2. Contents
Introduction …………………………………………………………………………..3
What is Account-Based Marketing …….……………………………..................5
Four Major Benefits of Account-Based Marketing ….……………..................9
Aligning Sales and Marketing Through Account-Based Marketing………..14
Five Must-Try Account-Based Marketing Strategies ..……………………..…20
Measuring and Optimizing Your Account Based Marketing Campaigns ....24
Recap ………………………………………………………………………………….28
3. Introduction
Account-based marketing has its roots in the
1990s, when B2C and B2B companies alike
began to realize the need for more
personalized marketing. In 1993, Don
Peppers and Martha Rogers published their
landmark The One-to-One Future, which
forecasted the movement from mass
marketing to the more 1:1 marketing that we
know today.
As consumers’ began to crave more
personalized buying experiences, many
marketers turned to account-based
marketing to meet those needs.
The phrase “account-based marketing” was
coined in 2004 by ITSMA, though many B2B
companies had been implementing ABM
strategies for years, whether they knew it or
not. However, it wasn’t until recent years that
ABM really began to catch on in the B2B
industry due to the shifting emphasis on
demand generation and inbound marketing —
and the increasing number of vendors offering
more robust ABM solutions. In fact, according
to Matt Senatore, Research Director at
SiriusDecisions, account-based marketing
generated enough global search traffic in
2013 to appear on Google Trends.
So what exactly is account-based marketing,
and how does it work? This Blueprint to
Account-based Marketing aims to answer those
questions and more by providing an
introduction to ABM, covering everything from
the benefits of an ABM strategy to
measurement and optimization. Let’s get
started!
3
5. Account-based marketing focuses on
marketing at the account level, rather than at
the lead level. The traditional sales funnel
starts by looking at all of the channels that
your customers may be engaging on, and
then attempts to target customers at the top
of the funnel.
Account-based marketing, on the other
hand, flips the funnel on its head. Instead
of starting with channels, an ABM
strategy begins with identifying and
targeting your key customer accounts.
Marketers can then reach out using targeted
advertising via the channels that their buyers
are actively using, such as mobile, social,
display, and video.
Think of it this way: how many stakeholders
are typically involved in your average B2B
purchasing decision? The answer isn’t just
one.
The length of the sales cycle is growing
longer as more and more decision makers
are becoming involved in B2B purchases,
which is why single-lead marketing is no
longer the most effective or the fastest
method to reach a sale.
Instead, companies are turning to account-
based marketing to place their marketing
messages in front of all of the decision makers
within an account.
Every company is unique, which is why
account-based marketing treats each account
as if it is its own marketing opportunity.
5
6. How Does It Work?
Account-based advertising uses digital (IP or cookie-based) targeting to reach specific
accounts. You can integrate an account-based platform with your CRM or marketing
automation tool to run campaigns targeted toward the accounts already in your database.
This gives you the ability to run multi-channel campaigns by choosing the ads you want to
show your target audience across mobile, social, display, and video — then engage your
prospects on their terms.
Not only that, but you can now finally understand which message resonates the most with your
target audience — and get the data to back it up — with A/B testing on your creative in near
real-time.
Account-based technologies have seen great success for two primary reasons:
1. ABM can help you engage your customers on their terms, i.e. using more digital channels
than email and phone calls.
2. AMB makes it possible to engage not only the lead but the entire account, which means you
can now do account-based marketing at scale.
6
7. Today’s account-based marketing technologies allow you to market across personas, sales
stages, campaigns, or statuses in your CRM, and go from one-channel marketing to multi-
channel nurturing, instantly.
As the one-size-fits-all approach to marketing continues to go out of style, account-based
marketing has become a reliable, must-try strategy to personalize the buying experience with
highly-targeted messaging. We’ll take a closer look at these benefits in the following chapter.
7
9. Even if you understand what account-based
marketing is and how it works, there’s one
critical question that marketers should ask
before adopting any new marketing strategy:
why is implementing an ABM strategy
beneficial to your business?
The major benefits of account-based
marketing can be boiled down to four main
categories:
• a more focused sales and marketing
strategy
• a better customer experience
• an improved sales-marketing relationship
• more revenue
1. A Focused Sales and Marketing
Strategy
As we discussed in chapter one, an account-
based marketing strategy starts by
identifying a set of target accounts that
your sales team would like to penetrate, and
developing personalized messaging and
creative to reach them.
Instead of starting with a list of channels to
run your marketing campaigns on — which
may or may not reach your target audience
— an account-based marketing strategy
allows you to focus in on the precise
accounts that you would like to target.
This hyper-targeting increases the
effectiveness of your marketing messages
without increasing the resources needed
to run more targeted campaigns.
9
10. 2. A More Tightly Aligned Sales and
Marketing Team
Before you can begin targeting your
account-based marketing campaigns, a
conversation needs to occur between sales
and marketing to identify those key
accounts (more on this in chapter three).
This allows marketing to have a better
understanding of sales’ goals, and
reinforces marketing’s position as an
important part of the selling process in
the eyes of the sales team.
When marketing is running programs on the
account level, sales sees that marketing
can deliver on their target accounts. This
can help patch up tensions that the two
teams may have experienced over lead
quality, while simultaneously bolstering
marketing and sales effectiveness.
10
11. 3. A Better Customer Experience
Account-based marketing is all about the
customer. In a time when B2B buyers are
craving more personalized selling
experiences, ABM has risen to the forefront
of marketing strategies as a way to improve
the relevancy of sales and marketing
messages.
Buyers are no longer looking for a sales call or
a marketing email to kick of their research
process. What they do want is relevant
outreach that’s personalized to meet their
needs — which is exactly what ABM offers.
Using targeted advertising, marketers can
reach their buyers in an unobtrusive way
on the channels that their buyers are
already using, so that buyers can choose to
engage with marketing messaging on their
terms, not on the companies’.
60% of marketers struggle to personalize
content in real time, yet 77% believe real-time
personalization is crucial. (CMO.com)
11
12. 4. More Revenue
By using account-based marketing and
advertising to reach target sales accounts,
marketing is setting sales up for more
successful conversations with their buyers
down the line. By the time sales reps reach out
to target accounts, buyers have already been
exposed to their company’s messaging.
This speeds up the sales process by cutting
down on unnecessary sales introductions and
sets the stage for a more personalized buying
experience, increasing the likelihood that a lead
will turn into a closed deal.
Not only that, but ABM ensures that you’re
focusing on the right leads from the start, so
time and money aren’t wasted chasing down
dead-ends.
12
Ready to start putting account-based marketing
into action? The next chapter will discuss how
sales and marketing can put a process in place
to start targeting key accounts.
14. Maximize ROI On Your Next Event
One of the most critical components of a successful account-based marketing strategy (and
one of the primary benefits, as discussed in the previous chapter) is sales and marketing
alignment.
Why Is Sales-Marketing Alignment Important? Let’s start by looking at the following
stat:
Only 2% of cold calls result in an appointment. (LeapJob)
Yikes. While traditional outreach tactics like cold calling and emailing do have their merits,
they also have significant limitations. Your buyers are busy, which means they’re only going to
respond to marketing messages that really resonate with them — and generally, cold calls
and mass emails don’t fall into this category. What buyers are looking for is personalized,
targeted marketing that really caters to their needs and pain points.
In other words, they’re looking for a relationship.
But how can companies be expected to build these relationships when their buyers won’t pick
up the phone or respond to emails? The answer is account-based marketing. When key
accounts are being targeted with personalized advertising, buyers will already be
familiar with your product or service by the time sales reaches out to make an
introduction, meaning that the relationship-building process is already under way.
Let’s take a closer look at how marketing and sales can work together to achieve success
with ABM:
14
15. Step 1: Flip The Funnel
At many organizations, sales reps and
marketers are struggling to make contact
with their buyers via traditional outlets like
email and phone.
That’s because they’re focusing too much
on channels. Instead, flip the funnel on its
head and start thinking about the
customers first.
Who are your target buyers?
What would you consider your
“best fit” criteria?
In an ideal world, which companies
would you like to penetrate?
This sets the stage for hyper-targeted
marketing messaging down the line.
15
16. Step 2: Identify Key Accounts
Once you’ve flipped the funnel and started approaching your marketing with a customer-first
attitude, it’s time for marketing and sales to have a conversation about target accounts. Find
out which accounts your sales team is trying to penetrate, and make those accounts the
primary focus of your ABM strategy. This is a conversation that should happen on a regular
basis so that both teams are always aligned behind the same objectives.
To assist in this identification process, marketers can use any number of technologies—
including Terminus, SalesLoft, Data.com, RingLead, LinkedIn Navigator, and a few others —
to help pinpoint the companies that match their best-fit criteria.
16
17. Step 3: Determine Your Channels And Messaging
Using the digital (IP- or cookie-based) targeting discussed in our previous post, marketers can
target these key accounts with specific messaging on the channels that buyers are
engaging on, whether that’s display, mobile, video, or social.
Having a number of options for creative and/or messaging that you can personalize to each
account will greatly increase the effectiveness of these campaigns.
And voilà — with no heavy-lifting from sales, you’ve set up targeted multi-channel advertising
that reaches your audience on their terms, not yours.
Step 4: Begin Active Outreach
Once your messaging is in market, it’s time for your sales reps to begin outreach using more
traditional channels.
Marketing has created significant coverage for sales using account-based marketing, so
when a sales rep makes a call or sends an email, your buyers (and many of their decision
makers, too) are already familiar with your offering.
This increases the effectiveness of sales outreach and gives sales reps more confidence in their
marketing counterparts.
17
18. Step 5: Measure and Optimize
As always, no marketing strategy is complete without a process in place to measure results.
Keep tabs on the performance of your ABM strategy and swap out the creative and the
messaging if you’re not seeing results (with a platform like Terminus, you can optimize your
campaigns in real time).
Make sure that sales and marketing are constantly communicating about new target
accounts, changing goals, buyer personas, and the most successful messaging and
channels. We’ll discuss this in more detail in chapter five.
To be successful with account-based marketing, marketing and sales teams need to take a
collaborative approach.
Not only will input from sales increase the effectiveness of your ABM campaigns, but
marketing can then enable sales by putting targeted programs into market, helping sales
to create a more powerful dialogue with their buyers.
18
20. By now, you’ve learned all about the basics of ABM, how it works, and how it can help align
your sales and marketing teams — but understanding the underlying principles of ABM is only
half of the battle.
What situations are best suited for an account-based marketing strategy?
How are companies employing ABM to find success?
We’ve compiled some of the most effective account-based marketing strategies here. Learn
how ABM can be used to acquire new customers, revive inactive leads in your database,
follow up with event-sourced leads, nurture leads to sales-readiness, and more.
1. Acquiring New Customers
One of the most common uses for ABM is to acquire new customers. By working with your
sales team to create a targeted list of companies and developing personalized marketing
messaging, you can drive greater engagement among your target accounts — and not just
with a single lead, but with all key decision makers in an account.
If your goal is to acquire new customers, consider developing personalized messaging and
creative for each potential new customer to increase the effectiveness of your marketing
.
20
21. 2. Nurturing Leads
Because of the nature of today’s B2B sales
cycle, many of the leads that you’re
marketing to aren’t going to be ready to
make a purchasing decision.
Don’t make the mistake of letting these
leads go to waste just because they’re not
going to turn into an immediate sale.
Instead, use account-based nurturing to
continue to present your marketing
message over time via targeted ads,
keeping your company top of mind until
your leads are ready to reenter the sales
cycle.
3. Following up after Events
When it comes to events, it can be tricky to
make sure you’re following up with all of
your hot leads and giving your colder leads
the attention they deserve.
While your sales team will likely be following
up with the most promising leads via phone,
less sales-ready leads may get neglected
without an appropriate account-based
strategy in place.
In order to create awareness and further
penetrate the accounts that you spoke to at an
event, run advertising campaigns targeted
toward these accounts.
Not only will this keep your brand in front of your
leads after the event, it will also put your
messaging in front of decision makers who
may not have attended the event at all, but
who still have a stake in the final purchasing
decision.
If you’re looking for more information about
using account-based advertising to boost your
event marketing efforts and maximize your
investment, check out this blog post.
21
22. 4. Reviving Inactive Leads
At any given time, your database is full of
leads who aren’t actively participating in the
sales cycle. In fact, these leads may have
been “dead” for six months or more.
Despite their inactivity, they aren’t necessarily
useless. To bring these inactive leads back
to life, you can run ABM campaigns
targeted toward unresponsive accounts.
Not only does this remind your leads about
your solution, it also allows you to reach
additional contacts within each account —
contacts that may be more receptive to your
messaging and more likely to engage with
your brand.
See how Kevy used account-based
advertising to wake the dead in this recent
Terminus blog post.
5. Expanding within Enterprise Accounts
Selling into enterprise accounts can be
tricky, especially when enterprise companies
are divided into smaller divisions that
operate independently (and often have
different points of contact for sales).
If you’ve sold into an enterprise
company before, but are hoping to
expand to other divisions, you can use
ABM’s IP- and cookie-based targeting to
present ads to key decision makers and
stakeholders within those other
divisions.
These ads can be personalized so that they
feature the benefits and testimonies that
your leads’ coworkers are already seeing
from your solution.
22
24. Even if you’re sold on account-based marketing, it’s important to have an understanding of
whether or not your account-based marketing efforts are successful. Let’s take a look at
one of the most important parts of account-based marketing and advertising:
measurement and optimization.
Step 1: Optimization
While many traditional marketing strategies don’t allow you to optimize until after a
campaign has run its course, advertising at the account level gives you the ability to
optimize your campaigns on the fly using A/B testing. See which advertising creative and
marketing messages are falling flat with your target audience as the campaign runs, and
swap out copy or ads that aren’t performing in real time.
An important part of the optimization process is gathering feedback from your sales team,
which should happen continuously as you run your ABM campaigns. Ask your sales
team if they have had better success penetrating key accounts, and see if there’s
anything you could be doing to better support their goals.
Pro Tip: In order to make sure switches happen seamlessly, have alternate messaging
and creative ready to go.
24
25. Step 2: Measurement
Measuring the success of your account-based marketing campaigns is a lot like measuring the
success of any other marketing campaign, except this time, you’re restricting your
measurements to key accounts.
Your metrics will depend on your business goals and the type of campaign you’re running, but
the list below provides a number of measures to start with:
1. Interactions with Ads
Is your target audience clicking on your ads?
Keep an eye on your engagement stats to see how well your advertising is resonating across
devices, personas, sales stages, and the different campaigns you may be running. Keep in
mind that the goal here is to see how your ads are performing within your target audience.
25
26. 2. Conversion Metrics
Is your target audience taking the desired
action, i.e clicking through your ad and filling
out a form, requesting a product demo, or
visiting your website?
Your conversion metrics can help pinpoint
important areas for optimization.
For instance, if your conversion rates are
low, your messaging may not accurately
reflect the offer presented on your
landing page or on your website.
Note that these metrics may change
depending on the type of campaign you’re
running. While website engagement may be
a significant measurement for an ABM
campaign aimed at engaging leads after an
event, a campaign that aims to “reawaken
the dead” will be looking
more at the number of leads who take an
action, period — even if that just means
clicking on an ad.
3. Overall Engagement
The goal of an account-based marketing
campaign is to increase engagement with
your brand (and ultimately, with your sales
team) within target accounts. Measuring
prospect activity levels and engagement
with your website can help determine
whether or not your campaigns are really
reaching their mark.
4. Reach
Account-based marketing can be an
important awareness-generating tool within
your key accounts. Better understand your
success by tracking new contacts
reached and generated from your ABM
campaigns.
26
27. 5. Return on Investment
Like with any marketing campaign, you want
to see a positive impact on your bottom line.
Are you getting more out of your ABM
campaigns that what you’re putting in?
Be sure to constantly optimize your
campaigns in order to ensure the highest
return on investment possible.
6. Sales Cycle Length
By exposing your target audience to
personalized messages that are targeted by
account, you can shorten the awareness and
research phase of the buyer’s journey,
thereby reducing the length of the sales
cycle.
Keep an eye on your sales cycle length to
gauge the impact of your ABM
campaigns.
7. Customer Retention
Account-based marketing isn’t only for
generating new business. It can also be an
important tool for customer retention (and even
for upsells and cross-sells).
Monitor retention rates among the accounts
that are being targeted with account-based
messaging to see if there are any significant
changes in customer churn.
Using any combination of the above metrics —
and optimizing based on your results — will help
you build the most impactful ABM campaigns
possible.
27
28. Recap
LAUNCH AUTOMATED
ACCOUNT-BASED
MARKETING CAMPAIGNS
IN LESS THAN 30 MINUTES.
Terminus makes it easy to target key
decision-makers on the account level
across mobile, social, display, and
video.
Launch A Campaign Now
Megan Heuer, Vice President and Group
Director at SiriusDecisions, has touted
account-based marketing as the next big
thing:
“ABM has been around for a long time as a
B2B marketing approach. ABM is rooted in
the basic idea that marketing works better
when it starts by focusing on the needs
and specific opportunity within a single
account or a group of named accounts.
This was the original promise of customer
relationship management and one-to-one
marketing. It’s still a great idea.”
As buyers continue to clamor for personalized
marketing, ABM will soon become a
necessary part of every B2B marketer’s
strategy — and with the rise in account-based
technologies, it’s already becoming more and
more accessible for the everyday marketer,
too. The question is: will you be joining the
account-based marketing revolution?
