Monday, January 30, 2017

ABM Quickly Evolved from Latest Trend to What Felt Like Full Adoption

Account-based marketing popped up in all corners of B2B marketing in 2016. Every martech vendor started offering it. Ever marketer implemented some form of it, or was planning to implement it.

In the world of B2B marketing where a marketer's job is to get in front of and identify those prospects who are likely to become customers, it only makes sense to focus on companies that marketing and sales have determined are more likely to become customers. That's ABM in a nutshell.

When we asked our panel of global experts to call out what had the most impact in 2016, several of them identified ABM. The funny thing is that nobody called this out as a thing to pay attention to in 2017. That doesn't make it a short-lived fad. That made it something that many B2B marketers implemented and nobody was talking about it anymore.

Here's what some of our global marketing experts said about ABM in 2016.

Account-Based Marketing is more than just a marketing strategy; it’s quickly become the cornerstone of most B2B marketing plans. In 2016, we saw more than 70% of B2B companies driving ABM programs to align their sales and marketing efforts, improve customer experiences, and accelerate their revenue gains.
 - Peter Isaacson (@peisaacson), CMO, Demandbase  

Clearly account-based marketing has had a huge impact on Modern Marketing in 2016. As the silo between sales and marketing continues to be broken down, and social selling and employee advocacy programs bring sales and marketing closer together, account-based marketing has emerged as a natural extension of these efforts for marketing to use increasingly sophisticated social CRMs. ABM combined with big social data and social ad custom audiences creates the ability to generate more revenue from targeted customers. With more than 90% of B2B marketers acknowledging that account-based marketing is either important or very important, it is clearly an idea that came out of nowhere to have a huge impact on Modern Marketing in 2016.
- Neal Schaffer (@nealschaffer), CEO, Maximize Your Social  

There's no doubt that talk of account-based marketing (ABM) consumed the most oxygen in 2016. Whether you think it's hype or a decades-old fundamental, one ITSMA study reported 84% of marketers said ABM delivers higher ROI than other marketing initiatives. Various other surveys placed the percentage of companies considering ROI in the next 12 months at "all of them."
- David B. Thomas (@DavidBThomas), B2B Tech Marketer

To learn what these experts and many more predicted for 2017, download the Future of Modern Marketing: 2017 today.



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