• by Jess Nelson , October 27, 2017

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is infiltrating advertising agencies, with a majority of marketing professionals now utilizing the strategy to help their clients. 

Demandbase, a San Francisco-based B2B marketing platform, partnered with Wakefield Research to poll 400 advertising professionals on how they utilize account-based marketing. Two-thirds of marketing agencies leverage ABM to better service their clients, according to the report, and nearly 70% of those who don’t use ABM plan to integrate it into their client work in the future. 

Every ad professional admitted that they had at least one client using ABM, but education was seen as the largest hurdle impeding ABM adoption. Almost half of respondents asserted that their clients don’t understand what ABM is and 32% of respondents said that their clients thinks they’re utilizing ABM when, in reality, they are not. 

John Dering, director of ABM technology and strategy at Demandbase, says account-based marketing automation can add significant value to email marketing programs.

He describes ABM as “the practice of identifying accounts with the best chance of a desired outcome” and “applying marketing activities targeted specifically to those accounts.”

For example, ABM can help marketers target leads that are most likely to close by identifying accounts that that are actually in need of their services. Furthermore, ABM also helps marketers pinpoint the correct person in a company to reach out to with personalized messaging.

“In B2B, you need to consider the social rules of spam,” says Dering. “If you send to an entire account, but only a few people really are your buyers, then you risk another employee hitting the SPAM button and automatically creating a filter on that company’s email server to block your messages.  If that happens, you won’t be able to reach the inbox again -- no one will see your emails. And the only way to get your emails into the inbox again is to get the IT person at that account to remove the filter.” 

It’s evident that batch-and-blast will not suffice in B2B marketing, and Dering argues that sending mass emails to an entire account ultimately impedes a marketer’s ability to influence the account long-term. 

“Unlike other channels that account-based marketers may use to influence an entire account, email has some serious guardrails,” he says.

Dering says email marketing presents a different set of challenges compared to other advertising channels used in ABM, such as displays ads and social media outreach, and that it’s essential that email marketers have access to the same data models that allow for segmentation decisions in other systems in real-time.

“It’s imperative that email marketers have access to account specific data being used for building target account lists and that they use that data to target the right accounts and buyers in their database with the best possible offer message,” says Dering.