In part 1 of our Account-based marketing (ABM) series we looked at how it can lead to substantial return for your business. In part 2, we outlined the three types of account based marketing, with the pros and cons of each and our top tips to think about.

Whether a One-to-One, One-to-Few or One-to-Many approach is the best fit, part 3 of our series will show you the three core ingredients to get started and make your ABM efforts successful.

1. Identifying the accounts with strategic value

It’s in the name - your target account identification is the crux of successful ABM. You need to know who your high-value customers are. Get a cross-functional team together and draw up a list of the potential members, subscribers, sponsors/clients or delegates who would be most valuable to have as customers. 

The characteristics - from sector, to business operating model, to technology - that these accounts share will help you build your Ideal Client Profiles (ICPs). Armed with this information, you can begin to identify additional target accounts if you are opting for a One-to-Few or One-to-Many approach.

Next, conduct deeper research to identify, understand and document the full Decision Making Unit (DMU) within each account – including any key influencers. Involve your sales teams in this process as they likely have a lot of valuable insight to offer. What challenges and opportunities are these people facing? What questions are they seeking answers to? What peers and businesses do they want to connect with? What would make them join your community, purchase your membership or attend your event? What would they hope to achieve by investing time, money and attention into your products?

Once your ICPs are built don’t leave them to gather dust. Continually scrutinise and update them to reflect market movements, change in personnel or company strategy. Incorporate new insights by analysing their interactions with your product to date - what might have appeared to be an ICP ‘on paper’ could look very different when you interrogate how they react to your promotional efforts.

Ensure that you have the customer data in your database to target these decision makers and influencers. If you lack this data, see if you can use research to fill these gaps. Where you do have data, make it part of your regular database health check to enhance and update contact data on current and prospective customers that match your ICP. Organise your data to create lists of customer types for ABM, segmenting by profile and behaviour. Make these easily accessible to marketing, sales and leadership teams and constantly talk about these segments so it becomes embedded in your go-to-market approaches. 

If data research is not possible or compliance issues make it difficult to hold or target these contacts, precision PPC campaigns can get your brand and message in front of key stakeholders within targeted companies.

Not sure where to start with PPC?
Contact us today to find out more about MPG’s PPC Training Course.

2. Hyper-personalisation: The 4 C's

You’ve taken the time to deep-dive on specific customer needs, desires, pain points and personalities within the decision making unit. Now it’s time to craft that into a compelling and hyper-personalised end-to-end experience with your brand.

Copy

The key to making ABM work is delivering highly relevant messaging. Every touchpoint should be compelling in isolation, but also cohesive with the wider journey.

First, define specific value points of your publication, membership or event that will appeal to that specific customer and craft benefit-driven messaging that will resonate - i.e. ‘what’s in it for them?’ The more relevant and specific you can be here, the more impactful your messages will be. If you can explicitly mention an account’s most pressing challenges or opportunities in your messaging, and explain how you can help them address this, you will grab their attention.

Need help with your audience segmentation and copy writing?
Take a look at MPG’s copywriting training course which can be tailored specifically for you.

Content

Just as with copy, you want to craft content that will inspire, educate and support individuals from your targeted accounts. These are your reports, whitepapers, interviews, webinars or any other type of content piece that is used for marketing and lead generation. To be practical and  effective, ‘package’ content in a way that is bespoke to an account or segment rather than editing the content itself. This can be done by prefacing it with context on why it’s relevant to a specific industry or challenge e.g. for an industry report, pull out the section that is the most relevant to the DMU you are contacting.

Customer journeys

Create tailored customer journeys that guide your target accounts seamlessly through the whole marketing-to-sales process. From first contact, through to final conversion, understanding their journey through your marketing funnel helps you to put the right content and messaging in front of the right person, at the right time. 

Get customer journeys down on paper, with a tool like Lucidchart, laying out the various options you think targeted individuals might take.

Channels

Using your customer journey maps, outline the particular channels and tactics you are going to deploy. A multi-channel, integrated campaign allows you to meet your customers exactly where they are.

A combination of emails, social media, PPC ads, content pieces and landing pages should create a compelling and engaging journey that feels ‘made just for me’. You don’t have to recreate everything from scratch for each account (or group of accounts), but at a minimum consider each touchpoint from the perspective of individuals within your target account DMUs. 

For example, grouping contacts by job function and sending them an email tailored to the challenges they will personally experience in their roles will still deliver a relevant and personalised message, while the grouping saves you time and resources.

Here are a few additional top tips you may want to consider:

• Don’t forget about touchpoints such as email autoresponders - these can be easily segmented and personalised to have a specific message when a contact from your target account interacts with your website or content.

• Web journeys and landing pages should talk directly to your target accounts - the use of logos and colours that reflect the account can help the experience feel familiar and be more happily received. 

• Make the return on your PPC/ paid media more impactful with company-specific ads. Consider different ads to different job functions within your target accounts. Influence can be everything.

• Sales and marketing need to be consistently aligned on the data you have about the account. Share what messages the account is receiving and most importantly how they are responding, so sales can pick up the conversation seamlessly.

• Whereas direct mail may not be cost effective at scale, for ABM, it can have a personal touch which grabs attention.

3. Measure and optimise

As with all marketing approaches, ABM relies on measurement and analysis of results. It is important to build your user behaviour and goal completion tracking from the outset, ideally in an automated report that highlights the most important metrics. (Looker Studio – working in tandem with Google Analytics is a good combination here).Look for areas where accounts are dropping off or left to ‘cool down’ if not contacted by sales quickly enough. It is not uncommon that a large number of targeted customers normally fall out of the funnel on their way down but with ABM, this drop off needs to be minimised, and understanding where and why accounts are disengaging is vital. You’re already placing extra emphasis on the marketing for individuals targeted within ABM, so make sure that applies to your reporting too.

Not sure where to start with GA4 for ABM?
Contact us today to find out more about MPG’s Analytics Training Course and Support Packages.

How to prepare your team for ABM:

Once you have a detailed plan in place, you need people in your team with the skills, time and motivation to execute it.

At its core, ABM is about making marketing and sales even more aligned. By defining and actively targeting high-value accounts, and making this integral to both your marketing and sales strategies, you can make your conversion funnel more efficient and cost-effective. Integration between sales and marketing must be seamless from your targeted customers’ perspective. Sales should be picking up the conversation that marketing already started, and marketing should only be pushing leads to sales teams when they are ready for the harder sales message. Together, your customers will have a much better and streamlined experience as they hurtle towards the bottom of your funnel.

This approach to ABM is well suited to events and media businesses where there are key accounts that would make a significant difference to your commercials and are worth considerable investment. However, this needs to be balanced with the high volume marketing demands and benefits of capturing early brand loyalty in a market where there is often a lot of competition.

Rigour and agility are valuable traits for marketers working on ABM. Getting targeted messages out to the right people at the right time requires careful forward planning, especially if your ABM efforts are running concurrently to your ‘business as usual’ marketing campaigns. Adjustments to your targeting, channels, and messaging are likely to be needed as campaigns progress, so critical thinking, an analytical mindset and the ability to execute well and at speed are all essential. 

Project management tools can make even complex campaigns easy to manage, especially when multiple stakeholders across sales and marketing are involved. Consider whether your current methods of project management and lead processing are fit for purpose to handle the extra complexity of ABM.

Regardless of your company size, the nature of your events, or the structure of your subscription or membership model, Account-Based marketing should have a part to play in your go-to-market strategy in 2025. ABM allows you to deliver more consistent and compelling customer experiences for your most coveted accounts.

Targeting certain accounts can reap big rewards but, do ensure that if you go down this path, your plan is to invest for the longer term. The careful engineering of campaigns and targeted comms takes time to set up, run and show results. As is usually the case with high performance marketing, a strategic mindset and support from senior stakeholders is essential to make ABM work.

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MPG can help develop your ABM strategy

From creating a robust ABM strategy, to strong execution for maximum impact, MPG has you covered. 

Our team of B2B marketing experts have the toolkit to ensure your sales team gets focused support to target and convert your most coveted customers.

With our well mapped out process and martech/salestech set, MPG will help you better integrate your sales and marketing to positively impact your revenue growth. 

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