What Is Account Based Marketing?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a B2B marketing strategy that uses personalized campaigns to target a select group of accounts. Marketing and sales teams work together to focus on best-fit accounts and turn them into customers. The great thing about ABM is that it involves a personalized approach to marketing, rather than a one-size-fits-all strategy. It engages each account depending on its specific needs, helping you drive marketing outcomes. Learn the answer to the question, "What is account-based marketing?" and how to implement it below.

Why is Account-Based Marketing Important?

Account-based marketing lets you focus on your most profitable accounts — the ones that generate the most revenue. That means less time wasted on accounts that aren't likely to produce successful financial outcomes. By targeting profitable accounts, you can increase the chances of converting high-value prospects into bona fide customers. Focusing on high-value accounts also means you'll deal with fewer accounts in general. That can optimize your resources, staff, and budget. You'll spend time personalizing marketing campaigns that solve pain points for your target accounts, helping you develop relationships with these potential customers.

Account-Based Marketing Benefits

Here are some of the benefits of investing in ABM:

Personalized approach

Prospects are more likely to convert if they receive personalized marketing messages. That might include emails with product recommendations based on a prospect's interests and previous purchasing history. ABM lets you focus on a personalized approach that improves the client's experience and maintains consistency across different channels. Using personalization can optimize engagement, brand loyalty, and sales.

Cost-effective

With ABM, you'll spend your marketing budget targeting smaller customer groups rather than wasting your resources on larger segments with customers who are unlikely to convert.

Cultivate relationships

ABM lets you nurture relationships with prospects, letting you build trust over time. You'll communicate with potential customers about how your product or service benefits their business and then slowly move these targets through your sales and marketing funnels.

How To Implement Account Based Marketing: Step by Step

Now you know the answer to the question, "What is account-based marketing?" here's a step-by-step guide to implementing it in your organization:

Step 1: Identify target accounts

Start by finding high-value accounts. You can do this by gathering business intelligence with the digital tools you use in your organization, such as analytics software. Reports, dashboards, and other data visualizations will tell you which customers will generate the most value in the future.

Step 2: Research and develop campaign strategies

Next, develop personalized marketing campaign strategies for each account type. You'll want to create strategies that build trust and convert prospects into customers, so think about the best channels and technologies for achieving these goals. For example, use email marketing to increase awareness about your offerings and then follow up on these emails with phone calls. Explaining your product or service to prospects over the phone could improve conversions.

Step 3: Execute strategies and gain customers

Test your strategies on a small group of high-value targets and see whether your campaigns are successful. You can always make changes to your ABM campaigns based on what works and what doesn't. Remember, successful ABM won't happen overnight. It's an iterative process that will take time. Now you know how to do account-based marketing!

Examples of Effective Account-Based Marketing

Here are some examples of ABM that you can incorporate into your campaigns:

Website

Create personalized headlines and images based on the industry of your target customer audience. So if you're trying to target local financial institutions, add finance-related headers and photos to your web pages. You might also want to produce separate landing pages for sub-industries in a larger vertical. For example, a landing page for credit unions, a landing page for banks, and so on.

Email

Create personalized emails based on different actions completed by prospects. For example, create separate emails for targets who downloaded a PDF or eBook from your website and targets who just signed up for your mailing list.

LinkedIn messaging

One way to target high-value accounts is to message potential customers on LinkedIn and increase awareness about your product or service. You can customize these messages based on the prospect's LinkedIn profile information.