Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has emerged as a popular marketing strategy. Many people think that ABM is a modern concept, but to everyone’s surprise, it is not a modern concept. ABM has been in use for a longer period than people have realized about its use. B2B companies have always targeted account lists of their top prospects and given them special attention from sales and marketing. This tactic was known as ‘integrated marketing’ before it was termed as Account-Based Marketing.
The day B2B companies emerged, somewhere in the 90s, they had to mimic B2C companies because they were providing powerful and personalized brand experiences to their audiences. In 2004 ITSMA termed integrated marketing as ABM, it took almost a decade to adopt this term as mainstream. Around 2014, account-based marketing received global search traffic to show up on Google Trends, and in 2015 global search traffic for lead generation hit an all-time low. Technology has empowered B2B marketers and provided personalized campaigns to the right audiences. Soon the term ‘ABM’ became synonymous with B2B marketing just the way ‘digital marketing’ is now known as regular marketing today.
COVID-19 presented new challenges and opportunities in front of the marketers and the finance team had to learn to do more with less. Here’s when ABM came into play and helped companies and marketers become smarter and more targeted to acquire new or existing customers. Now, the world has finally applied and caught up with the account-based marketing methodologies where CROs are purchasing more ABM platforms to help the sales teams.
There’s an important distinction to make between ABM and “inbound marketing,” which has been the standard B2B marketing strategy up until the 2010s. Unlike inbound marketing, ABM is not a lead-generation strategy. The focus is entirely different. Sure, it generates some leads as a by-product. However, at its core, ABM is about creating focused awareness and engagement with a segment of future customers and working closely with sales teams to create opportunities.
Account-based Marketing has always focused on the accounts that are the best-fit accounts for your business. These approaches have always been about efficient revenue growth in which most of the marketing efforts are put into the best-fit accounts. Lead generation is a part of ABM where the majority of ABM efforts are focused on account engagement and creating opportunities with the target accounts.
Every year, the integration of account-based marketing (ABM) into sales and marketing strategies becomes more profound, significantly impacting revenue generation. In 2020, this trend was unmistakable, with a staggering 78 percent of companies dedicating their demand-generation resources to ABM initiatives. The outcomes speak for themselves: nearly 80 percent of new opportunities and a substantial 73 percent of total revenue are directly attributed to these ABM programs. Even companies in the early stages of adopting ABM are reaping significant rewards, with around one-third of their revenue now originating from these targeted account-based approaches.
This shift underscores ABM’s effectiveness in focusing marketing efforts on high-value accounts, enhancing engagement, and driving substantial business outcomes. As companies continue to refine their ABM strategies, the trend toward prioritizing personalized, account-specific marketing approaches is likely to accelerate, further solidifying ABM as a cornerstone of modern sales and marketing practices.
