Most B2B marketing teams today prefer account-based marketing. ABM offers unparalleled advantages for segmentation and personalization.
How can a B2B marketer like yourself make your ABM programs more advanced and effective? The rise of advanced martech and GenAI tools compels marketers to develop and execute scalable ABM strategies. Unfavorable market forces also drive this need. Let’s look at some of the most important ABM trends for 2024. Marketers need to focus on these trends to build a predictable pipeline.
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5 Account Based Marketing trends for 2024
Marketers today are more aligned on revenue goals than ever before. They have to go deeper into the funnel to actively take part in conversions. Then, they must go further into the customer lifecycle to avoid churn. They also need to find opportunities for cross-sell and upsell. This is where ABM marketing programs prove highly effective. They offer great ROI for B2B marketers practicing it. Marketers must adapt to the latest ABM trends. This makes their campaigns and strategies more revenue focused.
Surface in-market accounts with intent data
Finding new customers is a perennial struggle for B2B marketers. In fact, 35% of B2B marketing executives stated this as the top business challenge in Gartner Digital Markets’ 2024 Tech Trends Survey.
Intent data is all the rage in the ABM world. B2B marketers across organizations are adopting or looking to adopt third-party intent data. They use this data to find quality prospects. Develop a process to source, filter, and apply intent data into the mix of account-based engagement signals. ABM marketers can then accurately identify and prioritize in-market accounts.
Use intent data to validate engagement signals from email, ad, and social campaigns. This validation process helps you understand which accounts are researching solutions like yours. A simple yet effective way to unearth the funnel stage of your target account.
Identify opportunities across the customer lifecycle
By definition, ABM relies on building and maintaining relationships with best-fit accounts to drive revenue. It doesn’t stop with new customer acquisition. It extends to building loyalty, cross-selling, and upselling.
Here too, you can use B2B intent data to identify churn signals in your customer list. By scanning if your customers are giving off intent signals for your competition or your category of solutions, you can sense their replacement intentions. Similarly, by tracking the intent surge of your customers for the rest of your solutions you can identify opportunities for cross-sell and upsell. With such intelligence, you can activate focused campaigns across the lifecycle. This will help you find and tap into new revenue streams.
Develop and execute an integrated ABM campaign
As a B2B marketing program, ABM focuses on targeting your named accounts across channels and activities. However, there are gaps in tying them together across the buyer journey stages.
As ABM marketers, you need to look at your ABM campaign across multiple channels from an integrated marketing lens. Serving consistent messaging across digital and offline channels, repeated enough to reach an effective frequency, is critical to drive successful ABM programs. Distorted messaging across a couple of channels will only take you so far. Integrated ABM campaigns help B2B marketers target buyers with a consistent message across relevant channels. This reduces friction and helps the marketer stay top of mind. In fact, integrated marketing can improve a customer’s buying intent by as much as 90%.
Run more hyper-personalized campaigns
Since you’ve chosen ABM as your revenue engine, it makes sense to deliver only the most focused campaigns. Personalization goals have to emerge from sending the same email with first-name merge tags. They should evolve to include more insightful and valuable content crafted with buyer group persona pain points in mind.
Marketers need to study their engagement and intent data to gain a deeper level of insights for personalization. What type of messaging and content would resonate with different stakeholders? To build highly targeted audience segments, understand the needs of buyers as both an organization and as individuals. Then, develop automated, integrated marketing journeys.
Your buyers must trust you to help fulfill their buying jobs. To do this, empower them with a library of self-serve tools. Include case studies, in-depth customer testimonials, and competitor comparisons or battle cards. These tools help them confidently make buying decisions.
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Expand ABM goals to encompass the entire funnel
Traditionally, marketing brings new leads or accounts into the funnel. But ABM demands marketers to go beyond TOFU metrics. They must effectively guide accounts to deal closure.
Your ABM strategy will find success when you execute a full-funnel marketing strategy. It requires you to build a funnel that is robust enough to help you track your target account from awareness to closure and beyond. ABM requires investment across channels and activities. You should consolidate all your metrics across touchpoints and funnel stages.
The KPIs of ABM marketers need to expand beyond generating leads. They should ultimately align with the organizational revenue goals. How many accounts actually convert into paying customers is the question to ask.
Execute effective and efficient ABM programs
Across B2B organizations, marketing is expected to become the lynchpin of organizational growth. And most marketers expect ABM to be their growth engine. However, ABM demands marketers to possess the insights on buyer-groups. They also need to know the next-best actions to run buyer-centric motions across the customer lifecycle.
Understanding individual buyer needs and behavior is important to build consensus. Marketing can become the primary revenue driver only with a state-of-the-art ABM tool for data gathering, executing multi-channel campaigns, funnel analytics, and business intelligence.
While being creative in the face of economic uncertainties has become a necessary trait of marketers, embracing innovation in marketing technology is now imperative. Marketers need a modern ABM tool to strategize, execute, and optimize a scalable ABM program. The tool should have AI-powered capabilities for insights, predictive analytics, and orchestration.
Want to learn how you can make your ABM program effective and efficient in 2024? Speak to one of our ABM experts today. Book a free demo call.
