In Simple Terms: What is ABM?

For starters, ABM is a marketing acronym typically associated with B2B campaigns that stands for ‘Account Based Marketing’. But what does that actually mean in practical terms? 

In this post we’re going to explore the notion of ABM, how it ties into your sales strategy, and how simple it can actually be to set up and run a basic yet very effective ABM campaign. There’ll also be a few actionable tactics thrown in for good measure! 

One of my personal frustrations with ABM is that it can often become overcomplicated, often falling victim to dry powerpoint presentations and buzzwords that would baffle even the most seasoned of marketers. 

That shouldn’t be the case, because at the core it’s pretty straightforward. Whilst a traditional marketing campaign might cast its net reasonably wide, account based marketing is the opposite. It’s all about identifying an extremely focused set of potential customers, and putting all your marketing efforts into talking to them, 

In essence, it’s about talking to the few rather than the many. 

This is a very good thing for many reasons. Firstly, it means that your marketing budgets and investment becomes extremely focused and gets deployed in a very effective way. Blindly building awareness is never going to be efficient, but building awareness regularly amongst a small group of people…that’s a very different case. 

Secondly, it helps to solve the age-old problem of marketing and sales mis-alignment. If your efforts are 100% focused on a specific set of prospects, then your marketing and sales efforts will naturally come together. 

Starting With Data

My view is there are two critical sides to running ABM successfully. One side is identifying the right prospects, the other side is what you do to attract them. We’ll come back to that in a bit, so let’s start with the prospect data. 

Before you start collecting data, make sure you’ve had conversations with your sales team. You need to be completely clear on your ICP and qualification criteria. If you miss this step then it’s never going to work. 

Once you have a good view on who you want to target, use tools such as Lusha, Cognism or LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator to start building your lists of prospects. My view is that at this stage you should start wider than you need to, with a view to refining your list later. 

Clearly, gathering contact data is important. However you should also be thinking about other data points you can collect to give you a better indication of prospect quality, prioritisation or pre-qualification. 

This could involve collecting hard data and information such as financial performance from Companies House, or it could mean looking for more tactical level information. For example, if you have a mutual contact that could make an introduction, assuming all other criteria are met, this could help push a contact to the top of the list. 

Ultimately, the method of how you build your lists and prioritise contacts should always be specific to business needs and circumstances. 

Planning Activity

The first point to raise, and one I feel often gets overlooked, is that ABM activity doesn’t have to be expensive. It could be as simple as connecting with your prospects on LinkedIn and running a regular series of content. 

The biggest point when planning your activity is to have a very clear view on what problems your prospects are trying to solve, and of those problems which ones might be underserved, and what exactly are you trying to gain? 

On this last point, if your ambition is to simply remain regularly present and visible (a perfectly good goal for ABM), then this will require a different type of content to a campaign designed to make contact. 

You can then set about planning creative and content that ties directly into your campaign objectives. This could be a series of videos, podcast episodes, LinkedIn posts, articles, whitepapers etc. It’s about find the right match for your goals AND available levels of budget and resource.

One very good option for promoting your content is to use ‘Thought Leader’ ads on LinkedIn. By doing this, you can ensure that your small and focused target audience regularly sees your content, but unlike other ad formats on LinkedIn, thought leader ads present the content as posted by yourself rather than a business. 

Despite LinkedIn’s often talked about costs, it plays very nicely with an ABM approach, and given audiences for ABM campaigns are often far smaller than broader marketing campaigns, most advertisers can afford the premium cost of the traffic in return for a very efficient and effective set up. 

Hopefully the above is good food for thought if you’re planning to work on an ABM campaign. As ever, if you’d like some help or a chat about your campaigns, please do feel free to get in touch here.