Account-based marketing — also known as ABM — involves tailoring your marketing approach to a market of one. So, rather than leaning on old, homogenized, one-size-fits-all strategies, ABM strategies require personalized, custom-fit interactions with your prospects, which is where account-based marketing tools come into play.
To carry out a successful account-based marketing strategy, it’s crucial that you utilize tools and software designed specifically for ABM and/or abm companies. After all, it’s easy to try to make do with what you’ve got, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into a winning ABM strategy.
Let’s take a look at what exactly account-based marketing is, how it can benefit your business, and which account-based marketing tools and software you should be considering.
What Is account-based marketing (ABM)?
As we mentioned above, account-based marketing is best described as a marketing strategy that’s tailor-made to reflect a prospect or target account. Everything — from marketing content to emails — must address and resonate with your prospect. This type of strategy empowers reps to directly address a prospect’s needs and pain points, boosting the chance of conversion and success.
Keep in mind, account-based marketing is best-suited for B2B companies. Typically, enterprise-level sales organizations execute ABM strategies in close partnership with marketers familiar with ABM. To support ABM efforts, there are specific account-based marketing tools that help you and your reps identify leads, address pain points, and fill the gaps accordingly.
The benefits of account-based marketing (ABM)
Account-based marketing offers a range of benefits, especially to B2B companies and sales organizations. It’s not designed to replace your larger marketing efforts, but strategically adding it to your arsenal can help you land important, large accounts or connect with multiple buyers, empowering you to leverage existing accounts.
- Stand out from the crowd — The more customized your content, the higher chance you have of standing out against your competitor’s outreach efforts that look and feel vanilla.
- Focus on the individual needs of each account — Since ABM is so personalized to your target audience, this helps ensure that your marketing campaigns truly connect with the decision-makers within the prospective organization.
- Quick and easily measure campaign success — Casting a wide net with your marketing makes it difficult to attribute your efforts directly to revenue gained. But when you target one specific account, it’s easier to connect revenue to your ABM marketing campaigns because you know the specific details that propelled the conversion.
- Save time and money — ABM strategies enables marketers to narrow down their efforts, so they can identify true business value and avoid wasting time or effort. Dedicating parts of your marketing budget to ABM means you can secure a strong client base, along with loyal customers that earn you more money.
- Shorten your sales cycle — Lead generation takes time. However, with ABM strategies, there’s very little to no need to conduct lead generation because you know who exactly you’re speaking to. So instead of spending time on leads that may or may not convert, you can focus on those that will.
- Strengthen existing relationships — Account-based marketing gives you the opportunity to strengthen relationships with existing clients. Plus, it’s easier (and cheaper) to retain customers than have to chase new ones.
The best account-based marketing (ABM) tools and software
In order to create and implement a successful account-based marketing strategy, you need to have the right tools. ABM-specific software (also known as abm vendors) and account-based marketing tools, like Demandbase, help you generate new leads, manage multiple accounts effectively, and distribute marketing materials quickly.
Demandbase
Demandbase is a popular platform that’s built specifically for ABM strategies. The beauty of Demandbase is that you don’t have to leave the platform in order to access important pieces of information. And through Demandbase, you can easily target your prospective audience, engage quickly, measure success, and secure conversion.
Leadfeeder
Have you ever wondered who is visiting your website (and what they want)? Leadfeeder demystifies this question by showing you (thanks to a little help from Google Analytics) who has visited your website in the last 30 days.
Not only does this help your marketing and sales teams to identify new accounts to focus on, but it empowers you with names and other relevant information that makes an ABM strategy all the more powerful. In turn, you save time and energy by having to avoid conducting a manual, hands-on search and it enables reps to truly focus on accounts that want and need your services.
Leadfeeder is a step in the right direction when you need to get the ball rolling on leads or build a foundation for outreach. Plus, it helps you monitor target accounts with various integration capabilities, alerts, and retargeting efforts via LinkedIn, Slack, or email.
Jabmo
Jabmo is a marketing automation platform that serves personalized ads to known and anonymous buyers relative to your target accounts. It captures anonymous buyer activity and offers account-based IP advertising and website personalization. Other features include ad retargeting, analytics, sales enablement tools, as well as CRM and marketing automation integrations. You can even gain marketing insights down to the account level, including ads, retargeting, email, social and paid search.
With Jabmo, it’s easy to see which leads are most important — and which ones can get put on the back burner. More importantly, it’s built with global manufacturing in mind and helps these types of companies see the actuality of their marketing efforts instead of having to guess.
Lucidpress
Content is an important part of ABM. But it can be difficult to manage and create batches (or one-off pieces too) of unique content — especially when you need it personalized for multiple accounts. To prevent rogue content from arising from your sales team, Lucidpress levels the playing field through brand templating.
Lucidpress makes creating content easy and accessible for anyone, while also maintaining and ensuring brand consistency through its lockable (and customizable) brand templates. You’ve got a wide variety of professionally-designed, ready-to-go templates to choose from — flyers and newsletters or social media ads — so sales reps can get started quickly and make personalized, on-brand content. Plus, with help from the data automation feature, reps can quickly populate pre-existing CRM tidbits, reducing the chance of typos or other errors. And when it comes time to share the finished product, sales reps can print, email, or embed content however they see fit.
Ultimately, personalized content helps enhance your ABM — and Lucidpress makes incorporating that personalized step less complicated.
DataFox
With Oracle DataFox, you can easily search for prospects that are comparable to your existing customers. Here you’ll uncover valuable leads that are most likely to convert, so you can create targeted ABM efforts.
DataFox uses an AI extraction engine to gather data-level pieces of information. One extrapolated, the data is then double-checked by a QC team for accuracy and validity. Plus, DataFox has automatic updates, so you’ll always have up-to-date information — and it provides more than 70 firmographic data points and 68 types of signals.
Alternatively, if you’re overwhelmed by the sheer amount of options, you can easily filter based on company criteria or other identifiers, so you gain the transparency and insight you need to maintain a solid ABM strategy.
Owler
Owler alerts you to key events, related to your prospects and current accounts so that you stay in the loop and know when something important happens, giving you an opportunity to reach out and connect. Owler will auto populate a concise company profile, so your sales team doesn’t need to research accounts manually. And comparable to Google alerts or notifications on your phone, it sends you prospect-related push news and alerts, making it easy for you to reach out when the time is right. Owler also integrates with your CRM, providing you with a seamless connection between interfaces, while the daily snapshot offers news and updates on the companies that you follow.
Getting started with Owler is easy. And it’s even easier to customize your alerts or filters, so whether you’re looking to track leads from Salesforce and Hubspot or keep tabs on your most important accounts, you can easily sync Owler to get the job done.
ActiveDemand
ActiveDemand is designed specifically for ABM. It features behavioral segmentation, predictive personalization, behavioral retargeting, lead scoring and sales and marketing integration.The behavioral segmentation software aggregates data and automatically personalizes the engagement experience (based on the aggregated data) for each target account. Meanwhile, the predictive content targeting is based on the exact industries and language of your prospects, which enables ActiveDemand to serve up content that resonates with them and reflects their pain points or needs.
ActiveDemand touts a wide range of tools — in one platform, so marketers can create quick, simple, and easy ABM campaigns. So, for those looking to get their ABM strategies off the ground, ActiveDemand is a great resource and one-stop-shop.
Engagio
Like ActiveDemand, Engagio is another ABM vendor with supportive tools and functionalities to help you at all stages of your ABM strategy. With Engagio, marketers can easily generate lists of leads or review the performance of your campaigns. Engagio makes it easy to manage all facets of your campaign, so you can focus on targeting the right people while aligning your marketing team for the best omnichannel experience.
Leverage account-based marketing (ABM) tools
Account-based marketing is a useful approach to marketing for many B2B businesses. Having the right ABM tools makes it easy to save time and money while producing the results that you want. Automation, in particular, makes it much simpler to get the information you need and carry out ABM techniques to make the most of your accounts.
