Understanding the Account Based Marketing Framework: A Guide

For most businesses, the term marketing applies primarily to business-to-consumer marketing. It’s your routine print ads, social media, and search engine optimization that helps you gain mindshare with everyday buyers.

For a smaller segment of the business community, marketing means business-to-business marketing. This is marketing designed around the idea of selling your product or service exclusively to other businesses.

While there is some overlap between a B2C and a B2B marketing strategy, they are different beasts. One of the newer approaches used primarily in B2B marketing is the account-based marketing framework.

If you’ve heard the term but aren’t sure what it means, keep reading for our quick guide to the essentials.

Specific Targets

One of the keys to account based marketing is the term account. Even in B2B, there is a distinct one-to-many element. You may buy a print ad in an industry publication so you reach your ideal market, but the ad still reaches a lot of potential customers.

With the account-based approach, you build marketing around a specific customer or account. In general, these are very high-value customers that you want.

Part of the process is research and identification of these kinds of potential customers. That includes normal things like the market they serve and their current suppliers.

It also means finding stakeholders in the organization that you will direct your marketing efforts toward.

It’s a Multi-Channel Approach

Account-based marketing uses multiple channels in its attempts to reach those key stakeholders in the target company. For example, you might build out content about your product as it directly relates to a target business’s needs. You might also leverage ABM tech to reach out through social media channels.

ABM also employs a very high level of personalization with its outreach. That’s why identifying stakeholders matters so much. It’s not a matter of convincing one person, but all of those stakeholders. That means you must target their specific interests and concerns to build the necessary trust.

Benefits and Pitfalls

The ABM approach offers a key benefit in that it typically offers a better return on investment than less targeted approaches.

It does come with some pitfalls. It’s a resource-intensive approach in terms of people-hours spent and money. The research phase can take quite a while compared with other approaches. It’s also more common with larger companies approaching other larger companies.

That doesn’t exclude it for smaller businesses, but the upfront costs can prove daunting.

The Account-Based Marketing Framework and You

The account-based marketing framework is a typically business-to-business marketing approach. It targets key stakeholders in a single business with content and related approaches with the end goal of securing a business relationship.

It does offer a good return on investment, but it’s not ideal for every business. It’s more resource-intensive than most small businesses prefer. In most cases, it’s a strategy that large companies use while targeting other large companies.

Looking for more marketing tips? Check out the Marketing posts in our Business section.