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. (Google Data 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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In part 1 of our Account-based marketing (ABM) series we looked at how this approach can lead to substantial return for your business. We covered the more ‘obvious’ performance metrics across sales and marketing, such as conversion rates, sales cycle length, average order value, retention rates and lifetime value. We also looked at how the insights and intelligence that an ABM approach surfaces can feed into your business to deliver a better customer experience, promote product-led growth, drive advertising revenue and support product development, continually optimising your product-market fit to stay relevant, valuable and a must-have.

Missed it? Catch up on part 1 HERE.

Now that you’re hopefully convinced that ABM can offer a multitude of benefits, let’s look at how you should approach your ABM execution in a way that works for both your business and your market.

One-size doesn’t fit all: select the right ABM approach for your needs

Many events and subscriptions marketers are already conducting a form of ABM. Sending targeted emails to specific market segments applies the basic ABM principles, or a “One-to-Many” approach. Recipients get messaging that addresses their specific challenges and needs.  You’re likely doing “One-to-Few” ABM if, for example, you’re targeting certain clients for cross-product promotional campaigns, across your events and publications. At the most advanced, you’re doing “One-to-One” ABM if you’re running a campaign to target strategically important individuals e.g. for a VIP programme or to help get sales a conversation with a key decision maker. 

Let’s deep dive into each of these a little further.

1. One-to-One ABM

With One-to-One ABM you should treat a single account with its own strategic focus. Every marketing and sales touchpoint is carefully crafted to harness the information you know about that account – which should be a lot e.g. their business model, operational infrastructure and growth aspirations.

Pros:

• This model facilitates personalisation, stronger relationships and higher conversions.
• You have a higher chance of ‘land and expand’ because of deep account knowledge – increasing the use of your product across departments, geographies, or cross-selling other products.
• You build client champions throughout the business because your offering truly delivers on their needs.

Cons:

• Personalisation to this degree can stretch resources, requiring upfront investment into research and the custom creation of emails, content, assets, microsites and more. This is why the approach needs buy-in from across the business, including senior management, so that there is an understanding that the ‘BAU’ will be affected.
• You need to balance the benefits of being laser-focused on a few high-value accounts with the potential of missing reactive opportunities simply because a company falls outside of your focus area.
• This approach doesn’t scale easily to a larger number of accounts because of the time involved to deliver a fully personalised and customised experience.

Advice for marketers:

• Make sure you ask yourself whether the benefits that One-to-One ABM could drive for your business fits with your overall strategy or your market. How sticky are customers in your industry? Can they accommodate more than one supplier in the same space?
• Only attempt this approach with a limited number of accounts at one time and where you think you could likely see results in a timeframe that works for stakeholders.
• Where you achieve success, engage with the account to gather feedback and use this to refine future attempts. Conduct comprehensive research, leveraging sales teams and key account managers who often possess in-depth knowledge.

One-to-One ABM will take investment and need time to convert but it can yield impressive returns.

2. One-to-Few ABM

For many, this will be the sweet spot between personalisation and scale, allowing accounts to be clustered based on shared characteristics or behaviours e.g. sector, turnover or employee size. You may want to group accounts to reflect the interest they have shown in your services or solutions e.g. watched a webinar but not engaged in a sales conversation.

Pros:

• It’s easier to scale this approach to several clusters. If you have multiple products, services, or markets, this allows you to replicate the campaigns that are driving success. Your marketing automation platform can likely support in doing this efficiently.
• Encourages a deeper connection with segments by being able to talk to shared pain points and offer applicable solutions.
• Being able to run a few of these segments concurrently allows for engagement comparison between similar accounts and quicker identification of successful tactics.

Cons:

• The time and resources required to understand each cluster effectively shouldn’t be underestimated.
• There is a risk of extrapolating or misinterpreting. Having lots in common doesn’t exclude two companies from having fundamental differences which impact their propensity to purchase.

Advice for marketers:

• Create a cohesive narrative for each segment, such as shared challenges, to ensure that your campaign resonates.
• Use marketing automation platforms, CRMs, analytics and AI to fine-tune segmentations.
• One-to-Few ABM is flexible so monitor campaigns closely, gather feedback, and be ready to pivot your strategies based on results.
• Collaborate with sales teams so that they can deliver additional personalisation between companies at the point of a sales conversation.

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.

3. One-to-Many ABM

This approach is still account-centric, but it uses technology to reach multiple similarly categorised accounts, often leveraging automation.

Pros:

• Of all the approaches, this offers the greatest scale – marketers can target a higher volume of contacts, across a broader set of accounts.
• Simplified asset creation makes it easier to execute campaigns at scale, thus reducing the time to market, cost and team resources needed.
• Most marketing teams are already set up in terms of technology, processes and headcount to undertake this approach of ABM.

Cons:

• True personalisation is not possible with ‘many’ targets and therefore you will likely see lower engagement and conversion rates than with the two previous approaches.
• The risk of targeting accounts with misaligned messages increases and this can be brand-damaging.
• A robust CRM is needed to manage contacts when you’re targeting multiple accounts, hence mismanagement, poor data or weak infrastructure can mislead you and result in a bad customer experience.

Advice for marketers:

• Robust data analytics will help you to identify patterns, challenges and opportunities across accounts.
• As you are working with greater data quantities, use your teams at key milestones to conduct quality checks.

This approach is the lowest ‘barrier to entry’ to starting on your ABM journey, and likely the approach that many events and media businesses are already doing. If you’re not sure where to go next, start by getting your technology to work harder for you. With this, you will garner more support from stakeholders, and practical bandwidth to experiment with the other approaches.

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These three ABM approaches are not mutually exclusive – you can deploy some or all of these at the same time depending on your market, products and of course, your resources.

You’ve likely spotted the commonality between all of these approaches, data and its usability. Quality marketing data and a robust database infrastructure are the foundations of successful ABM. If you don’t have clean and enriched data you won’t be able to accurately differentiate contacts and companies into segments. If you don’t have the data layers and automations set up that supports the flow of this data into your campaigns, your ABM efforts will require greater time and human intervention to be successful. Finally, if you don’t have the analytics specifically set up to review the performance of your ABM campaigns, you won’t have the information to optimise. One, two or all three of these factors are typical reasons why events and subscriptions marketers struggle to convince stakeholders of the benefits of investing in an ABM approach.

If you’re keen to develop your ABM capabilities but are unsure whether your data and tech stack are up to the challenge, MPG can help you to review your data and analytics, make recommendations and even train your team so you have the skills to deliver your ABM strategy.

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Account-based marketing (ABM) is a marketing approach focused on identifying, targeting and engaging a set of high-value accounts by creating personalised messaging and customer experiences. These may be current customers where you can measure and model their potential future value, or new business opportunities where market trends, customer need and product-fit indicate they should be a profitable customer.

In part 1 of our blog series about account-based marketing we’re going to look at how an ABM approach can deliver substantial return on investment.

Targeted and carefully considered interactions with your prospects and customers will have a direct impact on your performance metrics across marketing and sales. You can expect:

• Higher conversion rates: prospect to lead, and lead to sale, within your target accounts. Tailoring your approach to an account’s needs, wants and the personalities of the decision makers can drive a 25% rise in conversion rates from marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to Sales Accepted Leads (SALs)*. These accounts are much more receptive to a sales conversation with overall conversion rate improving 17% from SALs to sale*.
  
• Shorter sales cycles: your sales team can be more efficient because prospects and leads are further down the funnel when they interact. This means less time is required to sign off on a deal. 
  
• Higher average order values: when multiple decision makers and influencers throughout the business are persuaded that this purchase will deliver good value, they are more open to the idea that a greater investment means a greater return. The average order value could increase 13%*.
  
• Higher retention rates and greater lifetime value: not only will targeted messaging support efficient and successful renewal and rebook conversations, but a sophisticated ABM approach provides the intelligence that informs better product-alignment to key customers, adaptive pricing power and overall relationship management.

With these in mind, it’s clear to see how ABM, with a 28% increase in overall account engagement*, has an exciting role to play within a marketing strategy.

And appetite for ABM is growing. 39% of marketers* spent more on ABM in 2023 compared to 2022. With the rise of AI helping companies to prioritise key accounts based on demographic and behavioural data, it’s little wonder that ABM is getting a lot of interest from event and subscriptions marketers in 2024!

EVENTS: ABM helps you deliver a better event experience

ABM in events marketing should be a strategic priority. Events are unique in that the product only really ‘exists’ when everyone turns up in the room. The participants of the event are equally part of the product. 

Your attendees won’t return if ‘who’s in the room’ doesn’t meet their expectations and needs. This requires you to target the right brands, and the right individuals, many of whom are senior representatives with busy schedules and multiple similar event participation offers. ABM offers you a way to stand out from the crowd with a personalised, thoughtful touchpoint. 

Your sponsors and exhibitors won’t rebook if they don’t meet their prospects. This alignment needs to be achieved on both the company level – bringing their target accounts into the room – but also at the individual level so that you are attracting the decision makers that your commercial partners want to meet. A high volume of leads is a great start, but sponsors and exhibitors will soon question the value if they don’t build sufficient pipeline off the back of the event. If you offer inventory which allows sponsors to have smaller, more intimate or bespoke networking opportunities with delegates, then ABM is a critical lever to securing sponsorship revenue because your marketing teams likely need to deliver a wishlist of specific delegates.

SUBSCRIPTIONS & MEMBERSHIPS: ABM lays the foundation for product-led growth

ABM, when applied to subscription and membership models, supports a commercial framework for growth. Oppositely to events, it’s not the interaction between companies which is as influential, it’s the interaction within companies which is key to growth and retention. Therefore, getting your product in front of, and being used by, your Ideal Client Profiles (ICPs) is the 20% of the 80/20 rule that you want to focus on. An ABM approach has been seen to lead to 13% higher web traffic from target accounts*. 

Number of users and usage (frequency/ pageviews per visit etc.) are amongst the most important metrics to regularly monitor as they indicate the likelihood of retention and the potential change to order value at contract renewal. Whether your model is focused on volume of users and frequency of visits e.g. news-based publications; or access to the platform at key times, accompanied by depth of content e.g. consultancies utilising intelligence platforms – the commonality is that the users are deriving value from your content. This increases the internal advocacy for your product, which will be paramount at the point of renewal. The best scenario is that your content is disseminated throughout the business. This is the basis of product-led growth. A user wants to share a news article, an insights report, or key charts with colleagues, but limited licences prevent the efficient sharing of information. This can lead to mid-contract upgrades as well as an increase in the net revenue at next year’s renewal. With deeper penetration throughout the business, your product becomes stickier for that company and the Lifetime Value of the customer increases.

ADVERTISING REVENUE: ABM to drive advertising revenue

Just as delegates and sponsors are happier when there’s relevant alignment, the same goes for subscribers and advertisers. With a more targeted approach to building your readership within key accounts, sectors or industries, you have a better offering for advertisers. You can provide greater insights about the content-consumed by the prospective companies they want to be seen by and you can collaborate on advertising that will resonate. This approach can result in higher click through rates on digital advertising by up to 20%*. This may even help you increase your advertising inventory because you can achieve the necessary impressions or clicks from more targeted and personalised ad delivery to particular readers.

PRODUCT ENHANCEMENT: ABM provides intelligence to refine your offering

While ABM has a primary purpose in commercial performance – delivering greater revenue, in a shorter time frame, with greater resource efficiency – ABM can also provide intelligence and insights that allow you to further refine your product, your pricing and your promotion tactics.

By monitoring the engagement of your key target accounts – both customer and prospects – you can learn more about:

• Pricing sensitivity/ opportunity – for example, if your customers, by company, are renewing at close to 100%, this indicates that they are happy with the service and see value in your offering. There may be an opportunity to push the pricing further as this would be accommodated by your customers. 
  
• Product-market fit – if you are struggling to renew companies, or to increase prices where renewals are occurring, then you may want to reconsider your product-market fit. What product development or content innovation would offer your customers a service which they perceive greater value in?
  
• Accurate Account Targeting or ICPs – if you are churning some clients but increasing the order value with others, take the opportunity to reassess your ideal client profiles. Deep dive into those that are increasing their investment and identify their key characteristics – demographically, firmographically and their market needs. Finding lookalike clients will help improve your retention rates and prevent time being wasted on renewals of mis-aligned companies. You are now shifting more of your customers into the “20% zone” which will renew and increase their investment with a lot less input from your side.

From improving marketing and sales metrics, to enhancing product development, account-based marketing has the potential to light up your business growth in 2025.

*Stats in this article: https://www.gartner.com/en/digital-markets/insights/account-based-marketing-trends

If you need support with understanding where an ABM approach could fit within your business, or where to initially deploy it to showcase its value to stakeholders, contact MPG today. We have extensive experience with establishing ABM strategies and can help you ensure ABM achieves great results.

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