ABM was, and still is, lauded as the ultimate B2B marketing strategy, offering hyper-targeted and hyper-personalized campaigns with a promise of smashing target account revenue goals – cue the mic drop. What CEO wouldn’t want their team focusing resources and costs on the most important accounts verse casting wide, wasteful nets hoping to pull some keepers in along the way? On paper, it all makes perfect sense, but when deploying an ABM strategy in-house, some painful realizations start to rear their ugly head.
Talk to enough clients and you hear plenty of shared pain points, like resourcing! To say ABM is resource-intensive is a disservice to the term resource-intensive. Think about the complexity of operationalizing and deploying an ABM strategy. You need a technology stack, systems integrations, high volumes of content creation, coordinated marketing operations, digital advertising, creative (and also good) copy writing, product knowledge and sharing, data – and not just any data – clean data, advanced analytics, and a team of experienced people who understand how to make this all work in harmony in remote work environments. Oh, and let’s not forget about marketing and sales alignment, because as we all know sales and marketing ALWAYS see eye-to-eye when it comes to managing and nurturing leads.
I think it’s safe to say the complexity can be a bit overwhelming at times. When we ask companies how their ABM strategy is coming along, most figuratively curl up into a protective ball and mutter ‘it’s a work in progress.’ Frustrating? You bet, because there are so many teams who put in time, energy and budget who feel like they will never get it over the finish line. All of this is to say that most companies can’t do everything ABM, all-at-once, all in-house, nor should they be expected to. I am a firm believer in a hybrid approach to ABM that taps into the data, resources and expertise of external partners to strengthen and complement a company’s strategy, NOT replace it.
At CyberRisk Alliance, we believe that strong data is the foundation of a great ABM strategy and execution, and it’s also one of the toughest things for organizations to manage themselves. Publishers, like CyberRisk Alliance, have access to high volumes of unique, clean, 1st party data. Our users sign up for our newsletters, consume insights, news and information on topics that are relevant to them on SC Media, MSSP Alert, Channel E2E, listen to our Security Weekly podcasts, attend our live regional, national, and virtual events, download our research reports, and so on. That means our 1st Party Data comes with a wealth of behavioral and intent signals from outside your walls. This can help optimize your audience and marketing approach by appending and informing your data with ours.
We recently shared the top three topics (i.e. solution and technology categories) being consumed by our users in accounts that matched to one client’s TAL. They used that internally to reshape their marketing messaging and got better engagement as a result. Behold, the power of great 1st party data! We’ve also successfully surfaced additional personas that accounts should pull into their ICP, identified preferred formats through reviews of engagement data on lookalike accounts or contacts and built unique and fresh content to help power our clients’ existing ABM campaigns.
External partners also have access to prospective buyers you might not have in your database through their 1st party users. This can help you build scale against your high-value accounts without having to contract with third-party list providers. Better yet, we can assist your ABM strategy by targeting those additional prospects through our channels to convert them into qualified leads or drive them to your experiences.
When we mention research, product focus groups, content creation, audience nurturing - many clients say ‘wait, you can help us with that?’ Yes, we can! The point is by tapping into external partners’ data and expertise through a hybrid approach, we can take some of the ABM resource pressure of your internal teams and allow them to focus on the business at hand: smashing target account revenue goals.
Ready to get started on designing, optimizing, or refreshing your ABM programs and campaign efforts? Book a meeting with our team to learn more about how we can help augment your team and their resources.
.webp)