Marketing (and even!) sales activities today require deeper targeted efforts to enable better business ROI. At a time when the world is still reeling from the second year of an ongoing pandemic, the onus lies on marketing and sales teams to drive dedicated efforts to achieve faster results, keeping the various economic, local (especially true for global companies serving a global audience) and overall business operation challenges that the pandemic brings up. 

At the start of the year 2018, only 18% of ABM adopters were backed by at least two years of relevant experience running result-oriented account-based marketing campaigns. As per a 2020 State of ABM Report, 94.2% of the people surveyed said they had an active ABM programme in place, this growing number is not only set to continue all through 2021, it also shows that the rise in ABM adoption has also resulted in better ABM expertise among marketing and sales teams.

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Every marketing leader and business will have their own set of challenges and hurdles when setting up an account-based marketing programme for the first time, marketing teams who have been early adopters of this practice and are experts in the matching of the best-fit ABM practices and ABM technologies to drive results will still have a different set of challenges to deal with. Marketing after all can never be perfect of rid of challenges!

For most marketing leaders, minimizing some of the most common account-based marketing pitfalls and mistakes can be a starting point in at least cleaning up their ABM process and ensuring value-driven results to their companies. 

Here are some of the top account-based marketing mistakes that marketers should think about, to ensure they avoid them!

Your Target List has Wrong Data -> Marketing Leaders Don’t Work Closely Enough with the Team Building the Target List

Every account-based marketing campaign has to start with the building out of a target list of companies and the most relevant contact points from those companies. This is the holy grail of any ABM campaign. 

If marketers do not use the various martech to their advantage to not only diversify the various available data points from multiple online resources to identify their target audience, this can cause lower ROI for the campaign as a whole. In a multi-channel online marketing environment, marketers have a range of online sources and data points to choose from: website visitors, social media channels, email opens of past campaigns, for instance. 

This is where marketing leaders with relevant account-based experience behind them need to work more closely with the team building out this data and target list, to draw out the noise and create a relevant list based on past buyer interaction and interest as well as other key factors like technographics. 

Not having a Deep Enough Understanding of your Total Addressable Market

A total addressable market helps provide marketers a potential revenue opportunity idea for a particular product or service. Identifying and understanding your total addressable market does not only involve creating a list of target companies that would benefit from or most likely invest into your product, it also involves weaning out this list regularly with pre-ABM campaigns to identify interest, to identify ABM messaging based on the target company’s current tech stack (do they already use a product like yours and are they showing signs of wanting a new provider, for instance). 

Marketing leaders can set different parameters in place to eventually create a more targeted sub-list or multiple lists based on this, so that it is easier to run deeper hyper-personalized ABM campaigns to each separate list. Hyper-personalized campaigns are a definite must-have in any account-based marketing campaign and without it, no ABM campaign can show true results.

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Marketing technology leaders like Uberflip provide data on the types of companies using different types of technologies, they also provide relevant information that can help technology marketers understand potential IT budget spends and future propensity to spend or invest in a particular technology. With the sophistication available through technographic data today, marketers can understand more about the companies spending on a product that is similar to theirs, which companies currently use their competitor’s technology as well as which of these companies are about to have renewal come up for these licenses (so that they can plan their ABM campaign at the right time, with the right marketing messaging and strategy, maybe by even using pricing as a hook). 

Using the Right ABM Software with your Martech

To drive long-term account-based marketing success, marketers cannot have their ABM software stand apart from their overall marketing technology. The choice of technology to drive efforts from various online marketing efforts, including an ABM campaign lies in picking the right martech (as a whole) based on short to long term marketing goals and plans. 

If marketers want to run multiple ABM campaigns to multiple target lists, for instance, an integrated customer relationship management platform that saves all this communication and data in one place is important, besides which, having the CRM integrate with the company’s content management system can help identify which target companies are currently showing interest in your company’s website or product, marketing automation tools to drive personalized emails are a must, the use of targeted adtech to run personalized ads based on interest and then account-based marketing software have to be integrated well with each other to work in tandem. 

This is where marketing leaders with expertise in ABM campaigns can actually use all this information to drive deeper ABM outreach and to come up with new marketing plans that can help push potential buyers through the funnel a lot faster.

It’s not that Complicated!

Any ABM campaign needs constant understanding of results, breakdown of campaign information and regular fixing to each step and process. Marketing leaders who spend enough time digging through their ABM software and martech will always be able to drive more success with their ABM campaigns. There is no shortage of tools or marketing technologies today, or even data to help marketers break down user, buyer and prospect interest. Marketing teams who focus on strengthening their core practices can also use this information to reach out to completely new audiences who can be relevant buyers for their services or products in future. 

The more targeted the approach with the basic best practices firmly in place, it will be that much easier for marketing teams to focus on building the right content marketing plans, teamed with the right email marketing plans and cold calls to help supplement their ABM efforts. 

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