Adobe’s Partnerships Highlight Emphasis on Account-Based Marketing

It’s hard for B2B marketers to ignore the emergence of account-based marketing (ABM)Opens a new window .

As data evolves into the key marketing currency, ABM helps marketers use the vast amounts of that freshly available currency to engage specific target accounts.

Megan Golden, writing for the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions Blog, concludes that “ABM doesn’t just call for alignment between sales and marketing teams; it forces teams to align because personalization at the account level requires sales and marketing to be in sync on account-specific messaging. The motivation? Higher revenues in a shorter time frame.”

The idea is to focus on quality leads rather than capturing a large quantity of leads. ABM enables marketers to coordinate with sales to identify high-value prospects in the interest of developing personalized campaigns and messages for those target accounts.

As a growth driver, ABM is the idealOpens a new window  marketing approach.

With business leaders pressing marketing departments to focus on revenue growth, ABM is gaining popularity by prioritizing what Golden refers to as a company’s “highest opportunity, highest-value accounts.”

Adobe’s push for data connections

An organization’s ABM strategy can only be as effective as the data it has at hand.

Adobe clearly is acutely aware of that fundamental. The multinational computer software company has been entering a wide array of partnerships in recent weeks that will help it provide B2B marketers with access to more data connections and higher-quality information for their ABM operations.

A couple weeks ago, Adobe officially brought in ZylotechOpens a new window , an AI- and machine learning-powered platform, to help its clients shape increasingly personalized interactions in every element of their marketing campaigns.

More recently, at its annual Summit in Las Vegas, Adobe announced a slew of partnerships, including collaborations with Microsoft, Drift, Roku and ServiceNow.

The data-sharing deals are designed to accelerate ABM capabilities, helping clients to easily identify buying groups within targeted accounts and deliver customized content.

Steve Lucas, senior vice president of Digital Experience business at Adobe said that “orchestrating the engagement of multiple individuals in a complex marketing and sales journey is at the heart of account-based experiences. With these new account-based capabilities, marketing and sales teams will have increased alignment around the people and accounts they are engaging.”

The deepened partnership with Microsoft is especially interesting. The two companies intend to integrate Adobe’s marketing software with Microsoft-owned LinkedIn. Officials say this collaboration will “empower B2B marketers and sellers to easily identify, understand and engage B2B customer buying teams.”

For instance, it will allow marketers to use the predictive modeling and automation function of Adobe’s Marketo Engage Account Profiling to communicate with Microsoft’s LinkedIn Matched Audiences service. Similarly, the Adobe Audience Manager data management platform, which sorts audience data, can be used in conjunction with contact-based campaigns on LinkedIn.

This integration between Adobe’s suite of services and Microsoft’s LinkedIn marketing solutions can be a real gamechanger. According to Adobe, the benefits are many, from gaining a richer, real-time understanding of targeted accounts, to targeting specific consumer segments with greater efficiency by leveraging more in-depth account profiles, to providing greater precision for people-based campaigns.

“Together with Adobe and LinkedIn, Microsoft can help to deliver an end-to-end solution that ultimately accelerates lead conversion and can create opportunities for improved servicing and better cross sell, resulting in higher lifetime value of the account,” says Alysa Taylor, corporate vice president of Business Applications and Global Industry at Microsoft.

Ultimately, Adobe is making moves to align key data sources to provide richer account-based profiles across various pieces of software. And that makes sense as it looks to give its clients a competitive edge in a marketing environment that is increasingly data-focused.

While Adobe’s suite of services won’t work for everyone, the company’s emphasis on data connections and ABM should inspire marketers to start integrating ABM tools, technologies and strategies into their own marketing operations before they get overwhelmed by the data overflow that is undeniably on its way.