Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy where the marketing and sales departments come together to create personalized buying experiences for high-value accounts. Account-based marketing is a business-to-business (B2B) approach in which marketing and sales teams work together to target high-value accounts and turn them into customers.
Aspect
Explanation
Definition
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a strategic marketing approach where businesses focus their marketing efforts and resources on a targeted set of high-value accounts or prospects rather than casting a wide net. It involves personalized and tailored marketing campaigns to engage and nurture relationships with key accounts.
Key Concepts
– Target Accounts: Specific companies or organizations identified as high-potential or strategic targets. – Personalization: Customizing marketing messages and content to address the unique needs and challenges of each target account. – Relationship Building: Prioritizing long-term relationships and engagement with key decision-makers. – Alignment: Ensuring alignment between sales and marketing teams to collaborate effectively on account strategies.
Characteristics
– Highly Targeted: Focuses on a select group of high-value accounts rather than broad audiences. – Personalized Messaging: Tailors marketing materials to address the individual pain points and objectives of each target account. – Cross-Functional Collaboration: Requires close cooperation between sales and marketing teams to identify, engage, and convert key accounts. – Long-Term Focus: Emphasizes building and nurturing long-term relationships with target accounts.
Examples
– Customized email campaigns addressing specific pain points of target accounts. – Personalized content or webinars tailored to the needs of a particular industry. – One-on-one outreach by sales teams to engage key decision-makers in a meaningful way. – Account-specific advertising and retargeting efforts.
Advantages
– Higher Conversion Rates: Targeting specific accounts increases the likelihood of conversion. – Improved ROI: Efficient allocation of resources to high-value prospects. – Enhanced Customer Relationships: Focuses on building strong, long-lasting relationships with key accounts. – Alignment: Aligns marketing and sales teams, fostering collaboration and shared goals.
Challenges
– Resource-Intensive: Requires significant time, effort, and resources to personalize campaigns for each account. – Data and Insights: Needs accurate and up-to-date data to effectively target and engage accounts. – Measurement: Can be challenging to measure and attribute results accurately. – Scalability: May not be suitable for businesses with a large number of potential target accounts.
Adoption Trends
ABM has gained traction as businesses seek more effective ways to reach high-value clients and prospects. Advancements in data analytics and marketing automation have made it easier to implement personalized and scalable ABM strategies.
Conclusion
Account-Based Marketing is a strategic approach that focuses marketing efforts on a select group of high-value accounts. By personalizing messages and nurturing long-term relationships, businesses can increase conversion rates and build stronger partnerships with key clients and prospects. However, it requires careful resource allocation and collaboration between sales and marketing teams.
Table of Contents
Understanding account-based marketing
Account-based marketing is certainly not a new concept, though it has seen renewed interest in recent years. In the past, it was difficult to scale account-based marketing because it required a high level of personalization. Technological advancements have now made the ABM approach more accessible for businesses looking to develop highly targeted marketing content.
Essentially, the individual client account is considered a market in its own right, with each having a dedicated strategic approach to deepen the level of engagement across the entire marketing process.
In an era characterized by abundant information and fierce competition, it has never been more important for businesses to focus on accounts with the potential to deliver the highest return on investment.
Implementing account-based marketing
For most businesses, account-based marketing will feel like learning a new language. Instead of marketing to a demographic or buyer persona, the focus is on a specific organization.
Below we have listed some general steps to help businesses hit the ground running:
Define the strategic accounts – the business must begin by identifying the type of organization that will deliver the best ROI. This can be done by evaluating industry, company size, location, annual revenue, profit margin, or upsell potential.
Investigate key stakeholders – with the strategic accounts identified, it is prudent to identify the key stakeholders in these organizations. Who are the key decision-makers? How are decisions made? LinkedIn can be a good source of information, as can any previous interactions with the organization.
Create personalized content – as with traditional marketing strategies, the content should address specific pain points and detail how they can be addressed. Personalized content is fundamental to account-based marketing because the content needs to speak directly to the potential client.
Decide on channels – where do the stakeholders spend their time? A marketing team targeting financial executives may choose to run ads on Bloomberg or Market Watch. Facebook and LinkedIn can also be good places to start because they allow the creation of targeted ad campaigns for specific organizations and the role titles within those organizations.
Execute the campaign – when it comes time to run the marketing campaign, it is important to reiterate that the business is only marketing to a single client. Avoid bombarding them with messages across multiple channels in quick succession.
Measure and share results – after one or two months have passed, it is time to evaluate the effectiveness of the marketing campaign. Was the content engaging? Were any of the leads moved further down the funnel? Was any revenue generated? Were there any areas for improvement?
Benefits of account-based marketing
Businesses who are trying to sell into accounts with long sales cycles and large deal sizes will benefit the most from account-based marketing.
Here are some of the specific benefits they can enjoy:
Personalization – perhaps the most obvious benefit of account-based marketing is the degree of personalization offered to the client. Lucrative accounts attract a higher investment from marketing and sales, which deepens the relationship between the two parties.
Shorter sales cycles – major purchase decisions can involve multiple stakeholders which slow the process down. In account-based management, these stakeholders are nurtured simultaneously to ensure a streamlined and more efficient sales cycle. What’s more, there are fewer steps in an ABM sales cycle when compared to traditional marketing.
Increased collaboration – both sales and marketing teams work collaboratively to identify accounts, craft customized campaigns, and move accounts through the pipeline before and after lead conversion has occurred. The transparency of the ABM approach ensures both teams are focused on the same goals and understand the specific roles of each stakeholder.
Examples
Financial Services: A financial institution targeting a large corporate client identifies key decision-makers within the client organization and creates personalized financial reports tailored to their specific needs and goals.
Technology Solutions: A software company aims to win a contract with a major healthcare provider. They develop a series of webinars focused on addressing the unique compliance challenges in the healthcare industry and invite decision-makers from the healthcare organization.
Manufacturing: A manufacturing company seeking to expand its business with a key automotive client creates a customized online portal for the client. This portal provides real-time updates on production, inventory levels, and order status, enhancing the client’s supply chain visibility.
Advertising Agency: An advertising agency targets a luxury retail brand as a high-value account. They design a personalized marketing campaign that includes custom-tailored ad creatives, social media promotions, and influencer partnerships aligned with the luxury brand’s image.
Consulting Firm: A consulting firm specializing in environmental sustainability identifies a major energy corporation as a strategic account. They create a whitepaper addressing the client’s specific environmental challenges and solutions, positioning themselves as experts in the field.
Healthcare Services: A healthcare IT company targets hospitals and healthcare systems. They engage in personalized email campaigns that highlight case studies of successful implementations in similar-sized healthcare organizations, showcasing their expertise and potential benefits.
Education Technology: A company offering eLearning solutions targets large educational institutions. They host personalized online workshops for key faculty members, addressing the institution’s unique challenges in transitioning to online learning.
Professional Services: A law firm seeking to secure a major corporate client attends industry-specific conferences and events where the client’s decision-makers are likely to be present. They offer one-on-one consultations to discuss the client’s legal needs.
Real Estate: A commercial real estate agency targets a multinational corporation looking for office space. They create a virtual reality tour of available office spaces, allowing the client to explore properties remotely and make informed decisions.
Telecommunications: A telecommunications company aims to win a contract with a large logistics company. They develop a personalized mobile app that offers real-time tracking and reporting of the logistics company’s shipments, enhancing their operational efficiency.
Food Service: A catering company targeting corporate clients designs customized menus and dining experiences for each client based on their preferences and dietary requirements.
Human Resources Solutions: A company offering HR software targets mid-sized businesses. They provide personalized demonstrations of their software, showcasing how it can address the unique HR challenges faced by each potential client.
Key takeaways
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy where the marketing and sales departments come together to create personalized buying experiences for high-value accounts. Essentially, the individual client account is considered a market in its own right.
Account-based marketing implementation can be performed by following six key steps: define strategic accounts, investigate key stakeholders, create personalized content, decide on channels, execute the campaign, and measure and share results. Teams should be careful not to bombard the client with similar marketing messages across multiple channels.
Account-based marketing has multiple benefits, including a higher degree of personalization, shorter sales cycles, and increased collaboration between the sales and marketing departments.
Key Highlights:
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Definition: ABM is a collaborative strategy between marketing and sales teams in which personalized experiences are created for high-value accounts in the B2B sector.
ABM Evolution: ABM has gained renewed interest due to technological advancements, making highly targeted marketing content more accessible. Each client account is treated as a unique market, focusing on deepening engagement.
Implementing ABM: Businesses transitioning to ABM should follow key steps, including defining strategic accounts, identifying key stakeholders, creating personalized content, selecting appropriate channels, executing campaigns with caution, and evaluating results for improvement.
Benefits of ABM: ABM is particularly advantageous for businesses targeting accounts with long sales cycles and significant deal sizes. Its benefits include high personalization, shorter sales cycles, and increased collaboration between sales and marketing teams. It streamlines the sales process by nurturing multiple stakeholders simultaneously.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy where the marketing and sales departments come together to create personalized buying experiences for high-value accounts. Account-based marketing is a business-to-business (B2B) approach in which marketing and sales teams work together to target high-value accounts and turn them into customers.
Ad Ops – also known as Digital Ad Operations – refers to systems and processes that support digital advertisements’ delivery and management. The concept describes any process that helps a marketing team manage, run, or optimize ad campaigns, making them an integrating part of the business operations.
Venture capitalist, Dave McClure, coined the acronym AARRR which is a simplified model that enables to understand what metrics and channels to look at, at each stage for the users’ path toward becoming customers and referrers of a brand.
Affinity marketing involves a partnership between two or more businesses to sell more products. Note that this is a mutually beneficial arrangement where one brand can extend its reach and enhance its credibility in association with the other.
As the name suggests, ambush marketing raises awareness for brands at events in a covert and unexpected fashion. Ambush marketing takes many forms, one common element, the brand advertising their products or services has not paid for the right to do so. Thus, the business doing the ambushing attempts to capitalize on the efforts made by the business sponsoring the event.
Affiliate marketing describes the process whereby an affiliate earns a commission for selling the products of another person or company. Here, the affiliate is simply an individual who is motivated to promote a particular product through incentivization. The business whose product is being promoted will gain in terms of sales and marketing from affiliates.
The bullseye framework is a simple method that enables you to prioritize the marketing channels that will make your company gain traction. The main logic of the bullseye framework is to find the marketing channels that work and prioritize them.
Brand building is the set of activities that help companies to build an identity that can be recognized by its audience. Thus, it works as a mechanism of identification through core values that signal trust and that help build long-term relationships between the brand and its key stakeholders.
According to inbound marketing platform HubSpot, brand dilution occurs “when a company’s brand equity diminishes due to an unsuccessful brand extension, which is a new product the company develops in an industry that they don’t have any market share in.” Brand dilution, therefore, occurs when a brand decreases in value after the company releases a product that does not align with its vision, mission, or skillset.
The brand essence wheel is a templated approach businesses can use to better understand their brand. The brand essence wheel has obvious implications for external brand strategy. However, it is equally important in simplifying brand strategy for employees without a strong marketing background. Although many variations of the brand essence wheel exist, a comprehensive wheel incorporates information from five categories: attributes, benefits, values, personality, brand essence.
The brand equity is the premium that a customer is willing to pay for a product that has all the objective characteristics of existing alternatives, thus, making it different in terms of perception. The premium on seemingly equal products and quality is attributable to its brand equity.
Brand positioning is about creating a mental real estate in the mind of the target market. If successful, brand positioning allows a business to gain a competitive advantage. And it also works as a switching cost in favor of the brand. Consumers recognizing a brand might be less prone to switch to another brand.
Business storytelling is a critical part of developing a business model. Indeed, the way you frame the story of your organization will influence its brand in the long-term. That’s because your brand story is tied to your brand identity, and it enables people to identify with a company.
Content marketing is one of the most powerful commercial activities which focuses on leveraging content production (text, audio, video, or other formats) to attract a targeted audience. Content marketing focuses on building a strong brand, but also to convert part of that targeted audience into potential customers.
One of the first mentions of customer lifetime value was in the 1988 book Database Marketing: Strategy and Implementation written by Robert Shaw and Merlin Stone. Customer lifetime value (CLV) represents the value of a customer to a company over a period of time. It represents a critical business metric, especially for SaaS or recurring revenue-based businesses.
Customer segmentation is a marketing method that divides the customers in sub-groups, that share similar characteristics. Thus, product, marketing and engineering teams can center the strategy from go-to-market to product development and communication around each sub-group. Customer segments can be broken down is several ways, such as demographics, geography, psychographics and more.
Developer marketing encompasses tactics designed to grow awareness and adopt software tools, solutions, and SaaS platforms. Developer marketing has become the standard among software companies with a platform component, where developers can build applications on top of the core software or open software. Therefore, engaging developer communities has become a key element of marketing for many digital businesses.
A digital channel is a marketing channel, part of a distribution strategy, helping an organization to reach its potential customers via electronic means. There are several digital marketing channels, usually divided into organic and paid channels. Some organic channels are SEO, SMO, email marketing. And some paid channels comprise SEM, SMM, and display advertising.
Field marketing is a general term that encompasses face-to-face marketing activities carried out in the field. These activities may include street promotions, conferences, sales, and various forms of experiential marketing. Field marketing, therefore, refers to any marketing activity that is performed in the field.
interaction with a brand until they become a paid customer and beyond.
Funnel marketing is modeled after the marketing funnel, a concept that tells the company how it should market to consumers based on their position in the funnel itself. The notion of a customer embarking on a journey when interacting with a brand was first proposed by Elias St. Elmo Lewis in 1898.
Funnel marketing typically considers three stages of a non-linear marketing funnel. These are top of the funnel (TOFU), middle of the funnel (MOFU), and bottom of the funnel (BOFU). Particular marketing strategies at each stage are adapted to the level of familiarity the consumer has with a brand.
A go-to-market strategy represents how companies market their new products to reach target customers in a scalable and repeatable way. It starts with how new products/services get developed to how these organizations target potential customers (via sales and marketing models) to enable their value proposition to be delivered to create a competitive advantage.
The term “greenwashing” was first coined by environmentalist Jay Westerveld in 1986 at a time when most consumers received their news from television, radio, and print media. Some companies took advantage of limited public access to information by portraying themselves as environmental stewards – even when their actions proved otherwise. Greenwashing is a deceptive marketing practice where a company makes unsubstantiated claims about an environmentally-friendly product or service.
Grassroots marketing involves a brand creating highly targeted content for a particular niche or audience. When an organization engages in grassroots marketing, it focuses on a small group of people with the hope that its marketing message is shared with a progressively larger audience.
Growth marketing is a process of rapid experimentation, which in a way has to be “scientific” by keeping in mind that it is used by startups to grow, quickly. Thus, the “scientific” here is not meant in the academic sense. Growth marketing is expected to unlock growth, quickly and with an often limited budget.
Guerrilla marketing is an advertising strategy that seeks to utilize low-cost and sometimes unconventional tactics that are high impact. First coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book of the same title, guerrilla marketing works best on existing customers who are familiar with a brand or product and its particular characteristics.
Hunger marketing is a marketing strategy focused on manipulating consumer emotions. By bringing products to market with an attractive price point and restricted supply, consumers have a stronger desire to make a purchase.
Integrated marketing communication (IMC) is an approach used by businesses to coordinate and brand their communication strategies. Integrated marketing communication takes separate marketing functions and combines them into one, interconnected approach with a core brand message that is consistent across various channels. These encompass owned, earned, and paid media. Integrated marketing communication has been used to great effect by companies such as Snapchat, Snickers, and Domino’s.
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy designed to attract customers to a brand with content and experiences that they derive value from. Inbound marketing utilizes blogs, events, SEO, and social media to create brand awareness and attract targeted consumers. By attracting or “drawing in” a targeted audience, inbound marketing differs from outbound marketing which actively pushes a brand onto consumers who may have no interest in what is being offered.
Integrated marketing describes the process of delivering consistent and relevant content to a target audience across all marketing channels. It is a cohesive, unified, and immersive marketing strategy that is cost-effective and relies on brand identity and storytelling to amplify the brand to a wider and wider audience.
The marketing mix is a term to describe the multi-faceted approach to a complete and effective marketing plan. Traditionally, this plan included the four Ps of marketing: price, product, promotion, and place. But the exact makeup of a marketing mix has undergone various changes in response to new technologies and ways of thinking. Additions to the four Ps include physical evidence, people, process, and even politics.
Marketing myopia is the nearsighted focus on selling goods and services at the expense of consumer needs. Marketing myopia was coined by Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt in 1960. Originally, Levitt described the concept in the context of organizations in high-growth industries that become complacent in their belief that such industries never fail.
Marketing personas give businesses a general overview of key segments of their target audience and how these segments interact with their brand. Marketing personas are based on the data of an ideal, fictional customer whose characteristics, needs, and motivations are representative of a broader market segment.
Meme marketing is any marketing strategy that uses memes to promote a brand. The term “meme” itself was popularized by author Richard Dawkins over 50 years later in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In the book, Dawkins described how ideas evolved and were shared across different cultures. The internet has enabled this exchange to occur at an exponential rate, with the first modern memes emerging in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Microtargeting is a marketing strategy that utilizes consumer demographic data to identify the interests of a very specific group of individuals. Like most marketing strategies, the goal of microtargeting is to positively influence consumer behavior.
Multichannel marketing executes a marketing strategy across multiple platforms to reach as many consumers as possible. Here, a platform may refer to product packaging, word-of-mouth advertising, mobile apps, email, websites, or promotional events, and all the other channels that can help amplify the brand to reach as many consumers as possible.
Multi-level marketing (MLM), otherwise known as network or referral marketing, is a strategy in which businesses sell their products through person-to-person sales. When consumers join MLM programs, they act as distributors. Distributors make money by selling the product directly to other consumers. They earn a small percentage of sales from those that they recruit to do the same – often referred to as their “downline”.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measure of the ability of a product or service to attract word-of-mouth advertising. NPS is a crucial part of any marketing strategy since attracting and then retaining customers means they are more likely to recommend a business to others.
Neuromarketing information is collected by measuring brain activity related to specific brain functions using sophisticated and expensive technology such as MRI machines. Some businesses also choose to make inferences of neurological responses by analyzing biometric and heart-rate data.
Neuromarketing is the domain of large companies with similarly large budgets or subsidies. These include Frito-Lay, Google, and The Weather Channel.
Newsjacking as a marketing strategy was popularised by David Meerman Scott in his book Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage. Newsjacking describes the practice of aligning a brand with a current event to generate media attention and increase brand exposure.
A microniche is a subset of potential customers within a niche. In the era of dominating digital super-platforms, identifying a microniche can kick off the strategy of digital businesses to prevent competition against large platforms. As the microniche becomes a niche, then a market, scale becomes an option.
We can define pull and push marketing from the perspective of the target audience or customers. In push marketing, as the name suggests, you’re promoting a product so that consumers can see it. In a pull strategy, consumers might look for your product or service drawn by its brand.
Real-time marketing is as exactly as it sounds. It involves in-the-moment marketing to customers across any channel based on how that customer is interacting with the brand.
Relationship marketing involves businesses and their brands forming long-term relationships with customers. The focus of relationship marketing is to increase customer loyalty and engagement through high-quality products and services. It differs from short-term processes focused solely on customer acquisition and individual sales.
Reverse marketing describes any marketing strategy that encourages consumers to seek out a product or company on their own. This approach differs from a traditional marketing strategy where marketers seek out the consumer.
Remarketing involves the creation of personalized and targeted ads for consumers who have already visited a company’s website. The process works in this way: as users visit a brand’s website, they are tagged with cookies that follow the users, and as they land on advertising platforms where retargeting is an option (like social media platforms) they get served ads based on their navigation.
Sensory marketing describes any marketing campaign designed to appeal to the five human senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are enabling marketers to design fun, interactive, and immersive sensory marketing brand experiences. Long term, businesses must develop sensory marketing campaigns that are relevant and effective in eCommerce.
Services marketing originated as a separate field of study during the 1980s. Researchers realized that the unique characteristics of services required different marketing strategies to those used in the promotion of physical goods. Services marketing is a specialized branch of marketing that promotes the intangible benefits delivered by a company to create customer value.
Sustainable marketing describes how a business will invest in social and environmental initiatives as part of its marketing strategy. Also known as green marketing, it is often used to counteract public criticism around wastage, misleading advertising, and poor quality or unsafe products.
Word-of-mouth marketing is a marketing strategy skewed toward offering a great experience to existing customers and incentivizing them to share it with other potential customers. That is one of the most effective forms of marketing as it enables a company to gain traction based on existing customers’ referrals. When repeat customers become a key enabler for the brand this is one of the best organic and sustainable growth marketing strategies.
360 marketing is a marketing campaign that utilizes all available mediums, channels, and consumer touchpoints. 360 marketing requires the business to maintain a consistent presence across multiple online and offline channels. This ensures it does not miss potentially lucrative customer segments. By its very nature, 360 marketing describes any number of different marketing strategies. However, a broad and holistic marketing strategy should incorporate a website, SEO, PPC, email marketing, social media, public relations, in-store relations, and traditional forms of advertising such as television.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
