How to Use Marketing Automation Account-Based Marketing
Account-based marketing is a newer approach to marketing that focuses on personalized and targeted marketing tactics. The major difference between traditional marketing and account-based is that the focus has shifted from a single person or lead to an entire account.
Marketing automation can make account-based marketing easier to implement and execute, because it allows you to automate a lot of account-based marketing’s best practices, helping you save time, and allowing you to create more targeted and more personalized campaigns.
Shift the Focus to Multiple Contacts
Traditional marketing tended to be a relationship between an agent at the marketing firm and a single key contact on the client’s end. But that’s all changing with account-based marketing, which recognizes that a business’ buying and purchasing decisions aren’t actually made by a single person, but by multiple people, including a:
- Primary decision maker
- Buyer
- User
- Influencer and initiator
So how can marketing automation help you with this? It allows you to identify, catalog, and track all the key members involved in the buying process so that you can get a more complete picture of who and what you’re dealing with.
Centralize All Your Data
This is part and parcel with expanding your focus to a multi-member contact team: marketing automation can help you create profiles, action items, and activity histories for every key contact you identify within a client’s organization. Marketing automation facilitates this because while account-based marketing lets you collect data based on IP addresses, marketing automation uses cookies to let you track and target key individuals. And once you create the profiles you need, you can maintain and work from one central database that houses all the information you need.
Target Your Marketing Efforts More Effectively
One of the best things about using marketing automation to facilitate account-based marketing is that you can target your campaigns to the clients with the most potential or the highest possible return on your invested time.
When you organize your marketing efforts in this way, you can easily identify the needs of your potential clients, and see which clients stand to gain the most from what you have to offer. This means you get an inside scoop into their operations and can provide solutions they may not even realize they need.
Personalize Your Marketing Approach
Account-based marketing gives you a much greater and more comprehensive perspective on the needs of your clients and a bigger picture of their organization. So while it’s much easier to tailor each campaign to an individual prospect, marketing automation can also make this much easier to implement.
When you automate your account-based marketing, you’ll have the time and resources to nurture each member of the buying team by creating personalized landing pages tailored to their needs and vision and making sure individualized content comes right to that person’s desk. And since 75 percent of people would rather have a personalized offer than a generic one, your customers will be much more responsive.
Account-based marketing better reflects the way businesses operate and are structured, so when you use this type of marketing in place of traditional marketing, it’s like getting a crystal ball handed to you. With traditional marketing, you only get one part of the picture—the one provided by your sole contact.
Account-based marketing, on the other hand, embraces the fact that purchasing decisions are made by many people, giving you a better understanding of your clients. Moreover, marketing automation can help you take full advantage of the data uncovered by account-based marketing, because it helps you automate repetitive tasks, organize data, and identify ways to personalize and target your campaigns more effectively.
