Customer loyalty is the driver of B2B marketing success, but on whose terms? If you want to generate a steady stream of qualified leads and customers who become lifelong advocates, you need to see the world through your customers’ eyes and craft experiences that are tailored to their needs.
Effective customer engagement is not just about connecting with people at key touchpoints. It’s about building positive, lasting relationships with your B2B buyers. Relationships that have the potential to go beyond the transaction and turn customers into growth partners. But how do you choose the right engagement strategy to make this happen? The key is to determine which strategy, or combination of strategies, will best resonate with your audience. An “outside-in” perspective is key here: by deeply understanding your customers, their priorities and challenges, you can engage with prospects and meet their needs on their terms.
Lead-Based vs. Account-Based Engagement
Some articles portray lead-based and account-based strategies as either the only path to successful customer engagement or as opposing forces, but the reality is more nuanced. Meaningful customer engagement in today’s B2B environment requires an integrated approach tailored to each individual buyer and business.
Lead-based engagement focuses on individual prospects, while account-based engagement focuses on key customers and members of the corporate buying committee. Both engagement approaches have their own benefits and can contribute to B2B success. Both offer personalized, targeted interactions with prospects and customers. However, the scope and implementation will vary from person to person.
A 2023 Adobe study found that marketing leaders are likely to use a combination of approaches, ensuring your engagement strategy is flexible enough to address the complexities of B2B relationships.
Understanding your buyers allows you to choose the right balance of tools and tactics to fit the needs of your business and audience. Instead of memorizing a single strategy, choose the best method for each individual and account to increase your marketing ROI and drive growth. So let’s take a closer look at each of these engagement strategies and see how they can contribute to B2B success.
Lead-Based Engagement
This customer engagement strategy focuses on finding and nurturing individual prospects throughout the entire customer journey. You can expect a customized experience, similar to what you’d find in a B2C interaction.
Lead-based engagement is easy to scale and requires less upfront investment than an account-based approach. For this reason, it’s often the first port of call for startups and companies looking to grow and scale quickly. A wider net helps brands reach a larger audience, tap into new market segments, and increase market penetration.
It also gives brands more flexibility to customize strategies and messaging based on individual lead preferences and behaviors. This agility allows marketers to experiment, optimize campaigns, and quickly respond to changing market dynamics.
Key aspects of lead-based interactions include:
Lead generation: Brands first focus on the characteristics of their ideal buyers using tools like buyer personas, search intent research, and social listening. They then run content marketing, social media, and paid advertising campaigns designed to capture attention and generate inbound leads. Lead Scoring: Not all leads are the same. So marketers assign points to potential leads to determine where they should prioritize their attention and resources.
This is an automated process. The score is based on criteria collected from lead generation forms (such as industry and company data) and dynamic behavioral data (such as engagement levels). For example, the score may increase if a potential customer downloads certain content or visits an important page. Lead nurturing: Nurturing is the process of building a deeper connection with a lead using one-to-one tactics like drip email marketing and social outreach. The goal here is personalization and relevance. Brands need to understand how their customers feel, build trust, address their concerns, and guide them towards a buying decision.
Sales handover: Marketing hands over “marketing qualified leads” (MQLs) to sales for tracking and nurturing. Marketing and sales need to work together to ensure a seamless transition. Marketers need to understand what sales considers to be strong purchase intent. At the same time, sales need a complete view of every interaction a lead has with your brand: what marketing content they read on your website, what questions they asked on social networks, and what answers they got. There can be no tedious repetition.
Account-Based Engagement
The account-based engagement (ABE) strategy is a new approach related to the account-based marketing strategy (ABM). While an ABM strategy focuses on sales and marketing activities, ABE focuses on the entire customer journey. Your team focuses on the accounts with the highest potential for a sale.
The goal isn’t just to close the sale; rather, it’s about increasing customer lifetime value by increasing customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. This is achieved by building deeper, more meaningful relationships with key accounts, deepening their understanding of how your business works, and helping your brand establish itself as a trusted advisor. Account-Based Engagement recognizes that the B2B buying process often involves multiple decision makers. And the composition of buyer groups can change. That’s why ABE targets entire accounts or companies, rather than individual leads. Focusing on the account level allows brands to remain relevant, even if certain decision makers leave the company.
The key components of account-based engagement are:
Account selection: Brands first identify high-quality accounts that fit their ideal customer profile. Factors such as company data, industry relevance, sales potential, and strategic fit are analyzed.
Account research and insights: The ABE team conducts in-depth research on target accounts to understand their pain points, needs, goals, and key decision makers. This knowledge allows marketers to tailor messaging and engagement strategies to the specific goals of each account.
Customized campaigns: Account-based engagement relies heavily on hyper-personalized content that directly addresses the individual needs of the account and its buying committee members. This includes creating account-specific landing pages, custom videos, tailored case studies, and articles tailored to the interests, needs, and objections of individuals within the account.
Cross-functional collaboration: ABE requires close collaboration between marketing, sales, and customer success teams. They must work together throughout the customer journey to design and deliver custom experiences that attract, convert, and satisfy high-value accounts.
The best of both worlds: Hybrid customer engagement
Rather than an either/or decision, lead and account-based strategies work together to attract customers.
B2B organizations can benefit from integrating both approaches, giving them more flexibility. Tactics can be adjusted based on what works best for each lead and account. As the market changes, teams can adjust focus and resources to meet new demands. The ability to switch strategies allows companies to stay agile and responsive.
By combining approaches, B2B brands deliver seamless, satisfying customer experiences throughout the sales cycle. Lead-based engagement builds awareness, generates interest, and nurtures individual leads throughout the buyer journey. Account-based engagement complements this by building stronger relationships with target accounts across the board, ensuring that partnerships continue beyond the tenure of a single decision maker or contact.
For example, lead-based engagement gives sales teams a steady stream of qualified leads to research and target. By nurturing individual relationships, companies can gain insights that help identify new target accounts. They also build relationships with people who may become key allies within the company, helping the accounts become valuable customers. It also doesn’t hurt that maintaining a relationship with an individual means that it continues even if that person moves on to another company.
At the same time, ABEs can expand relationships with existing clients and forge new partnerships. This allows brands to orchestrate opportunities across complex business ecosystems, for example, running coordinated campaigns targeting multiple accounts within a large international organization. By deepening connections across accounts, the relationship is no longer dependent on a single brand ambassador. This system remains in place even if an individual champion leaves the company. In short, by balancing lead-based and account-based approaches, companies can gain valuable insights from both individual leads and target accounts. This data helps brands identify patterns, preferences, and trends to improve and optimize engagement tactics for better results.
Leverage marketing automation and content strategies to orchestrate journey excellence
Luckily, lead and account-based engagement strategies require many of the same marketing automation capabilities to achieve great journey orchestration.
Marketing automation is the linchpin that brings these strategies together and enables brands to understand customer behavior across multiple channels. It tracks prospects at every interaction, scores and dynamically routes leads, and collects data at the individual and account levels. A holistic view helps companies make connections between individual leads and establish lead relationships and account strategies.
Automation platforms can use this data to plan personalized content campaigns that will best engage audiences. And automating lead nurturing campaigns allows brands to continually engage with leads at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
An integrated marketing automation solution also enables seamless collaboration between marketing and sales teams. For example, the system can automatically route promising prospects to the right sales rep. This functionality facilitates timely follow-up, ensuring people have the right information when they need it. It increases engagement and reduces manual work.
However, successful customer engagement doesn’t just mean having effective delivery and tracking mechanisms in place. Technology won’t be successful without a strong content marketing strategy that creates valuable experiences that attract, engage, and retain prospects.
Given that B2B buying cycles are often long, creating stage-specific content is a critical part of engagement. This goes a long way in building relationships with individual customers as well as meeting the needs of the entire buying committee.
Well-designed, relevant content creates engagement and encourages interaction with your target audience. It invites comments, social media shares, and discussion. The more time customers spend interacting with your content, the stronger the sense of community and connection they feel. It creates lasting engagement, builds relationships, strengthens brand affinity, and increases customer loyalty. Combining marketing automation and content marketing gives companies a great toolkit for delivering personalized, relevant experiences to B2B customers at scale. Both are essential for a comprehensive B2B customer loyalty strategy that addresses the distinct needs and preferences of different target groups.
But to reach their full potential, they require a smart, data-driven approach to planning and optimizing campaigns. Leveraging analytics, companies can benefit from both lead- and account-based engagement strategies.
