Ultimate Guide To Account-Based Marketing
01/30/25
account-based marketing
In the crowded world of B2B marketing, companies are always looking for more efficient and effective ways to do business. That’s where account-based marketing comes in. By following this strategic and focused marketing style, you are able to not only win more clients – but get better results for the ones that you do.
In our latest ultimate guide, we are showing you everything you need to know about account-based marketing (ABM). This includes a ton of information about how to approach it strategically for the best results.
Let’s dive in!
Click here for your PDF version of this guide.
5 Benefits Of Account-Based Marketing
Let’s first cover the benefits of account-based marketing. Many people are doubtful that getting so specific with their marketing can be effective. A common belief is that ABM cuts you off from other opportunities. That’s not true. Here are five benefits to consider:
1) Better Returns
Traditional marketing is all about scale. You send a general message to a huge audience and hope for the best. While this can work, the results are often underwhelming. You bring in leads, sure, but many of them are unqualified and have little chance of becoming a customer.
ABM flips this model around. By instead concentrating on a very specific type of account, you are able to use your resources more efficiently. This means that your time, money, and personnel only go towards something that is likely to work. The result is a higher return on your investment. Also, because ABM makes it easier to upsell and cross-sell, you bring in even more revenue per offer.
2) Aligned Sales And Marketing
For many companies, the sales and marketing teams work in silos. This is to be expected: the two teams don’t necessarily have a lot of overlap. That said, most people would agree that a closer working relationship between these two departments can only be a good thing.
By pursuing account-based marketing as a strategy, you force your teams to work together. This creates a working environment where everything is informed by the team effort. For example, with the customer contact that a sales team has, they are able to provide their marketers with vital information like target accounts’ pain points and most important decision-makers. In the same way, marketing is then able to craft more tailored campaigns that send more potential customers to the sales team. This creates a virtuous (and more effective) cycle at your business.
3) Enhanced Personalization
We all know that better personalization means more sales. But with a general approach to marketing, that kind of personalization is difficult to achieve. The fact is, B2B decision-makers expect this personalization. By refusing to get clear on who exactly you serve, it’s difficult to find anybody to serve.
Account-based marketing fixes that. By becoming an expert in each account’s industry, organizational structure, and particular challenges, you can create marketing that is much more targeted. This results in content like demos and case studies that are customized to potential clients. The result is an overall marketing strategy that resonates much more deeply.
4) Trackable Results
As we’ve mentioned, account-based marketing is all about being specific. Specific content, created for specific accounts, in the name of working with specific clients. By definition, this limits the amount of clients that you can work with. The big positive here is that through ABM, you become the perfect service-provider for a very particular type of account. This makes “results” much easier overall to track.
Just think about it. By focusing on one or two types of clients, you create a service that is easily replicable. Often you end up working with clients that are very similar. Maybe they have similar sizes, or similar problems, or are looking for very particular features of your product. You inevitably become well-acquainted with this targeted working style. Results are then much easier to track, because instead of many “general” clients, you are tracking your actions (and results) for a smaller number of specific clients.
5) Long-Term Relationship Building
If you are focusing on just a few accounts, your efforts are about more than just that first sale. Think about the last point we made about specificity. By getting clear about who you help, you inevitably build stronger relationships than you ever would with more general marketing efforts. Almost always, focus equals results.
This has a tendency to lead to loyalty over time. If you are driving end results for someone, and showing that you understand their problems just as well as they do, why would they want to work with anybody else? Account-based marketing results in initial sales, sure. But the long-term relationships are where the real lifetime value comes in.
The Key Elements Of A Successful ABM Strategy
Every company that pursues account-based marketing will differ. That said, there are a number of elements that just about every successful ABM strategy needs to incorporate. Below we’ve laid out five of the most important as well as practical steps you can take to implement them.
1) Collaborative Sales And Marketing Alignment
Why It’s So Important:
As we discussed above, alignment with sales and marketing is a huge benefit of ABM. More than that, though, it’s a requirement. If you want to set up a system where you are able to successfully pinpoint and land a specific kind of client, these two teams need to work in tandem. Check below for our advice on how to do this.
Practical Steps:
- Schedule regular cross-department meetings where both teams can share any important information about target accounts
- Use a shared CRM system (options linked in our “Tools And Resources” section) that is able to track every interaction
- Work together to set up joint KPIs to ensure mutual accountability.
2) In-Depth Account Research
Why It’s So Important:
If you want to succeed at account-based marketing, you need to understand your “dream account” intimately. The entire marketing strategy is built on this detailed understanding.
Practical Steps:
- Use the right tools for comprehensive data on contacts
- Compile annual reports and press releases from each target account to learn more about their challenges
- Map out the account’s hierarchy and identify the people most likely to be involved in decision-making
3) Tailored Content And Personalized Outreach
Why It’s So Important:
As stated above, personalization drives results. Nowhere is this more true than in ABM. If the people that make the decision about working with you feel like you’re talking directly to them, there is more likely to be a sale.
Practical Steps:
- Segment your content by vertical (“finance” or “healthcare”, for example) or even account-specific references (key strategic priorities of different account types)
- Produce content in a variety of formats: short videos, whitepapers backed by data, or interactive product demos
- Consider direct mail for accounts with the highest value – anything from customized notebooks to personal invitations to virtual summits
4) Multi-Channel Approach
Why It’s So Important:
For B2B sales, higher ups at your target accounts often use multiple platforms and channels throughout the day. By meeting them where they are, you can engage with them consistently and reinforce the message that you are somebody to consider.
Practical Steps:
- Maintain consistent messaging across all channels so you’re telling a cohesive story
- Combine email nurturing with outreach on LinkedIn, direct phones calls, and possibly even retargeting ads
- Use marketing automation so that follow-ups and content distribution are properly coordinated
5) Robust Analytics And KPI Tracking
Why It’s So Important:
You can’t improve what you don’t track. KPIs are an essential part of ABM if you are looking to succeed (and improve). By tracking the right things, you know exactly what’s working and where further action is necessary.
Practical Steps:
- Establish the KPIs that matter the most: average deal size, contact engagement, and final revenue are common for ABM
- Use UTM parameters to connect different marketing touchpoints to sales outcomes
- Analyze data regularly (monthly is probably enough) to update your approach if needed and drop low-performing accounts
The ABM Process: 4 Tips For Success
At this point we have covered both the benefits of account-based marketing, as well as a five-step process most organizations should follow to succeed at it. We now want to provide you with a few more general tips. Treat these as “best practices” when it comes to your ABM efforts.
1) Identify The Right Prospects
This is where everything starts. If you are working with the right accounts, account-based marketing can get great results. If you aren’t, nothing you do will matter much. This is why working with the right prospects has the power to make or break your efforts. Here are a few specific things you can do:
- Think about your company’s main objectives before you map out which accounts are the best fit (which will typically have you measuring factors like potential revenue, industry fit, and brand alignment)
- Work with your sales team to build a target account list using things like product research and competitor analysis
2) Profile And Prioritize
Once you have your list of potential accounts you want to work with, it’s time to profile them. If our first tip is all about the general idea of who you want to work with, this is where you get more specific.
- Develop in-depth profiles for each account that detail their business model, core challenges, and main decision-makers
- Rate these accounts in order of potential value and likelihood of success, which ensures you invest your effort only in the accounts most likely to pay off
3) Create Tailored Content
We have covered numerous times how important content marketing is. With B2B sales, though, content is even more important. If there is one thing that can be a gamechanger in finding the right accounts, great content is it.
- Work closely with your marketing team to develop specialized content and outreach plans that are specific to each account’s most important interests and pain points
- Use personalization where it matters most: email campaigns, direct mail, and retargeting ads
4) Engage And Nurture
There is typically a fairly long period of engagement and nurturing before somebody signs up to work with you. This is to be expected: because B2B sales are usually more expensive, people need more convincing before they make a purchase. Here are two important tips to engage people with end sales in mind:
- Publish your targeted and personalized content across channels: email, in-person or virtual events, and (crucially) social media like LinkedIn
- Align your efforts with your sales team, who are usually hosting account-specific webinars or otherwise building executive-level relationships
3 Examples Of Account-Based Marketing In Action
It’s one thing to talk about ABM in theory; it’s another thing to understand the big companies that are doing it themselves. Here are three well-known companies that make a ton of their profits through account-based marketing.
Everybody knows this software giant. While Adobe sells a ton of subscriptions to individual users, it also uses ABM to target enterprise clients. These are clients that they will typically make personalized demos and specialized industry reports for. Because Adobe is a tool that can get “entrenched” in a company’s project work, it’s a tool that is difficult to replace. This, combined with their effective ABM, drives billions in repeat revenue every year.
As a data platform, Snowflake has implemented highly targeted campaigns in their search for clients. This takes a number of forms: unique whitepapers, in-person events, and specialized landing pages. By targeting the messaging for each of these, the company is able to speak to specific account’s data challenges. This has repeatedly driven total revenue past expectations.
More than 700,000 companies use Slack. And for good reason: it’s one of the most convenient and easy-to-use messaging softwares there is. A big part of this success is due to their effective account-based marketing. When Slack approaches large organizations, they typically offer them a customized solution for team collaboration. This is enabled by sales reps who have spent time studying an account’s communication pain points.
Tools And Resources
Lastly, to ensure your long-term success, we’ve also provided a list of resources you might find useful. Account-based marketing can sometimes be confusing – here are five categories of tools as well as several options for each one.
CRM Platforms: store account data and track all interactions between your teams.
Marketing Automation: automate your workflows, personalized content, and lead scoring at the account level.
Account Intelligence Tools: get deep insights into specific accounts and the people that work at them.
Ad Platforms: create targeted ads to beef up your marketing abilities.
Analytics: track the data that matters and understand each stage of an account’s journey working with you.
Conclusion
Account-based marketing is more than just a tactic – it’s a complete shift in how you approach your marketing strategy. Set it up correctly, and it can completely change your organization’s overall success over time.
We hope this guide has helped you. If you are considering ABM, be sure to refer to it often – we tried to make it as actionable as possible! And if you ever need help, let us know.
Click here for your PDF version of this guide.
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