This past week, a few members of the uStudio team attended the #FlipMyFunnel conference here in Austin. The event was focused on Account Based Marketing (ABM), the hottest trend in B2B marketing today.  Account Based Marketing takes a page from sales by identifying and marketing to companies and people within those companies, that are most likely to generate revenue.

ABM has gained traction because marketers today are tired of two things:

1. The lack of control marketers feel in response to a world where customers and prospects have gained the upper hand in the B2B sales cycle
2. The single digit returns and excessive spending that take place throughout the traditional funnel (see below)

The biggest difference between ABM and the traditional funnel – outside of the fact that they are flipped – is who you’re targeting. In traditional marketing, we go after leads, leads, leads. And hopefully, the mass of leads you acquire at the top of the funnel produces a few good opportunities at the bottom.

So how does this happen? Very simply. Instead of focusing on driving people to your website, getting them to fill out a form and then tracking them via cookies, you focus on following the people in your target accounts based on the company’s IP address. In other words, if by knowing a company’s IP address, I can engage individuals based on their terms and and online behavior, I can then focus my marketing spend on high revenue opportunities vs. hoping a few qualified prospect companies fall through the funnel.

As a company that specializes in helping B2B companies utilize video, uStudio finds ABM exceptionally intriguing. Think about it. Now that you can “follow” individuals from targeted accounts and serve up tailored and specific information to each and every one of them. Just think about what you could do with video!

• Every time an individual from a target account lands on your website, you could provide a video specific to his or her company
• When an individual from a target account clicks through on an ad, you could have a custom video for his or her company on the landing page
• For every account, your sales reps could create individual “greeting” videos that contain an interactive layer for requesting a meeting or downloading more information

Video can also support ABM for individual sales reps. When video analytics are tied to account performance in your CRM, a sales rep can see what video content has directly influenced previous deals. Marketing can also create account-specific videos for reps and upload them directly in the CRM system so that sales reps have target-rich content at their fingertips.

ABM is taking the B2B marketing world by storm for a very good reason – we need to take back the ownership of the sales cycle. At the same time, video is the hottest content format out there today. You’ve seen us recite the stats over and over again – from the billions being viewed on YouTube, SnapChat, and Facebook to the impact just the word “video” can have on open rates, click-throughs and engagement. People love video.

It isn’t a stretch, then, to proclaim ABM and video as a perfect match. Both provide the opportunity to target and tailor your message and content as specific as you want. And video is the attention-grabber you need to put your ABM campaigns over the edge.