If you want to give your business the right kind of boost at the moment, it’s highly likely you will need to make use of account-based marketing. This, otherwise known as ABM, is all the rage right now, and it’s easy to see why. By focusing on creating accounts with clients that are genuinely long-term, you also engage with them with depth, and you ensure that you have a much more solid financial future. It’s all about reaching high-value customers and keeping them on board for longer.
But to make that work as well as possible, you will need to know how best to approach it. And to that end, it’s vital to keep up with the future trends of ABM that are likely to be most important in the coming year. These are not only the future, but the present, so make sure you are falling in line with each of these.
AI-Driven Tools
The world of AI is changing so much about so many industries, and that certainly applies to the world of ABM. If you want to keep ahead of the ABM game right now and into 2024, you are going to need to make use of AI-driven tools. That does not simply mean getting AI to carry out the repetitive tasks; it’s more about combining these tools with intent data, as set out above, to analyse huge swathes of data much more quickly and effectively, allowing you to connect and personalise with much greater aplomb.
Make Use of Intent Data
You are probably already aware of the huge importance of using intent data in crafting your marketing. Indeed, the ability to target very specific accounts is a major part of what makes ABM quite so powerful and effective. But the question of how to know which accounts to target is a big one, and the answer is by making use of intent data.
This data will help you to find the best-fit customers for your needs, so you can approach them with the right kind of targeting, and make it much easier to reach your sales targets. It’s hugely valuable to use this data, so make sure you are doing this as soon as possible.
Hyper-personalisation
In fact, there is another way in which having all that data can help your cause, and it’s by giving you even more of a sense of who your clients really are. And the better you know who they really are, the more effectively you can target them. In practice, that looks like personalisation taken to the nth degree – a kind of hyper personalisation where it is as though you really are talking to them and them alone. You’ll find that this is powerful in keeping them on board and their accounts active.
Focus on the Team
There is often something of a gap between sales and marketing, and that is something that can hold many businesses back. But if you want to make sure that you are really making your ABM as effective as possible, you need to try and bridge that gap as best as you can. That means aligning your teams as well as possible, because better aligned teams are going to work as a unit and quite simply achieve a lot more.
What you want is a collaborative effort across the board, ensuring that your sales and marketing teams are working towards the same goals at the same times. The power of that is hard to overstate, but it’s something that you will be glad you made sure of.
Optimise Full-Funnel Metrics
While a major part of ABM is ensuring that you bring your potential clients face to face with your funnel, alone that is not quite enough. You also need to make sure that they actually go through it, and often that takes a kind of hand-holding on your part. While in the past, ABM was perhaps overly focused on the top of the funnel, it’s much more effective now if you can make sure you are present at every part of the funnel instead.
That will mean that you can gain insights on how each part of the funnel needs to function, allowing you to bring those new clients fully all the way through, and that is something that is going to help your figures considerably in no time.
As you can see, ABM is set to change in 2024. Make sure you are above and beyond the trends, so you can get ahead.
Author: Louise Bowers, Founder & CEO of AmbitionABM, a boutique ABM consultancy where personalized service, expertise and price are top of the agenda to help companies grow their most important customers and help win new ones.
In this blog I cover many top ABM Trends for 2024, if you would like a personalised talk-through please get in touch by clicking here
