Account Based Marketing (ABM) is often, and in my personal opinion, totally unhelpfully, thought of as a channel. It is actually lot more useful to think of ABM as an account based mindset, and that's a much more accurate way of describing how we practice ABM here at MomentumITSMA.
An account based mindset can help to drive brand growth, because its core principle is to put the customer first, deeply understanding their needs, wants and behaviours. And if we then apply that mindset to the right audiences, brands can create valuable mental and physical connections that create long term growth. In contrast, thinking about ABM as a channel, leads down a reductive path of increasingly narrow targeting, automated creepy personalisation, and efficiency as the end goal, rather than impact and growth.
The recent white paper and research by the Erhenberg-Bass Institute in partnership with Linked In, examined whether widely accepted (although not totally uncontested) principles of brand growth in the B2C space would also apply to B2B. It's a fascinating read, and what comes out most clearly for me is that the strategy proposed by Byron Sharp (originally in How Brands Grow) to drive growth also clearly applies in B2B - namely the strategy of maximising the mental and physical availability of brands to potential buyers.
In B2B, even just one individual customer organisation can have lots potential actual buyers, so targeting a subset of the total market makes tons of sense....i.e there may well be "light" buyers inside an existing customer, hence why many focus on key accounts. What isn’t different between B2C and B2B is human nature, and what the Erhenberg-Bass Institute’s work seems to suggest is that this means the principles of brand growth are very similar in the B2B space. Humans are short on time and attention, and that leads to some dynamics that must be understood to successfully grow a brand in any domain (even if it's at a different scale, given our capacity for attention in making a multi million dollar tech purchase is larger than when buying a soft drink, yet it is still a limited resource).
Increasing mental availability is all about ensuring that a brand is top of mind in the context of a satisfying a specific need (eg AWS is a brand I recall for flexible and scalable public cloud), and increasing physical availability is all about ensuring the brand is easy to access (eg AWS has a simple and clear purchase journey if I want to satisfy xyz need)
And viewed through that lens, there are many ways we apply an account based mindset to help our clients increase both the mental and physical availability of their brands:
How an account based mindset helps brands drive mental availability:
Creating clear and compelling value propositions that make it clear how brands address customers specific category and buyer needs
Using creativity to cut through and be memorable
Flexing brand cues to create targeted, relevant communications but in a way that reinforces the brand memory structures critical to keeping a brand top of mind
Building strategies that balance creating short term impact with maintaining an always on presence, to reflect the fact that buyers aren't always in the market
How an account based mindset helps brands drive physical availability:
Helping align sales and marketing to create a seamless customer journey from first enquiry to sale
Enabling sales to make it easy for the customer to buy by giving them clear, compelling messaging and collateral
Creating a tight connection between customer need and client solution with tailored messaging and content so it is easy for customers to find the tight solution for their specific persona-type and industry
Integrated marketing campaigns across channels that end in and are connected with sales enablement
I'm sure there are more!
It’s fascinating to see this research applied to the B2B space and it’s a timely reminder that people are people, and a lot of the same principles seem to apply whether making brand choices at home or at work. I’ll definitely be thinking more about how we can find new ways to help our clients cut through, how else can ABM be used to keep brands memorable and easy to buy, whether working across multiple target customers or when deep in a key account that we are treating as a market in its own right.