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Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategic approach that focuses on targeting and engaging specific high-value accounts or companies rather than a broader audience.

 

Instead of attracting a broad audience, account-based marketing focuses specifically on attracting and nurturing individual accounts. 

 

Because of this personalized approach, it can be an incredibly effective strategy for B2B brands.

Learn more about Account-Based Marketing:

What is ABM and why is it important?

By focusing efforts on high-value accounts, ABM enhances personalization and relevance, increasing the likelihood of successful conversions. 



This strategic approach enables tailored messaging and custom solutions, leading to stronger customer relationships. ABM aligns sales and marketing teams, fostering collaboration and improving overall efficiency. Its precision enables businesses to concentrate resources on accounts with the highest potential, optimizing ROI. 



In a competitive landscape, ABM empowers organizations to stand out, drive revenue, and build long-term customer loyalty.



Account-based marketing isn't a tactic; it's functionally a completely different approach and mindset to attracting and closing clients.

Icon representing ABM
Illustration representing ABM

The benefits of account-based marketing

Navigating the landscape of account-based marketing (ABM) offers significant advantages, including ABMs efficiency, potential for cross-selling and upselling, emphasis on personalization, and the importance of aligning sales and marketing teams.


This section will dive deeper into each of these benefits.

Icon representing the benefits of ABM

1. Account-based marketing exemplifies efficiency

Account-based marketing, when done correctly, is more efficient than traditional inbound marketing. 

 

Brands waste fewer marketing and sales resources attracting unqualified clients, and they put more of their time and effort towards attracting attention from the best-fit accounts. 

 

Additionally, because these prospects have been vetted and have received personalized messaging, sales qualification and follow-up are typically much easier. Less time is spent on attracting broad audiences and building lead scoring models. 

Icon representing the benefits of ABM

2. ABM is a powerful tool for cross-selling and upselling

In addition to attracting new clients, account-based marketing is also useful in building upsell, cross-sell, and retention campaigns for existing clients. This is considered a “land and expand” motion.

 

Certain account-based marketing campaigns exclusively focus on existing customers and driving expansion revenue through additional products, seats, and features. 

Illustration representing cross selling

3. Personalization is at the center of account-based marketing

By tailoring marketing messages, content, and offerings to specific accounts, ABM ensures relevance and resonates with target audiences. 

 

This personalized approach fosters a sense of exclusivity and demonstrates a deep understanding of the account's unique needs and challenges. It helps build trust and credibility, as prospects perceive the effort invested in understanding their business. 

 

Personalization enhances customer experiences, drives engagement, and increases the likelihood of conversion and long-term customer loyalty.

Illustration representing personalization

4. ABM encourages sales and marketing teams to align

Finally, account-based marketing programs effectively give sales and marketing teams shared goals and alignment. 

 

Brands often create "revenue teams" that combine sales and demand generation efforts, and the teams are unified through a single KPI or shared revenue metric. 

 

This is an incredibly effective way to build trust with potential customers and create a lasting relationship that goes beyond a one-time sale.

Illustration representing sales and marketing alignment

How to implement account-based marketing

There's no single way to do account-based marketing, but there is a high-level playbook marketing leaders can follow to help implement it at their companies.
 

Account-based marketing campaigns have three distinct stages; account research, content creation, and execution and measurement.

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Stage 1: Account research

1. Identify high-value accounts

2. Perform customer research

Stage 2: Content creation

3.  Choose channels and tactics

4. Develop tailored content

Stage 3: Execution and measurement

5. Execute personalized campaigns

6. Measure and optimize

In large organizations, it’s not uncommon for multiple teams to own each stage and execute on the individual tactics.

 

Like any form of personalization, the key is to agree on the highest-value target accounts and uncover ways to reach them. There's no single software tool, tactic, or a way to do this; in fact, creativity and customized tactics are standard practice in ABM.

Account research

Step 1: Identify high-value target accounts

Some companies have a very small ceiling on the total number of accounts they could work with. For example, a brand selling analytics to airlines can only work with airlines, and there are only a set amount of airlines in the world.



For brands starting account-based marketing campaigns, it's best to start small and identify patterns within the most successful customers.

 


Consider the industries, company sizes, and demographics of the most successful clients that can help identify similar prospects.

 

For mature account-based marketing programs, marketing leaders can segment their lists in different ways, such as by region, use case, company size, or pretty much any other defining characteristic of an account.


It's best to approach ABM like a bullseye, starting in the middle with the highest propensity accounts, and moving outwards only when the team has saturated each ring.

Illustration representing high value accounts

Step 2: Uncover customer research on these accounts

While firmographic and demographic segmentation help segment the data and identify patterns among top accounts, marketer leaders will need qualitative insights to craft messaging that resonates with this audience.

 

This includes customer needs and pain points as well as where they are in their customer journey.  Leverage the data that already exists as well as additional research (customer interviews, surveys, market research, and experiments) to understand their current marketing and sales processes, as well as the competitors that exist for this segment.


In this step, begin researching what channels they're using, influencers they follow, and the content they consume. This will help marketing leaders form a campaign plan to reach them.

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Content creation

Step 3: Choose the channels and tactics

This means identifying the channels the brand will use to reach the desired audiences. How this is done depends on a) where this audience spends their time and b) the resources the brand has available.

 

One of the best channels for B2B account-based marketing is LinkedIn. With LinkedIn, brands have access to marketing and sales solutions and specific targeting parameters for both.

 

Here are a few ways LinkedIn can help brands reach their target accounts:

Account-Based Advertising

LinkedIn marketing products allow teams to run targeted ad campaigns specifically aimed at identified target accounts. Use account-based advertising to display personalized ads, sponsored content, or InMail ads to decision-makers within the selected accounts, increasing brand visibility and generating leads.

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Account Profiling

LinkedIn provides detailed information about companies and professionals, allowing revenue teams to gain valuable insights into target accounts. Teams can analyze their organizational structure, key decision-makers, recent news, and company updates.

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Personalized Outreach

With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, sales development reps can send personalized connection requests, messages, and InMails to decision-makers.

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Account Engagement

LinkedIn's platform allows marketing and sales leaders to share insightful content through posts and articles to position the company as thought leaders in the space. Additionally, the team can engage with account stakeholders by liking, commenting, and sharing their updates to build rapport and establish credibility.

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Social Selling and Relationship Building

LinkedIn supports social selling strategies by enabling teams to build and nurture relationships.

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Account Monitoring and Insights

LinkedIn also offers account monitoring to track activities and updates, such as job changes, promotions, and company news, from target accounts.

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Collaboration and Sales Intelligence

LinkedIn provides collaboration features that allow sales teams to share insights, notes, and updates about target accounts.

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Outside of traditional channels, account-based marketing can leverage creative campaigns like small personal events and dinners, custom gifting, or pretty much whatever the creative mind can conceive. For example, a brand could publish a beautifully designed magazine featuring quotes and data from decision-makers in their target accounts list and distribute these via direct mail.

Step 4: Develop content tailored to each account

Account-based marketing requires content tailored to each prospect. 

 

Depending on the channel, this could include custom landing pages or personalized website copy and imagery, custom LinkedIn or social media ads, email copy and scripts, webinars, invite-only panels, podcasts, or research reports. 

 

The best way for marketing leaders to determine what content to create is to collaborate with sales and customer success teams. They often know the common objections, pain points, and questions each segment has, so marketing teams can proactively create content to attract and convince target accounts based on these data points. 

 

Many marketing tools exist to personalize broader campaigns with relatively low effort, swapping in different logos and brand names based on the identification of an IP address, email address, or other defining factors.

Illustration representing tailored content

Execution and measurement

Step 5: Execute personalized campaigns

After preparation has been completed, marketing and sales leaders need to execute and operationalize their personalized campaigns.



Start small and use early data to improve messaging and resonate.

It helps to craft "minimum viable tests," where marketing teams will execute a certain percentage of campaigns and measure the effectiveness of them to see where they can improve.

Illustration representing personalized campaigns

Step 6: Measure campaigns and optimize over time

ABM campaigns should be more cost-effective and ROI positive than broader inbound marketing campaigns. This should show up in the data with, Improved click-through-rates, conversions, lead quality, sales closing ratios, revenue from target accounts, and customer satisfaction and retention rates. 

 

Keep in mind that measuring the success of ABM programs can be more complex than traditional marketing initiatives due to the highly targeted nature of the campaigns.

Illustration representing measuring campaigns

Account-based marketing best practices

Personalization often suffers the same fate: the orchestration and data necessities rival the promise of 1:1 messaging to actually reach that reality.


Therefore, the biggest advice for new account-based marketing programs is to start small and think scrappy. Before investing in expensive technology, consider the easiest way of reaching a small cohort of ideal target accounts.


Doing so without tools can inform business leaders as to what tools they'll need to scale and automate the program.


Here are other account-based marketing best practices:

Icon representing ABM best practices

What messaging matters to the target audience?

 

The first thing marketers often think about when they hear "personalization" is using the prospect’s or the brand’s name in their communications. 

 

This approach may provide additional click-throughs or response rate, but it's unlikely to turn a prospect from unaware to convinced of the product's superior value. 

 

Business leaders can find the messaging that matters through research focused on the pain points faced by the target audience. Invoking these pain points and the product's competitive advantages in the marketing materials is a true way to stand out. 

Illustration representing messaging

What data is needed to target prospects accurately?

Not just performance data to track campaign effectiveness but also the data used to identify and segment best-fit leads and accounts, as well as using real-time data to target these prospects at the ideal time. 

 

Certain platforms, like LinkedIn, make this easy. However, to do account-based marketing on a website, brands need to have data tools that correctly identify traits of website visitors that correlate them to a company, and then use a tool that can deliver personalized experiences at that moment. 

 

Again, starting small is key. 

 

It doesn't take as much complexity to send personalized emails or LinkedIn messages. But to do complex account-based marketing like programmatic ad campaigns requires operational excellence.

Illustration representing targeting data

How can sales and marketing align on shared goals?

As mentioned above, many companies are forming "revenue teams" that are a combination of sales and marketing professionals. These teams have shared goals and strategies, and this allows them to sync their efforts toward attracting the right prospects. 

 

Even if the org structure doesn't change, it helps to have shared goals that map towards pipeline or revenue instead of something farther up the funnel like marketing qualified leads (MQLs). 

Illustration representing marketing and sales shared goals

Account-based marketing is fundamentally different

Account-based marketing is a mindset shift compared to traditional inbound marketing. Instead of attracting as many leads as possible, the goal is to identify, up front, which leads are worthy of attracting, and set out on custom campaigns to reach only them.

It’s a bottoms-up approach that, when done well, can increase the ROI and efficiency of both sales and marketing efforts.

 

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