Why You Need an Account Based Marketing Agency?
Should I Hire an Account Based Marketing Agency?
Account based marketing (ABM) can be a very powerful strategy for B2B marketers targeting enterprise clients, but most companies don’t practice it well. Most rely on traditional B2B marketing tactics, in which prospects pass through numerous levels of qualification or nurturing prior to conversion. If the B2B marketer is successful in getting a marketing qualified lead (MQL), the sales team likely must parse through numerous opportunities to determine if each is a sales qualified lead (SQL). This traditional process can be costly to fill the top of the funnel and then nurture the opportunities though the middle of the funnel. A lot of time, effort, and money spent can lead to low conversion rates and low return on marketing investment.
Sales and marketing effectiveness and efficiency can be improved through strategic, well executed account based marketing. An account based marketing agency experienced in B2B strategy can help.
What is Account Based Marketing?
Account based marketing (ABM) is a business-to-business strategy that a marketer customizes to each key prospect in its target market. ABM is based on the premise that every enterprise account is unique: Different use cases, procurement practices, and buying criteria.
Rather than solely trying to cast a wide net for inbound leads, account based marketing focuses outbound efforts toward targeted, high-value ideal accounts, which should maximize conversions and ROI. ABM is most useful when the product, service, or solution being sold has a higher price and a longer, more complex buying cycle.
Because of the complexity, it is common for the potential client to have a buying committee of multiple influencers (personas) involved in the decision making process (e.g., members of procurement, operations, finance departments). With such a complex buying and selling process, it is logically beneficial for the seller’s marketing process to be personalized to each target account.
How an Account Based Marketing Agency Can Help
If the seller’s marketing team is under-resourced or inexperienced in customizing unique one-off campaigns, it may be beneficial to hire an account based marketing agency to facilitate the strategy and execution. An external ABM agency can help the sales and marketing better align their goals and collaborate more strategically. For each targeted account, the ABM agency may help in identifying, researching, and understanding the target account’s various buyer personas. The agency can help repurpose generic marketing assets and messaging into customized communication workflows. The agency can help leverage and customize existing case studies, white papers, videos, presentations, articles, and proposals for each persona in each account for each stage of the buyer’s journey.
The Account Based Marketing Process
A strong ABM strategy begins with defining the attributes that make the targeted account an ideal fit. Focusing on the traits and needs of these organizations will help the marketing team develop campaigns that leverage intentional person-to-person relationships and deploy effective messaging and placement. Because account based marketing is designed with each targeted client in mind, it can create a better customer experience, shorten the sales cycle, and increase the closing rate. An account based marketing agency can help prepare the targeted personas with thought leadership content and positioning tactics before the buyer is approached by the salesperson. As the selling cycle progresses, content can be modified and quickly delivered to each buyer persona based on the behavioral triggers in the ongoing engagement.
Benefits of Hiring Account Based Marketers
An experienced, knowledgeable, strategic account based marketing agency can execute the heavy lifting of content creation, customization, and delivery. Such an agency partner can research target markets and industries, ideal customer profiles and can deliver custom campaigns to drive sales. The best ABM agencies can research and expand one targeted campaign to reach another similar one, opening the opportunity for even greater increased revenue with little extra effort on the selling company’s part.
The success of ABM relies heavily on tracking buyer journey stages, optimizing conversion rates, and calculating customer acquisition costs (CAC). Skilled account based marketing companies like Nvent Marketing can provide reach, engagement, and conversion analytics so that future campaigns can be improved. I
Should I Hire an Account Based Marketing Agency?
If you’re still contemplating whether to hire an account based marketing agency, it may be worth the effort to get a complimentary consultation to learn more and consider the costs and benefits. Contact Nvent Marketing to get started.
7 Ways A Strategic Marketing Agency Can Improve Your Marketing ROI
Today, social media and online marketing are driven by digital transformation. Digital marketing has changed the way nearly every business communicates with its current and future customers, especially since the pandemic. However, 63 percent of digital marketers still struggle to personalize their services to their intended audiences today. The challenge for brand owners is understanding how marketing strategy can help execute impactful plans and generate ROI. Business marketers must align their business goals with their marketing plans. Following are seven reasons why marketing strategy is critical for marketing return on investment.
1. A strategic marketing agency can help you understand your ideal customer profile:
Understanding buyer motivation and audience behavior is critical for any business. This is especially true in niche businesses where markets, services, and products offered may be highly specific and narrow in focus. Since one brand can’t be highly valuable to every customer, it may be necessary to narrow the target audience and identify your ideal customers. The development of a marketing strategy can help in profiling your ideal buyers and specifically target them with points of relevant value as they progress through the buyer’s journey.
2. A strategic marketing agency can help you understand your customer personas:
To capture and engage your ideal customer, you need to know and understand them. What is each buyer’s role in the decision to buy your product or service? Are they motivated by the economics, utility, or user experience? Is sustainability, customer service, or low cost most important to them? How do they discover and learn about products and how do they make decisions? Your solution and your message to each potential buyer must address their pain points and desires. An effective marketing strategic plan should probably include market and customer research to validate who you are selling to, why they care, and what processes they follow in making a buying decision.
3. A strategic marketing agency can help you illuminate your business goals and values:
It’s important for your company’s leadership team and your marketing messaging to be able to effectively articulate your brand’s ethos and values. People today tend to buy from brands with meaning and purpose. Your marketing strategy and messaging plan may be to target potential customers, investors, employees, colleagues, vendors, and partners. To reach the right audience with the right message, your marketing strategy requires a clear position on why, for whom, and how.
4. A strategic marketing agency can help you establish benchmarks and KPIs:
Marketing strategy creation can help you quantify metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that define the success of your campaigns, projects, and investments. Once you understand the metrics that matter the most, you can track and understand how your target audience responds to your marketing and which investments and strategies you should prioritize. Over the long term, this measurement and analysis can create the baseline to determine success or failure.
5. A strategic marketing agency can help you build a budget and plan of action:
Marketing plans are critical to ensure advanced scheduling, prioritization, proper resource allocation, and cost control. Your marketing plan will guide your team in decision making and in performance analytics. Understand all the variables in your plan, including communication channels, messaging platforms, and events. The goal is to align the short and long-term goals of your business with the marketing plan so you receive the best possible return on investment.
6. A strategic marketing agency can help you understand how you compare to your competitors:
One of the best ways to know where you stand in your market is by conducting a competitor analysis. Formulating a marketing strategy can help you understand who your competitors are targeting and how, as well as what’s working for them or not. It can be an opportunity for learning and for validating your own actions.
7. A strategic marketing agency can help you create a baseline for trend analysis:
We can see things well in hindsight because tracing patterns is simpler. A marketing strategy executed well over a period of time can help collect enormous sets of usable data for trend analysis and subsequent decision making. Data is essential for understanding audience behavior, competitors, and other market patterns that can be leveraged to push a marketing plan forward.
Developing a marketing strategy will help you focus, reduce waste, and make better business decisions. Whether you manage a business in Arizona or anywhere else in the world, a strategic marketing agency can work with you and your team to write your own roadmap that will help you navigate through the unknown ahead. If you ever decide to hire an agency, you may need to issue a web development rfp, an SEO rfp, or a social media rfp. If so, now you are armed with more knowledge about what factors to consider.
Social media supports all marketing channels
Social media needs to be integrated with non-digital channels. The old school thinking that social media is just “a secondary tactic” doesn’t fit today.
Today, customer acquisition is the top priority for most brands. It should be a part of your company’s product marketing strategy. Targeted demand generation processes must also satisfy your customers’ needs.
To stay ahead at this game changing moment where new technologies are making everything easier than ever before—from finding information on Google Search pages or Instagram stories-to engaging directly one consumer who may purchase something online without having another advertisement interrupt their experience -you need every edge possible.
People often utilize social media as an additional tool in their demand generation investment strategy, but it is important to not neglect the power of organic content marketing.
if you want your campaigns and efforts on Facebook or Twitter be effective then they need integrate paid advertisements with this type digital outreach technique so that both forms can complement each other instead just being done separately like many companies do today .
I recently spoke to a VP of a billion-dollar brand who told me about his million-dollar TV/radio ad campaign that produced negative ROI. They’re now shifting more marketing budget to digital channels. CMOs often struggle with the conflicting priorities of brand marketing and measurable demand generation. Sometimes it must be either/or, but it can be both if well integrated.
Another proof point on the value of marketing campaign integration: A new Hootsuite study of 2,000 marketers shows that 78% feel social media improves the operational efficiency of their other digital and non-digital marketing channels. I don’t think that’s too surprising.
Using pixels and links in online content and hashtags in offline content can drive immediate improvement in reach, engagement, and feedback to maximize trackable ROI. Plus, scheduling timely messaging to highly tuned audiences through multiple channels can optimize conversion.
