Account-based marketing (ABM) is a business-to-business (B2B) marketing strategy that focuses on identifying your “ideal customer profile” (ICP) and then targeting companies that match your created ICP.

By engaging with decision-makers at different levels (be that the CEO, Financial Director or Group Commercial Director etc.) across your ICP with personalized messaging that will match their problems and goals, you can engage with each account to best support them and their future growth by helping to resolve their issues.

Work closely with the Sales team to understand your ideal customer profile. It is so critical to this form of B2B outreach. Once you’ve defined your ICP and their problems and goals, you can begin researching which accounts match up with your ICP the most.

Rather than launching a broad marketing campaign that targets thousands to take care of only the few that express their interest, ABM targets specific companies in an offer to engage with key decision-makers and then build on that relationship to open new sales opportunities in the future (also known as “land and expand”).

Although account-based marketing has been used as a strategy for more than 15 years, it’s only now that businesses are starting to realize the huge potential for delivering highly personalized and relevant campaigns to their target audience.

With ABM, the goal is to close a single account, which means both teams (sales and marketing aka The Taskforce) stay focused and work towards the same business goal. Account-based marketing is about tailoring campaigns to specific accounts, here’s a simplified breakdown of steps to take as a part of your Account-Based Marketing campaign:

1. Identify a list of key accounts.

2. Research each account by:

• Market: industry, company size, competitors
• Company: revenue, marketing share, history
• People: management, buying power, key roles, influencers
• Relationships: organizational structure, reporting, buying teams

1. Create personalized and relevant content.

2. Distribute content to the right people.

3. Measure your campaign success

   • Look at sales cycle length, deal size and total revenue from any new sale that resulted from your ABM campaign, and then you can compare these figures with the customers you acquired from your non-ABM activities. (It is important to keep track of campaign success for tracking your ROI, to see if your campaigns have had the desired impact).

The bottom line is to understand issues your customers face, even predict issues they may come across in the future, address them and offer appropriate solutions to support their and your own growth forming healthy relationships along the way for further successful collaborations.

About the author: Ruta Barlote

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