Account based marketing (ABM) has become an indispensable strategy for B2B companies looking to increase sales and revenue. ABM focuses marketing efforts on targeted accounts rather than scattering resources across a broad audience.
According to ITSMA, 96% of marketers say ABM provides a higher ROI than other marketing methods.
But not all ABM strategies are created equal. There are three main types of account based marketing, each with their own approaches:
- One-to-one marketing: Strategic ABM
- One-to-few marketing: ABM Lite
- Programmatic ABM
In this comprehensive 2,300+ word guide, we‘ll explore examples and use cases of these 3 types of ABM to help you determine the right approach for your B2B organization in 2024 and beyond.
A Detailed Look at Account Based Marketing
Before diving into the specific ABM models, let‘s take a step back to understand what account based marketing is and why it‘s valuable.
What is Account Based Marketing?
Account based marketing represents a significant shift from traditional inbound marketing tactics. Instead of creating broad content aimed at large groups of anonymous website visitors, ABM focuses on identifying and targeting your ideal customers proactively.
ABM typically involves:
- Conducting in-depth research on your ideal customer profiles
- Identifying and prioritizing target accounts
- Creating highly-customized campaigns and content for those accounts
- Coordinating sales and marketing efforts on targeted outreach
This approach allows you to focus energy and resources on the accounts most likely to become customers.
The Value of an ABM Approach
Research shows that ABM delivers significantly higher returns compared to scattered, generic marketing. According to ITSMA:
- 9 out of 10 marketers say ABM provides higher ROI than any other approach
- 66% of marketers see at least 5x higher ROI with ABM vs traditional methods
- Companies using ABM are 2x as likely to exceed revenue goals
Additional benefits of ABM include:
- Shorter sales cycles due to highly qualified leads
- Ability to engage elusive prospects by targeting them directly
- More predictable pipeline and reduced revenue volatility
- Higher deal sizes and share of wallet in existing accounts
- Customized messaging that resonates with each account
Given these advantages, it‘s no wonder ABM adoption has steadily risen:
Now let‘s explore the three types of account based marketing in more detail.
One-to-One Marketing: Strategic ABM
Strategic ABM represents the most intensive and customized type of ABM. It focuses on nurturing relationships with a very small number of high-value, existing accounts.
How Strategic ABM Works
With strategic ABM, your sales and marketing teams collaborate to identify just 1-5 total accounts to target. These are often large, enterprise-level customers that already buy from you.
Your goal is to build loyalty and increase sales within these accounts. To do this, you develop hyper-targeted marketing campaigns tuned specifically to each account.
Hyper-targeted marketing involves:
- Conducting deep research into each account through social media monitoring, persona development, and more
- Crafting customized messaging that speaks directly to each account‘s needs
- Timing content delivery to when the target contacts are most likely to engage
- Leveraging incentives and offers tailored to the account
Because strategic ABM focuses on so few accounts, it often takes months or years to execute each campaign. Significant time and resources go into understanding the target companies and contacts inside and out.
The Benefits of Strategic ABM
Hyper-targeted, high-touch strategic ABM offers a wealth of benefits, such as:
- Deeper account penetration: Increase sales by identifying new champions and use cases within accounts
- Improved retention: Build lasting loyalty through VIP treatment and custom value
- Higher deal sizes: Strategic accounts drive bigger contracts; land expansion revenue
- Richer insights: Discover granular intelligence to continually refine targeting
For example, LinkedIn boosted retention by 10% and increased deal sizes by over 25% using strategic ABM. Such results demonstrate the value of nurturing strategic accounts.
Strategic ABM Example: GumGum
GumGum utilized strategic ABM to market its contextual advertising technology to wireless provider T-Mobile.
The company researched T-Mobile‘s executives on social media and discovered that CEO John Legere was a huge Batman fan. GumGum decided to leverage this insight creatively.
They developed an original Batman comic featuring a hero named T-Man who rid the city of bad wireless service, aided by his sidekick Gums. The comic incorporated GumGum‘s image recognition technology to bring its capabilities to life.
By tapping into Legere‘s passion for Batman, GumGum created a memorable campaign that humanized their brand. The CEO loved it:
I love this!! Thank you @GumGum for making this epic comic book about @TMobile. Go #Tman!!! https://t.co/ygzWVS947d pic.twitter.com/wFp8CAiGz1
— John Legere (@JohnLegere) November 29, 2016
This creative, highly-tailored campaign exemplifies strategic ABM at its best. When done well, strategic ABM forges lasting connections with accounts that drive sales over the long-term.
When to Use Strategic ABM
Since strategic ABM requires extensive resources, it‘s best suited to these situations:
- You‘re an enterprise-level company with existing high-value accounts
- Your sales cycles are long and complex (6+ months)
- You have the budget, staff, and capabilities to devote months to a single account
- Your goal is account retention and loyalty vs. net-new acquisition
The high-touch, hyper-targeted nature of strategic ABM delivers results under these conditions. It may not be feasible for smaller businesses or those seeking shorter sales cycles.
Strategic ABM Campaign Best Practices
To maximize success with strategic ABM, keep these best practices in mind:
- Get executive buy-in: Strategic ABM needs cross-departmental collaboration with shared goals.
- Clarify ideal account criteria: Define must-have firmographic, technographic, and intent factors.
- Map key buyers: Identify champion users, decision makers, and influencers within each account.
- Personalize across channels: Orchestrate tailored messaging across email, ads, site experiences, and more.
- Leverage intent data: Detect research signals to deliver hyper-targeted content.
- Continuously optimize: Use feedback and analytics to refine campaign elements.
With the right foundation in place, strategic ABM strengthens relationships with your most valuable existing customers.
One-to-Few Marketing: ABM Lite
For companies with smaller marketing budgets, ABM Lite offers a scaled-down version of strategic ABM. Also known as programmatic ABM, this approach targets a select group of accounts vs. just a single one.
How ABM Lite Works
With ABM Lite, you select 5-10 targeted accounts that share common attributes like:
- Industry
- Company size
- Tech stack
- Business challenges
You then segment these accounts and develop slightly customized content for each group. While not as tailored as strategic ABM, this content still speaks directly to the accounts‘ needs.
For example, you may create different nurture tracks for retail accounts versus manufacturing accounts. Or send different content to small businesses compared to enterprises.
ABM Lite in Action
Let‘s look at how Microsoft adopted an effective ABM Lite strategy:
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They identified mid-market companies as a strategic target account segment.
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They grouped these accounts by industry, like retail and healthcare.
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They created customized content, offers, and campaigns for each industry group.
While not personalized 1:1, this approach allowed Microsoft to efficiently engage hundreds of accounts with relevant messaging. They saw a 38% increase in deal conversion rates compared to generic marketing.
The Benefits of ABM Lite
An ABM Lite approach can deliver significant advantages:
- Wider reach: Engage more accounts than 1:1 ABM.
- Scalability: Requires less customization effort per account.
- Consistency: Send coordinated messages across segments.
- Cost efficiency: Gets more mileage from content assets.
For companies seeking an entry-level ABM strategy, ABM Lite strikes a balance between personalization and scale.
When to Use ABM Lite
ABM Lite works best for these situations:
- You want to target more than a handful of accounts
- Your accounts share common attributes like industry, company size, etc.
- You have a decent marketing budget but lack resources for 1:1 personalization
- Your sales cycles are shorter term (1-3 months)
Scaling ABM to a small group of accounts provides better ROI than mass blasting content. But it’s more affordable than tailoring everything for individual companies.
One-to-Many Marketing: Programmatic ABM
At the other end of the spectrum from strategic ABM, programmatic ABM takes an automated approach to account targeting. This expands ABM to thousands of accounts using segmentation and automation.
How Programmatic ABM Works
Programmatic ABM relies on leveraging account data to categorize accounts automatically based on attributes like:
- Firmographics (industry, employees, revenue)
- Technographics (tech stack, tools)
- Engagement data (web activity)
- Intent signals
Once accounts are grouped, you can deliver tailored content aligned to each segment automatically via your tech stack.
For example, you may target accounts in the retail industry with content specific to their needs and pain points. Or send certain nurture tracks to accounts that have visited pricing pages on your site.
Programmatic ABM automates the process of assigning accounts to segments and customizing their experiences. This allows you to execute ABM at a much larger scale than manual approaches.
Programmatic ABM in Action
Here is an example of how VMware utilized programmatic ABM successfully:
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They identified IT infrastructure upgrade as a key challenge for customers.
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They targeted 10,000 accounts showing research behavior on new infrastructure solutions.
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They delivered tailored content to these accounts promoting VMware‘s solutions.
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They automated this outreach using their CRM and marketing automation platforms.
This enabled VMware to scale specialized messaging to thousands of accounts efficiently. They drove $72 million in pipeline with this campaign.
The Benefits of Programmatic ABM
Programmatic ABM provides advantages including:
- Massive reach: Engage thousands of accounts personalized by segment.
- Efficiency: Automate tailored messaging across accounts.
- Speed to scale: Launch and iterate campaigns swiftly.
- Enriched insights: Gain collective insights from large account pools.
For companies seeking to extend ABM across their entire customer base, this approach delivers.
When to Use Programmatic ABM
The hands-off, automated nature of programmatic ABM lends itself to these use cases:
- You want to extend ABM beyond a few accounts to hundreds or thousands
- You have the data needed to segment accounts algorithmically
- Your marketing team uses automation and CRM tools
- You lack budget for highly customized 1:1 approaches
If you have the right tech stack in place, programmatic ABM brings account targeting to the next level.
Programmatic ABM Campaign Best Practices
To drive success with programmatic ABM, incorporate these best practices:
- Map the funnel: Identify key stages and metrics for your account funnel. Set targets.
- Build segments strategically: Develop segments that align to customer needs and data trends.
- Test and refine: Continuously improve account scoring models and campaign tactics.
- Orchestrate experiences: Connect messaging across channels and stages.
- Leverage intent: Detect research signals for timely outreach.
- Expand the dataset: Enrich data with second- and third-party sources.
With the right foundations and governance, programmatic ABM can scale hyper-targeted marketing exponentially.
Key Factors for Choosing an ABM Approach
With an understanding of the different types of ABM strategies now under your belt, here are some key tips on selecting the right approach:
Budget and resources – Strategic ABM costs the most given its high-touch nature. Programmatic scales much further on a budget. Know your resources.
Existing accounts – Do you already have high-value customers to nurture? Or need to land net new accounts? Your starting point matters.
Sales cycle length – Long complex sales need nurturing. Shorter sales favor automated programs.
Number of target accounts – Is your focus on individual VIPs or broad segments? Size matters.
Ideal account criteria – Are you targeting named accounts? Shared attributes and behaviors? Get clear on your focus.
Hybrid methodology – Blend Strategic ABM for VIPs with Programmatic for the long tail. Mix and match strategies.
Choosing the right ABM approach depends completely on your unique business situation and goals. But no matter where you fall on the spectrum, ABM delivers proven results when implemented effectively.
Customizing an ABM Strategy for Your Organization
Rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach, leading B2B companies customize ABM to maximize results based on their organization. Here are three examples of tailored ABM frameworks:
Cisco: VIP Account Strategy
- 12 strategic global accounts make up 25% of revenue
- Dedicated account teams for each VIP customer
- Executive engagement and advocacy programs
- Unique value and offers for key accounts
Adobe: ABM Center of Excellence
- Cross-departmental team chartered to set ABM vision
- Focus on technology, operations, analytics
- Centralized tools and consistent metrics
- Goal of scaling ABM across all segments
SAP: Loyalty Circle Program
- Circle levels based on annual recurring revenue
- Rising benefits and perks by level
- Special access to resources, events, and training
- Gamification to incentivize customer renewal and growth
Developing a customized strategic framework makes ABM even more impactful for your business.
The Future of Account Based Marketing
While account based marketing has already evolved considerably, it will continue expanding as technology progresses.
Here are two predictions on where ABM is headed next:
Integration with new data sources – Customer data platforms (CDPs), second- and third-party data, and more will enrich ABM targeting with a 360-degree view of accounts.
Omnichannel orchestration – Campaigns will become more unified across channels, leveraging connected systems and customer engagement platforms.
Predictive analytics – AI and machine learning will enable more predictive segmentation, targeting, and personalization for accounts.
Full lifecycle alignment – Sales, customer success, and product teams will increasingly align to shared account outcome metrics.
Leading businesses are already taking an omni-channel, lifecycle approach to align every customer interaction across the entire journey. This next-generation ABM will only grow more precise and effective through 2023 and beyond.
Conclusion
In today‘s crowded B2B landscape, account based marketing is more important than ever. But there are smart, strategic ways to adapt ABM to your unique business goals and budget.
The three types outlined in this 2,300+ word guide—Strategic ABM, ABM Lite, and Programmatic ABM—provide models to help you maximize revenue from your accounts.
Done right, account based marketing shifts spend from general branding to targeted, relevant interactions with priority accounts. This leads to higher conversion rates, larger deal sizes, and truly delighted customers.
To learn more ABM strategies and examples, download our complete guide:
I hope this detailed overview has provided a helpful framework for determining the right data-driven ABM approach to boost B2B sales for your organization in the year ahead. Please reach out if you have any other questions!