As a business marketing to other businesses, what would you prefer? A thousand leads with some of them converting into your customers, or targeting your desired accounts and converting them into your advocates?
Well, you could choose either of them, and yet not succeed. Why, you ask?
Because it all depends on choosing what is right for your business and deploying it in a way that creates a smooth user experience, induces engagement and helps build relationship with your prospects. The ultimate aim is to convert them into your customers, and then advocates.
So while the ongoing debate between Inbound Marketing and Account Based Marketing (ABM) lays focus on where one is superior to the other, the reality is that they are not. They are actually complementary when done well, and together.
But then where do they differ?
Inbound Marketing is about generating a greater amount of leads, and then taking them through the sales funnel. However, while this creates a good number of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), they may not necessarily be the kind of leads the sales team wants to go after.
So while you may attract a huge number of visitors, only a few of them will convert into your customers. For instance, you need 1,087 inbound leads across all channels to generate 500 MQLs, to further generate 30 SQLs, finally converting to 8 customers. The average visitors to customers conversion range per industry being from 0.25% through to 1.16%.
So to get to the number of customers you want, you do have to generate large volumes of leads.
ABM, on the other hand, focuses on only your best fit accounts. It fosters a close relationship between your sales and marketing team, where the marketing team actually enables the sales team.
So the sales team identifies the accounts they want to sell to, and the marketing team works on converting them into engaged prospects so sales have a better chance of closing them as customers. In a nutshell, this is how the ABM process looks like:
However, the ABM platform approach works well only when you are addressing a limited set of accounts. If your company sells to a wider and more diverse market, it may not work well, as ABM is hard to scale.
This leads to the following conclusion.
The question still stands. But it is no longer about choosing between ABM and Inbound, but choosing what is right for your business. And that involves going according to your target market, budget, and preferable conversion period.
Niswey understands a business and what its clients want to achieve. It correlates it with its experience of similar projects and knowledge of both the services to suggest what is right for the client.
Its Inbound Marketing Services helps its business clients attract a huge number of leads through optimized content, focused campaigns and continued data review
In the same way, its Account-Based Marketing Services enables its clients’ sales team market to the kind of accounts they desire, through personalized content, email marketing and targeted advertising
Taking the example of Srijan, our client for the past seven years. A few years ago, we were providing Inbound marketing services to them because their target was to sell to small and medium enterprises. And at that time, Inbound marketing generated a good quantity of leads, many of which also got converted to their clients.
Nearly three years ago, Srijan changed its target to large enterprises. It no longer just wanted a huge number of leads but only the best fit accounts. And so we molded our services to suit their requirements.
Using our account-based marketing tactics, we enabled their sales team by identifying their best fit accounts and creating personalized campaigns and content so that they can sell better.
We are no longer their marketing counterpart alone, but their sales enablement ABM vendors team as well!
And the results have been encouraging. Our ABM strategy for Srijan not only helped them convert a high-value account but also helped build a sustainable accounts pipeline, with highly engaged decision-makers across accounts.
If your business is looking for ROI-based growth, you are at the right place. Our team can work with you to understand your business requirements and provide you the solutions that you need to scale up your game.