A well-organized marketing plan is critical to operate more strategically and effectively in a dynamic market environment. With research from Gartner revealing that marketing budgets will continue to shrink, now is the time to reevaluate how to maximize your marketing spend and ensure your teams, channels, resources, and tech stacks work together well.
While budget will always be a primary concern, it’s essential to understand how all these moving pieces help you achieve your departmental goals alongside the company’s bottom line. After all, marketing is not on an island—you need alignment with sales and customer success teams, data-driven account and buyer insights, and an integrated approach across multiple channels to target and engage your best accounts.
In this guide, we’ll explore how to proactively build an account-based marketing (ABM) plan that aligns with your business goals, optimizes your resources, and helps you navigate your B2B marketing challenges more effectively.
Define Clear and Measurable Goals
You might think that the first step in creating an effective marketing plan involves establishing your budget, but it’s goals—not money—that drive your actions. You need to know the destination before you can plan your route.
Start by aligning your marketing goals with the broader business objectives. They should be specific and clearly defined. For instance, instead of just saying “increase sales,” specify the exact outcome you want to achieve. Using a metric like “increase sales by 20% in the next fiscal year” ensures that your marketing efforts are focused and can be tracked effectively.
A best practice is using the SMART framework to set goals that are clear, achievable, and trackable. The acronym stands for five qualities that a goal should have:
- Specific: Clearly define what you want to accomplish in simple, direct terms.
- Measurable: Track your progress and identify areas for improvement.
- Achievable: Set goals that you believe you can achieve.
- Relevant: Ensure your goals align with your personal or organizational objectives.
- Time-bound: Set a time frame for your goal.
When setting SMART goals, consider your strengths and capabilities and evaluate what you can achieve now and in the future. While it’s good to be ambitious, goals must be realistic based on your current resources, market conditions, and historical performance. Setting unattainable goals will lead to frustration and low morale.
It’s also important to align marketing goals with those that sales and customer success teams aim to achieve as well. Marketing, sales, and customer success collaboration is crucial for ABM success. Focusing on this from the start helps ensure that all teams are cohesively working toward a common view of what that success looks like.
Other key elements to consider when defining your goals include:
- Time-Bound Objectives: Establish a timeline for achieving each goal. This could be monthly, quarterly, or annually, depending on the nature of the goal. Time-bound goals help maintain focus and urgency.
- Prioritize Goals: Determine which goals are most critical to your overall strategy. Not all goals will have the same level of importance; prioritizing them helps in allocating budget and resources effectively.
- Consider Long-term vs. Short-term Goals: Balance immediate objectives (like lead generation for a new product launch) with long-term goals (such as brand loyalty or market positioning) to ensure sustainable growth.
Establish Your Budget and Resource Allocation
Once you have a clear idea of what you’re working toward, you need think about the budget you’ll need to reach your goals. Create a detailed financial plan that outlines expected costs and allocates funds accordingly.
Begin by identifying the financial and human resources required to support your marketing activities. This includes costs for content creation, advertising, software tools, and personnel. Evaluate the potential return on investment (ROI) for each expenditure to prioritize your spending on the most impactful channels and strategies.
Here’s a list of potential costs you need to consider:
Personnel: Do you currently have the people you need to execute your plan effectively or will you need to expand the team to cover growing needs? Make sure to account for any additional costs associated with training or professional development needed for your team. If using freelancers or agencies, include their fees as well.
Marketing Channels: Identify costs associated with any marketing channels you plan to utilize such as:
- Content Marketing: Costs for creating whitepapers, eBooks, videos, infographics, and other forms of content.
- Digital Advertising: Expenditures for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, social media ads, display ads, and retargeting efforts.
- Email Marketing: Expenses related to email service providers (ESPs), design, and list management.
- Social Media: Costs for social media management tools, paid promotions, and content creation.
- Events and Trade Shows: Registration fees, booth design, promotional materials, travel expenses, and follow-up campaigns.
- SEO and Website Maintenance: Budget for website development, SEO tools, and ongoing maintenance.
Tech Stack: Account for monthly or annual subscription costs associated with the tools and software you use currently use, including marketing automation, ABM activation platforms and channels, generative AI (genAI), analytics, project management, and design. Are there any new solutions you need that will enable you to achieve your goals? Make sure to include one-time purchases for software that may require licenses or additional features.
Review and Reallocate Your Budget
Regularly review your budget against actual spending from the previous years to identify any discrepancies and adjust as more information becomes available or as market conditions change. Set up regular intervals (monthly, quarterly) to review your budget against actual spending. This ensures you stay on track and can make timely adjustments as needed. Look for significant differences between your projected costs and actual expenditure. Determine whether these variances are due to overspending, underspending, or changes in strategy. Understanding the “why” behind the variances is crucial.
Based on the insights gained from your review, reallocate funds to areas that are performing well or that may require additional investment. For instance, if a specific channel is generating more leads than expected, consider increasing its budget. Consider trends over multiple budget cycles. Long-term patterns can provide insights into areas that consistently need adjustment, allowing for more accurate forecasting in future budgets.
Other key elements to consider when establishing your budget and resource allocation include:
- Technology: Leverage tools and software to help you track expenses and manage resources efficiently. Consider using project management and budgeting software to streamline the allocation process and maintain financial oversight.
- Budget Templates: Use a structured format to organize all estimated costs by channel and tactic. This will help visualize the entire budget and make it easier to communicate with stakeholders.
- Plan for Contingencies: Allocate a portion of your budget for unexpected expenses or opportunities. This could be around 5-10% of your total marketing budget, allowing flexibility for adjustments.
Identify Your Target Audience
Understanding your audience so you know how you’re going to reach them is a crucial step in building a proactive marketing plan. However, it’s important to use data—not your gut—to determine the accounts demonstrating the highest propensity to purchase for the biggest impact on engagement and ROI. Here’s how:
Step 1: Collaborate with Sales to Create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Collaboration with sales and customer success is key to creating an ideal customer profile (ICP) that fuels your target account list (TAL). Establishing a strong ICP and target account list ensures that your marketing spend, and your marketing plan outlines the accounts with the highest propensity to purchase to target, engage, and convert as your customers. When you focus on these accounts, you avoid wasting resources and maximizing your impact on the pipeline and revenue.
Start by analyzing your pipeline and closed deals to find common traits among prospects and customers. Leverage first-party data in your customer relationship management system (CRM) and marketing automation platform (MAP) to pinpoint shared characteristics of high-value accounts. These lookalike target accounts enhance your understanding of your ideal customer profile and allow for the creation of a predictive scoring system for your TALs. This system clarifies which account characteristics qualify or disqualify potential leads, streamlining the selection process.
Step 2: Segment Your TAL With Data
While there are no limits on the size of your TAL, you need to focus your efforts on accounts that demonstrate the highest purchase intent and will gain the most value from your solution. To identify and prioritize these accounts, leverage a mix of your own first-party data along with third-party intent data and external behavioral insights, including:
- Technographic Data: Reveals the technology stack that accounts are currently using.
- B2B Research Data: Provides insights into the content and advertising that accounts are engaging with relevant to your solution.
- Historical Performance Data: Includes purchased data that uncovers behavioral insights from key members of buying committees who are interacting with other businesses, obtained with permission.
Think of segmentation as peeling back the layers of your data to uncover distinct subsets within your TAL. Consider segmenting by:
- Industry-specific challenges
- Patterns in product usage
- Engagement level metrics
- Trends in purchase history
- Preferred content types and channels of engagement
Step 3: Prioritize Accounts with Shared Characteristics to Include in Your TAL
Once you’ve established a deeply segmented TAL you can prioritize these accounts based on shared characteristics that indicate a higher likelihood of engagement and conversion.
Key indicators include urgency for your solutions, active engagement with your digital content, and significant organizational changes that create demand for your products. For example, accounts that consistently interact with high-intent content or make inquiries aligned with your value proposition are strong candidates for advancement in the buying process. Additionally, external factors like market expansions or leadership changes can signal opportune moments for engagement.
Prioritizing these accounts allows for more strategic allocation of marketing and sales resources, focusing on those most likely to move quickly through the funnel. This dynamic process requires ongoing monitoring of account behaviors and market signals, enabling sales and marketing teams to adjust strategies in real-time and engage with the most promising prospects effectively.
Determine Your Key Marketing Channels
Choosing the right marketing channel mix is crucial for effectively reaching your target audience and achieving your marketing goals. Research finds today that a significant portion, typically 40-50%, of marketing budgets is directed toward digital marketing efforts. Allocating your marketing channels effectively ensures that your efforts align with your target audience’s behaviors and preferences. It allows you to maximize reach, enhance engagement, and drive conversions across multiple platforms. By strategically distributing your budget across the multiple channels your buyers frequent the most, you can create a cohesive brand presence that resonates with them at various touchpoints. This holistic approach not only optimizes your marketing investment but also enables you to adapt to emerging trends, measure performance accurately, and refine your strategies for better results over time.
Start by analyzing your target audience to understand which channels they frequent. Remember that buying committee members are increasingly more self-sufficient and digital-dependent in their search for solutions to business challenges. According to research, 90% of the purchase process is completed before buyers reach out to a vendor, highlighting the need for marketers to effectively guide these decision-makers toward a decision. Identifying which channels resonate most with your target audience will help you effectively engage and convert prospects, allowing you to tailor your messaging and content strategies to meet their preferences and drive meaningful interactions that help them get to that sales conversation. Consider how each channel fits into your strategy based on the needs of buyer personas and the goals you want to achieve. Ensure you have enough material to serve their needs, alongside what content performs best per channel.
Develop a Content Plan
Your ABM content strategy should focus on delivering consistent, high-quality content that aligns with your audience’s interests and needs. To ensure that you remain top-of-mind, you need a strong content and messaging sequence that urges the buyer to continue through the buyer’s journey.
Begin by identifying the core themes and topics that resonate with your target market, based on your research. Develop a content calendar that outlines your publishing schedule and ensures a steady flow of diverse content types such as blog posts, videos, infographics, and social media updates. Each piece of content should be designed to provide value, whether it’s educating, entertaining, or solving a problem for your audience.
Next, tailor your content to different stages of the buyer’s journey. Focus on addressing the specific pain points and questions your audience has at different stages of their decision-making process. For example, create informative blog posts or videos to attract new visitors, in-depth guides or case studies to engage those considering their options, and testimonials or product demos to convince prospects ready to make a purchase. Leverage various formats and platforms to reach a broader audience and keep them engaged.
Choose two or three strong assets that serve as cornerstones for each funnel stage and each persona. While there are several ways to determine the strength of your assets, you’ll eliminate much of the guesswork by looking at the historical data around past asset performance from previous campaigns or nurture programs. Investigate which website pages show the highest buyer intent, especially when those pages tie to a solution being promoted for the overall campaign. You can then check if you should create any assets, like a display banner ad, to promote these pages.
Incorporate SEO best practices to enhance the visibility of your content and drive organic traffic. Use relevant keywords, optimize meta descriptions, and include internal and external links to boost search engine rankings. Consistently measure the performance of your content through analytics to understand what works best and refine your strategy accordingly. By strategically planning and executing your content, you can build stronger connections with your audience and support your overall marketing goals.
Other key elements to consider when developing your content plan include:
- Involve Stakeholders: Work with other teams, such as sales, customer service, and product development, to gather insights and ideas for content. Their perspectives can enrich your content and ensure it addresses customer needs effectively.
- Stay Current with Industry Trends: Keep an eye on industry trends and emerging topics that may be relevant to your audience. This can help you create timely and engaging content that positions your brand as a thought leader.
Layout Your Timeline
It’s critical to establish a timeline—including key milestones and deadlines—that keeps your marketing efforts on track by aligning marketing objectives with your business strategy. This helps keep the team organized, accountable, and focused on clear objectives, like what tasks need to be done, who is responsible for each task, and what date they must be completed by.
Start by defining key milestones by breaking down your marketing plan into key activities. This could include campaign launches, content releases, events, product launches, or significant marketing initiatives. Assign specific deadlines for each milestone to keep the team accountable and ensure timely execution.
Sequence activities logically by identifying tasks that are dependent on others. For example, content creation may need to be completed before promotion can begin. Make sure the timeline reflects these dependencies. Allow for some overlap in activities where feasible, such as preparing for a new campaign while still promoting an ongoing one.
Be sure to plan for contingencies by allocating buffer time between tasks and milestones to accommodate unexpected delays or adjustments. Even the most well-run companies experience product launch delays. Accounting for these possible setbacks with contingency plans helps your team adapt to unexpected changes and ensures you’re continuing to work toward achieving your goals.
Schedule regular review points in your timeline to assess progress, evaluate results, and make necessary adjustments. This could be weekly or monthly, depending on the complexity of your marketing plan. Include time for gathering feedback from team members and stakeholders, ensuring everyone is aligned and informed. Be flexible and ready to adjust the timeline, if necessary, based on performance data or unexpected changes in the market.
Other key elements to consider when creating your timeline include:
- Use a Visual Format: Implement tools like Gantt charts, spreadsheets, or project management software (e.g., Trello, Asana, or Monday.com) to create a visual representation of your timeline. A visual format makes it easier to track progress and deadlines.
- Consider Team Schedules: Be mindful of team members’ availability and workload when scheduling activities. Avoid major deadlines during busy periods or company-wide events that could hinder productivity.
Monitor and Adjust Your Plan Based on Insights
To keep your marketing plan effective, continually adapt it based on insights gathered from your performance analysis. Examine the data to identify what works and what doesn’t and be prepared to refine your strategies accordingly. This involves not only adjusting your current tactics but also exploring new ones that could yield better results.
Setting a review cadence keeps your teams agile and focused while also allowing for breathing room in case you need switch strategies or explore new whitespace opportunities. Establish consistent review cycles, whether monthly, quarterly, or annually. Regular evaluation not only aids in aligning marketing efforts with overarching company goals but also ensures flexibility in tactics and strategies to optimize results. Pay close attention to changes in consumer behavior, industry trends, and market conditions. By staying informed, you can swiftly modify your approach to stay relevant. For instance, if your social media engagement has declined, investigate the underlying reasons and test different content formats or posting schedules to see what resonates better with your audience. Use A/B testing results to finetune your campaigns. If a particular advertisement or email subject line performs significantly better, analyze the elements that contributed to its success and apply those learnings to future efforts. Regularly update your content strategy to include fresh and compelling topics that address emerging trends or newly identified audience needs.
Collaboration with other departments can provide additional insights for strategy adjustment. For example, feedback from the sales team about customer interactions can highlight areas where your messaging may need tweaking. Likewise, customer service data can reveal common issues that could be addressed through targeted marketing efforts.
Secure a Clearer Path to ABM Success with a Strong Marketing Plan
Just as you wouldn’t start a road trip without a set route and destination, you can’t expect success without a strong marketing plan in place.
Building a proactive marketing plan is vital for maintaining a competitive edge and effectively engaging your target audience. In addition to aligning your team’s efforts toward common goals and ensuring that resources are allocated efficiently, a well thought out plan allows you to anticipate shifts in market trends, consumer behavior, and competitive actions, enabling you to pivot your strategy as needed. By anticipating market shifts and customer behavior, you are better positioned to respond swiftly and effectively, keeping your campaigns relevant and impactful.
Keep your plan aligned with your goals by using the right tools and partners to measure your success and how your efforts influence account engagement and interest. ML Measurement and ML Insights provide marketers with a comprehensive framework to enhance their effectiveness in targeting and engaging potential customers. The combination of intent data with campaign performance metrics allows you to make real-time adjustments to your ABM strategies. This capability is crucial in the fast-paced B2B environment where customer interests can shift rapidly. By understanding how prospects engage with content and campaigns, you can refine your messaging and tactics to better resonate with your target audience. Through integrations with your CRM and MAP, ML Measurement provides you with a unified view of account engagement and pipeline so you can maximize conversion paths and track accounts through the sales funnel.
But don’t just take our word for it—request a demo and see how you can create marketing plans that work based on comprehensive account and campaign intelligence.
