What is Account Based Marketing ABM – B2B Marketing Glossary

Uses automation and data to reach a larger set of accounts with scalable personalization. Marketing and sales collaborate closely to tailor messaging and content for each company. One-to-many tactics empower you to use the same marketing funnels for hundreds or even thousands of target accounts. All of your marketing and sales efforts come with some degree of flexibility. An ABM lite strategy helps you get more out of custom content and campaigns.

The firm xGrowth helps tech companies curate ABM strategies to reach high-value targets. Thanks to a tailored strategy, the company now boasts over 60,000 client accounts. Alerts, notifications, and automation kept the team updated with account activity. Leadfeeder then used its own tool to track website visitors and identify potential high-value accounts. Gartner reports that ABM increases overall account engagement by 28%.

Similar marketing materials are used for all B2B prospects in the same cluster. Also known as ABM lite, high-value prospects are segmented into groups. Before you start, put together a team that combines levels and roles, including an experienced ABM manager. The company creates customer-focused content, including white papers and case studies. When messaging is highly relevant to a company’s needs, prospects move through the buying process faster. This alignment ensures both teams focus on the same target accounts and messaging.

Increased personalization

That expectation should be set what is an abm with leadership before the work begins. "Six to 12 months on average is when you can really feel the impact of account-based. If you're not aligning on the timeline upfront, you're setting yourself up for failure." With an understanding of what ABM is and how it can help your company grow, the next step is to look at how to implement this process.

By building strong, authentic relationships with prospects, you will have the solid foundation needed to nurture them into loyal, long-term customers. Use 50+ filters to prioritize accounts by ICP fit, then activate outreach automatically through your CRM. Data should give you a better understanding of the people you are selling to, or it’s not doing the right job. Data gathered helps measure intent signals and overall campaign success.

Can Account-based Marketing tech be used to scale campaigns?

Jillian Als is Chief Marketing Officer at Leadfeeder and a B2B SaaS marketing executive with nearly two decades of experience leading global go-to-market teams. The key is choosing software that supports your goals rather than simply following the latest trend. No, you don’t necessarily need specialized software to run an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy, but the right tools can make the process much easier. With the right tools, a deliberately scoped start, and tight sales and marketing alignment, there is no reason account-based marketing should be beyond you.

• Technology tools like marketing automation and artificial intelligence can help you automate many ABM processes, including identifying accounts and engaging buyers.
• Done correctly, ABM has yielded percentage increases of hundreds and thousands in terms of marketing ROI.
• By this point, your pilot campaigns should have evolved into complete ABM programs, filled with personalized messaging leading to excellent engagement with key accounts.
• Insights from behavior scoring have helped companies set criteria and develop touchpoints that have led to as much as a 2,500% ROI.

What Goals Should Marketers Set with ABM?

This often leads to significantly higher ROI compared to broad marketing campaigns. Because ABM targets high-value accounts, marketing budgets are spent on prospects most likely to convert. Many B2B companies adopt account-based marketing because it delivers stronger results than traditional demand generation. Many companies use lead generation to identify potential prospects and then apply ABM tactics to the most promising accounts. Think of traditional marketing as casting a wide fishing net, while ABM is more like using a spear to target a specific fish.

Gather the names, email addresses, and questions they have asked in online communities or on LinkedIn and collate all this information in a spreadsheet. The CEO might not be a great target, as they are likely busy, but the marketing manager or HR executive assistant might be perfect. Now that you have a list of prospects, it is time to start tiering them. Using Leadfeeder, CloudTalk identified and targeted 1,000 new prospects each month who visited their site but didn't sign up for a trial. Before you begin developing a strategy, your first step should be to identify your target companies.

Which metrics help you filter out the noise and keep the pulse on your account-based marketing? Track engagement data to identify which campaigns are working and refine your strategy over time. They gathered contact information from promising leads, then delivered content through targeted email campaigns. The strategy you use to deliver the content might include LinkedIn advertising, email marketing, direct mail, or carefully targeted PPC ads; it just depends on where your audience is. Start by creating tier and persona-specific campaigns, then personalize your approach for each marketing channel and tier. The main purpose is to address the struggles a specific company faces or the block that is preventing them from converting.

In practice, teams often burn through those resources by trying to prove the model at full scale too early. Account-based marketing strategies require significant strategizing and data gathering to identify the prospects you should be targeting. The differences between these ABM types are the number of people targeted.