Account-based marketing (ABM) is on the hot list of marketing tactics for B2B businesses. Marketers use it as a strategy to build more qualified pipelines and engage better with target accounts. And it works. ABM results in:
- An average deal size that’s 3.98 times higher
- Campaigns with 2.22 times better spend-to-revenue ROI*
The concept of ABM has been around since the early 1990s when companies started questioning the effectiveness of mass marketing. Predictions from big hitters in the marketing industry were that advertising would see a shift towards increased personalization.
Today, many sales, marketing, and ops teams rally behind ABM as a way of engaging key decision-makers at target accounts through customized content and personalized interactions. The term “account-based go-to-market” has even cropped up, indicating how some companies are centering their entire strategy—product development, customer success, and post-sale engagement—around high-value accounts.
What is Account-Based Marketing?
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a strategic B2B marketing approach where a business targets specific, high-value accounts or companies rather than wider market segments. Instead of a broad strokes approach, ABM focuses on identifying key accounts that are a good fit for the company’s products or services. Then, aligned internal teams design customized marketing and sales programs to engage and close these accounts.
Core Components of an ABM Strategy
Four components must be present for an account-based marketing strategy to knock it out the park: targeting, personalization, sales-marketing alignment and tracking the right KPIs.
- Intentional targeting and segmentation, which focuses on finding the right accounts to market to. Efficient client segmentation at this point is crucial for an ABM strategy to work. It enables you to tier personalization based on a target group’s potential value and relevance to your business. Then, you can effectively engage accounts at each level.
Vincent Plassard, Growth Lead at Userled explains: “At its core, ABM is about strategically segmenting and tiering your accounts from 1:1 to 1:many. You then build customized programs to engage each tier. It all comes down to smart audience segmentation.”
- Relevant personalization, which sets you up for success as you deliver unique content based on the industry, persona or account you want to go after, making prospects feel valued and seen. Userled allows you to implement personalization at scale, empowering your team to market with more relevancy by removing the time spent customizing the content.
- Alignment between departments, which sees to it that marketing, sales, and ops teams are on the same page in order to better connect with potential customers. Everyone works toward a common goal, taking actions backed by data to identify, engage and nurture prospects through the pipeline.
- Tracking relevant KPIs, which allows you to leave the vanity metrics behind. Instead, focus on tracking meaningful KPIs, like website engagement, campaign response rates, and sales cycle velocity. Follow through by tracking revenue generation from the targeted accounts.
Benefits of an Account-Based Marketing Strategy
ABM strategies focus on individual accounts instead of broad marketing campaigns. Zoning in on high-value prospects serves up excellent advantages for sales and marketing teams, as well as your company as a whole. Let’s look at the benefits of account-based marketing.
“ABM allows us to understand each group's unique needs and tailor campaigns to them. For example, one of our clients saw a 65% boost in opportunities after we targeted their top 10 accounts' decision makers with personalized content.” —Luke Heinecke, Founder and CEO at Linear Design
Alignment of Marketing and Sales Teams
Since ABM typically occurs with high contract value accounts (with complex deals and sales cycles), this work will take place in a sales-led motion. However, it requires close collaboration and support from the entire go-to-market (GTM) team (marketing, sales, and operations) for the duration of the sales cycle.
From conceptualizing and defining the ICP, to tailored messaging and content, and capturing insights to notify sales and determine next steps, each department has a vested role in moving prospects through the pipeline.
The benefit of having everyone aligned with the same outcomes is the ability to maximize the impact of your efforts in the long term.
Consistent Customer Experiences
The challenge with creating, capturing, and controlling demand at a mid-market to enterprise level is you’re likely dealing with multiple stakeholders, potentially in different departments. You need to move from an individuals to a buyings groups motion, using tactics like account mapping, buyer persona categorization and engagement.
A major benefit of ABM is your ability to create consistency in the customer experience; an experience that’s tailored and strategically unified across every engagement stage. ABM ensures that all messaging, touchpoints, and solutions you present are aligned. You can deliver a cohesive narrative that reflects a deep understanding of the account’s unique challenges and needs to every stakeholder.
Personalized Marketing Efforts
According to research, 84% of consumers say treating them like a person, not a number, plays a significant part in winning their business. Even in B2B, decision-makers and end-users are “consumers” who want to feel special.
One of the central principles of account-based marketing is creating hyper-personalized marketing assets that go beyond generic campaigns. Personalization is a key differentiator when buying cycles are complex and multiple stakeholders are involved.
ABM campaigns deliver highly relevant messaging tailored to each target account's specific pain points, business goals, and industry context — across all channels. This precision and maximized personalization ensures every interaction resonates, which helps to increase engagement and drive meaningful conversations. For example, Userled brands report increases in engagement from target accounts of over 67%.
By focusing on the nuances of each account and channeling this to your marketing, you can create a personalized online experience for every target at every touchpoint with your business.
Here’s how you can deliver personalized content to target accounts with Userled:
- Landing pages: Create custom 1:1 microsites with personalized content and images that perfectly align with each target account’s brand and profile.
- Content library: Access templates with advanced personalization options. Tailor content based on your audience with AI or dynamic fields.
- Personalized ads: Launch and track your custom LinkedIn, Meta, and Google Ads from one dashboard. A/B test different combinations of messaging, imagery, layouts, and CTAs.
- Email banners: Add custom visual elements like email banners and custom thumbnails to your 1:1 microsite, paired with targeted messaging and unique offers to drive engagement within your email campaigns.
- Inbound website personalization: Dynamically showcase the most relevant products, content, and CTAs to website visitors to increase engagement and conversion rates.
Increase Engagement
According to Powered By Search, companies using ABM campaigns see a 90% engagement rate with their target accounts. They also achieve up to 50% better customer re-engagement with personalized messaging.
We can connect the dots between this elevated level of engagement and ABM’s drive to deliver relevant, tailored content. Every touch point becomes valuable and impactful, speaking directly to each account's specific pain points and needs.
“From our experience, personalized content consistently outperforms generic messaging,” states Ahmed Elmahdy, Founder and Consultant at Rocket Launch Media. “One notable example is when we tailored a campaign for a small local HVAC business. By creating custom landing pages with their branding and showcasing their unique selling points, we saw engagement rates soar by over 60%.”
Shorter Sales Process
According to research, 77% of B2B buyers say their latest purchase journey was complex. Account-based marketing removes a lot of friction in this process by aligning your sales and marketing efforts around pre-qualified accounts. You’ve already fit the shoe; now it’s a case of getting the customers to walk it out the door.
ABM makes it easier for buyers to make confident decisions without wading through generic outreach. It allows you to focus your energy on a specific set of accounts and put real solutions in front of them.
Plus, your buyers can’t miss the fact that you are willing to engage with them (across multiple touchpoints, with deep personalization). When everything is tailored to turn engagement into conversations, you stand out. This accelerates trust and moves them quickly through the funnel.
Increase in Content Relevancy and Trust
According to Hubspot’s State of Marketing Report, 85% of marketers were better able to retain customers with an ABM strategy. With every piece of marketing messaging speaking to target accounts' specific needs and challenges, it’s easier to build trust. You’re demonstrating to prospects that you know their pain points and have a solution that aligns with their goals, taking you from “just another vendor” to a trusted partner.
This trust is invaluable in complex B2B relationships, as it helps build long-term loyalty and deepens relationships with key stakeholders.
Creating an Account-Based Marketing Strategy
Here are some expert pointers to consider when developing your next ABM campaign.
“Personalization has increased open rates over 40% and click-through rates by 36%, plus decreased cost per lead by 50% for my clients. The key is doing deep-dive research to understand accounts' needs, then crafting custom content and campaigns. Personalization at every touchpoint is critical.” —Luke Heinecke, Founder and CEO at Linear Design
1. Pinpoint Target Accounts
Developing a successful ABM campaign starts with finding the right companies – and people within them – to target. A few good places to start include:
- Customer lookalikes: Hunt down accounts that exhibit similar traits to your most successful clients. These will have a higher likelihood of engagement.
- Customer data: Look back at your data and pay special attention to customers with a higher LTV. Then, define segments and sub-segments to target. Once this is done, start putting in place the right messaging and tailoring content per sub segment.
- Firmographics data: Examine information related to company size, industry classification, and revenue to refine your list and align with your ideal customer profile.
- Industries that your solutions best serve: Turn to your niche to sell offerings that resonate deeply with those audiences.
Tools such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator, 6sense, or KeyPlay, which provide rich data and insights like unique market signals and customized scoring, can help you track down, discover, and connect with decision-makers within your target market.
2. Narrow Down Your Target Accounts
Account-based marketing is anything but a volume game. After identifying your key accounts, you need to narrow down targets to select a few most likely to convert.
You’ll want to use a mixture of the sales team’s knowledge and technical analysis to determine these, eg: CRM data analysis and looking to past opportunities and closed won deals. With this combination, you can effectively create customer segmentations and whittle down your targeting to a fine point.
3. Create a Strategic Workflow
A strategic workflow is the cornerstone of a perfectly executed ABM strategy—it’s where the magic happens. It not only streamlines processes but also sees to it that both sales and marketing teams are pushing in the same direction, whether there are dozens or even hundreds of touchpoints to navigate.
It all starts with a shared vision. Teams can design workflows by considering the following points:
- Ideal customer profile (ICP): Develop tiering based on the type of company or buyer persona (like champions, end-users, or decision-makers).
- Messaging: Align messaging across all channels for a consistent customer experience at every touchpoint.
- Key performance indicators (KPIs): Decide who owns what in terms of the feedback loop and who’s in charge of adjusting tactics for greater impact.
- Where to reach potential customers: Do you meet your audience on LinkedIn, at industry conferences, or via direct email outreach? Account for these nuances in your workflow, and integrate the right touchpoints at the right time. Ensure your workflow captures these kinds of engagement, across all channels, and builds in links to sales.
- Tech and support kit: Your tools should support collaboration between sales and marketing. Is it better to use a devtool over martech? Which is more accessible and allows for innovation in real time?
- Best way to qualify leads: Dynamically score leads based on their behavior, engagement, and fit with your ICP.
- Who will nurture leads: Designate specific roles for nurturing leads during awareness, engagement, and decision stages. Each stage should be supported by the right team members with the right messaging to maintain momentum and avoid drop-offs.
- How to measure success: Determine metrics that signal success at each stage of the ABM process. Tracking long-term customer growth, account penetration, relationship health, and conversions guarantees that your strategy evolves based on data-driven insights.
4. Develop Personalized Content
Every client wants to feel like they’re your top priority. When people and companies feel seen and understood, it leads to a greater chance of successfully converting them into customers.
Personalized content opens doors in this sense. It acknowledges a problem a prospective customer is facing and offers valuable solutions at the right time. Providing a white glove service is sure to set you above competitors who use generic messaging, hoping it will land in the right spot.
“After interviewing stakeholders, I develop resources addressing their specific challenges,” says Luke Heinecke, Founder and CEO at Linear Design. For instance, he created an ebook on "The 7 Ways to Shorten Your Sales Cycle" for an account frustrated with long closing times. Their engagement was 38% higher than with generic content.
There are several ways that you can speak more personally to potential clients in content.
- Send an email mentioning a LinkedIn post you found insightful, congratulate them on a job promotion, or ask after their recent funding round.
- Go the extra mile for key accounts and add dynamic content to your website, leveraging CRM account fields to adapt your site’s text, offers, images, and CTAs in real time to suit each visitor’s journey.
- Create personalized landing pages that bring in account knowledge, CRM data, and more relevancy in order to increase engagement and conversion.
- Target and delight with customized 1:1 social media and search engine adverts directly addressing the account.
5. Distribute Personalized Content
With ABM, content distribution is as targeted as the content itself. From dynamic website content that adapts to the user’s specific needs and email campaigns that speak directly to the challenges of a key decision-maker, personalized content ensures your messaging resonates at every touchpoint.
Leverage various channels—like 1:1 landing pages, social media, ads and email—to reach each target account with hyper-relevant, actionable content that moves them further down the funnel.
Ahmed says that he’s “had great success running LinkedIn campaigns that target specific industries.” When working with a large roofing company, his team created personalized LinkedIn messages targeted towards facility managers and property owners. “We generated meaningful conversations, which ultimately led to closed deals,” he states.
6. Analyze Your Results
It’s important to use analytics tools to understand your ABM campaigns' effectiveness. Userled allows you to track the entire buyer journey, from initial contact to closed-won. You can see how personalized content performs across your channels and key accounts.
You can also track engagement across all touchpoints and trigger actions based on target accounts’ behavior, such as retargeting.
This helps you identify what works and what doesn’t and enables you to continuously optimize your content to increase your pipeline and conversion rates.
Here are some key ABM metrics we recommend monitoring:
- Account engagement by company
- ABM penetration by stage
- Annual contract value, customer lifetime value, and win rates
- Click-through rates
- Conversions
- Cross-sells and upsells
- Engagement rates
- Expansion revenue from ABM campaigns
- Funnel metrics from current deals in the pipeline
- High-intent leads without deals
- Influenced pipeline
- New revenue from ABM campaigns
- Number of touchpoints
- Open rates
- Pipeline velocity
- Renewal revenue from ABM campaigns
- Sales cycle
- Uplift of account signals on conversions compared to users and accounts without these signals
- Website “high intent” account journeys
7. Capture Engagement and Sales Notifications
It’s a no-brainer to track every interaction your potential customers have at every touchpoint to see their engagement. This will also give you a glimpse into how positively people respond to your customized content. Userled lets you see exactly where prospects are lingering and where they’re dropping off so you can optimize as necessary.
And with sales insights and direct to Slack sales notifications, your sales team will be informed when a warm prospect is ready to engage.
Account-Based Marketing Examples with Userled
Userled has helped countless businesses like yours activate account-based marketing strategies. Here are three examples of brands that have succeeded using our platform.
Coverflex
Coverflex, a benefits administration software, increased their inbound conversion by 27% after using our software. We also helped them reach a $1.3M supported pipeline with UTM personalization.
With Userled, Coverflex can tailor landing pages with variables like the target company’s industry, company name, entire blocks of text, and CTAs. They pair these with outreach assets like LinkedIn Ads and email banners.
They also sync the results with their CRM program to find the accounts that show the highest purchase intent, to better focus their efforts.
Causal
Causal enables clients to drive their revenue-led planning with spreadsheets and analytics software. With the help of Userled, they have focused on their SEO traffic to attract and convert more customers into qualified leads.
After doing this, they’ve seen a 35% increase in SEO traffic conversions and a 55% increase in traffic discovery.
They use our tools to personalize CTAs, text, and images on their website. They also target specific verticals in channels such as Google and LinkedIn and A/B test their customized content to see what performed best and optimize it.
Onfido
Onfido, a security software company specializing in digital identity verification, increased their booking rate by 120% after personalizing landing pages with Userled.
Landing page personalization occurs at a 1:1 level thanks to integration with their CRM software, as do CTAs. All assets generated for outreach campaigns link to a personalized landing page so that messaging and assets remain aligned.
In addition, the team can monitor and take action in real-time with their analytics dashboard, which focuses on capturing insights like click rate and engagement.
For more examples of ABM done right, read our article: 6 Account-Based Marketing Examples to Inspire Your Strategy
Userled’s ABM Solution
Userled’s account-based marketing platform offers powerful tools for companies looking to scale their personalization, even on a 1:1 basis. Cut your time to launch by fivefold compared to going it alone, all while driving meaningful results.
Make the most of our AI-driven platform to tailor landing pages, email banners, and LinkedIn Ads for each of your high-value accounts. Build custom microsites and generate content that feels like it was crafted specifically for each prospect. And with our AI copywriting tool, creative blocks are a thing of the past.
We ensure your sales team is always a step ahead, alerting them the moment a warm prospect shows interest so they can respond instantly and nurture the relationship.
Adopt an account-based marketing strategy with Userled today to wow your prospects and increase conversions.
Author
Generated £1.3M pipeline by focusing on UTM parameters personalisation.
Generated £1.3M pipeline by focusing on UTM parameters personalisation.
