Account-based marketing (ABM) is all about targeting your most important accounts with strategies tailored to grab their attention and understanding how deeply you’re engaging them.
It’s a marketing technique that yields an excellent return on investment (2.22x better spend:revenue ROI) than others. But implementing it without a plan is like playing darts in the dark.
Our ABM Strategy Template helps you map out campaigns, execute with confidence, and optimize for success so that you have a clear path to win over high-value accounts.
What is an Account-Based Marketing Strategy?
An account-based marketing strategy focuses on precision and personalization. Instead of trying to appeal to a broad audience, your sales and marketing teams work together to focus their efforts on specific high-value accounts that align with your business’s ideal customer profile.
Some successful account-based marketing examples include targeted LinkedIn campaigns or personalized landing pages that address specific pain points for high-value accounts.
Who Should Use an Account-Based Marketing Strategy Template?
Anyone who wants to make ABM less complicated and more effective will benefit from using our ABM template. Whether you’re tired of juggling campaigns, struggling to align marketing with sales, or just want some tips about ABM best practices, this framework is for you.
It’s especially useful for:
- Demand generation managers: Map out how to target and nurture big accounts to optimize your activities and reduce wasted resources.
- Campaign marketing managers: Plan and execute ABM campaigns that bring your marketing team’s goals in line with your sales team’s.
- Field marketers: Gather feedback from key customers and create more targeted campaigns to improve the metrics that matter.
- Sales leaders: Enable your team to focus on high-value accounts and minimize guesswork by providing a clear roadmap for success.
Guidelines for Using Our ABM Strategy Template
These guidelines will help you get the most out of our ABM strategy template.
1. Be Flexible, Not Rigid
Think of this template as your ABM roadmap. Your business, team, and goals are unique. And how you approach your ABM strategy should be too.
Don’t feel like you need to follow the template to the letter. Rather use it as a starting point, and tweak it to align with your team structure, your marketing goals, and your target accounts’ needs.
2. Focus on Quality Over Quantity
Trying to do too much will only leave you feeling frazzled. Instead of stuffing the template with too many accounts or drowning in details, keep it simple. Start small, refine your approach, and scale from there. A few well-executed campaigns will outperform a scattershot approach every time.
3. Regularly Update the Template
An ABM strategy is never “done.” You should constantly have an eye on your account performance and ask your team for feedback. That way, you’ll have a good idea of what’s working—and what’s not—so you can revisit your template regularly and adjust it accordingly.
4. Collaborate Across Teams
Alignment is the foundation for any successful ABM strategy. Encourage your sales, marketing, and customer success teams to give input on how this template should be tweaked and ensure that they all use it when executing their tasks.
When everyone is on the same page, your targeted outreach will become more effective and you’ll see better results across the board.
Userled’s Account-Based Marketing Strategy Template
Use our template to get organized, align your teams, and fine-tune your ABM approach to attract and engage key accounts.
Following the ABM Strategy Template
In this section, we’ll walk you through the key steps to make the most of our template and successfully implement your ABM strategy.
Bring Together Sales and Marketing Teams
Most of the success of an ABM strategy comes down to one simple thing: alignment. When sales and marketing teams work closely together, things should run as smoothly as the gears of a well-oiled machine.
Here’s how you can make that happen:
- Account selection: Both teams need to be on the same page about the ideal customer profile (ICP) to ensure that they’re targeting the right accounts (and don’t miss any high-value ones).
- Goals and KPIs: Although what they do on a day-to-day basis will be quite different, sales and marketing should both be chasing the same outcome. Be sure to set KPIs that measure both the success of your ABM strategy and your teams’ collaboration.
- Content strategy: Marketing creates the content and sales has deep insights into the pain points and preferences of each account. Working together enables you to develop a strategy that really speaks to key decision-makers.
- Messaging: Marketing knows where—and when—to deliver messages, but sales has a deeper understanding of what moves the needle toward conversion. Collaboration here will help you to say the right thing at the right moment.
- Engagement channels: Agree on which channels to focus on. Whether it’s email, calls, social media, or in-person events, make sure both teams are aligned on how to engage your target accounts.
- Responsibilities: Each team has a role to play. Marketing creates and runs campaigns; sales takes the lead on outreach and relationship-building. Be sure everyone knows what they’re supposed to do—and when they’re supposed to do it—by establishing in OKRs who leads each initiative and who provides support.
Define Your Goals
Defining your goals and setting your ABM priorities is key. Without these, it’s easy to lose focus and waste resources on efforts that don’t move the needle.
But not just any goals will do. You need them to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound).
It’s not enough to say “I want more engagement.” A SMART goal needs more detail; “I want to increase engagement with 20% of my top accounts by the end of the quarter.” Using this framework helps to ensure that you’ll stay on track and see success.
Using SMART goals ensures your ABM tactics are focused, measurable and adaptable. This means you’ll always know exactly where you stand and what needs improvement.
Let’s take a look at a few examples of how you can approach SMART goal setting.
Identify Your Target Accounts
Account-based marketing is all about focusing on high-value accounts that are most likely to convert. But how do you go about choosing the accounts you should target?
There are a bunch of factors that you can look at to build an ICP that can guide your targeting. Here are a few of the most important things to consider when you’re getting started:
- Industry: What industries do your top customers belong to? Look for patterns in the sectors that are most aligned with your offerings.
- Size and revenue: Consider the size of the company and their revenue. This helps for targeting businesses that can afford your solutions.
- Geography: Does your product or service have a regional or global focus? Choose accounts that fall within your operational reach.
- Intent signals: Are they looking for solutions similar to yours? Keep an eye on behaviors like online searches, content engagement, or vendor comparisons.
- Tech stack: What tools do accounts currently use? Consider how your solution fits into their tech stack and whether it integrates with their existing software.
- Challenges: What problems are these companies trying to solve? Prioritize accounts that have a clear need for your solution.
- Customer lifetime value (CLV): Focus on accounts that offer the highest potential lifetime value; those that will stick with your product over the long term.
- Sales feedback: Don’t forget to involve your sales team to get deeper insights about accounts they think have the best fit and likelihood of conversion.
Research Your High-Value Accounts
Research is everything when it comes to understanding what motivates your high-value accounts to choose to work with you.
The whole point here is to uncover patterns. You’re looking for the common traits that your best customers share so that you can speak directly to their needs, instead of just blasting a generic message out there.
The more you know about these accounts, the better you can engage with them and, ultimately, close those deals. You can start by gathering information from these sources:
- CRM data: Look at past interactions and their history with your company. This gives you a solid foundation of who your best customers are.
- Tech stack: Pay attention to the other tools your existing customers use. Could an upsell allow them to remove another platform and keep yours at a higher cost? For prospects, consider how you integrate with their existing software.
- Social media: Follow target accounts and their employees to get a feel for their priorities, activities, and pain points. LinkedIn is a goldmine for this.
- Industry reports: Research industry trends and challenges. This can give you insight into the broader landscape and where your solution fits in.
- Intent signals: Keep an eye on behaviors like website visits, content downloads, online discussions that indicate potential purchase intent, and if they’re already using a competitor. You can even look into whether they’re actively hiring your key persona or someone in your target buying committee.
Create Your Engagement Strategy
You’ll want to pick the right channels and decide what kind of messaging will resonate best with your target accounts. Then you’ll need to have a plan in place to carry on those conversations (i.e. nurture those relationships) until they’re ready to convert.
Map Out Content for the Customer Journey
One of the most effective ways to guide your accounts through the funnel is by aligning your content strategy with their buyer’s journey. Delivering the right content at the right time will help you nurture relationships and build trust with your target accounts.
Let’s take a look at the different ABM stages and the types of content that might drive action.
Create Personalized Content
Personalization is everything in ABM. To win over high-value accounts, your content must be highly relevant to the person you’re speaking to. It should speak directly to their needs and goals. This can be done in a variety of ways, including:
- Custom emails: Reference key accounts’ challenges, goals, or even industry-specific trends, and share high-value assets such as 1:1 landing pages.
- Case studies: Share success stories that mirror their business needs to show the potential ROI.
- Account-specific offers: Offer tailored discounts or early access to features that they’d find useful.
Activation
Next, it’s time to track how your target accounts respond to your marketing efforts.
Look at whether your prospects are clicking on your ads, figure out how much time they’re spending on your site, or whether they’re opening your emails. These are some of the breadcrumbs that show how engaged they are.
Get your marketing team to share this information with your sales team. This will give them insights to use when they make a move. For example, if a prospect checks out your pricing page twice in one week, it’s likely a good time to reach out.
Measure Results and Optimize Campaigns
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: ABM is never “done.” Continuous learning and improvement are essential if you want to catch and keep high-value accounts.
Once your campaigns are up and running, be sure to track their success. Don’t go for vanity metrics, though. Rather focus on the ones that really matter: engagement rates, pipeline influence and ROI.
Regularly analyzing your performance data will give you a clear picture of what’s working and help you to identify patterns.
Consider whether certain accounts engage more and which content gets the most attention. You can use this intel to fine-tune your strategy. That case study that flopped? Swap it out. The webinar that crushed it? Do more of that.
Once you have the insights, iterate. Test new approaches, refine your messaging, and double down on high-performing tactics. Don’t shy away from dropping what isn’t working.
The more you measure and optimize, the more your campaigns will align with your target accounts’ needs, and drive stronger results over time. Remember, ABM is about precision, not perfection. Use the data to guide your strategy and keep improving as you go.
Userled for Seamless Account Based Marketing
Having the right account-based marketing tools makes ABM easier (and more effective). With Userled’s ABM strategy template, you can align your team, focus on the right accounts, and execute campaigns that hit the mark.
Userled supports every step of the ABM journey, from planning to execution. Our platform makes cross-team collaboration easy. Plus, it will help you gain the clarity and control needed to deliver seamless, high-impact marketing campaigns.
Let Userled take your ABM strategy to the next level. Track progress, refine tactics, and turn insights into measurable results.
Author
Generated £1.3M pipeline by focusing on UTM parameters personalisation.
Generated £1.3M pipeline by focusing on UTM parameters personalisation.
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