What is account based marketing?

Grant Leboff: One of the areas that you cover in your book is account based marketing. Can you just explain that for the audience who perhaps, haven't heard of that term before?

Simon Hall: Account based marketing is basically sub segmenting your customers into groups of accounts, and by groups of accounts, defining marketing messages or themes or programmes that you want to then deliver to those accounts. It's actually been around a long time with bigger corporations, now it's possible for smaller businesses and medium businesses to carry out with digital applications - account based marketing software.

Grant Leboff: And how small can these segments be, in theory?

Simon Hall: I guess the key thing with account based marketing is based on the fact that today - well as always - there's the decision making unit within accounts and you need to reach two or three different stakeholders. What account based marketing can do is to actually manage and track the content and the engagement of content that you're using and sending to the different stakeholders within an account to allow you to build an account relationship and account business.

Grant Leboff: And why would a company employ account based marketing? So someone watching this, who says, 'well we already segment. I've got my segmentation, I've got my messages that go out...' What are the advantages and why would a company decide to adopt an account based approach?

Simon Hall: Account based market is not for everyone. If you've got a widely dispersed audience that has no similarity and you're just trying to get a message out, then account based marketing isn't for you. If however, you're trying to actually get into a particular vertical sector or market and grow your base there a bit more, then account based marketing can be interesting, and there are different ways of doing account based marketing.

Grant Leboff: And what are the keys, in your opinion, for making it work? So someone says, yeah, this is for me, we want to go into this tight vertical. There's some really big players that we can focus in on those, which then becomes a bit more reasonable for account based. What are the key drivers then to start to make that work, if it's something you haven't done before?

Simon Hall: I think the key thing is making sure you have a good handle on your goals, your segment you want to go after, but also having some really good data. So being able to actually manage the data really well around those accounts, whether it's directly or through a third party - you can actually do account based marketing through third party agencies as well - So having the data really right, and then actually having the ability to group accounts through good CRM management is probably one of the ways to go.

Grant Leboff: And then, if you're nurturing these accounts through marketing - for want of a better word - how is it then measured because if you're looking at very long cycles, and these are often major purchases aren't they?... You can spend a lot of time and effort and money doing this before you see any tangible results in terms of buying. So what are the measurements that you put in place to know that you're making progress?

Simon Hall: Depends on the industry. One measurement could be, let's say, touch rates in terms of content. So some industries... there was actually a software invoicing company I was talking to and they said they needed to put out between seven and 12 pieces of content before they got to the point of actually physically engaging as a company. Another one in the IT industry that wasn't in invoicing, was talking about seven touchpoints. So five to seven. So it will depend on industry. And the key thing is actually, defining what you think is the key amount of engagement level you need within that content.