Want to engage your target audience? Heres how.

B2B companies are bombarded with irrelevant marketing (and are just as guilty of dishing out).

Marketers drop blanket advertising in the hopes that a fraction of recipients will engage and an even smaller portion to be viable.

It’s costing the economy millions in wasted, “wishful” marketing as well as taxing sales teams who have to sort through and follow up with bulk unvetted leads. Most businesses are barely scratching the surface when it comes to connecting with their target audiences.

But there’s a better way.

Account-based marketing is the idea that marketing doesn’t have to be done in bulk to be effective. Rather than blanketing your industry, account-based marketing looks at who your target audience is and builds marketing tailored to them.

On our latest episode of The Corporate Data Show, we spoke with Chris Golec, founder and CEO of Demandbase, about why account-based marketing is so effective and what his company is doing to help B2B’s use technology to effectively engage with their target audiences.

What Is Account-Based Marketing?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is the by-product of marketing and sales alignment. 

Rather than marketing providing sales with leads based off blanket industry data, ABM looks at personalized marketing based on the needs and trends of individual accounts.

Viable sales leads soar in this scenario as marketing aren’t casting a net across the industry--they’re intentionally focused on targeting potential and existing customers.

Companies like Demandbase are revolutionizing this process by providing solutions to help companies utilize patented technology that links the IP addresses of website visitors to specific companies.

It’s the kind of data that allows B2B companies to measure how effective their marketing is in engaging with their target audience and then narrow their marketing focus to those specific accounts.

And ABM, while relatively new to the marketing scene, is quickly proving itself. The results of a Demandbase survey showed that in companies which had implemented ABM for more than a year, 60% of users reported at least a 10% increase in revenue, with 19% reporting more than 30%.

Getting started

First things first--clearly define your target audience. Are you looking to sell to Fortune 1000 companies? Maybe you already know your target is the healthcare industry, but which branch do you want to zero in on?

Once you know who your marketing focus should turn to, you can then start to measure how effective your current campaigns and strategies are at engaging with that audience.

Chris mentioned that many B2B businesses are surprised to hear that only around 8-10% of their web traffic comes from visitors who match their ideal audience. Companies who don’t understand this reality risk creating an average website, 90% of whose visitors will likely never be viable leads.

Utilizing ABM across your website is proven way to increase the quality of leads generated from that medium. Marketing lead generation numbers may drop, however, you’ll gain in qualified leads what you lost in frivolous ones.

Utilizing ABM across your website is proven way to increase the quality of leads generated from that medium. 

Landing more accounts

Implementing ABM through your website is only the beginning.

While it’s great for generating new leads and creating more intentional connections with your previously untapped target audience, it’s also effective for deepening engagement with your existing clients.

CEB Global estimates that a stakeholder who perceived supplier content to be tailored to their needs is 40% more likely to buy from that supplier than other stakeholders who didn’t feel that way.

Your existing customer base may even be better a place to start using ABM than just tailoring your website. Your ABM metrics can help you identify what other services your customers are interested, prompting you to generate targeted marketing materials to a group of people who are already involved and invested in you.

Your service offerings can vary as greatly as your customer sizes and needs do, which is why ABM is so effective. You may be able to market a wide range of services to your larger customers, where it would be pushy and inappropriate to market those same services to smaller customers.

How any business can get the most out of account-based marketing

Account-based marketing, in its simplest terms, is about marketing the accounts that your sales team is going to sell to. One of the core parts of account-based marketing is sales and marketing alignment. Often marketing is running off of metrics that aren’t aligned with the sales team.

In this episode Chris Golec, CEO of DemandBase, dives a little bit deeper into that basic definition and explains how small (or large) businesses can use account-based strategies to the fullest.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for the most effective and efficient way to engage with your target customers, ABM is the best way to do it.

Not only are you increasing your prospects and sales conversions, you’re also strengthening your company culture by bringing together your marketing and sales teams, both of whom have equal contribution to and benefit from the process.

This episode is based on an interview with Chris Golec, founder and CEO of Demandbase, the leader in Account-Based Marketing. To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The Corporate Data Show.