When you go fishing with a net, you can never be really sure what you might bring back into your boat. It’s not a terrible approach if you don’t care what you catch. But if you’re angling for something specific, you’ll use the proper tackle and cast your bait into a choice spot to hook your fish.
Marketing — and its various approaches — is not unlike fishing. There are different strategies to achieve the same outcome: capturing customers.
“From traditional marketing approaches, it’s an upside down triangle,” RGVision Media CEO Gabriel Puente said. “We’re casting a large net over a large demographic to hopefully create interest and we’re going to start get narrowed down to the point with those interested people.”
The goal of this approach is to create conversations using different platforms with the hope of catching consumers and leads as the audience focus is refined.
Account-based marketing — or ABM — takes the opposite approach.
“The account-based marketing approach is, let’s focus on those ones we already have. Let’s nurture those relationships,” Puente said. This also includes identifying and targeting prospective clients. For example, if you’re opening a new gym, leaving flyers for it all around town would be casting a wide net for potential members. Leaving flyers at fitness retailers, outdoors companies, and health food stores, however, would be likely drum up more focused interest and actual members — the specialized, targeted approach typical to ABM.
Puente’s background includes working for a large Hispanic advertising agency at a time when marketing was limited by its platforms — TV, radio, and outdoor. Today, the internet and social media have expanded marketing, its approaches, and its audience.
Located in Mission but serving the entire Rio Grande Valley and beyond, RGVision is an account-based marketing firm.
“What intrigued me about our clients was the creative process and the messaging behind what they wanted to communicate and getting down to the truth as far as what is ultimately what their clients need to hear and what their customers are supposed to be receiving,” Puente said.
When he founded RGVision in 2009, many people around him advised Puente to turn his company into an ad agency. But that traditional approach wasn’t going to cut it in a swiftly changing digital age.
Now, businesses are looking for more targeted approaches to their marketing needs, and creatives who used to work at ad agencies are branching out to offer specific services like video, social media marketing, and graphic design, among others. RGVision has the team and resources to do all of the above and more — including ABM.
“Account-based marketing is let’s first understand who is bringing in the most revenue for your business and let’s focus on them and cultivating those relationships and really paying attention to those,” Puente said. “Those relationships will eventually become advocates for your brand, your products, your services, and your company.”
For example, a chocolatier sees a small portion of its business coming in from consumers walking in to purchase treats. If the larger portion of that business is actually coming from school districts needing treats for parent appreciation nights, raffle gift baskets, and other uses, then it would be an ABM approach to nurture existing relationships with those school districts — and cultivate new relationships with districts that aren’t yet buying from the chocolatier.
“Let’s figure out a space and mediums that the school districts are sharing and let’s invest in those,” Puente said, detailing how a marketing firm could bring the chocolatier in to a regional training event or other places to target the desired audience.
It’s the personalization per client that really makes a difference in ABM. Any agency can fill in the blanks on a one-size-fits-all template used for each of its clients.
“The ‘set it and forget it’ and ‘let me call you next year whenever we’re up for renewal’ and nobody wants to do the work,” Puente said. “What we do, that’s the hard part. Getting down to it talking to the client, getting to the weeds and really understanding the data. Taking that quantitative data and turning it to the benefit of the client.”
That includes creating a customized strategy specific to each client.
“We’re an account-based marketing firm, so the resources that we have are not only to benefit the client, but to benefit their clients, as well,” Puente said. ABM goes beyond simply selling to a client. “People are tired of being sold stuff.” ABM even goes beyond content marketing, which has oversaturated the digital space, Puente added.
RGVision crafted a strategy for a medical service that relied on other physicians for its business. One facet of the strategy was to capture physicians who had used the service on camera, talking about the benefit of the service. This strategy was mutually beneficial — the physicians would have material they could use on their platforms, while the medical service’s reach and additional value would increase.
The right tackle for the right fish.
“It’s a little hard to manage and get creative with the data,” Puente said. “I’m really proud of the team that we have here at RGVision. Every client has a different base, so we take a dive into understanding who that base is — talk to the clients and understand that — so we can come up with a solid strategy that can work for them.”
#JoinTheConversation at rgvisionmedia.com.
