The New Approach to Integrated Marketing: Inbound + ABM

In the past, B2B marketers have used separate inbound and outbound marketing strategies to reach different audiences and achieve goals through specific sets of tactics. Today’s robust suite of tech tools and platforms, such as LinkedIn and programmatic advertising, has allowed marketers to evolve traditional outbound marketing methods, such as cold calling, into carefully curated account-based approaches.

As we routinely step back to reassess our approaches to the marketing and sales processes for opportunities to improve, we’re finding that inbound and ABM actually offer incredible potential as complementary tactics that work towards a common goal. The 2021 B2B Marketing Mix Report shows that not only are these two traditional and traditionally separate strategies still being used, but they’re also being combined to even greater effect.

In this blog, we’re looking at the differences between inbound marketing and account-based marketing and how the two can be combined for superior results than either could achieve alone.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing takes a broad approach to generating leads and sales, focusing on attracting as many customers as possible through high-quality content and experiences that are intuitive, valuable, and tailored to the user’s needs. Inbound marketing content revolves around the buyer’s journey. It answers peoples’ questions at every stage, including awareness, consideration, and decision, making your company their trusted source for information, and hopefully, their chosen partner at decision time.

This content includes blogs, articles, eBooks, webinars, podcasts, infographics, and videos that exist to demonstrate your industry knowledge and expertise behind your brand to ultimately convert people into customers.

SEO and digital advertising play major roles in the overall effectiveness of an inbound marketing campaign, as the competition in areas like SERP standings, Google Snippets, and Google Ads is fierce.

What is Account-Based Marketing?

Account-based marketing (ABM) has a much tighter focus than inbound. ABM campaigns are carefully targeted, thoroughly planned growth strategies where marketing and sales teams work together to develop customized, streamlined experiences for individual accounts. With this strategy, marketing and sales have a plan that describes the entire journey, from prospect to sale, for a specific type of buyer account.

The main benefit is that all the work of sorting out which accounts are the most valuable to you is done upfront, allowing marketing and sales to create highly optimized and streamlined processes that speed up the buyer’s journey for those accounts. The success of an ABM campaign is highly dependent on the markets and audiences in question and is especially effective in high-value B2B sales journeys.

Combining Inbound and ABM

With inbound marketing, we’re hoping to grab as much attention as possible through quality content, develop brand recognition and loyalty, and generate more leads. With ABM, we’re creating a focused sales and marketing process designed to take a specific type of customer account through a highly streamlined sales journey from beginning to end. So, what do they have in common, and how do we combine them?

To Learn More, Continue Reading Here: https://www.sagefrog.com/blog/the-new-approach-to-integrated-marketing-inbound-and-abm/