ABM and Your Industry

Retail and Consumer Goods

In the retail and consumer goods industries, marketers know they must make every moment count. There is a complex supply chain behind retailers and direct-to-consumer brands. Each link in that chain — including suppliers, distributors, wholesalers, and manufacturers — requires distinct information. Retailers who buy from consumer goods companies must engage with multiple teams — buyers, inventory managers, procurement, regional and local locations — and build relationships with each. For consumer goods companies, this means engaging with various stakeholders across the value chain while actively seeking new relationships with potential customers.

In both cases, consumer goods companies and retailers must deliver unique, relevant messages and experiences to each audience. Effectively connecting with each requires effortless personalization, a unified customer experience, and real-time digital experiences.

Introducing ABM to Retail and Consumer Goods Industries

Use personalization to drive conversions. ABM helps businesses navigate complicated deals, relationships, accounts, and touchpoints. In many instances, such as direct-to-consumer or B2C storefronts that also sell B2B, retailers and consumer goods brands must utilize both B2B and B2C strategies. Often there is only one team to cover both B2B and B2C, resulting in a singular approach instead of two independent strategies. ABM disciplines can help by segmenting customer data to drive personalized relationship-building. This helps the brand to serve the right message or experience at the right time to the right person – whether that’s a direct consumer or a specific role along the supply chain.

Align marketing and sales teams. From the corporate level down to retail associates, ABM helps connect all teams involved in the decision-making process and provides a complete view of everyone involved. ABM goes beyond marketing and truly requires close-knit collaboration between marketing, sales, and service teams. Sales can understand key accounts, and share that information with marketing to identify which individuals were engaging with marketing campaigns and digital tactics. This kind of collaboration helps your brand deepen relationships with the right people – and close deals.

Pull deep insights from data. Successful ABM happens when you can anticipate what your audience’s needs with their preferred content and messages. With ABM, you can scale insights from your data and use automation to improve data quality, saving valuable time in the process. This requires making sense of all your data and combining data silos across departments. To start, we recommend a single, unified view of all accounts and stakeholders within your customer relationship management platform (CRM) backed by the power of a customer data platform (CDP). From there, you can make data-driven decisions that go beyond a momentary data snapshot and help you be highly agile and relevant.

With today’s high customer expectations, retail and consumer goods marketers must strive to accurately segment and engage their customers in real time. Using an ABM strategy is one way to help them do just that — and ultimately turn each engagement into a lifelong customer.

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