For B2B marketers looking to capture the attention of key decision-makers, “always-on” account-based marketing (ABM) has become a lucrative and necessary tactic to get and keep content and messaging in front of your target audience throughout the buying process.   

With joint research from Google and Bain & Company finding that most buyers have an initial consideration list and ultimately select a vendor from that day one list, maintaining a continuous and consistent approach rather than sporadic or campaign-based efforts is key to engaging buying committee members. If your message isn’t available to them before they’re ready to engage, there’s a good chance you’ve probably missed your opportunity to get onto the list of vendors up for consideration.  

Significant changes to B2B buying behaviors have shifted how marketers reach and engage key decision-makers. Faced with larger buying committees, tighter budgets, and longer sales cycles, you need to deliver more personalized experiences to stand out from competitors. By focusing resources on a defined set of specific accounts, ABM has become an effective, strategic approach to reach and engage buyers. Now—more than ever—you must focus on the buyer experience and leverage data to create full-funnel, always-on B2B marketing strategies to engage and convert your best accounts.   

Always-On ABM vs. Campaign-Based ABM  

Always-on ABM—as opposed to campaign-based ABM—involves continuously engaging target accounts rather than focusing on isolated, short-term campaigns. The concept is simple: If the right content and messaging reaches all business decision-makers, not just before they are ready to engage but throughout the buying process, your brand has a better chance of staying top of mind.   

Here’s why an always-on ABM program is more effective:   

• Builds Relationships Over Time: ABM focuses on building long-term, personalized relationships with key decision-makers within target accounts. By maintaining an always-on approach, you can nurture these relationships consistently, which is crucial in complex B2B sales cycles where trust and credibility are important.  

• Consistent Engagement: B2B purchasing decisions often involve multiple stakeholders and have extended decision-making timelines. Always-on ABM ensures that your brand remains top-of-mind throughout these extended periods, providing relevant content and touchpoints that align with the account’s needs and challenges.  

• Adaptability and Responsiveness: Market conditions and account priorities can change over time. Always-on ABM makes it easier to adapt your strategies and messaging continuously based on real-time insights, metrics, and feedback from ongoing interactions with target accounts.  

• Maximizes ROI: While campaign-based B2B marketing can deliver immediate spikes in engagement, always-on ABM aims for sustained impact and relationship-building. This reduces the risk of gaps in engagement that can occur between campaigns and maximizes the return on investment (ROI) over the long term.   

• Aligns Sales and Marketing Efforts: ABM is known for its alignment of sales and marketing teams around shared goals and target accounts. An always-on approach reinforces this alignment by maintaining consistent communication and collaboration between these teams, ensuring everyone is working toward nurturing and converting key accounts effectively.  

• Account Expansion and Retention: Beyond initial acquisition, always-on ABM supports efforts to expand relationships within existing accounts (cross-sell and upsell opportunities) and retain them by continuously demonstrating value and addressing evolving needs.  

Despite these advantages, many marketers still pause at the idea of always-on ABM due to cost concerns. But the fact is, round-the-clock campaigns don’t have to cost a fortune, nor should they. The smart use of intent data keeps marketing costs down and makes spending more efficient than ever by ensuring you’re only reaching accounts ready to engage.   

Let’s say you are marketing payroll solutions. If you use intent data to drive your media delivery, your ad will only be seen by the accounts and buyers exhibiting certain behaviors online that make it clear that they’re actively seeking to streamline their payroll processing. An always-on approach ensures you are delivering highly targeted messages to those decision-makers and influencers throughout the entire buying process—not just when they’ve reached a specific funnel stage.   

Leveraging Always-On ABM to Enhance the Customer Experience  

When you meet customers where they are in the buyer’s journey with relevant and personalized content, you’ll see better ROI and higher engagement. This is the cornerstone for enhancing the customer experience.   

An inconvenient truth most marketers tend to forget is that the buyer’s journey is not always linear. The journey from awareness to decision often involves multiple touchpoints. As much as we try to map it out, there are people behind those buying decisions. It’s human nature to be unpredictable and frequently change our minds. Furthermore, not all members of the buying committee progress through the funnel at the same rate. Someone might still be in the awareness stage while everyone else has moved on to the consideration stage. This makes the continuous need to keep your content and message in front of your prospects with an always-on ABM program more critical than ever before.  

A large part of enhancing the customer experience through a full-funnel approach is delivering content that buyers need to progress to the next stage of the customer journey. More importantly, buyers desire specific content according to their needs and goals, and marketers need to adapt to give them what they want to positively affect the buyer’s experience.   

In our “Why Full-Funnel, Always-On ABM” webinar, guest speaker Nora Conklin, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, shared research revealing the issues concerning B2B marketers and evolving buyer trends. She discussed the  Forrester 2021 Content Preferences Survey which highlights the content and messaging most beneficial to buyers at each stage of the decision-making process. Here’s what it found:   

• In the early stage of learning about a solution, buyers require bite-sized information that will not overwhelm them or assume that they know more about the solution and a vendor, short-form content performs best here.   

• In short-listing vendors, buyers find short-form video and long-form written content helpful because they require a bit more information in understanding how a solution works to solve a problem.   

• In choosing one vendor, buyers need more in-depth information via long-form content, such as an eBook or white paper, because they need to accurately understand the differences and benefits of choosing one vendor over the other.   

• In the post-sales relationship, interactive tools bring more utility from a buyer’s investment in a solution to give them more value.   

These findings tell us that interactive tools and video stand out as preferred content forms, but the length and nature of these forms change throughout different parts of the buyer’s journey. If you want to stay top-of-mind among all buying committee members, you need to surround buying committee members with persistent and cohesive experiences through a more thoughtful B2B marketing media mix placement strategy across the channels they’re already using. Leveraging a unified, always-on strategy that includes display advertising, content syndication, Connected TV (CTV), and LinkedIn ads will lead to a more successful ABM program. Activation across more channels allows for deeper reach into your target accounts at scale. Consider how each channel fits into your strategy and leverage your content thoughtfully based on the needs of each persona and the goal you want to achieve. Ensure you have enough material to serve their needs, alongside what assets from your content marketing strategy performs the best per channel.  

Optimize Your ABM Strategy with an Always-On Approach  

The significant benefits of an always-on ABM program in reaching today’s more discerning and complex B2B buyers cannot be overlooked. By fostering continuous engagement instead of focusing on one-off campaign initiatives, always-on ABM is an effective digital marketing approach that enables you and your team to maintain a consistent and personalized presence with your target accounts, resulting in deeper relationships, more efficient resource utilization, higher conversions, and ultimately, better business outcomes.   

As market dynamics continue to change and evolve, marketers will succeed with a stronger focus on the customer experience. We are in a golden age where data takes away the guessing game of your most important customers and prospects, which leaves room for a full-funnel, always-on strategy. Through the use of better intent data and the best practices we’ve discussed here, you can maximize your marketing investments with always-on ABM while providing game-changing customer experience.    

Ready to implement an always-on approach for more ABM success? Download The 2024 Full-Funnel ABM Playbook to learn how you can craft an impactful ABM campaign, then contact us to learn how we can help you get even more out of your ABM efforts.