Knowing your audience deeply is an essential part of any marketing strategy. But account-based marketing takes it a step further by developing personalized offers for each potential customer.
Together, marketing and sales develop a strategy to group buyers into accounts, rather than treating each individual buyer as a customer. This way, sales and marketing can create impressions of a buyer based on the group of buyers in an account.
Account-based marketing is ideal for high-value products and services. Many B2B companies benefit from this type of marketing due to the complexity of the sales process.
The Benefits of Account-Based Marketing
- Encourages close collaboration between sales and marketing
- Focuses on how to satisfy the needs of a specific subset of customers
- Encourages a personalized content strategy
- Can shorten the sales cycle
- Often results in higher return on investment
Cons of Account Based Marketing
- Often too complex for simple, low-value products
- More difficult to get started as it requires deep understanding and audience segmentation
- More training is required to work effectively.
Where Inbound and Account-Based Marketing Meet
Once you have a better understanding of each of these types of marketing, you can begin to explore their similarities.
- Both are aimed at creating dynamic interactions with customers – from strangers to brand advocates.
- Once you’ve developed an inbound strategy, account-based marketing helps speed up the process by segmenting your audience and gaining a deeper understanding of what subgroups within your business need and care about.
- Both strategies focus on creating targeted, highly personalized content and experiences for customers.
- Both strategies are aimed at retaining and delighting customers, but account-based marketing is even more personalized, making it even more effective for customer retention strategies.
When used together, inbound marketing helps you attract new customers, and account-based marketing accelerates the three-step inbound marketing process, delivering an even more valuable customer experience through a deep understanding of specific segments of your audience.
You can’t use account-based marketing effectively without an inbound approach. That’s because inbound marketing focuses on valuable content that builds relationships, which is essential if you want to show your customers that you understand their needs.
Account Based Marketing Tips
With account-based marketing, you can focus your marketing on specific groups of your audience. To get started, follow these tips.
1. Identify relevant accounts within your target audience
Analyze your audience as a sales and marketing team. Then, look at the data and subsets of your audience. This could be by company size, sales process, geography, income, etc.
You can create buyer personas for these country wise email marketing list groups of accounts so that you and your team can better understand them, their needs, and why they matter. This will help you find the best way to work with them.
2. Understand each team member involved in decision making
Customer-based marketing focuses on understanding the decision makers involved in complex purchasing processes. Most purchasing decisions involve an average of seven people . While these seven people may vary by company, you will find many similarities in these buying teams and their members.
By learning more, you can engage each azerbaijan business directory member of your buying team in the ways necessary to make the final purchasing decision.
Assess the challenges each stakeholder faces, then develop content that will help overcome those challenges.
3. Engage stakeholders through the necessary channels
Now that you know the members of each account, you can engage customers in the way that works best for them. For some, that might be email, for others, social media, or one-on-one conversations.
This stage is all about building relationships. You want to spend time getting to know your customers and decision-making teams.
4. Provide value and protect your product/service
Some buyers filter out information, especially automation tools play a critical if it is information they do not want or are not ready to hear.
You need to attract these buyers and educate them about your product or service when needed. Remember, your goal is to educate and serve as a resource without being too hard-selling.
5. Create reports on accounts to learn and improve
The final step in account-based marketing is reporting on what you’ve learned to increase your chances of getting sales from other similar accounts in the future.
Inbound and account-based marketing will help you build valuable relationships with your customers while increasing your profits. If you don’t know where to start developing marketing strategies for your business, schedule a free consultation with New Light Digital. We’ll discuss how best to use these strategies based on your industry, target audience, and products/services.