Isn’t marketing much easier when you know exactly which companies to target and what marketing messages to deliver that would resonate with them the most? That’s the dream. Given that we don’t live in a perfect world, we do live in one where inbound marketing and account based marketing exist. But when the two strategies converge, this dream can become a reality.
To begin with the basics, inbound marketing creates SEO-optimized content that attracts, delights and converts customers doling out information that’s important to them in an organic manner whereas account-based marketing takes a more focussed approach towards prospects aligning marketing and sales to deliver a personalised experience for a select set of accounts instead of an individual buyer. The best fit for a B2B marketing agency selling high-value products or services is opting for account based marketing services. But inbound and account-based marketing have a common ground in requiring a deep understanding of your target buyer to inform what type of content needs to be curated and how you can choose to deliver it. This increases the discover-ability of your content by that target.
You can easily recycle and remodel the content and use the same channels for account-based marketing as you’ve already put into place with inbound. Basically, what account-based marketing does is takes that foundational content and personalizes it even more. At the end of the day, both inbound and account-based marketing focus on delivering a great buying experience across the entire flywheel. Account-based marketing just helps accelerate the flywheel once the inbound foundation is in place.
The Flywheel Model
Additionally, account-based marketing services focus on a specific set of accounts curating targeted, personalized content that provides more opportunity to focus on the happiness and retention of those clients. This is another essential part of the inbound marketing flywheel. To put it another way, inbound marketing helps you attract the right customers post which account based marketing uses sales and marketing to speed up the process of the flywheel providing a valuable customer experience. In the end, both of these strategies enable you to win those target accounts. Using inbound and account based marketing in partnership can help elevate your company’s entire marketing strategy. Thus, it is critical to use account-based marketing the inbound way- providing valuable content and customer experiences to those high-value accounts.
In conclusion, instead of pitting inbound and account-based marketing against each other, you must think of them in alliance (i.e. inbound and ABM, not inbound vs ABM). Combining the services of inbound and account-based marketing offers a more robust strategy helping you to make streamlined decisions for your business.