If you’re aiming for lead volume, then lead (or demand, whichever you prefer) generation is the right method for you. What is lead generation? It’s an inbound marketing approach where you post up blogs, webinars, ads (whatever you want really), and sit and wait for your “ideal account” to come knocking at your door. It’s a pretty simple approach, and it’s been around a while.
If you want to envision traditional lead generation using “real-world” items, think of yourself as a fisherman. Your goal is to capture as many good fish as you can to sell and make a profit. So, what do you do? Get a net of course! A net would allow you to capture as much fish as the net could hold, exponentially increasing your chances of getting great fish and making great profit. Or at least that’s what is supposed to happen.For the sake of argument, let’s just say that the lake where you are fishing is home to both poisonous, inedible fish, and also great, tasty ones. Through your use of the net, you’re bound to capture both species, forcing you to spend time and resources sorting through the fish to determine which are “bad” and which are “good”. To backtrack a bit, the bad fish are poor leads, that will often drain you of resources and not bring you any profit. The good fish are those leads who swim well through your pipeline, but are not as easy to come by.
An account-based demand approach changes that.
Like I said, as a fisherman your goal is to make profit off the fish you capture, and you can’t bring inedible fish to the market because nobody will buy. You need a more accurate and precise way to capture the right fish, the ones who will bring you the most money. So, what do you do? Get a spear, so you can see and pick the best fish consistently for the best return on your (spear) investment. This is exactly what an account-based approach is, a method from which you can select the right, qualified accounts before the marketing even starts.
Account-based marketing is a strategy as much as it is a mindset that a business adopts. It aligns the marketing and sales teams to agree on accounts they will go after, create and deploy persona based engagement across the buying committee, measure and optimize campaigns, and develop a content cycle based on win rate. By flipping the traditional marketing funnel, account-based marketing allows marketing and sales to start with accounts who show high purchase intent, work with the buying committees who have already been engaged and therefore increase pipeline or funnel velocity.
What now? You have a very broad understanding of what account-based marketing (ABM) is; you want the best return on your fish yield but don’t know where to begin. My suggestion would be testing. The tools to actually incorporate ABM are expensive, so you want to know what works before you begin to drop thousands of dollars. Do you research, read up on what you need and what tools provide what. One of which is us, Netrocon Digital. Don’t be afraid to drop us a line through our contact page if you need some guidance or help with adopting ABM. Also, be sure to leave a comment below with your thoughts on anything account-based. We’ll be in touch.