ABM and Why Wealth Management Firms Need to Use It

This is the first post in our ABM — Account Based Marketing and Wealth Management Firms series. We help our customers in the wealth and advisory space achieve more in their business with insights on growth and clients. Subscribe below to receive the latest posts as they are published.

For wealth management firms, B2B sales is a major piece of how new business is created. It can be expensive and competitive to market to large clients, especially if the message is too broad. Usually, B2B marketing is done by utilizing paid and owned marketing tactics to reach a wide range of a target market to raise awareness and bring in leads — such as Google Adwords, paid LinkedIn posts, or sponsoring influential events and people. But business to business marketing can be a crowded place, full of giants like IBM and Oracle competing on the same keywords and for the same audiences as smaller or newer companies who don’t want to pay $83 per click for traffic that may never become a lead. That’s why sometimes for business to business, traditional broad-spectrum marketing can to be more expensive and less effective. That’s where Account-Based Marketing (ABM) comes into play, providing an effective method for marketing to businesses by making the message specific for each account.

Similarly to wooing a special someone, ABM tactics require research and knowledge about the accounts, its key players, and other factors in their decision making and day to day operations to work. Rather than organizing marketing metrics by lead or channel, ABM organizes everything by the account as a whole. Maybe that’s why according to GreenHouse Agency, more than 90% of marketers believe account-based marketing is essential.

What is account-based marketing (ABM)?

Account-Based Marketing is an alternative B2B sales method for inbound marketing that focuses marketing efforts on a defined set group of target accounts. Meaning, with ABM you are not sending outbound messages to the entire target market — instead you are sending specific messages that apply to the target accounts you have decided to market towards. This makes for a much more effective strategy when wealth management firms are developing new business.

Why is account-based marketing (ABM) worthwhile for wealth management firms?

Increased ROI

Return on investment (ROI) is one of the most important factors for executives when deciding to implement a new strategy or program. ABM uses a sales funnel that shows what is going on with each account that you are marketing to, its worth in terms of potential ROI, and how much you’re spending. This makes it easier to know what your ROI will be from the beginning. In fact, 87% of marketers measuring ROI say that ABM outperforms other marketing investments (ITSMA) — probably because you’re able to spend money in a smarter and more direct way, only spending the budget you’re comfortable with when it comes to what you can hope to make back in terms of new business.

Integrated sales and marketing strategy

ABM offers one of the most efficient ways to align the sales and marketing teams, partly because the marketer running the ABM strategy is deeply aligned with the goals and processes of the sales team. And, according to Marketo, when sales and marketing teams are in sync, companies became 67% better at closing deals. ABM is a strategy that the two teams will have to collaborate on and build out to work for both departments. With the same goal in mind, the sales and marketing can create the ABM strategy seamlessly together, which is a shift for many wealth management firms that normally have different sales tactics and marketing processes, which are not necessarily aligned but both have the goal of growing leads and developing business.

More personalized messages

With an ABM strategy, your firm will be reaching out to several specific accounts toward which to market, versus in a traditional inbound marketing campaign, one (inherently more general) message would be used in the target market. Since account-based marketing varies, account to account, wealth management firms benefit from taking the time to create a custom campaign for each account or custom messaging. ABM would be effective in highlighting your firm’s main product offering, promotion, or other value proposition that would specifically resonate with the account in question, versus trying to appeal to a more general public.

Expanding existing opportunities

There are a lot of opportunities to create new business from the existing accounts that a wealth management firm already possesses, and it pays to use ABM to market to them. As Marketo reports, nearly 85 percent of marketers said ABM provided significant benefits to retain and expand existing client relationships. One of the reasons an ABM strategy is so successful for your current accounts is because the information for the main contacts is already available, and there is a relationship where sales and marketing teams have knowledge of the client and their needs.

Measurable and innovative

Being able to learn from campaign results is one of the most important pieces of overall success in gaining new clients and ensuring that the ROI is on track. In addition to an ABM strategy that has a fully visible sales funnel, there are also more specific actions being tracked for each account. It’s easier to tell which accounts are performing well and which are not worth spending money and time on anymore. Mass messaging can be much harder to interpret feedback from with an inbound sales strategy because it is more difficult to determine where the success is taking place exactly and where it is not working.

Originally published at xtiva.com on January 8, 2019.