Introduction
While marketing in all its glory and spheres plays a pivotal role in spreading brand awareness, it’s imperative for such efforts to align with the said business’s offers, revenue objectives, and ideal client persona profiles. This way, the possibility of missed targets is eliminated, leaving room for B2B sales and marketing teams to carefully strategize and correctly allocate marketing resources toward clients that better fit their financial narratives.
In this article, we dissect account-based marketing tactics, look at the benefits of designing and adopting an ABM strategy, expand on the benefits of account-based corporate gifting, and look at gift examples to help optimize your ABM efforts.
>> What Is Account-Based Marketing?
>> What Are The Benefits Of Account-Based Marketing?
>> How Can Account-Based Gifting Help With Your ABM Efforts?
>> What Is An Account-Based Gifting Platform?
>> Why Is An Account-Based Gifting Platform Better Than Manual Gifting?
>> Setting Up Your ABM Strategy
>> Gifts To Help Optimize Your ABM Outreach
What Is Account-Based Marketing?
86% of marketers report improved win rates with ABM.
By definition, account-based marketing is a strategy adopted to tailor each client’s experiences and align these with their attributes. It is based on the idea that just as no two business leaders are the same, despite harboring similar objectives and possibly functioning in the same vertical, no two accounts/clients can be managed using a linear approach. As such, businesses study each account, curate SWOT analysis for better and more lucrative experiences, and adopt additional methods to help support their retention, retargeting, and upselling efforts.
ABM marketers incorporate inbound marketing tactics to minimize the ‘disruptive’ nature of introductory marketing and instead, create content, deal packages, and an overall customer experience that prompts cross-product curiosity and increased purchasing behavior by targeted clients.
Before technicalities can be dissected and implemented, it is essential for a business’s account research efforts to focus on decision-makers, their solution-buying tendencies, and their general commercial personality. This way, high-value accounts are quickly identified, sales cycles are shortened, revenue wheels are oiled, and high-value clients are retained.
What Are The Benefits Of Account-Based Marketing?
As discussed previously, business is no longer conducted on a supply vs. demand basis. Patrons are no longer solely concerned with ‘big brand’ marketing but are most likely to spend on brands that understand the importance of relationship building, no matter how small. ABM marketers understand this, curate their strategies accordingly, and reap benefits such as:
- Shorter sales cycles: While purchasing decisions in large corporations run through a few tracks and require that multiple stakeholders sign off, account-based marketing is concerned with mass lead nurturing – resulting in quicker decision turnaround times.
- Measurable ROI goals: According to an ITSMA survey, 87% of B2B marketers reported that their ABM efforts preceded their normal marketing activities, and 91% of companies using ABM tactics reported a healthy increase in deal sizes – with 25% of those reporting a 50% increase. In a nutshell, account-based marketing allows for accurate ROI forecasting.
- Decreased resource wastage: Given that ABM marketers focus on a smaller number of high-value accounts, fewer resources are required, and these can be reallocated toward an entity’s secondary marketing tactics. A ‘one stone, multiple birds’ approach.
- Healthy departmental cohesion: While sales and marketing teams may focus on a different aspect of an entity’s revenue run, under traditional marketing instances, ABM requires collaboration between these two departments, and this may result in cohesive growth and target-smashing for sales and marketing teams.
- Client/account familiarity = better and more lucrative relationships: The more a business intentionally engages with its high-value clients/patrons, the more fertile the relationship, and the greater the financial harvest and chances of retention.
How Can Account-Based Gifting Help With Your ABM Efforts?
While sending corporate gifts to clients may seem small and insignificant, the gesture is, in fact, pivotal to effective account management and nurturing – and should be considered an integral part of a business’s account-based marketing strategy. According to Gartner’s 2021 CMO survey, 73% of CMOs are focussing their growth efforts on nurturing existing buyer-seller relationships.
By adding a personal touch to your business outreach, you can break through the noise and make the recipients feel that their needs are highly considered, and instead of a ‘one size fits all’ linear approach, personalization is adopted to ensure unique resolutions and experiences.
It is an undisputed truth that every single client is instrumental to an organization’s success, and should receive due attention. However, some business relationships prove to be more important when analyzing an entity’s profits objectives. What we’re highlighting here is that it’s more worth a business’s while to nurture a single account worth $1000 than it would be to focus on ten accounts worth $100 each. The higher the potential return from a single account, the more effort the said account warrants.
The corporate gifting process requires that this distinction be made in order for appropriate messaging to accompany gift offers. When this becomes a religious function, businesses are able to reassess their account focus strategies and re-identify their key accounts.
What Is An Account-Based Gifting Platform?
An account-based gifting platform is an online automated gifting system that enables the selection, storing, sending, management, and tracking of corporate gifts and branded SWAG items in one central platform. Much like e-commerce platforms that facilitate buying and selling without the need for manual work, automated account-based corporate gifting enables senders to seamlessly initiate, launch, and report on their corporate gifting campaigns.
When using a gifting platform as an ABM tool, account-based marketing teams can launch well-timed and objectively-phased corporate gifting campaigns on an international scale. In a nutshell, account-based marketing professionals can use corporate gifting to:
- Maintain existing business relationships
- Redefine relationships with previously active clients
- Redefine key accounts and reinforce management strategies
- Find new clients that are good MQLs
- Reward and delight both existing and prospective clients
Why Is An Account-Based Gifting Platform Better Than Manual Gifting?
Besides the need to manually input data, contact vendors, and oversee shipping processes, there are quite a few issues that may arise when opting for manual corporate gifting, especially frequent and large-scale gifting. Let’s look at a few:
- Unavailability/ poor quality of items: When vendor contact is done manually, you run the risk of not being able to acquire certain items due to stock and warehousing issues. This may delay manual steps to follow and incur higher costs.
- Packaging issues: Most gift item vendors service both commercial and private gifters, and given the thin formality line, gift items sourced may not adhere to corporate standards in terms of packaging and messaging. This may require additional monitoring and support.
- Shipping addresses: Because of a lack of integration with a CRM or mailing list software, you run the risk of sending items to incorrect addresses, or when recipients aren’t available to receive items. This may result in multiple shipping costs.
- Customs and duties for international gift shipping: Rules and regulations governing the import and export of items may negatively affect delivery, and high import costs will negatively affect the budget and incur further losses.
- Budget issues: Due to unpredictable hindrances to the manual corporate gifting process, it’s almost impossible to have set-in-stone budgets to support corporate gifting.
Setting Up Your ABM Strategy
It’s imperative for businesses to develop and adopt well-thought-through ABM strategies that are tailored to address their account/lead nurturing needs. While the method to the magic isn’t entirely set in stone, the following steps may assist in formulating a solid ABM strategy:
- Analyze current client data, and optimize: As mentioned previously, existing clients are already familiar with your services and are more likely to buy in than newly acquired leads. Research reveals that a 5% increase in retention efforts results in an incredible 95% rise in profits – so, reinvesting in your existing book of clients proves more profitable and generally makes more ‘cents’. The current client data can also help you determine your ICP.
- Tier Target Account Accordingly and determine personas: If you are targeting new leads, find out everything you need to know to sell to them. What does an ideal target account look like? What is the account’s income potential? Does previous data highlight profitability? Who are the key decision-makers? What is the entity’s revenue model? All these points ought to be addressed when defining account tiers.
- Tailor offers to suit each target account: As soon as you have a holistic view of the client, their needs, and buying behavior, curate growth maps, upselling models, messaging, and content that expand their knowledge of your offers and highlight why your solutions are necessary. Remember, the aim is to create ‘needs’ where none exist.
- Collaboration between sales and marketing teams: As soon as the above is established, intuitive workflows can be established to enable both sales and marketing teams to make use of the ABM tools at their disposal.
- Execute: Focus your efforts where your dollar is.
Gifts To Help Optimize Your ABM Outreach
- Custom SWAG: From essential office supplies to merchandise and gadgets, incorporate high-quality branded items as effective ‘brand reminder’ ABM tools. All you need to do is submit your request and our highly experienced corporate gifting experts will find suppliers and deal with the logistics to provide you with a seamless and personalized ABM gifting experience.
- Custom gifts: Have something in mind that your recipients would appreciate but haven’t quite seen on store shelves? No worries! All you have to do is brief our gifting associates, and they’ll curate gift packages in line with the said brief.
- Choose from hundreds of options in our well-curated catalog: From gourmet gift baskets to tech, beverages, and self-care packages, choose from our varied gift collections. Pre-selected gift items can be sent directly (should addresses be freely available), through email, or as shareable gift links.
Ready to get started with corporate gifting on a global scale and level up your ABM strategy? Book a 30-minute demo with one of our Gift Campaign Managers to see how our gifting platform works.
