Is it time to consider an Account-Based Marketing strategy?

Ever feel you’re not cutting through with your existing inbound approach? Is it not working fast enough or attracting the right prospects? Accounts-based Marketing may be just what your sales and marketing strategy needs to boost stagnant pipelines and accelerate your sales cycles. 

For some businesses with mature inbound marketing programmes, the power of your content may appear to have flat-lined in recent years, with familiar tactics failing to deliver leads and conversions at the pace they once did.

If this is the case, you're probably looking at new tactics to kick-start success - ensuring you're updating existing content, exploring video marketing and maximising the potential of new distribution channels to drive new engagement. And all that, of course, is important.

But is there some more fundamental shift at play here that's preventing faster and sustained revenue growth for your business?  

4 reasons a B2B inbound marketing strategy may be struggling

1. Content Saturation 

As sectors mature, the volume of content increases, resulting in saturation. Audiences are overwhelmed with helpful, optimised content sitting in the SERPs. Competition can be fierce and the success of inbound has often created an arms-race of words, making it more  and more difficult for brands to cut through with content that once did well.  

2.  Diminished Engagement

It’s testament to the success of the inbound marketing revolution that there’s so much excellent content about. But it’s also a feature of the ChatGPT revolution that the amount of substandard published content is exploding and clogging up search returns. Spoiled for choice, and with their choice often spoiled, it’s harder than ever to build audiences through search and spark engagement.

3. Changing SEO environment

Search engine algorithms are constantly changing. What worked historically in SEO, may not be effective today, leading to a decline in organic search traffic coming to your site. AI is the unspoken threat to many search strategies. Some experts suggest that AI driven search will decrease clicks as people will get the professional analysis and advice they need from AI engines like Bing and ChatGPT, rather than from the websites of experts like you.   If you want to explore this topic more, this is a great blog on the potential impact of AI on search marketing. 

4. Changing buyer behaviour

In some sectors, the number of people involved in buying decisions has increased exponentially. Without a content strategy that can properly identify and orchestrate engagement with specific groups of buyers, efforts to convert and close big deals with larger organisations may founder.

So, what’s the problem?

It may be hard for traditional inbound content marketers to admit it.  

But there’s often a problem with the pace and precision of their methods.

In some sectors, there’s a failure of traditional inbound marketing strategies to target complex prospects fast enough - and systematically deepen existing sales relationships when they’ve won new accounts.

So, what’s the answer?

If certain deals are proving elusive, if you’re struggling to sell deeper within existing client networks, then it follows you’ve got to become more customer-centric and intentful in your marketing strategy and tactics. 

And that’s where Accounts Based Marketing comes in.

What is ABM?

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a strategic sales approach in which marketing and sales teams collaborate to target specific high-value accounts with highly personalised campaigns. 

It focuses resources on identifying the most promising prospects for your business, increasing engagement by speaking directly to their needs. It aligns sales and marketing efforts, leading to higher ROI and better conversion rates.

ABM is a strategic combination of outbound and inbound approaches that is much more proactive than inbound alone.

Who is ABM for?

If your  business works in niche sectors, where there are fewer but larger opportunities to be won, ABM could help  laser guide and accelerate your sales and marketing process to engage with a smaller pool of potential leads more quickly.

It’s a solution that’s particularly suitable for:

Companies with long and complex sales Cycles 

Businesses with long sales cycles, such as those in manufacturing, healthcare, and technology sectors, find ABM invaluable. The strategy allows them to target and nurture specific relationships over time by delivering tailored content that can orchestrate engagement with multiple decision-makers at each stage of their collective buying journey. 

Organisations with hard-to-reach audiences

ABM leverages precise targeting and personalised messaging to break through barriers, more effectively  capturing the attention of niche audiences. The deep research into the interests and pain points of decision-makers buried deep inside target organisations can help your sales and marketing team become more creative and effective in their content and campaign creation.

Sales and marketing teams aiming for deeper alignment 

ABM fosters strong alignment between sales and marketing teams, making it a perfect fit for organisations striving to synchronise these functions as integrated revenue operations. By collaborating on account plans, sharing insights, and developing coordinated strategies, sales and marketing teams can work together seamlessly to engage target accounts.

ABM and Inbound?

Merging inbound with an ABM strategy presents a new direction and impetus for your content strategy. 

Content is the glue that pulls an inbound and an accounts-based strategy together and, used in tandem, the two can begin to complement each other remarkably.

Without inbound, supporting it ABM will become intrusive, and disruptive. Meanwhile, a targeted version of inbound, using ABM precision will accelerate your efforts and help lift your content from the generic to the potently precise .

ABM is helping fuel a new generation of inbound: an approach that is more customer-focused, driven by content, yet non-intrusive, and designed to appeal to customers on a more detailed level.

Is ABM right for me?

Many B2B businesses have a list of addressable businesses that fit the criteria of their ideal client, and if this is you, a blended ABM-Inbound model could be the first step to reinvigorating your whole sales and marketing approach

With quantified research, sales and marketing alignments can pinpoint an ideal fit, targeting them with a strategy designed through exploration of pain points, needs, visions and goals.

As a starting point, review any existing targeting strategies, and begin to segment your databases.

How do you identify your ideal fit - by company size, location, or challenges?

Is this something a close sales and marketing alignment will help you to achieve?

From there, you can look at your existing methods of advertising or content marketing to set a benchmark for your new ABM-Inbound strategy. Are visitors to your website making conversions? Is traffic to your website stagnant? Who is your ideal client? These are just some of the questions you'll need to answer.

Our free ebook offers some insider advice on how to you can unify your sales and marketing resources, and subsequently kickstart your ABM-inbound strategy. 

If you'd rather, speak to us about your goals and we'll be completely transparent about whether or not this is the right fit for you.

Good luck!

Editor's note: This post was originally published in May 2018 and republished in July 2024 to ensure accuracy.