December 17, 2020
Strategy #3: Integrating Inbound with ABM
Inbound marketing has been widely accepted, with 76% of marketers using it as their primary strategy. After all, compared to outbound marketing, inbound can be 10x more effective for lead conversion and inbound leads cost 61% less. The perfect strategy for today’s self-service world, inbound marketing builds trust with prospects by providing helpful and relevant content when they’re searching for solutions.
With account-based marketing (ABM), instead of trying to nurture every lead, high-value accounts are identified to target with campaigns and content personalized to their needs. This strategy is used to upsell or cross-sell to existing customers, and to educate and engage high-quality prospects better.
When paired, these proven strategies reap lucrative results. Here’s why:
Targeting a select group of high-value accounts instead of wide persona demographic
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Tailoring inbound content to specific needs instead of the general marketplace
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Increased probability of securing best-fit opportunities and getting higher ROI from your marketing efforts
What’s more, combining these strategies ensures you provide a consistent experience throughout the customer journey. Continually delighting customers with personalized, educational content is crucial for customer engagement, retention and building strong relationships.
So what does integrating these two strategies look like?
Simply put, it’s creating personalized inbound content for high-value accounts. This could very well include repurposing existing content and editing it to the target account’s needs, so you don’t have to start completely from scratch.
Before any content is created, identify what’s important to your target accounts. These organizations should fit your ideal customer profile and have the greatest opportunity for high and long-term relationships. Determine the decision-makers and their pain points, challenges, needs and goals. Based on the information you learn, strategize what content would be most effective in engaging them to reach your goal. Deliver that content via personalized emails, videos, eBooks, webinars and virtual events, as well as one-on-one sales communications.
To promote your content, create a campaign and targeted Google and/or social ads, and set up a workflow that nurtures the accounts with the relevant content through emails and landing pages. By using tools such as HubSpot ABM Software, you can monitor progress and engagement so you can reach out with the right content at the right time. This will help you capitalize on opportunities to educate prospects, upsell or cross-sell to existing customers. You can also use that data to evaluate the delivery tools that get most use, and reduce spending on those that deliver less engagement.
While inbound and account-based marketing take a different approach in who to target, they have one key similarity—the strategies truly revolve around the customer. Whether marketing to general buyer personas or specific accounts, it’s all about creating relevant content and reaching the right people on the right platform, at the right time. When you do that right, the sales process should be a more streamlined and productive path.
