Most marketers are aware of account-based marketing (ABM). Many have experienced its tremendous potential to create revenue for their company and build meaningful relationships with clients.
Unfortunately, it can be daunting to scale a successful ABM strategy in a complicated, modern marketing landscape. And now, a fresh take on ABM has gained popularity: account-based experience (ABX). What are these strategies and how do you know which to leverage for your business? In this blog post, we’ll explain the differences between ABM vs ABX and the best practices for both.
ABM vs. ABX
ABM and ABX are two sides of the same coin. While they have many similarities, the main difference is in their approach.
For instance, ABM follows the typical outbound sales approach. In contrast, ABX is customer-focused and driven by customer experience. Let’s explore each in more detail.
What is Account-Based Marketing?
Account-based marketing is a growth-focused strategy. In this strategy, your marketing and sales departments collaborate. Together, they create personalized buying experiences and tailor these buying experiences to a mutually-identified group of high-value clients or accounts.
So, instead of marketing to a broad target audience, ABM focuses efforts on specific accounts that are more likely to convert.
Benefits of ABM
ABM offers companies several excellent benefits, making it a popular strategy. Some of the benefits are:
- Alignment: ABM keeps your marketing and sales teams aligned and focused on the same goals.
- Maximize Current Accounts: ABM lets your business capitalize on its current high-value accounts.
- Consistency: ABM ensures a consistent customer experience when sales and marketing are aligned.
- Easy Measurement:. ABM makes measuring your return on investment (ROI) easy.
- Streamlined Sales: The partnership between sales and marketing streamlines the sales cycle. This makes it easier for customers to purchase your goods or services.
- Business Growth: ABM makes it easier to grow your business through existing account relationships.
Best Practices for Account-Based Marketing
To truly benefit from ABM, you need some clever tactics. Successful ABM experts do the following:
- Implement a Strategic Account Planning Template: Having a template unifies your sales and marketing teams into a coherent force. Include your business overview, goals, and customer relationship landscape in this strategy.
- Secure Alignment: All stakeholders must be on board with your ABM strategy. Approval should include support for the ABM budget, organizational structure, and KPIs.
- Build Your Team: Your ABM team should consist of individuals from marketing and sales. Try to limit your teams to 10 sales reps and 1 marketer.
If you’re unsure how to implement a powerful ABM strategy, consider chatting with a digital marketing agency. At Mad Fish Digital, we can help you leverage the power of ABM to scale your brand.
What is Account-Based Experience?
Account-based experience is a marketing strategy that combines the power of your marketing, sales, and customer support departments. Instead of focusing on sales, ABX shifts the focus to customer experience.
ABX ensures customers have the best possible experience while going through the customer journey. With ABX, it’s essential to understand your customer’s journey. Customer journey mapping, as the foundation of ABX, provides companies with the precision of traditional ABM while helping customers enjoy the buying experience.
Benefits of ABX
The benefits of a successful ABX strategy include the following:
- Customer Relationships are First: ABX prioritizes customer relationships. This improves the customer’s trust in the brand and ensures long-lasting loyalty.
- Improved Personalization: With sales, marketing, and customer-faced teams working together, companies can offer an enhanced, personalized experience. Personalization improves reach and conversions.
- Maximize Content and Experience Delivery: With the proper ABX strategy, you can offer content delivery and personalized experiences across various channels within the business.
Best Practices for Account-Based Experience
You shouldn’t replace ABM with ABX. Instead, view them as complementary strategies that unlock improved sales, marketing, and customer experiences.
To make ABX work for your business, focus on the following:
- Ensure Strong Customer Relationships: ABX can only work when the customer relationship is prioritized. Sales, marketing, and customer care teams should work together to improve customer relationships.
- Prioritize High-Value Accounts: It’s tempting to create personalized customer experiences for every lead you get. However, it’s best to focus your ABX resources on targets that are most valuable to your business high-value targets. For the best results, identify accounts or clients with high -value and tailor experiences to them.
- Align Experience with the Journey: For ABX to succeed, you must align the customized experiences with the account or client journey. Predict what the customer experiences at a particular stage of the journey, and see where and how you can improve it.
In a customer-centric world, ABX aims to improve your ABM strategy. Use it to build long-lasting customer relationships and ensure a smooth customer journey.
Your ABM and ABX Strategy Experts
ABM and ABX are powerful B2B strategies. They have the potential to grow your business, improve revenue, and leverage customer loyalty. However, both methods require tremendous collaboration, resources, and time.
Should your business need more time or resources to implement an effective, growth-focused ABM and ABX strategy, consider consulting with a digital marketing agency like Mad Fish Digital. Our digital marketers are ready to transform your business by implementing an ABM and ABX strategy to improve customer retention, revenue, and brand recognition. Contact us today!
