7 Ways to Level Up Your ABM Campaign Strategy

In B2B marketing, reaching more people doesn’t guarantee you’re reaching the right people. With average sales cycles of 60 to 120 days, buying decisions involving multiple stakeholders, and offerings that require significant investment, a broad marketing approach may not deliver the results you want. Luckily, an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy offers a more targeted option.

Rather than casting a wide net to attract as many leads as possible, ABM focuses marketing and sales efforts on specific high-value accounts that are more likely to convert. To make this approach work, you need an ABM campaign strategy in place.

Whether you're building your very first ABM program or you're looking to refine an existing one, there are a number of things you can do to improve your results. Let's look at a few practical approaches to take your campaigns to the next level.

Elements of an ABM Campaign Strategy

When mapping out an ABM campaign strategy template, these elements are essential:

• Ideal Customer Profile: Define the characteristics of organizations most likely to benefit from your offering, including industry, company size, business needs, and growth potential.
• Target Account Selection: Identify the organizations that fit your ideal customer profile and could lead to revenue opportunities.
• Buying Group Identification: Determine which decision-makers may participate in the purchasing process.
• Personalized Messaging and Content: Develop relevant content that addresses each account’s challenges, goals, and stage in the buyer journey.
• Sales and Marketing Alignment: Coordinate the outreach, share account intelligence, and define clear ownership across the teams.
• Measurement and Optimization: Track engagement, account progression through the funnel, and revenue to understand how effective your campaign is.

Essentially, your strategy should focus on building a strategy around the organizations that matter most to your business and creating relevant experiences that turn them into long-term customers.

7 Ways to Level Up Your ABM Campaign Strategy

A good ABM campaign strategy is more than just identifying your target accounts and sending a few personalized emails. You need to understand the account, provide the right experience, and have your marketing and sales teams working in sync.

These seven tactics will help you level up.

1. Create Personalized Account Microsites

Generic landing pages are a dime a dozen, and quite frankly, they don’t deliver an impressive experience for potential buyers. Account-specific microsites offer a way to create something special that’s been tailored to a target’s priorities.

For example, you could develop a private microsite for a high-value account that includes industry-specific insights, relevant case studies, and recommendations based on the organization’s unique challenges.

2. Use Private Account Intelligence to Inform Personalization

Effective personalization depends on knowing more than an organization’s name, industry, or company size. You’ll also want to gather insights into its priorities, current challenges, and more. To do this, collect public information and review CRM records, past interactions, and any sales notes you have. Just be sure to keep account intelligence organized, current, and accessible to the necessary team members. Old, inaccurate data doesn’t serve anyone.

3. Automate AI-Powered Research Tasks

Researching target accounts is essential to ABM, but manually gathering information about dozens or even hundreds of organizations can be time-consuming. Luckily, AI can streamline this process by handling repetitive research tasks, letting marketers focus more on strategy and relationship building.

Our tool, AccountSherpa, can help with that. You can schedule AI-generated research tasks in advance to collect company updates, news, and more. Then, the microsites it creates can be automatically updated to reflect the new data.

4. Develop Repeatable ABM Plays

An ABM play is a series of coordinated marketing and sales activities that are meant to engage an account in response to a particular situation, need, or opportunity. Repeatable plays enable the team to execute campaigns in a more consistent way without losing the element of personalization.

Possible ABM plays include:

• New Account Engagement: Get your brand in front of a target organization via content, targeted advertising, and coordinated sales engagement.
• Buying Intent Activation: When available intent signals suggest an account is researching a relevant topic, share useful resources and initiate appropriate follow-up.
• Opportunity Acceleration: Support active opportunities with relevant case studies, product demos, and content to address any objections they may have.

5. Align Sales and Marketing Around Shared Account Goals

ABM works best when sales and marketing operate as a coordinated team, rather than separate entities. Both teams should agree on targeted accounts to pursue, messaging, engagement strategies, and the signals that show an account is progressing through the funnel.

6. Personalize Content Across the Buying Journey

Personalization should extend beyond inserting a company name into the greeting of an email. The most effective campaigns deliver information that reflects an account’s priorities and the questions its buying group needs to answer.

Map the content to different stages of the buyer journey. Early-stage accounts are likely to benefit most from educational articles and industry research, whereas accounts in the evaluation phase will be looking for comparison guides and customer success stories.

7. Measure Performance and Optimize Your Campaigns

An effective ABM campaign strategy is one that evolves as your team gains more insight into target accounts. The key is to measure performance regularly so you can see what's working, what's not, and where engagement drops off, then refine your approach for the next campaign.

Use these insights to refine your account selection, your messaging, your content recommendations, and your campaign plays. If an account is clearly engaged with a certain topic, then you can follow that up with more in-depth content or a conversation with sales.

Ready to Improve Your ABM Campaign Strategy?

The right ABM marketing tools can help you put these strategies into practice. That’s exactly what AccountSherpa is designed to do. From AI-powered research to personalized account microsites, it allows your team to deliver more relevant buying experiences to target accounts.

Book a demo to see AccountSherpa in action.