Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Enjoy higher ROI with ABM

Account-based marketing is not a one-to-many approach like traditional advertising or cold outbound, it’s a one-to-one approach. It’s a marriage between sales and marketing. It’s about identifying target accounts, building rapport with them by providing value and personalization in order to warm them up to a sales engagement.

The reason ABM is so effective is because it has high ROI compared to many other forms of marketing. The downside is that it doesn’t scale.

There are two ways to think about marketing / advertising:

High volume / low close rate
Low volume / high close rate

Considering the resource / time allocation of gaining and retaining these accounts, they should have:

High order value (whatever that means to your business)
High lifetime value (ARR + expansion opportunities)

Tactical Pathway to Success

1. Determine Target Account List (TAL)

2. Identify Buying Committee and Decision Influencers

3. Research, strategize, and develop content

4. Use inbound marketing to help attract target accounts

5. Use outbound marketing to engage accounts and build rapport

6. Measure and analyze results

How to engage and delight high-value accounts

There are a number of tactical approaches, here are some of the top ones that we’ve seen work:

Determine which social platforms they’re on, join the groups they’re in, contribute to conversations, and share helpful and relevant content you’ve created.
Build custom landing pages tailored to the needs, questions, and concerns of your target accounts.
Produce a podcast or video series and invite a leader from the account to be a special guest.
Send a direct messages via social media and email.
Offer gifts for engagement and interaction (e.g. prizes, swag, and discount codes).
Create ad campaigns and social ads to target different factors such as location, skill, and job title.
Ask current contacts, accounts, and customers for referrals.
Invite contacts to (physical or digital) events and ask attendees to invite their colleagues.

Start with a "light" ABM approach

We recommend starting small, or what we like to refer to as a light ABM approach. The goal here is to launch a pilot campaign with:

1 vertical
10 accounts
3 buyers per account

This will give you the time operationalize your pilot into a systematic and repeatable process.

Common account-based marketing KPIs

Focusing on net new leads alone may be too narrow in scope. Instead, it’s better to focus broadly on the total engagement across the accounts. These will be leading indicators that your efforts are driving meaningful engagements.