Report: Challenges Still Causing Issues for Marketers Interested in ABM

As B2B marketers look for new ways to achieve their top objectives, account-based marketing (ABM) is becoming a popular tactic.

Dun and Bradstreet recently published the “Mind the Data Gap: 2019 Data-Driven Marketing and Advertising Outlook” report and discovered that the majority of B2B marketers (37 percent) now carry out ABM. About 22 percent said that they do not use ABM, but intend to roll it out in 2019.

However, nearly 30 percent of respondents said that they still do not use ABM. The researchers behind the report decided to look into what the biggest hurdles are to succeeding with ABM, and statistics showed that having an unclear strategy (35 percent) was the top challenge.

Other obstacles included a lack of time/resources (31 percent), a lack of understanding about ABM (29 percent) and an unclear picture of the customer journey / touch points (24 percent).

Confidence in ABM Continues to Rise

Despite some of the challenges associated with ABM, previous research suggests that marketers are overall fairly confident in their ABM strategies.

Openprise surveyed companies for its “2018 Marketing Operations Benchmarking Report” to gauge their confidence in this marketing tactic. Participants were asked to rank their responses based on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being considered the best. When asked how confident they felt about ABM, companies with 501 to 1,000 employees showed the highest level of confidence, averaging a 3.73 response.

Companies with more than 5,000 employees were close behind (3.55), followed by those with 251 to 500 employees (3.42) and businesses with 1,001 to 5,000 employees (3.33).