Marketers have been using content marketing to generate leads for business for the longest time now. Moreover, the trend of pushing out generic content to capture prospects has been prevalent. Only problem? The content is created hoping that it resonates with the audience to generate more leads. This often makes us wonder whether there is any way of improving the chances of converting prospects. Enter Account Based Marketing (ABM)!
ABM is known to spike the revenue by 200% compared to traditional marketing practices. Likewise, B2B marketers realise the effectiveness of ABM. And over 87% of them think that it delivers more revenue than other marketing activities.
That being said, let’s dive right into understanding what is abm. We will also explain some proven methods to implement abm and the best practices to get expected results.
What is Account Based Marketing?
Now that we know how wonderful abm can be, it is time to understand how it works. In conventional marketing, we often begin by publishing bulk content to attract leads. This is followed by filtering the captured leads and then engaging them further to convert them.
ABM, to the contrary, identifies such prospects (a.k.a accounts) and then creates marketing campaigns to entice them. It is about qualifying the accounts right at the beginning and then laser focusing on them. Click To Tweet
ABM marketing essentially goes big with quality outreach and lead nurturing. Instead of pushing out random content for all the audience it revolves around curating content for specific people from a particular account.
How does ABM differ from inbound marketing?
Take a look at the difference between account-based marketing and inbound marketing to better understand this trending marketing technique.
⚡ ABM has a targeted approach:
Unlike the broad-reaching campaigns which draw in a lot of prospects to you, ABM drills down to the prospects that are most likely to buy the product or service. It then creates campaigns to engage these specific users via the various abm techniques. For instance, by building a user persona and predictive analytics to understand the type of audiences.
⚡The focus is on accounts instead of industries or markets:
Account based marketing focuses on the buyer persona and specific types of users instead of the market as a whole. Whereas in inbound marketing the focus is on the industry or market.
⚡ABM has a comprehensive approach of targeting both prospects and customers:
Account based marketing goals revolve around both acquiring new customers and nurturing the existing ones. With a focussed marketing campaign, abm generates qualified leads. Moreover, it also grows the current accounts by cross-selling and upselling.
Conversational Marketing – the future of ABM
So abm brings in the leads to you that are most likely to buy your products/services without having to scour through various prospects and narrowing them down. But what happens when they finally arrive at your website?
They come across a boring contact form which can be really off putting. This is where conversational marketing shines! It is your tool to provide a personalized sales experience with a human touch that users yearn for.
Known for its chatbot functionality and live chat integration, conversational marketing helps a great deal in moving the sales up the marketing funnel. In fact, 95% of buyers choose a solution provider that gives them enough content to help them through each stage of the buying process.
How Chatbots and Account Based Marketing Work in Tandem
To truly benefit from account based marketing one has to do the number crunching and real-time data analysis for accurate results. And artificial intelligence has made it possible! Here’s how:
⚡ Mapping prospects with the right sales reps:
Chatbots can act as virtual assistants to take care of tedious tasks. It can pull up the relevant data and display it for the users. It also asks basic qualifying questions (like asking customers what product they are looking for) and strikes a conversation.
⚡ Providing customized experience which your customers deserve:
With the chat flows fed in the chatbot already, it easily caters to users in all stages of the buying cycle. Thanks to automation, you can focus on other important aspects of your business.
⚡ More power to the user:
Let’s say your ideal client drops by your website and you want to engage them. A chatbot can start the conversation for you and greet them with a personalized message. If your ideal customer has any questions then the bot can direct them to the account owner. Your customer’s wish is the bot’s command quite literally! Click To Tweet
⚡ Goodbye lead capture forms:
Let’s be honest, nobody likes filling out the mundane contact forms. And showing them to your qualified leads is a complete disaster! A chatbot takes in information like the name, contact number and the like via simple conversations.
⚡ Reaching out proactively:
We understand that not everyone will respond to your messages in your webchat. But when you proactively start a conversation with them it shows that you care! Moreover, with most of the businesses having acquired the chatbots, customers expect to have a simple gateway where they can ask their questions. Moreover, you can enable notifications so that every time someone engages with your website you will be notified to jump in on a chat with them.
A lot can be achieved with conversational marketing while giving it a human touch. As per a Gartner study, people’s interest in chatbots increased by 160% in 2018. Customers are more than ready to adopt this transition to conversational marketing. Also, 58% of users say that chatbots have changed their expectations of customer service (Salesforce).
Now that you know what is account based marketing and how it weaves into conversational marketing. It is important to know how to get it right.
Hard learned lessons
Marketing has definitely evolved with a host of mistakes to learn from. As much as we are familiar with creating bulk content and distributing it, Account Based Marketing has brought about a revolution.
It’s time to identify the accounts that might be interested in you and then shape your marketing strategy. Be it nurturing emails or cold calls, how you communicate depends on the user persona. The idea is to make the buying process as simple as possible. Drop the back and forth email threads. Real-time conversations are here to stay! Click To Tweet
Wish to leverage ABM by implementing chatbots? Get in touch and we will help you build a chatbot within minutes. 😀
