Account-Based Marketing is a marketing strategy that applies focus on identifying and targeting a specific group of accounts. The account-based approach is one of the most effective B2B sales strategies for companies looking to differentiate themselves in the market. ABM is all about creating personalised campaigns to increase the chances of generating and converting leads.
Account-based marketing can be split into three subcategories:
- Strategic ABM
- ABM Lite
- Programmatic ABM.
Each method offers a slight variation on account-based marketing strategy. If you’re looking to incorporate ABM into your campaigns, you’ll need to know the difference between each method.
Programmatic ABM
Programmatic ABM is about implementing account-based marketing on a large scale. The main objective of this method is lead generation. Marketing is still personalised, but is focused on a wider group of businesses. In Programmatic ABM, the overall market is segmented into target groups, made up of businesses that share similar traits and challenges. Tailored campaigns can then be put in place to target these groups and generate leads. This method has the advantage of being less resource intensive than ABM Lite and Strategic ABM, as well as being highly-scalable, giving your marketing a wide coverage. A good way to judge the success of a Programmatic campaign is to analyse your revenue growth, sales pipeline and the total revenue directly connected to your ABM initiatives.
ABM Lite
ABM Lite focuses on slightly smaller groups of select accounts, rather than the wider market. The objectives of ABM Lite is to build relationships with prospects and identify market opportunities. As with Programmatic ABM, certain accounts are grouped together and targeted, however, these accounts have a large enough opportunity size to justify more time and resources being spent on them. ABM Lite marketing content is therefore slightly more personalised than Programmatic ABM. Marketing content can often be customised to focus on shared ‘pain points’ that a particular group of businesses might have, and suggest how your services can help. Your messaging should be about the client, their challenges and how you can help them – don’t make it all about you. Again, your sales pipeline revenue are the important metrics to track, when analysing the success of your ABM Lite campaigns.
Strategic ABM
Strategic ABM is focused on a select group of high-value accounts, meaning that it is a highly-personalised approach to marketing. Your marketing should not only be customised, but should also demonstrate that you have a strong understanding of the market you are focused on. Strategic ABM costs more in investment and resources per account, when compared to the other two methods, but gives you a high chance of converting leads into sales and retaining customers.
