Account-Based Marketing Best Practices for Targeting, Messaging and Engagement

B2B marketers are turning to account-based marketing at record rates. 75% of practitioners have had their ABM strategy in place for less than a year, according to a recent Demand Gen Report survey. But despite this explosion in ABM adoption, many marketers are struggling to identify account-based marketing best practices and are failing to achieve the promised results. Key elements for success, such as sales and marketing alignment, personalization at scale, and proving ROI / attribution, too often elude the most well-intentioned ABM programs.

A new special report from Demand Gen Report can help marketers achieve the ABM success they’ve heard so much about. The report — “The 2018 State of Account-Based Marketing” — provides insights and best practices from companies like Oracle and FinancialForce, which are seeing record conversion rates, higher average deal size and significant pipeline growth. Armed with these best practices, marketers can learn how to set their own ABM programs up for success.

Perhaps the most striking insight is that a winning ABM program is more about solid collaboration and marketing fundamentals than it is about your tech stack (though third-party providers can still give your ABM program a serious leg up). Here are four other key takeaways from the 2018 report:

1. Get the targets right. This might be the most important step. Though ABM can feel lightyears away from the direct marketing campaigns of days gone by, an old adage still stands — the right list has more impact than the right offer or message.
2. Know your buyer. ABM is all about relevance, and you have to know your audience to know what’s relevant to them. Gaining knowledge of individual account priorities is a great start, but you’ll also want to better understand key stakeholders by building buyer personas. And once you’ve gathered these insights, you need to know how best to leverage them.
3. Make it meaningful. When you’re just getting started with ABM, technology and data can grab a lot of your focus. But at the end of the day, you still need to make sure you’re creating highly relevant messages that matter to your audience. Use segmentation to reach out with highly relevant, personalized campaigns. And be sure to follow through with strong creative execution.
4. Use all the tools in your marketing toolbox. With so much focus on ABM technologies and the ability to personalize digital advertising at scale, many organizations assume that ABM plays will all be digital. But to drive the most meaningful engagement from ABM, you need to think omni-channel. Even technology player AdRoll went offline to leverage direct mail in a successful campaign featured in the report.

These are just some of the many great takeaways in the report we are proud to co-sponsor with Demandbase, RollWorks and Triblio. Download your copy of the report today to get your hands on some of the account-based marketing best practices that companies like Oracle and FinancialForce are using to deliver big wins — and bring ABM success to your own organization.

Get your copy here!