The Role of Account Based Marketing in the Manufacturing Industry

In my experience leading Customer Marketing teams, I've seen firsthand how Account Based Marketing is revolutionizing the way manufacturers build relationships with customers.For companies selling complex, high-value products to other businesses, taking an account based approach is critical for success today. Account Based Marketing helps manufacturers like Honeywell cut through the noise to engage potential customers in a relevant, personalized way.

Account Based Marketing helps build trust with customers by investing time and effort into truly understanding them. For instance, focusing on a specific target audience allows you to comprehend clearly what each customer is looking for. This approach helps you enhance your understanding through unpacking the nuances of each customer, which ultimately builds credibility and trust.

Account Based Marketing also demands relevance across teams. It takes a collaborative approach across the organization - marketing, sales, and business development must unite behind account plans. You cannot operate on separate functional plans for Account Based Marketing to be effective.

This unified approach is necessary when engaging customers. Without internal collaboration, customers will not understand who you are as an organization. As a result, that hinders building trust in your relationships through ongoing, meaningful conversations. Ultimately, Account Based Marketing succeeds by dedicating resources to knowing customers deeply and deepening your relationship with them.

1. The ‘Three Rs’

When developing an Account Based Marketing strategy, there are three key elements I focus on that I call ‘the three Rs’:

• Relationships

Building relationships through Account Based Marketing starts with identifying who you want to connect with. You will need to work with sales and business leaders to understand your target market and carefully select target accounts. Account selection is critical in an Account Based Marketing strategy.

For larger organizations, focus on specific business segments rather than tackling the entire company at once.You can define the particular groups you want to engage within selected accounts. Then, identify key decision makers, influencers, and other stakeholders within those segments. List out names of individuals you aim to build relationships with.

The relationship pillar of Account Based Marketing is based on doing the advance work to pinpoint the precise people you need to connect and cultivate relationships with. This targeted approach is more meaningful than mass outreach and enables the deepening of relationships.

• Reputation

Next, let’s look at reputation. The reputation pillar in Account Based Marketing focuses on connecting with target individuals to build credibility for your organization and people. This requires a multi-channel approach to reach customers with relevant content across media types. However, it's critical to do this in real time. If a customer visits your website and you don't follow up for months, you will miss the opportunity as they would have likely moved on.

To build reputation quickly, you need marketing technology and processes that provide real-time visibility into customer engagement. This enables you to respond promptly and continue nurturing relationships. 

With tight monitoring and agile outreach, you can boost reputation by demonstrating deep understanding of target accounts and consistently adding value through ongoing interactions. The key is optimizing every touchpoint to reinforce your credibility and strengthen your position with each carefully chosen audience member.

• Revenue 

Lastly, the revenue pillar focuses on capturing engagement to demonstrate impact and fuel growth. To achieve this, track both online and offline interactions with target accounts. Report meaningful metrics that illustrate how conversations are progressing to move opportunities forward.

There are many potential Account Based Marketing metrics to consider. For a manufacturing company, these could include customer lifetime value, customer retention rate, advocacy metrics, cost metrics, and content engagement metrics. The key is identifying and monitoring the KPIs that indicate that you are achieving your specific goals.

In a nutshell, to implement Account Based Marketing successfully:

• Define your goals
• Identify target segments
• Understand account needs
• Build detailed buyer personas
• Create relevant content
• Execute multi-channel outreach
• Leverage technology for scale and real-time engagement
• Collaborate closely with sales and leadership
• Rigorously measure and track performance

To reiterate, the most relevant metrics depend on your specific goals, target audience, industry, and products. But generally, revenue metrics are critical given the purpose of Account Based Marketing is driving business growth. You would want to track pipeline and revenue with target accounts before launching an Account Based Marketing program. Then, compare your results after 6, 12, and 18 months of focused engagement.

With the fundamentals in mind, let's look at how this strategic approach actually worked for one of Honeywell's largest oil and gas customers.

2. Account Based Marketing in Action - Turning a Customer into a Partner

As Global Head of Customer Marketing, I spearheaded an Account Based Marketing program focused on strengthening engagement with a major long-term oil and gas client. We had a long-standing yet underutilized relationship with this customer. Our key goal was to deepen engagement across their organization to increase mindshare and revenue.

Through Account Based Marketing, we worked closely with sales to identify influencers we wanted to build relationships with. With that knowledge, we created multiple touchpoints as follows:

• Invited the president of the customer’s business segment to speak to our entire organization and to external channel partners. This opened up new conversations on pain points we didn't know before.

• Engaged them for our Executive Engagement Program as a featured speaker.

• Our sales partner and I visited the customer’s facility and automation center to better understand their operations.

• Our site visit opened up more options for collaboration such as running workshops.

• Reinforced outreach through existing marketing channels like SEO, email, and advertising.

• As a result, built an entire ecosystem around the key target audience.

This strategic approach, centered on the target customer and contacts,  created a wave of new opportunities by strengthening credibility through purposeful engagement. It fostered a valuable partnership through meaningful interactions across both organizations. Due to that, the approach uncovered expansion opportunities beyond our original goals. Ultimately, by dedicating focused resources to deepen our engagement with them, we advanced the relationship and built a strong foundation for future growth.

1. Deliver Personalized Experiences

Account Based Marketing helps manufacturers establish credibility and trust with targeted accounts by delivering personalized, valuable experiences.

2. Utilize the ‘Three Rs’Build relationships, reputation, and revenue through coordinated cross-channel engagement strategies.

3. Measure Your Impact With the Relevant MetricsUse key metrics to track pipeline growth and share success stories internally to gain buy-in.

In conclusion, in today's world, traditional broad-based marketing is no longer enough for B2B companies. To become a partner instead of just another supplier, take an account-based approach to truly understand and communicate value to each customer.