B2B Success lies in how quickly your sales and marketing team can generate a higher interest in your products or services. In B2B Marketing, you refer to that as “successful demand generation.” Over the years, digital marketers have been trying different demand gen strategies to find one which can help them convert more leads into actual customers. Today, that search is over for many organizations who have adopted ABM, or an Account-Based Marketing approach.

In ABM, the strategy is to spend more time and resources on different stages of the customer experience. Rather than taking a “spray and pray” approach, such as driving high volumes of traffic to a landing page and expecting 1-2% to convert, you invest in pursuing targeted accounts with strategic outreach that you want to sell to. 

Today, ABM has become the “new normal” in B2B marketing. The one-size-fits-all marketing model doesn’t work anymore and many large-scale marketing organizations, particularly for those companies with a complex sales cycle, uses ABM at some level. 

How different-sized organizations use ABM to boost their daily demand gen funnel 

• Companies with large TAM (Total Addressable Market) generate a high volume of inbound leads; marketers compare those leads against their ICP (Ideal customer profile) and determine the accounts with the highest intent and revenue potential. Further, they apply ABM tactics like direct mail and display ads, focusing on role specific messaging, to classify customer accounts in tiers and determine which customers they should focus on at what time. 

• Companies with limited TAM might have a highly specific ICP. Using this limited ICP, they can identify the middle and bottom of the funnel accounts, and use a very targeted and strategic approach. These companies might use multichannel 1:1 ABM campaigns to generate demand within these accounts.

• For organizations with a large amount of data already sitting in their systems – quite literally might be a pile of forgotten accounts – marketers use every ABM tool in the arsenal to boost their demand generation funnel. This starts with using predictive data analytics to distinguish accounts and then engage them with personalized content, programmatic advertising, and sales outreach campaigns.

3 types of demand generation campaigns using ABM

#1. Pre-targeting Campaigns

Pre-targeting is the opposite of re-targeting. Instead of waiting to run relevant ads to prospects who browse through your website, you proactively pre-target your ideal accounts with relevant ads. 

This is a great way to ensure all key decision-makers within your target accounts are familiar with your products and solutions before any kind of marketing or sales activity reaches them. 

Pre-targeting is highly recommended before important events and company summits. You can use this ABM strategy to drive event registrations, warm up net-new accounts, etc.

#2. Account Nurturing Campaigns

Account nurture aims to capture the prime stakeholders of your target accounts already in your database and move them into the pipeline. As B2B sales cycles are often complex and lengthy, most of the accounts won’t be instantly available to make purchase decisions.

Rather than ignore these accounts at the time, move them to nurturing and continue with relevant content marketing. The moment they are ready to make a purchase, your brand will come to their mind first.

#3. Lead-to-Account Nurturing Campaigns

Lead-to-account nurturing is suitable for Bolt-On ABM programs. This drives funnel leads, such as event leads and inbound leads, into your database and then broadens your reach to nurture the entire buying group at.

Similar to account nurturing programs, the purpose of lead-to-account nurture is to convert an account into an opportunity and opportunity into sales. Lead-to-account nurturing campaigns trigger actions that engage different personas from a particular company when the lead comes in and progresses through the funnel for conversion. 

Demand generation made easy with ABM

Irrespective of your industry or customer type, ABM can help close more deals, quickly convert, and enhance your entire customer experience. Account-Based Marketing, and Account-Based Engagement is a popular strategy that any B2B company’s requirements can virtually adapt to. 

To learn more about ABM, refer to these articles:

• Truth Matters: 4 ABM Truths for B2B Marketers
• Account-Based Engagement: Look at Relationships Over Time