Account-based marketing (ABM): A complete guide for B2B teams

You know ABM works. The question is how to make it work for your organisation — without wasting time, budget, or sales goodwill. Many organisations are implementing ABM or want to get started with ABM. But what exactly is ABM and what is the importance of an account-based approach for your organisation? Not sure if ABM is right for you? Start with a free session.

Account-based marketing: key takeaways

• ABM focuses on high-value accounts, not broad audiences
• It requires tight marketing and sales alignment
• Success is measured by engagement and pipeline, not leads
• It works best for complex B2B sales with long deal cycles

In this guide:

• What is account-based marketing?
• ABM vs. inbound marketing
• When and why use ABM?
• Advantages of ABM
• Is ABM the right choice for us?
• Sales and ABM
• Create an account-based marketing plan
• ABM framework
• Successfully measure account-based marketing
• Examples of account-based marketing
• Account-based marketing software
• How to use LinkedIn for ABM
• Starting with ABM?

What is account-based marketing?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a B2B strategy in which you engage with a predefined group of target accounts using tailor-made sales and marketing campaigns. When running an ABM programme, you focus on the personal needs of your key (potential) customer, creating exceptional customer experiences.  

ABM vs. inbound marketing

To get started with account-based marketing (ABM), you first define your goals. For instance, do you aim to engage with 3 high-priority accounts, a broader list, or an entire industry? Then, your marketing team collaborates with Sales to define target accounts and identify key personas within those accounts. Using these insights, you create personalised content and campaigns designed to improve your pipeline of opportunities.

While inbound marketing attracts customers broadly, ABM takes a hyper-focused approach. This targeted strategy allows organisations to efficiently allocate resources to pursue accounts with the highest potential return.

When and why use ABM?

Account-based marketing is often used by organisations looking for big (international) customers with a high deal value or those who provide a significant part of the total revenue and profit.

Account-based marketing is also a great approach when dealing with complex purchasing processes. In B2B, this is often the case. Buyers in different roles can be responsible for purchasing your product or service, and you need to cater to multiple interests.

By targeting specific accounts and focusing on the quality of interactions, ABM improves customer retention and builds stronger relationships. In short, you focus on influencing the buying group.

Advantages of ABM

Compared to traditional marketing campaigns, account-based marketing programmes offer some important benefits to you. At SPOTONVISION, we’ve helped B2B teams across Europe unlock exactly these benefits. Here’s how: 

1. Better insight into the buyer and buyer journey 

Personal customer experience is increasingly important in B2B. Account-based marketing plays into this trend. ABM leverages account intelligence to create more relevant, value-driven campaigns, improving the buyer experience and ensuring that content resonates with specific accounts.

2. Better collaboration between marketing and sales 

For a successful ABM campaign, you need input from sales and marketing. Consider account plans and data, market developments, existing contacts, history, intent data, etc. You start together by defining the scope before creating and rolling out a campaign using relevant content. This alignment fosters better outreach, shared best practices, and ideally, a unified approach to account management. Stakeholder management is a key aspect of ABM. 

3. A more strategic go-to-market approach 

In ABM, you focus on target accounts that could add real or substantial value. Therefore you invest time, money and resources in accounts that really matter. This will give you a head start on your competitors who do not implement an ABM strategy. You simply focus on accounts that provide the greatest opportunities, helping your organisation sell strategically and gain a competitive edge.

4. Better results with ABM 

Research consistently shows that ABM gives a higher Return on Investment (ROI). The average deal size is higher because you only focus on accounts that can add a lot of value, and ABM also enables you to create more buy-in within the DMU of your target account. Therefore you can focus on spending your marketing resources more efficiently.

Is ABM the right choice for us?

Whether your market and/or organisation is the right choice for ABM depends on the market and internal organisation. With the help of this infographic, you can assess whether ABM fits you. Or you can read this article: Is ABM right for you? Seven questions and seven tips to help you decide. 

Sales and ABM

To make account-based marketing successful, it is essential to establish good collaboration between Marketing and Sales. Together, you gather interesting and relevant information on the market and the key target accounts. Sales can share insights and knowledge regarding contacts that they have already. Based on that, Marketing can find ‘signals’, or intent data and first and third-party data to drive successful account targeting and build engagement. 

Create an account-based marketing plan 

An ABM plan is the foundation for a successful engagement programme and business growth. A well-structured ABM plan means a bigger chance of success during the actual execution and optimisation. At SPOTONVISION, we use the following 5 steps. 

Step 1. Getting to know your accounts

Together with the sales team, define which accounts you want to focus on. Then choose the target accounts with high value that fit your organisation. And finally, you define the goals and determine your KPIs.

Step 2. Look for account insights

Gather relevant information about your accounts, including decision-makers, influencers, and their value proposition. Understand their business drivers and challenges to craft tailored messaging. Finally map your contacts and map the purchasing process.  

Step 3. Create account-relevant content

Get started with the creation of personalised and account-relevant communication. Specifically, creating appealing content for your ABM campaign. This could include blogs, infographics, e-books, and customer success stories that highlight best practices.

Step 4. Build and launch your campaign

Combine online and offline tactics, such as digital advertising, email campaigns, and personalised outreach. But make sure you align messages across all touchpoints to maximise engagement.

In addition you need close collaboration between Marketing and Sales and work on a consistent message together. Listen to the story of ABM expert Karin Schaff Glazier on how to build an ABM programme and what ABM pitfalls to avoid. In an earlier interview, she also gives us some tips to get started with ABM quickly. 

Step 5. Measure and optimise

Track metrics like engagement, pipeline impact, and account influence to refine your ABM efforts. In addition, share successes with your team to foster continuous improvement and search for ways to optimise your campaign where needed.  

The rollout of an account-based marketing programme requires a coordinated and personalised approach from Marketing, Sales and other commercial teams. So, once your plan is ready and before you start executing, make sure there’s a sales playbook available.   

Successfully measure account-based marketing

In ABM you don’t try to generate as many leads as possible, but you build as much engagement as possible within your selected accounts. To measure success and progress, look at the information on the account level. Think of: 

• Engagement – All activities that are part of your ABM approach are aimed at having valuable interactions with the contacts in your target account. You want to measure this.  
• Reach and impact – Are your ABM activities actually reaching the right people? 
• Influence – A good way to measure your actual impact and influence, is to compare results between different accounts.

Also, read ‘How to measure ABM and its success‘.

Three account-based marketing examples

Example 1: Account-focused content 

Personalised and customised content can be a powerful base for your ABM strategy. Think of blogs, infographics, e-books, and whitepapers you can make buyer, account or industry-specific. You can use a personalised title or subtitle or a front page adjusted to a segment or industry. Or you can share customer cases that fit your target accounts.

Example 2: Out-of-the-box 1-1 actions 

In order to close big accounts and stand out from all commercial actions of your competitors, you can develop a special and personalised action for one account.  

To raise interest, it is important to play into the needs and challenges of this specific account. Finally, you can make it even more personal by using the same language and words your target account uses.  

This example is from GumGum, a software company that wants to close McDonald’s as a new customer. They developed a special kit of a Big Mac containing different ‘ingredients’, each explaining a part of their services.

Example 3: Web personalisation for specific accounts

You can apply web personalisation for account-based marketing in different ways. You can use dynamic content to personalise websites for different accounts or persons within the DMU of an account.

You can also adapt images and texts on a specific landing page. Or go the extra mile and show different content (e.g. blogs, e-books, and infographics). This will lead to improved customer experiences.

These examples show that ABM can be executed in an approachable or a more labour-intensive way. Of course, this also depends on your budget and available time.

Yet, with a lot of creativity, originality, guts, and the help of AI, you can come a long way. And don’t forget; ‘One swallow doesn’t make a summer’. With one successful action, you’re not there yet. In order to build long-term engagement with your accounts, you need multiple moments of contact, spread out over a longer period of time.  

For more account-based marketing strategy examples, have a look at some of our customers who implemented ABM:  

• How Ultimo successfully started with ABM 
• How Unit4 scaled ABM 
• Cyclomedia from Lead Gen to ABM 
• Odido: from outbound to inbound and starting ABM  

Account-based marketing software

Even though you can execute and monitor your account-based marketing campaigns using an excel sheet, our advice is to at least have access to a CRM and marketing automation platform. Per phase, we explain how other ABM tools could also help you.  

Determining target accounts 

To determine your target accounts your CRM system is leading. Who is your ideal customer? In marketing terms, what is your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). The goal is two-sided: 

1. Determine the characteristics of your ICP 

2. Select accounts within your CRM that meet your ICP 

The account data in your CRM might not be sufficient due to missing data, such as the number of employees, revenue, etc. In this case, you can enrich your CRM data using an external source such as the Chamber of Commerce or Apollo.io.  

Collecting relevant contacts 

The next step is to get insight into the DMU on a contact level. Which people are involved in the purchasing process of your product or service? Also think about influencers. You identify these roles and functions through buyer persona research.

Next, map the specific people using your CRM or LinkedIn. To identify and enrich contacts at scale, tools like ZoomInfo, Clay, and Apollo.io are widely used. Clay lets you build and enrich account lists automatically by pulling data from multiple sources. Apollo.io combines a large B2B contact database with outreach sequencing, making it useful for both finding and engaging key contacts within your target accounts.

Gathering insights into target accounts 

Within your organisation, much is known about the target accounts. Gather this information and enrich it with information from the website and by monitoring social channels and news about the accounts. In addition you can use Google Alerts or intent monitoring tools for this.  

There are also tools you can use to grasp ‘intent’. There are plenty of product and service comparison tools that offer visitor information. This way you immediately know which accounts show an interest in your product or service. 

Content creation 

You use the insights you found for your content creation. Personalisation plays an important role. For example by adding a company logo to a whitepaper for a specific account. Or personalising web pages based on which accounts view your page. This way you can provide each target account a relevant experience on your website.  

There are plenty of tools that offer personalisation. Most important is that these are linked to your marketing automation platform (MAP). Many MAPs have this functionality already, such as Hubspot, Pardot and Marketo. For stand-alone personalisation tools, you can have a look at Trendemon. 

Campaign execution 

In order to reach and engage persons within your target accounts, you use different tactics: 

• LinkedIn or LinkedIn Sales Navigator – You may already be connected, otherwise you can use InMails or LinkedIn Ads 
• Account-based advertising – Tools that recognise the IP addresses of target accounts and have these available for online advertising 
• Website personalisation (see above) 
• E-mail marketing via marketing automation 
• Chat functionality via website or messenger platform 
• Physical post (Direct Mail) 
• Face-to-face (online) events 

Measure and optimise 

Your CRM and marketing automation are the basis for measuring and optimising. In addition, there are cloud solutions specifically developed for the execution of ABM programmes. Examples are Demandbase or 6sense for account engagement. Existing marketing automation platforms are also enhancing their systems for ABM functionality.  

How to use LinkedIn for ABM 

For ABM, you want to focus on your key accounts and nurture your DMU. To do this you can use LinkedIn in a couple of ways. LinkedIn as a branding tool or LinkedIn for targeted reach, and/or build out your account list. Read more in ‘How to leverage LinkedIn for your ABM strategy’.  

Getting started with ABM?  

Do you want to get started with account-based marketing and are you looking for practical step-by-step guidance? At SPOTONVISION we make ABM easy, whether we collaborate face-to-face or online.

The most important ingredient for success is close co-operation between your Marketing and Sales. So, when you are ready to work together, SPOTONVISION can facilitate and support with impact. We work in pre-defined sprints, quick wins, and no surprises in the process. Talk to an ABM specialist for more information. 

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Frequently asked questions about account-based marketing