Strategies & Tactics for B2B Companies
The focused account-based marketing (ABM) approach allows B2B companies to concentrate their sales and marketing efforts on engaging specific high-value accounts with the greatest revenue potential. Rather than using one-size-fits-all prospecting and spray-and-pray tactics, an effective ABM strategy aligns hndighly customised campaigns and sales plays to the unique needs of each targeted account.
This comprehensive guide will outline a strategic framework along with the core strategies and tactics for mastering ABM to maximise ROI and accelerate growth from your most economically valuable prospects and customers.
The 6-Stage Strategic Framework for B2B ABM Success
Define Your Ideal Customer Profile and Total Addressable Market
The critical first step is clearly defining the firmographic and behavioral attributes of your ideal customer profile (ICP) that represent the highest-value, best-fit B2B accounts. Conduct thorough market research, client/sales team interviews, and data analysis to understand:
With your ICP locked in, you can then identify your total addressable market of companies meeting those criteria to build your target account universe.
Build and Prioritise Your Target Account List
Using your ICP profile, leverage intent data, predictive modeling, and detailed research into all potentially viable accounts to build out a comprehensive target account list. Not all accounts are created equal though. Prioritise and tier your full account list into groups like:
Map the Full Account Journey and Buying Process
For each tier of accounts (especially Tier 1 and 2), map out their unique buying committees, processes, content needs, sales cycles, and potential objections across every stage of the customer journey.
This mapping exercise will allow you to define the optimal, integrated strategies for influencing all of the decision makers.
Develop Customised, Insight-Driven Account-Based Campaigns
With your tiers and account-specific buying maps in place, build out customised, insight-driven marketing campaigns tailored to each group's attributes, challenges, sales cycles, and buying processes.
Focus campaigns on addressing:
Customise the messaging, content, channels, ad creative, sales plays, and more for a true white-glove ABM experience.
Execute Campaigns with Complete Sales-Marketing-CX Unification
Successful ABM is a team effort. Closely coordinate and align the deployment of your account-based campaigns and materials across all customer-facing teams and channels. Unify all components including:
The more unified and synchronised the marketing, sales, and success motions, the more effective your ABM campaigns will be in guiding accounts through their buying journeys.
Continuously Measure, Optimise and Nurture
Feed all engagement data, conversion metrics, feedback, and overall performance into a centralised ABM analytics system. Analyse what's working (and what's not) across each tier of accounts to optimise and iterate campaigns for maximum impact. Beyond the initial closed-won deal, continue nurturing relationships and providing value to expand footprints, cross-sell/upsell, and maximise customer lifetime value within each account.
By taking this comprehensive account-based approach, aligning teams around each stage, and optimising through centralised ABM analytics, B2B companies can dramatically improve:
Real Examples of Innovative B2B ABM Campaigns
When Palo Alto Networks needed to close several six-figure deal opportunities, they partnered with Demandbase to orchestrate multi-channel, hyper-personalised ABM campaigns for each target account.
Video, ebooks, webinars, direct mail gifts, and other education and enablement assets were custom-created for the specific use cases, roles, industries, and more than 30 priority accounts identified by Palo Alto's sales teams.
This "personal marketing" approach drove 35+ new high-quality sales opportunities totalling $4.6M in pipeline value across just five targeted accounts.
For Salesforce, Terminus executed a laser-focused account-based advertising and website personalisation program targeting 150 of Salesforce's top ABM accounts.
Personalised account-based display ads tailored to each account's unique use case and pain points were triggered across the web and social channels.
The ads promoted personalised landing pages continuing the tailored vertical/account experience.
This hyper-targeted, unified ABM experience generated 85% more engagement than standard display ads and doubled Salesforce's account-based pipeline.
E-commerce company Boxed leveraged the RollWorks ABM platform to serve hyper-targeted ads specifically to employees and administrators at office buildings, hospitals, and other locations identified as having an account relationship with Boxed.
The location-based ads promoted Boxed's bulk office supply delivery offering. Targeting the campaign ads only to these select segments of existing Boxed accounts helped maximise ad relevancy and minimise wasted impressions.
Boxed saw a 4X increase in engagement from the account-based ads compared to their typical campaigns.
Looking to engage specific accounts researching martech products, PFL executed personalised direct mail ABM campaigns targeted to those accounts' C-suite personas. Marketing leaders at each account were mailed a customised direct mail package containing highly relevant content tailored to their challenges and roles.
Along with stylised creative copies of PFL's Solutions Guide and other unique branded assets, the direct mail packages drove extremely high engagement, accelerating conversations with contacts that had been in PFL's CRM for months.
Overall, PFL saw a 40% reply rate from the C-suite contacts at target accounts.
Whether you're a small business or enterprise company, following this comprehensive 6-stage strategic framework will allow you to master an account-based marketing approach tailored to your unique ICP, goals, and growth trajectories.
By aligning your team's efforts around a unified ABM practice of identifying, analysing, prioritising, creating customised campaigns, and continuously nurturing your highest-value target accounts, you'll maximise ROI while accelerating revenue and expansions from your most economically valuable opportunities.
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