Based on a B2B marketing survey, only 50% of marketers possess an understanding of their target market and only 36% actually keep buyer personas in mind while creating content.
And then they wonder why they are constantly challenged with the “right person, wrong company” situation. What marketers need to do is to get their context in perspective. For instance, consider a marketer identifies the target market as enterprises. However, there is a high level of response, interest and engagement from SMBs. The context of the content here (created for enterprise customers) would be totally off. How SMBs address business issues and situations is quite different from enterprise customers.
It takes a second to do basic research on people and companies online. Why then would marketers and sales people think they can just pick a phone or personalize content without understanding the context the persona will resonate to? This counterproductive approach is not only a waste of time it’s not going to win anyone any customers!
Here’s where Account Based Marketing (ABM) comes in.
Jason Stewart of Demandbase interestingly spoke of creating an ‘Account Persona’. He said, “The point I was making about the efficacy of buyer personas was not that they were ineffective, simply that there needs to be an account-based component to the evaluation of our prospects that relying on buyer personas (or buyer role demographics like title/department) alone as a targeting mechanism could lead to trouble.”
Account based marketing is a business marketing approach that includes communication with individual customer accounts or prospects within the context of the market or industry they operate in. For budget challenged marketers to get ROI on their efforts through ABM:
- they need to understand strategic priorities of their target market,
- they need to identify the role of individual influencers and decision makers within the company and industry,
- they need to map their services to the needs of their audience and
- then they need to customize their marketing plan around their target market.
As marketing functions rapidly evolve, it will pay to pay attention to the latest B2B marketing practices. And while marketing approaches may change,
Your prospects and customers are still people.
Know them,
Relate to them,
Converse with them,
Engage them
And then think about converting them to customers!
Want to connect with your target market?
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