New technologies help marketers significantly improve targeting
If you are trying to stay up to date with the trends in marketing, you have probably heard about Account Based Marketing, marketing technology which enables companies to better align sales and marketing processes and build relationships with specific targeted accounts.
Like Marketing Automation, Account Based Marketing has become a hot buzz-word among marketers. They both are claimed to be magic solutions that help grow business on relatively small budgets. Misleadingly associated with each other, Marketing Automation and Account Based Marketing are two different things. What should you know about them and how do they both fit into your digital strategy?
Account Based Marketing: precision targeting
Account Based Marketing focuses on specific target companies, based on the assumption that most B2B buying decisions are not made by a single person, but by a group of people within an organization. Modern technologies allow you to target the company with an advertising message if you know the organization’s IP address (or addresses).
Account Based Marketing combines real-time ad buying, IP address-based identification and other means of tracking. It means that instead of trying to reach a broad segment, marketers can create a customized advertising message and target one organization for which this ad is made. All the impressions you are going to get will be by the right people during the time that your sales team is in pursuit. While there is not enough data yet, Account Based Marketing is expected to deliver some of the highest ROI of any B2B marketing strategy by eliminating wasteful spending.
Marketing Automation: toolkit for executing and measuring
Marketing Automation structures online marketing processes by using software to execute and manage marketing tasks within an organization or agency. Marketing Automation helps to do personalized marketing, and it uses cookies to target individuals. It means that user and their organization are not known until the first interaction with the customer. Account Based Marketing allows to reach customers you have never worked with – and this is the biggest difference between Account Based Marketing and Marketing Automation.
Putting it together
Marketing Automation can complement Account Based Marketing by identifying individual users and their interests and then automating the flow of messages to those individuals. Account Based Marketing helps to identify anonymous interest from companies and helps with outreach to targeted accounts.
B2B companies can benefit from both – Account Based Marketing and Marketing Automation.
Account Based Marketing allows B2B companies to find and approach clients, while Marketing Automation tools help develop these relationships.
While many companies offer marketing automation software, the account based marketing field has only a few major vendors. Bizo and Demandbase are currently the biggest players, with Demandbase uses some patented IP-mapping technologies, which may make it grow quicker than Bizo. Insightera is the player number three in this field, and was recently bought by Marketo.
Are Account Based Marketing tools worth investing?
Account Based Marketing has its limitations, such as the necessity to invest in the platform and its support and questions of accuracy in targeting. Setting up Account Based Marketing platforms requires investment in services, along with manual work involved in mapping IP addresses, and your team will most likely need to be trained. These are hidden costs and they need to be taken into account. Then, if you can’t identify the IP address of the company you want to work with, you won’t be able to target it.
Despite all these disadvantages, some experts believe that the pros of Account Based Marketing outweigh the cons and that it will be one of the biggest revenue drivers for B2B businesses in the very near future. Account Based Marketing is growing quickly in popularity, and if you are in B2B business, you may want to consider implementing this new technology. According to Sirius Decisions’ “2015 State of Account-Based Marketing” study results, 92% of companies acknowledge the value of Account Based Marketing and more than 60% plan to invest in this technoogy.