If you’re like many B2B marketers today, you likely recognize the increased role account-based marketing (ABM) plays in reaching, engaging, and—ultimately—converting high-value accounts.
ABM embodies a strategic framework that extends across the revenue organization. It leverages a targeted approach where marketing investments and campaign efforts are deliberately focused on buying groups within specific accounts. This marketing method amplifies the alignment between marketing and sales teams, significantly enhancing ROI by ensuring cohesive, tailored engagement with key stakeholders.
While not a new concept, you and your team might not be fully maximizing the full potential of what an ABM approach provides without implementing the necessary data to identify the right accounts and understand buying committee concerns, activate personalized campaigns at every stage of the sales cycle, and measure performance and optimize campaigns in real-time to accelerate conversions.
So, what exactly is ABM, why do you need it, and how do you build a stronger strategy with it? Read on to learn everything you need to know to become an ABM wiz in no time.
What Is Account-Based Marketing?
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a highly focused business strategy that aligns revenue teams to engage a specific set of target accounts, treating each account as a market of one. This strategy shifts from broad-based marketing to a more personalized, targeted approach. It’s particularly effective for B2B companies, where the buying process is complex and involves a buying group of key decision-makers and influencers within each target account.
The essence of an ABM strategy lies in its precision and personalization. Unlike customer marketing, which aims to attract and retain customers on a wide scale, ABM zeroes in on high-value accounts with tailored messaging and campaigns designed to resonate with each account’s unique challenges and needs. This targeted approach increases the effectiveness of marketing efforts and significantly enhances the customer experience, fostering deeper relationships with key accounts. By prioritizing quality over quantity, ABM allows you to narrow your time and resources on accounts demonstrating the highest propensity to purchase and deliver more personalized experience across all members of the buying committee. The result is better engagement, faster sales cycles, and stronger relationships with accounts that will deliver more long-term value.
ABM vs. Demand Gen: What’s the Difference?
Account-based marketing and traditional demand generation represent fundamentally different approaches to capturing and nurturing leads. Conventional demand generation focuses on a wide-reaching approach—as long as marketing generates leads and fills the pipeline, they’re doing their job. The problem is that the volume of leads doesn’t signify the quality of the lead. Sales and marketing teams spend hours qualifying leads, which depletes the time they could spend diving deeper into their data for quality insights around their target accounts that impact their outreach efforts.
ABM focuses instead on quality by identifying the key stakeholders within your target accounts and personalizing your marketing efforts to increase conversion and ROI. ABM isn’t just a top-of-funnel effort—it’s a unified and consistent approach to reach all decision-makers with relevant content and messaging throughout the entire buyer journey.
Through targeted engagement, an ABM strategy ensures strong marketing and sales alignment, with both teams working collaboratively to convert key accounts into long-term customers.
You can easily break out and compare traditional demand generation and ABM through the following categories:
Precision vs. Volume: ABM zeroes in on predefined target accounts that have been identified as ideal customers, based on a detailed understanding of their business needs, challenges, and potential for revenue growth. These account lists contrast traditional demand generation, which measures success by lead quantity rather than quality or engagement depth.
Personalization at Scale: Traditional demand generation leverages broad messaging with the goal of reaching the largest possible audience. In contrast, ABM focuses on crafting customized campaigns designed to resonate deeply with each targeted account, incorporating insights into the account’s specific context, needs, and decision-making processes. This level of personalization is critical in ABM, facilitating stronger relationships and higher conversion rates.
Alignment and Collaboration: ABM requires a high degree of alignment and collaboration between sales and marketing teams, more so than traditional demand generation. This synergy is essential for developing and executing a unified strategy that effectively addresses each target account’s unique needs and pain points, ensuring a cohesive and compelling buyer’s journey.
The Different Types of ABM
Implementing an ABM strategy requires a thorough understanding of the target accounts’ business models, industry challenges, and individual objectives. This deep insight allows B2B companies to craft customized marketing campaigns that speak directly to the needs and interests of each target account, significantly improving the likelihood of engagement and conversion. There are three types of ABM strategy you can implement depending on your goals and available time and resources. They are:
- 1:1 ABM—Also known as “Strategic ABM” or “Large Account ABM,” 1:1 ABM focuses on developing and executing a hyper-targeted marketing strategy for each individual account.
- 1:Few—Also known as “ABM Lite,” 1:Few ABM groups 5-10 accounts into a distinct audience segment to target with the same strategy. Each account shares similar characteristics, such as the same business challenges, similar buyer personas, and company size, that the customized marketing strategy will appeal to and lead down the sales funnel.
- 1:Many—Also considered “ABM at scale,” 1:Many ABM targets an audience segment on a much larger scale. Marketers create a personalized ABM strategy that speaks to each audience segment at large, which is especially beneficial when targeting large accounts with multiple decision-makers within a large buying committee.
The goal of any ABM strategy is to provide buying committee members with the information needed to move with urgency along the sales funnel. A 1:1 ABM strategy may lead to enough attention on an account that they expand their services with you. If you want to improve conversion metrics, especially if you’re branching into a new market, a 1:Few ABM approach allows you to consider a larger target account list (TAL). Late-stage B2B companies (Series D and onward) have an ample inventory of historical data that helps to create audience segments for a 1:Few or 1:Many approach. Early-stage companies arrive to a point where they glean data around customers and build out stronger ideal customer profiles (ICPs) to create larger TALs, hence expanding from a 1:1 to 1:Few ABM strategy. Each method also results in different impacts across your company’s bottom line. While a 1:Many ABM approach reaches more accounts, the return on investment may yield lower returns than a 1:1 ABM approach. That said, a 1:Many ABM strategy can have larger effects in terms of brand penetration and awareness than the other methods, which can make larger impacts in terms of receiving new customers and growing the relationship with current customers. It’s important to align with your sales team to determine which approach to take and get their buy-in from the start of your program to increase its success.
Why Do You Need ABM?
Perhaps the question most asked by companies is why they need ABM in the first place, especially if traditional lead generation efforts are adequately filling the pipeline. The problem is that the B2B buying process has changed. Purchase decisions are no longer made by a single person—instead, they’re decided by a buying committee consisting of four to six members (on average), which can grow to 10+ participants with more complex and expensive solutions. These individuals each come to the purchase decision with their own perspectives, concerns, and pain points. They also hold different roles across different departments and range in other demographics across genders and age groups—all of which impact their decision-making process.
With deals taking longer to close and decision-makers increasingly needing to demonstrate ROI to justify their spending, buying committees need relevant information to reach a purchase consensus. Buyers no longer want personalized experiences—they demand it. Crafting these experiences involves more intelligent targeting and a better understanding of their individual needs to deliver more relevant content and messaging across the channels they use the most.
By leveraging data to understand the accounts showing purchase intent, the personas making the purchase decisions, and the content that will ultimately drive them to that sale, ABM is the answer to overcoming today’s complex marketing challenges.
A common view of target account research, engagement activity, and key performance indicators (KPIs) ensures your sales and marketing teams work more collaboratively to deliver a unified, “always-on” approach that guides buyers through the sales journey faster and establishes a better connection that leads to a stronger business partnership for years to come.
ABM helps you:
- Maximize your marketing budget by targeting the accounts and buying committees most likely to convert now.
- Saves you time and effort with a persistent experience in the market that delivers a personalized experience and drives engagement with the accounts that matter the most.
- Demonstrate success by measuring engagement in real time and augmenting content to yield higher conversions.
Marketing and sales teams collaborate to develop content and messaging that speaks to buying committee members across their target accounts. By incorporating personalized, targeted content developed specifically for the accounts you want to reach, ABM can help you generate more data, drive higher engagement, accelerate the sales cycle to deliver positive ROI, and makes it easier to share the results of your efforts across your organization.
4 Benefits of Account-Based Marketing
The power of account-based marketing lies in its ability to offer tangible, impactful benefits aligned with B2B companies’ strategic objectives. Among the foremost advantages of embracing ABM is the significant potential for a higher ROI. Directing marketing resources toward a curated list of target accounts streamlines efforts and optimizes spend, ensuring every dollar generates returns. This focused approach reduces waste and enhances efficiency, contributing to a more favorable bottom line.
1. Stronger Identification on High-Value Accounts
Focusing on a concise list of target accounts is a strategic move that allows a business to concentrate its resources and efforts on opportunities with the highest potential.
Instead of trying to appeal to a broad audience, the laser focus allows for an intensive understanding of the target accounts’ business models, needs, and challenges, thus developing highly targeted campaigns. However, it can be challenging to maintain engagement over time, especially with larger buying committees and multi-stakeholder messaging.
A successful ABM campaign requires clear identification of high-value accounts, extensive research, relevant content creation, multi-channel engagement strategies, and a thorough evaluation of campaign effectiveness. By addressing these key components, businesses can deliver more value to their top customers, maximize ROI, and drive meaningful business growth.
2. Enhanced Sales and Marketing Alignment
In traditional marketing models, misalignment between sales and marketing can lead to diluted efforts and squandered opportunities. However, ABM fosters a unified approach, as both teams collaborate from the outset of campaigns to identify, target, and nurture high-value accounts. This alignment ensures that messaging is consistent, efforts are complementary, and goals are jointly pursued, paving the way for a smoother buyer’s journey and a more cohesive customer experience.
3. Elevated Customer Experience
By leveraging personalized messaging and outreach tailored to each target account’s specific needs and pain points, ABM enables companies to establish deeper, more meaningful relationships with their clients. This personalized approach increases the likelihood of conversion, fosters loyalty, and encourages retention, as customers feel understood and valued individually.
4. Better Understanding of Customers’ Needs
As ABM focuses on insight-driven marketing, grounded in real data and genuine customer engagement, it positions companies to offer solutions that resonate with their target audience, further enhancing revenue potential and fostering sustainable growth.
How Do You Get Started with ABM? 3 Steps of a Successful ABM Strategy
The most effective ABM strategies dynamically target, nurture, and convert accounts through a full-funnel, always-on strategy. To get the most out of your approach, you’ll need to align your efforts with sales and ensure you’re working cohesively and toward shared goals. Consider the following three steps to create a stronger ABM strategy.
Step 1: Identify and Prioritize the Right Accounts, Personas, and Content
Everything starts with data. For your campaign to be effective, you need to prioritize in-market accounts, identify which personas to engage across the buying committee, and understand what content is most likely to convert them. ABM moves away from generalizing a dream list of clients and thinking you know what they care about toward using data to focus on the accounts demonstrating readiness to engage and creating content that supports their concerns and buying behaviors. A competitive displacement campaign, for example, may have a clear wish list from sales, and requires digging into the target accounts’ activities to find where these accounts may be in terms of potentially switching vendors.
Intent data is key to identifying in-market accounts based on their online research and content consumption behavior. This data not only helps you narrow your efforts on those accounts with the highest propensity to purchase, but also indicates how the accounts you’re actively engaging with are moving through the purchasing process based on buying committee behaviors. Combining multiple sources of data provides a differentiated and multi-faceted view of buyer intent. Here are a few sources to use:
- Owned Data: This includes first-party account and customer information found in your customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation platform (MAP).
- External Behavioral Data: This proprietary data purchased and used with permission from other businesses uncovers the behavioral insights from key members of buying committees engaging with content. Examples include hosted events, online communities, tradeshows, and review websites.
- Third-Party Data: The two main forms of this data include technographic data, which identifies the technology that accounts are currently using and researching, and B2B research data, which provides insight into account content consumption behaviors relevant to your solution.
Once you’ve used data to decide which accounts to prioritize, you need to determine who to engage within those accounts and what content and messaging will resonate with them the most. Understanding the individuals to engage provides the blueprint to approach your business targets effectively.
Each member of the buying committee has specific concerns and wants to find a viable solution to solve them. The end user who will likely use your solution every day will have different concerns from a senior or C-suite decision-maker. Data-driven insights around these concerns allow you to create content and messaging that educates buyers about your solution, motivates them through the funnel, and persuades them that you are the ideal solution to partner with to reach their goals. It also helps you align your content with the trending topics your target customers are researching.
You also need to map personalized content and messaging for each buying committee member based on each stage of the buyer’s journey. This ensures that you’re presenting them with the content and messaging they need at each stage to get them to that decision faster. Keep in mind that not all personas progress through the funnel at the same rate. One person can be in the consideration stage while everyone else is in the awareness stage. Use engagement and intent data to identify where each buyer is and to signal when they have moved to a new stage. This level of personalization will pay off in the end.
Targeting in ABM
Targeting in account-based marketing is a pivotal process that forms the backbone of a successful ABM strategy. It’s the practice of identifying and focusing on high-value accounts that are most likely to convert and drive significant revenue for your business.
Understanding High-Value Accounts: The first step in effective targeting is to define what makes an account high-value for your specific business context. High-value accounts are typically large organizations with a significant budget, a complex buying process involving multiple stakeholders, or companies strategically aligned with your business offerings. Identifying these accounts requires a deep dive into market research, intent data analysis, and the leveraging of insights from your sales and marketing teams.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): Developing a detailed ICP is crucial for targeting in ABM. The ICP should encapsulate the characteristics of companies that represent your ideal target, including industry, company size, location, and revenue potential. Additionally, it should consider the technological landscape, pain points, and business objectives of these potential accounts. An accurate ICP guides your marketing and sales efforts, ensuring you focus on accounts most likely to benefit from your solution and become long-term, valuable customers.
Collaboration Between Sales and Marketing: Both departments must work closely to share insights, develop unified messaging, and coordinate outreach efforts. This collaboration ensures a seamless, personalized customer experience across your marketing approach and salespeople that can significantly improve engagement and conversion rates.
Step 2: Activate Relevant Content for Each Stage of the Buyer’s Journey
ABM is all about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. But buyers research solutions on various channels and their journey isn’t confined to one place. You can’t dictate where they research and explore solutions, nor can you expect them to waste time looking for the right information. If you want to remain top of mind, you need to surround the buying committee with a persistent and cohesive experience across the channels they’re already using.
The most effective ABM campaigns are multi-channel, leveraging digital platforms, social media, personalized email campaigns, direct mail, and face-to-face meetings to engage key decision-makers that may be cold or through a retargeting strategy based on prior engagement with your brand. Each channel should be selected based on the preferences and behaviors of your target accounts, ensuring your messages are delivered in a way that resonates and drives engagement. The four channels to focus on in your ABM marketing channel strategy include:
- Connected TV: A category of over-the-top (OTT) streaming devices that connect to or are embedded into a television to support video content streaming. As more buyers shift to more independent research methods, a CTV marketing strategy helps raise brand awareness with buyers.
- Content Syndication: Amplify reach and strengthen brand visibility through republishing efforts that reach your target accounts. Following these content syndication dos and don’ts will help you navigate syndication with precision to generate high-quality leads.
- Display Advertising: Includes rich media and standard display, such as banner ads, that appear across the Internet and apps, and are particularly strong at reinforcing messaging, delivering content, and encouraging high clickthrough rates and webpage visits.
- Social Advertising with LinkedIn Ads: Including LinkedIn in your unified ABM strategy helps you own the experience on the largest B2B social network and deliver more dynamic ads directly where your target accounts will see them.
While you don’t have to use every channel available, you should prioritize the channels buyers spend most of their time on, while also getting the highest quality engagement possible. When you’re developing your multi-channel strategy, consider how each channel fits into your strategy and integrate them thoughtfully based on the needs of each persona and the goal you want to achieve. Ensure you have enough material to serve their needs, alongside what content performs best per channel.
Personalization in ABM
In account-based marketing, personalization isn’t just a buzzword—it’s the very foundation upon which successful campaigns are built. Unlike traditional marketing strategies that often rely on generic messaging to cast a wide net, ABM focuses on crafting highly personalized and targeted outreach efforts to engage specific high-value accounts. This level of personalization ensures that each interaction resonates deeply with the target audience, fostering a sense of understanding and connection that is rare in broader marketing campaigns.
The essence of personalization in ABM lies in its ability to tailor messaging and content to each account’s unique needs, challenges, and interests. This is achieved through a deep understanding of the target accounts, including the key decision-makers, their business objectives, the hurdles they face, and the solutions they seek. By leveraging data and insights, marketers can create customized communication strategies that speak directly to these elements, significantly increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion.
Key to effective personalization in ABM is the use of personas. These detailed profiles represent the stakeholders within a target account, each with their preferences, pain points, and buying behaviors. Marketers can ensure that their outreach efforts are seen and felt by crafting messages and content that appeal to these personas. This nuanced approach to engagement transforms the customer experience, making each interaction meaningful and impactful.
Moreover, the channels through which these personalized messages are delivered play a crucial role in the success of ABM campaigns. Whether through targeted emails, social media outreach, bespoke direct mail, or tailored webinars, selecting the right channels based on the preferences of your target account ensures that your message is delivered in the most effective and receptive manner.
Step 3: Measure Performance and Optimize Campaigns in Real-time to Accelerate Conversions
All good things take time, and it can take a while for your ABM efforts to pay off. ABM programs often take up to nine months to see full fruition, from generating engagement to a closed deal. That’s why it’s important to measure campaign performance against your ABM KPIs regularly so you can optimize your approach in real time instead of waiting until the end to determine what went wrong. Quickly identifying trends, adjusting strategies, and making data-driven decisions will improve the effectiveness of your campaigns in the long run.
When deciding what metrics matter to your business, focus on data points that help drive improvements over time. Metrics that uncover the key drivers of performance with your ABM strategy include:
- Volume: The number of sales opportunities and deals created from each ABM campaign
- Value: The average revenue value of opportunities in the sales pipeline and closed deals
- Velocity: The average time it takes to convert your target accounts into customers
You also want to ensure your key metrics tie into departmental and company goals. Revenue growth, engagement metrics, account penetration, and ROI are primary indicators of ABM success:
- Revenue Growth: Tracking revenue generated from targeted accounts provides direct insight into the financial outcomes of your ABM efforts. This metric not only signifies immediate gains, but also helps gauge long-term account value.
- Engagement Metrics: Engagement levels within target accounts are critical to assess the effectiveness of personalized content and outreach strategies. Metrics such as email open rates, website visits from targeted accounts, and social media interactions offer valuable data on how engaged these accounts are.
- Account Penetration: It is essential to understand how deep and wide your relationship with a target account goes. Measuring the number of engaged contacts within an account, especially key decision-makers, can indicate the success of your targeting and personalization efforts.
- Return on Investment (ROI): Calculating the return on investment for ABM campaigns is fundamental. This involves comparing the revenue attributed to ABM efforts against the costs incurred, providing a clear picture of your strategies’ financial efficiency and effectiveness.
For a comprehensive analysis, marketers should utilize ABM platforms and CRM tools to aggregate and analyze these metrics across the sales process. Monitoring these KPIs allows marketers to refine and optimize their ABM strategies, ensuring they remain aligned with the overall business objectives and contribute significantly to the company’s growth and success. By focusing on these metrics, companies can better understand the value derived from ABM, enabling data-driven decisions that drive enhanced performance and outcomes.
Remember that ABM campaign success isn’t necessarily measured by the quantity of account leads gained. Instead, focus on the quality of accounts converted. One enterprise account that you’re able to grow and retain for years to come is much more valuable than landing several low or mid-level accounts that won’t benefit from your solution in the long term and will move to a competitor solution.
Addressing Common Challenges in ABM
Implementing account-based marketing presents unique challenges that demand strategic foresight and tactical adaptability.
Misalignment Between Sales and Marketing
One of the most common hurdles is aligning the sales and marketing teams. This alignment is crucial for ABM success, which relies on a cohesive approach to targeting and engaging high-value accounts. To overcome this, organizations should foster open communication and shared objectives between these teams, ensuring that both fully commit to the ABM strategy and understand their pivotal roles in its execution. Having critical data from CRM and MAP systems available in one holistic view will also help sales and marketing departments avoid misalignment—especially if the data can be shown in as close to real time as possible.
Inaccurate Target Account Identification and Prioritization
Identifying and prioritizing the right accounts requires a deep understanding of your market and the ability to leverage data effectively. Companies can address this by employing sophisticated data analysis tools and criteria that align with their ICP, thereby enhancing the precision of their target account selection.
Misalignment Between ABM and Content Marketing Strategies
Your content marketing strategy must align with the goals of your ABM strategy and speak directly to the pain points of the chosen accounts. This requires creating different types of content for various channels, including social media posts, blogs, case studies, and more. Every piece of content should aim to educate, engage, and build trust with the targeted accounts. Achieving this balance requires in-depth market research, a thorough understanding of the accounts, and a robust content creation process.
Additionally, crafting personalized messaging that resonates with multiple stakeholders within an account is a complex task. It involves a thorough analysis of each decision-maker’s pain points, touchpoints, and preferences. Utilizing persona-based marketing strategies can help tailor content that speaks directly to each stakeholder, thereby improving engagement and fostering meaningful relationships.
Reactive Measurement and Campaign Optimization
When you review campaigns for opportunities to improve, oftentimes you may be too late to make any real impact to the current campaign. Defining clear metrics and KPIs from the outset that align with your business objectives is essential. Employing ABM and CRM software that provides real-time analytics and reporting can help in tracking these metrics, offering insights into campaign performance and areas for optimization that you can implement immediately.
Dwindling Engagement
Campaigns can easily become stale, as there may be multiple stakeholders from the same account in different campaigns, at different stages, and not moving with any urgency. Maintaining engagement over time requires ongoing innovation and adaptability in your ABM tactics. Regularly reviewing account feedback, market trends, and campaign performance data will enable you to adjust your strategies, ensuring sustained engagement and maximizing the ROI of your ABM efforts.
Power Your Growth with ABM
ABM doesn’t have to be overwhelming. By employing the three key steps of Identify, Activate, and Measure to your ABM strategy, you can dynamically target, nurture, and convert your best accounts to accelerate the buyer’s journey.
Download the 2024 Full-Funnel ABM Playbook to dive deeper into why adopting a full-funnel ABM approach is your best bet to align your strategies, maximize budgets, and improve operational efficiency.
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