4 Benefits of Account-Based Marketing for Programmatic

For B2B marketers, getting in front of the right professionals with buying influence is essential for campaign success. B2B marketers need the means to efficiently target within their brand’s ideal customer profile to ensure their ads can lead to meaningful conversions. 

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a personalized and precise targeting strategy that tailors messaging specifically for B2B audiences so they are more receptive and media spend is more efficient. A report by Momentum ITSMA gathered input from 279 ABM heads and practitioners from across the world, to evaluate how they are leveraging AMB tactics.

It found that 84% of marketers experienced pipeline growth, and 77% reported revenue growth thanks to their ABM efforts. Seventy-two percent said that ABM delivered higher return-on-investment (ROI) than other types of marketing.

What is Account-Based Marketing?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a business-to-business (B2B) marketing strategy that concentrates marketing toward a set of specific accounts within a market. For example, a common ABM strategy is to host VIP in-person events for target accounts. With ABM, you can personalize campaigns with the goal of engaging each account. 

There’s value beyond just lead generation when you leverage an ABM strategy. Many marketers find that ABM results in measurable improvements across a range of accounts, sales, and organizational objectives.

Account-Based Marketing and Programmatic

Traditional ABM has relied on physical-world activities. Marketers would attend events to get one-on-one time with the stakeholders at a target company. Or, they would send gifts to ideal company clients. 

Although traditional ABM works, personalization at scale for target accounts is a top challenge.
One way to overcome this challenge is by leveraging the power of programmatic. With programmatic ABM, you can target high-value B2B audiences based on account lists, firmographic, and personal-level data.

4 Benefits of Account-Based Marketing for Programmatic

Modern programmatic ABM can be a B2B marketer’s best friend: Precision targeting at scale for your highest-ROI tactics. Let’s explore 4 reasons why B2B marketers should be leveraging programmatic ABM. 

1. Programmatic ABM is precise and scalable.

With programmatic ABM, marketers can leverage tools that target select account lists and employees based on factors, such as seniority and other firmographic data. This approach results in meaningful ad campaigns that can scale. By using firmographic and account data to pivot their ad campaigns, B2B marketers can optimize their results and achieve greater campaign success.

2. Marketers can track progress across the buyer’s journey.

Advertisers can leverage programmatic ABM to see what actions users are taking at which stage of the programmatic funnel. This gives them insight into their unique sales cycle, and helps them prioritize what to do next. Understanding how business professionals and decision makers are engaging with campaigns and creatives makes it possible to better iterate on campaign performance. 

A B2B marketer can use these insights to segment the audiences into more applicable groups that can be targeted using increasingly focused and effective means. They can also leverage ABM to discern interested and engaged accounts for prioritization within the sales team. 

3. ABM streamlines the customer acquisition process. 

Programmatic ABM supports the streamlining of the customer acquisition process because it gives marketers the opportunity to create more personalized messaging for B2B professionals. Rather than creating a broad message for a large population, B2B marketers can personalize messaging based on who their target personas are or where specific accounts are in the funnel. This enables B2B marketers to eliminate those poor leads that go nowhere.

While ABM supports personalized messaging, this doesn’t mean marketers should only nurture the primary decision maker that they are targeting. For ad campaigns to scale, it can be helpful to build a strategy that gets in front of the wider team that could influence a buying decision. Limiting campaigns to reach only senior decision makers like a CEO, for example, may lead to campaigns that struggle to scale. 

4. Marketers can leverage ABM for multi-channel campaigns.

The B2B buying journey isn’t linear. A multi-channel strategy is key, because it enables marketers to reach influential B2B audiences wherever they consume content. Using a mix of complementary channels increases the percentage of the total target audience that a campaign can reach, and it helps advertisers to craft a cohesive brand story throughout the entire customer journey.

Why is this important? It can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to several months to close a B2B sale. Pursuing a full-funnel marketing approach allows B2B marketers to nurture leads who aren’t ready to buy yet across a multitude of channels, such as unleashing their message through a full-screen video via connected TV (CTV) advertising, or retargeting them through a programmatic audio ad. 

Get Started With Programmatic ABM

Alongside the rise of programmatic advertising, ABM has become increasingly powerful—and it’s time for B2B marketers to take advantage! With programmatic ABM, you can nurture audiences throughout the B2B buying journey, across all devices, and different programmatic channels. Using ABM to create highly targeted and personalized campaigns will enable you to win over the right accounts. 

Account-Based Marketing FAQ