Account based marketing guide: Everything you need to know 

In today’s competitive market, the traditional marketing approach is proving to be inefficient. The recent market research highlights shocking facts about traditional methods:    

• 70 to 80% of customers ignore brands appearing in sponsored search results.  
• 81% of internet users employ ad blockers to avoid intrusive ads.  
• 73% of customers express a strong dislike for pop-up advertisements.  

While traditional ads and marketing practices can yield results, they often do so over a longer period and have significant limitations.

This inefficiency has prompted many businesses to explore more targeted and effective alternatives, such as account based marketing (ABM).  

ABM represents a transformative approach to marketing. It focuses on high-value accounts and tailors personalized campaigns to meet their unique needs. This strategy aligns sales and marketing efforts, fosters deeper customer engagement, and drives higher revenue growth.   

To adapt this approach, this comprehensive account based marketing playbook will guide you through the essentials of ABM, including its concept, benefits, real-world use cases, etc.  

Let’s start by understanding ABM concept.  

What is account based marketing? 

It is a focused marketing approach in which marketing, sales, and customer support teams work together to target high-value customers (those who are heavily dependent on your business for products/services).    

Teams using account based marketing (ABM) create personalized campaigns and target the ideal existing customers for better engagement.    

Besides, a successful ABM can result in better ROI, increase revenue growth, and scale your business to new heights.   

ABM can be tailored to fit the needs and capabilities of all B2B companies, whether large or small to medium.   

After clarifying the concept through an in-depth account based marketing definition, let’s explore its three types in the next section.  

What are the different types of ABM?  

There are three different types of account based marketing that you should know to choose and yield the best results for your company: 

Strategic 

For this ABM approach, the sales, marketing, and management teams work together to effectively establish a plan for up and cross-selling from these clients.  

Strategic ABM focuses on developing hyper-specific accounts marketing for the selected higher-value accounts.    

The strategy might require quite a bit of time and effort. Marketers must thoroughly understand their target audience before committing to it. Every step is to convert sales through highly personalized messages and other ways.     

Such an ABM strategy is better for a large company, as a one-on-one strategy requires a larger budget than usual, which would be risky for the small to medium business.  

Lite 

One-to-few marketing is the second type of ABM strategy you can adopt for your business, also called ABM lite. In this format, you don’t have to pay close attention to every customer’s unique needs and demands.   

Instead, the teams can collaborate to select 5 to 10 accounts that share common problems, objectives, and requirements.  

It can be used by small businesses as common groups are formed based on preferences and tastes. This eliminates the cost of individual marketing strategies.  

However, in-depth knowledge of customers’ needs and wants is still required to personalize messages and make the ABM campaign successful. 

Programmatic 

It is similar yet takes a different approach from ABM lite. The programmatic account-based marketing model also segments the common things, differences, opportunities, and threats that an organization faces.   

This ABM cluster considers hundreds to thousands of accounts based on the client profile. For such segregation, this type of ABM often prioritizes the CRM with marketing automation.   

The tool will help you organize the segments and send tailored smart emails and messages based on factors like geography and industry.       

Account based marketing vs inbound marketing: Can both strategies be used together? 

Account based marketing and inbound marketing are two dynamic duos used together. Also, these marketing tactics can accelerate your business’s growth.   

Though they can work together but have some distinctions, account based marketing is a high-end strategy. Whereas inbound marketing is more functional. Inbound growth strategy allows you to grow with content, SEO, and a delightful prospect experience.   

Even though both ABM & inbound marketing are different, they can be aligned:   

• Inbound marketing helps attract target accounts, and ABM can accelerate its speed and gear up for better sales.   
• The inbound marketing efforts are a foundation for the ABM strategy as they make up the base for choosing high-value accounts.   
• Content can be two-for-one. You can create and use content that serves ABM and inbound strategies.  

What are the benefits of account based marketing? 

The ABM marketers saw a 500% jump in target account traffic post adaptation of strategy. As we see, there are numerous benefits of allowing account based marketing in your business. We have compiled the positive impacts it creates in your business: 

Improves alignment between marketing & sales teams 

Cross-team collaboration is better for any organization’s growth. In account based marketing, the transparency between marketing and sales teams confirms working towards similar goals.   

Proper alignment between sales and marketing teams will ensure that all communications, interactions, and content are consistent as per the account based marketing plan.   

Increase content relevance and customer’s trust

As ABM campaigns are built on a long-term basis, they will help enhance customer experiences. Each customer will feel they are having a one-on-one conversation with the company.   

Team members collect prospect interests, customer journey stages, and more to personalize an ABM strategy more closely.   

That’s why ABM delivers consistent customer experiences and personalized campaigns with prompt communication, product information, and other pricing details.      

Delivers consistent and enhanced customer experiences 

Personalization improves relevance in ABM strategy by personalizing each message, including content, product information, communication, campaigns, and more, for every account. 

Through this personalization and customization, the relevance amongst these accounts is maximized. That happens because your content and interactions show how your specific products, services, etc., can solve their problems.  

Hence, ABM allows your business to angle in a way that makes it a more relevant and ideal choice for your target accounts.    

Offers clear metrics for measuring and increasing ROI  

Through various account based marketing metrics, you can measure the return on investment in your resources and time. It is beneficial to know whether certain accounts the company is invested in are worth it.  

Then, you can easily focus on those long-term accounts to keep, recognize, and target similar accounts in the future. Various ABM metrics are:  

• Pipeline velocity  
• Target account coverage  
• MQLs (Marketing qualified leads)  
• Customer churn rate  
• Account engagement  
• Net promoter score  
• Annual contract value   

Streamlines & shortens the business cycle 

Regardless of your industry or resources, the sales process follows this pattern: Prospect, connect, research, present, close.  

Account based marketing efforts can streamline this cycle by focusing only on your business’s high-yielding customer accounts.  

This approach will save time and resources, and you can focus on the stages of the sales cycle that can positively impact the audience.   

Reduce wastage of business resources 

As ABM focuses on fewer accounts, that results in less wastage of time and resources compared to the traditional methods.  

Besides, many ABM programs add data and resources to help marketers gauge and identify target accounts’ pre-existing problems, making targeting them easier that also uses less time of the business. 

Top 2 common challenges faced in an ABM strategy!   

Account-based marketing is a sure-shot strategy for your business, but there are certain disadvantages associated to it. Amongst them, these two highlighted have impacted most of the strategy users:     

Integration with existing technologies 

ABM platforms only sometimes integrate with existing marketing and sales rep apps like data management platforms and other software, which can create some complexity.  

As employees learn the platform from scratch, their alignment and workflow might break at the initial stage. 

Ensuring data accuracy 

It might become challenging to ensure accuracy due to the complex nature of data collection and review.   

The focused approach of ABM is worth it, but it can sustain errors like data integration issues, human data entry errors, outdated information, incomplete data, and more.

What should be an account based marketing strategy? 

The account based marketing approach needs a proper strategy to scale up the business and gain better revenue:

1) Define your ideal customer profile 

An ICP is a hypothetical description of a perfect customer who would benefit from your solution and provide significant value in return. It helps sales and marketing teams identify and target your business’s most desirable and valuable accounts.  

Based on demographic and psychographic factors, who are your customers, and why do they buy? are the prominent questions to answer. 

It takes quite the opposite approach to traditional marketing, which requires responding to leads. First, identify and then attract target companies that you are willing to work with tailored marketing campaigns.   

The better way is to select a high-value account. For some companies, it can be a few hundred dollars and for others, it can be a multi-million-dollar deal to crack.   

You can quickly identify such high-value accounts by:   

• Listing accounts that are like your past or current accounts.   
• Choosing targets based on their size, annual revenue, and location   
• Learn more about your high-value accounts through various ways like social media, blogs, and others   
• Read news articles or press releases about your industry that mention growth, mergers, or other indicators.   

Most account based marketing strategies assign the finalized set of accounts to each team member.  

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2) Craft personalized campaigns

ABM is all about targeting specific prospects at your target organizations. This makes it easy to create hyper-personalized content with unique needs.  

For example, as an entrepreneur leader, you can create multiple content ways for your business to get better results using the CRM tool.    

B2B prospects tend to receive a lot of marketing content, so gain personalization to convince them for your product/service. You can personalize the ABM by:   

• Creating ads targeting specific roles or companies   
• Reaching out the contacts via LinkedIn when they receive a promotion   
• Using dynamic content on your website or direct mail campaigns   
• Mentioning companies or key decision maker’s name   
• Crafting one-on-one emails to your contacts   
• Meeting prospects in person at industry events   

3) Implementing the best ABM tool 

A successful ABM strategy will require a tool to support your company and its goals. Many CRM tools, like Salesmate, offer such services for small to large companies.  

It comes with a range of adaptable features, such as reporting and analytics, contact management, built-in calling, messaging, emails, and various integrations, ensuring it can meet the unique needs of your company.

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4) Regularly measuring & optimizing ABM 

It might take some time from your productive hours, but to improve the reach of future ABM plans, it’s better to examine the work of account based marketing to understand the results it is yielding.  

This is possible through an ABM tool, where you avoid spending too much time on irrelevant leads. ABM thrives on data, so that you can measure ABM’s success with different account based marketing KPIs:  

• Engagement rates  
• Open rates  
• Click through rates  
• Conversions  
• Cross-sells and Upsell  
• Account contract values  
• Win rates   

Also read: Is account-based selling business right for you?

How to get started with ABM? 

Even though you know the procedure to start an account based marketing framework, the proper plan of starting up is required:  

Decide if ABM is correct for you

Recent data shows that ABM tends to attain results with over 97% higher ROI than other marketing activities. Therefore, ABM can be considered an effective strategy for any B2B business.  

However, in account based marketing, you need enough high-value accounts to make the strategy worthwhile. Once the accounts are selected, the ABM takes time, effort, and coordination.  

If you have marketing team members and a significant amount of time, then ABM is a perfect fit for you.

Get the right tools for ABM

An account based marketing strategy requires accounts, teams, time, and cloud solutions. It can start with an effective CRM tool that collects and manages data and allows you to create personalized experiences that define ABM.  

Many account based marketing tools are available, which we will discuss later, but the main features you should look at are marketing automation and AI integration.      

Collaborate with various teams for ABM 

As discussed, different teams must collaborate on the account based marketing campaign. Though it is a marketing team’s initiation, it still impacts other teams requiring interaction like sales, support, and more.   

All these teams must be in the loop from the beginning of the ABM, as it may change how they approach a specific account. The teams will also need access to all the data and tools to help them create successful interactions.   

To get all your teams on the same page:   

• Train everyone on managing leads for ABM and teach them how to talk with high-value customers. This will create more consistency and unification across every step of the ABM journey.    
• Underline the importance of building open & cross-team communication into everyone’s workflow. This will give everyone access to their team chat, fostering collaboration and sharing critical insights about top accounts, which is crucial for the success of our ABM strategy.  
• You can use CRM to create a shared list of accounts that all teams can easily access. This will ensure people save time searching for the information they need to identify, target, and engage the best accounts.      

Set the achievable goal for the ABM campaign 

You can’t expect instant results from an account based marketing strategy. It is built slowly and requires time, investment, and effort. Setting goals and establishing your ABM program at a pace that works well for your team members is better.  

Start slowly with a small crawl by creating an initial campaign of high-value accounts. If your initial campaign results are encouraging enough, you can continue with the ABM. But first, do a brief with your team and answer the questions:  

• What kind of customization has the most impact?  
• Did accounts respond to one type of outreach over the other?        

How to grow ABM campaigns? 

It’s not only about creating a strategy but also excelling from time to time. That’s when you can follow these account based marketing tips: 

Start in co-ordination with CRM platforms

To make the most of b2b account based marketing, you need a great list of potential target accounts. For that, you will need the best CRM platform for advanced automation. 

It will give you a 360-degree view of all the accounts in your CRM so you can compare them according to your needs.  

Focus on accounts in your top industry segments and note the characteristics shared amongst the accounts you choose. 

Build a one-on-one experience 

Personalized experience is the foundation of account based marketing. Use the data in your CRM and information from your sales team to craft content and experiences for every target account.  

Today’s growth of AI can also automate your work of crafting compelling campaigns by analyzing the data you input and the similarities of accounts you have vested in. 

Engage these high-value target accounts 

Once the personalized content is created for an ABM strategy, it’s time for engagement.  

To align sales and marketing teams, you can provide high-touch engagement with valuable customer accounts and nurture them towards renewals, upgrades, and expanded products.  

Remember, ABM customer engagement is about the continued personalized connection, which differs from one-to-done campaigns.     

Measure and record ROI 

These account based marketing results are more prompt to measure than those of broader marketing efforts.

Keep an eye on ROI to collect and record important engagement, brand awareness, lead quality metrics, and other. 

Ensure that ABM is consistent  

ABM campaign doesn’t stick but continues to flow with cross-team alignment, shared data & content, and personalized experiences.     

For the data, give teams a shared point of connection. The tool that can cross-store their data for up-to-date information.

Grow your ABM campaign with the right tool!

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Best account based marketing tactics to know

Account based marketing best practices are the building blocks of your campaigns. As we have already seen, customization is the primary key, so review these tactics for better marketing and sales success:   

Give tailored value proposition 

Mostly, top funnel marketing strategies are broad and brand focused. However, account based marketing takes a value-driven approach specific to each high-value account.  

To create each value proposition, ensure you understand each account’s detailed pain points, needs, and goals. The message should clearly articulate your product or service’s value to the organization.  

Be sure to highlight how your product or service can overcome the challenges of your b2b audiences. This will avoid generic messaging while keeping your brand consistent. 

Stakeholders mapping and better engagement 

Once you know the key stakeholders, start mapping target accounts and their roles, responsibilities, and more.  

Then, dive deep into your stakeholders with relevant communication strategies. This level of communication can help you engage and build relationships with these decision-makers.  

You can initiate communication tracking, which is an easier way to know your audience’s needs and pain points.   

Account based social selling 

Encourage your sales team to use social media for account based marketing. According to the latest account based marketing statistics, around 77% of businesses use social media to reach their customers.  

Some platforms like LinkedIn have made it simple to share personalized content, start relevant discussions, and network with key stakeholders.  

First, you must choose the target platform where your highest stakeholders are available for the proper source. Account based advertising on these platforms is also an excellent option for an ABM campaign.  

Retargeting 

It is helpful for the stakeholders who have shown some interest in re-converting to customers. Retargeting can help you customize your ads with relevant content across the channels.  

This can further target decision-makers to take the desired actions, such as revisiting a website or downloading a resource. 

Events and experiences 

Host targeted events, webinars, and roundtable discussions for your key accounts of ABM campaigns. You can optimize the content, agenda, and attendee list to address each account’s specific pain points and objectives.  

Offer unique experiences, networking opportunities, and valuable content that aligns with the interests and needs of your target accounts. After the event, be sure to follow up and continue relationship building. 

Targeted content 

For targeted content, create sequences that combine multiple touchpoints of your ABM. Maintain a consistent brand presence through blog posts, industry reports, case studies, and more.   

Best account based marketing platforms for your convenience 

There are multiple account based marketing solutions available offering automation, from which we have shortlisted the top three exclusively for you:  

Salesmate 

This account based marketing CRM can help enhance your ABM strategies. Salesmate is a perfect tool for your marketing tactics. Here are the vast features provided by Salesmate – the best ABM software:  

• Sales pipeline management: Identify the high-value accounts from your pipeline management data and yield the best ABM ROI. 
• Contact management: Saving prospects’ contact details can help you identify and analyze the type of personalized content you are willing to create.  
• Email marketing: Deliver your cadence through email with automation and gain results.  
• Live Chat: Use live chat to gain more information on prospects’ needs and wants.  
• Reports & analytics: When measuring account based marketing performance, use customized reports to track the success ratio.  

Salesmate is an all-in-one CRM offering more features and driving the business towards automation. 

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HubSpot 

HubSpot is one such CRM that offers full-fledged campaign rights in your ABM software. It gives a distinguishing list of features, like identifying target accounts and many more.  

The tool can identify challenges for you in personalizing messages to attract them.  

Features  

• Create ICP  
• Import spreadsheet to target accounts  
• Leverage marketing tools  

Clearbit 

It is a B2B marketing and intelligence tool that empowers revenue teams to implement more targeting, analytics, and workflow across their go-to-market teams.  

Clearbit account based marketing automation allows you to streamline data collection, prioritize high intent leads, and align marketing and sales strategies.  

Features  

• Leverage AI native data  
• Trigger high buy intents  
• Integrates with the existing tech stack

Best account based marketing examples for you 

The ABM use cases are the ones that have helped businesses create an impact and scale up in the market:   

1) GumGum’s custom comic book for T-Mobile 

GumGum, an intelligence company, created a highly personalized ABM campaign to engage T-Mobile.  

They designed a custom comic book featuring both companies as superheroes, which was then sent to T-Mobile’s CEO. This creative approach captured the CEO’s attention and earned public recognition on Twitter.  

The campaign demonstrated the power of innovative and personalized content in capturing the interest and engagement of high-value targets. 

2) Salsify’s personalized roadshow invitations 

Salsify, a product experience management company, aimed to increase attendance for their roadshow event in Newyork city, featuring speakers from major companies like Google and Johnson & Johnson.  

They used a personalized ABM approach by sending custom messaging, targeted display ads, and customized emails to their list of target accounts.  

This targeted effort secured 82 registrants within two hours of the sales team reaching out, showcasing the effectiveness of focused messaging and collaboration between the sales and marketing teams. 

3) Clari’s Re-Engagement of Closed-Lost Opportunities 

Clari, a revenue operations platform, used an ABM campaign to re-engage with closed-lost opportunities.  

By leveraging 6sense to track these accounts, Clari ran highly targeted display ads with urgent and value-driven messaging aimed at senior-level personas.   

This approach, dubbed “waking the dead,” achieved a 79% account click-through rate and a 93% engagement rate among targeted accounts.  

Demonstrating the potential of ABM to revive previously lost opportunities and convert them into valuable engagements. 

Conclusion 

Account based marketing can be implemented in numerous ways in your business. It is a proven strategy for using your resources more efficiently by aligning sales and marketing teams for converting your high value prospects into customers.  

When you start with your ABM strategy, initiate by reviewing your prospects and leads for identifying and listing high value customers that would benefit in giving personalized experience.  

You can segregate prospects by ranking them and create a workflow of your ABM strategy that aligns sales and marketing teams and creates personalized results and in-brief measure your results.  

In this process, the best ABM marketing software, like Salesmate is available for the ease your journey and yield better results through various strategies.  

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