Account-based marketing (ABM) is all about aligning your sales and marketing efforts with a list of target accounts in mind.
These are specific, high-value leads that your team has highlighted and grouped together based on criteria like company size, location and industry. It’s a way to concentrate your marketing and sales efforts on these accounts and increase your chances of engagement (and hopefully, conversion).
You can think of it as being the opposite of spray-and-pray type outbound and advertising, where you interrupt people with generic ads and hope that something will stick.
Instead, sales and marketing teams hope to amp up their efforts to engage and convert, with tactics like personalization — which, while effective, typically takes massive time, effort (and budget) to scale.
But how do marketers use account-based marketing exactly? We’ve created a list of account-based marketing campaign examples to help you make your next campaign a success and inspire you to create a personalized marketing strategy.
Why ABM is Effective for B2B Companies?
Unlike traditional marketing, which typically consists of attracting, nurturing, and closing a lead, account-based marketing consists of first identifying specific targets, then engaging them with personalization, and finally landing the sale. This targeted means of B2B marking is effective because:
- It aligns marketing and sales teams: With traditional marketing, teams may bring in loads of unqualified leads, and the sales team has to try to convert them. With account-based marketing, the sales and marketing teams work toward capturing the same businesses, which are strategically targeted.
- It delivers customized experiences for target accounts: Personalization helps to make target accounts feel important. It impresses the customer at every touchpoint, making them feel like they’re the most important client you’re after.
- It maintains relevance among target accounts: A potential customer that sees a customized advert or landing page is much more likely to remember your brand’s efforts compared to one that sees a generic ad or page that could be aimed at anyone remotely related to their industry.
- You can measure your return on investment (ROI): It’s easier to measure the results of your account-based marketing strategy. You can track which accounts responded to what piece of marketing collateral and determine whether an account was worth the spend and energy you put into it.
- You’re more likely to succeed: You’ll see a higher return on your investment, simple as that. Userled customers, for example, see a 27% increase in pipeline generation from target accounts on average.
Account-Based Marketing Tactics to Increase Engagement
These account-based marketing strategies offer excellent ways to create multiple touchpoints to stay relevant so you can nurture, captivate and delight your target audience. Use them to start targeting high-value accounts.
Account-Specific Landing Pages
An account-based landing page is one that targets high-value accounts. It’s vital to tailor the landing page to the needs and preferences of the account and speak to how your company can solve its unique challenges. This personalization makes all the difference.
There are numerous ways to include an account-specific landing page in your marketing efforts, like a link in a personalized email (Userled generates a custom thumbnail to help drive click-throughs to your new landing page), LinkedIn InMail message, or LinkedIn Ads.
This sounds like a lot of work, and it is if you’re doing this manually across all your target accounts. Using an ABM landing page creator can simplify the process and improve the performance of your customized landing page.
Customized Email Campaigns
Personalized email is not specific to account-based marketing campaigns and is a standard tool for outreach. However, there are a couple of opportunities where these are particularly useful in the context of ABM.
In addition to using tools like the ABM email banner generator to make your outreach feel even more custom, email helps to amplify other ABM tactics, like personalized landing pages, which typically produce the best outcomes. It’s also helpful for tracking click-through rates to these landing pages and ensuring sales teams are informed
For example, Userled lets you share your custom landing pages via email (and any other channel you’re targetting) and incorporates a personalized landing page thumbnail to help incentivize clicks. Plus, your sales team will be kept informed of any activity so they know where to focus their efforts.
Personalized LinkedIn Content for Inbound Marketing
LinkedIn is an ideal platform for your marketing team to use in an account-based marketing strategy. It provides a direct connection to the professionals you want to target, allowing you to reach out directly. It’s highly effective at helping you reach your ABM campaign goals.
But doing this with generic messages simply places you in a sea of similar outreach. Instead, personalize your message or LinkedIn Ad and demonstrate how you can solve a business problem for them. You can do this easily with a specialized ABM LinkedIn Ad creator and use a tool like Userled to scale your production and distribution of personalized LinkedIn Ads for your key accounts.
Customized Google Ads
Finally, create customized Google Ads for specific industries with an ABM Google Ad creator. This provides a highly targeted message to decision-makers searching Google for a product or service like yours.
You can tailor the message and the design elements and include targeted calls to action. This means you can address specific industry pain points and outline how you can resolve them. Plus, you can create customized offers that appeal to industry searchers.
6 Real-Life ABM Campaign Examples From Different Industries
Salsify Exceeds Event Attendees' Target with Personalized Emails and Display Ads
Increases Event Attendees and Exceeds Targets
Salsify, which helps retailers both win on the digital shelf and create the best product experiences for their clients, hosted an event with speakers from Google and Johnson & Johnson.
Their goal? To attract key decision-makers from their high-value accounts. They aimed for at least 60 sign-ups and ended up exceeding their goal with a total of 82.
Implementation
- Salsify implemented a multi-channel, account-based marketing campaign using targeted display ads and personalized emails.
- Their sales team then followed up with calls. The result? High engagement and a great sign-up rate.
Dialpad Gains 10x Target Site Visits with Account-Based Marketing
Tripled its Closed-Won Revenue and Closed Deals 52% Faster
Dialpad, a customer intelligence and engagement platform, has been expanding its offering over the past few years. It offers differentiated products and services for sales, customer service, and internal communications teams.
Dialpad planned to leverage these products to land more enterprise clients. It ended up with 10 times more site visits than its initial goal and more than tripled its closed-won revenue. It also closed deals 52% quicker than before.
Implementation
- Dialpad implemented 50 sets of unique, personalized ads to drive key accounts to its new features pages using specialized account-based marketing software.
- It used tracking tools to measure which target accounts were engaging with its adverts, and sales reps continued communications with those who had interacted with the ads.
Onfido Increases Booked Demos with Enterprise Leads
55% Increase in Traffic Discovery and 35% Increase in Traffic Conversion
Onfido, a global leader in automated digital identity verification, aimed to book more demos from high-value prospects.
Its technology is applied differently across industries, so a message that appealed to one decision-maker would not appeal to others. So Onfido needed customized landing pages for each industry.
Onfido used Userled for its account-based marketing strategy, which resulted in a 120% increase in booked demos, along with increased sales development representative (SDR) efficiency.
Implementation
- We helped Onfido with website personalization for their landing pages and marketing assets. Onfido could tailor 1:1 pages for known accounts, with key details synched from its CRM channel.
- We also personalized campaigns using CRM, and CSVs to ensure we reached the widest audience possible.
- Once the personalized landing pages were up and running, we enhanced CTAs, changing them from self-service to booking a demo. We also changed the software trial CTA to another demo-booking button to reinforce the message.
- In addition, we aligned all messaging and marketing assets to enable the SDR team to drive the demo-booking goal. This ensured that the marketing and sales teams worked in conjunction with each other to achieve a common goal.
- Finally, we provided an analytics dashboard focused on capturing click-through rate and gaining visibility on engagement so the marketing and sales teams could monitor the results and optimize their strategy.
PitchBook Uses AI to Discover Key Accounts and Personalize Content Through LinkedIn and Digital Ads
Website Visits by Target Accounts Increases by 79%
PitchBook, a research firm for the financial data and research industry, wanted to increase website visits with select accounts. It increased website visits from target accounts by 79% and boosted the number of high-value accounts actively engaging with it by 220%.
Implementation
- PitchBook used machine learning to combine data from various industries, companies, and trends to analyze over 2,000 target accounts—ultimately identifying those most likely to convert. It ended up with a list of 300 high-value accounts most likely to bring in the best business for the company.
- It then used digital adverts and LinkedIn ads to send personalized content to key decision-makers from these 300 businesses. This is what enabled it to achieve its site visit and engagement goals.
Salesloft Uses Gifting to Entice Target Accounts
Gains 60x ROI
Salesloft is a sales engagement platform that helps businesses find prospective customers, build trust, and close deals. It increased its ROI 60 times when it started gifting coffee and lunch vouchers as incentives to book meetings with the Salesloft team.
Implementation
- Salesloft created an account-based marketing campaign around gifting coffee vouchers, and later lunch vouchers, to prospective clients.
- After increasing ROI, the company has since given its ABM team free reign to send more personalized gifts to target accounts.
Coverflex Converts Inbound Traffic with UTM Personalization
Increases its Inbound Conversion by 27% and Reached $1.3 million Supported Pipeline
Coverflex, an employee compensation management solution company, needed more website visitors and wanted to discover its ideal customer profile (ICP) so it could aim for high-value target accounts.
Using Userled, Coverflex launched an account-based marketing strategy. It needed to tailor its messaging for specific industries to ensure it resonated with target accounts. This increased conversion rate by 27% and resulted in a $1.3 million supported pipeline.
Implementation
- We used UTM parameters to narrow down Coverflex’s audience and personalize customers’ experiences on its website.
- We also employed CRM data to focus on key target accounts for a 1:1 experience. Coverflex can now customize landing pages with variables like industry, company name, and other important content.
- We then paired this with outreach assets such as email banners and LinkedIn ads, enabling sales and marketing teams to work together.
- In addition, we helped sync the results to its CRM channel and enabled Coverflex to perform A/B testing to optimize user experiences and focus on ICPs that show the highest buying intent.
How to Measure Your ABM Strategy
It’s one thing for marketing and sales teams to work together; it’s another to be able to measure the success of their combined efforts.
It’s vital to track how well your account-based marketing campaigns are performing. Otherwise, you can’t understand your ROI or even determine if your strategy is working. For this, you need ABM analytics.
Read more: 12 Account-Based Marketing Metrics to Track for Better ROI
Account engagement
You need to know what kind of personalized messaging resonates with the high-value accounts you’re targeting. This enables you to A/B test and optimize campaigns so you’re constantly improving upon your content.
Calls booked
If you’re in a call-led industry, this is the ultimate factor in determining whether your account-based marketing strategy is working. Without tracking how many calls you book, you’ll never know how successful your campaign is.
Cost per acquisition
Measuring the cost per acquisition is essential for optimizing your ABM strategy and uncovering whether your campaign has been successful. If it costs more to obtain a client than you’ll earn from that client, then there’s a problem with your campaign.
Revenue per account
You need to know how valuable your account-based marketing campaigns are, and this is determined by the total revenue you receive from your accounts. If you’re spending more than you’re making, you need to figure out why and resolve it.
Deliver Personalized Messaging with Userled
Now that you’ve seen some unique examples of ABM strategies, it’s time to ramp up yours for your key accounts and win their business.
Userled can help you create customized messaging on any channel across your buyer journey, plus track individual activity so you can gauge the impact of your strategy. Deliver the right personalized message at the right time, every time.
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