Account Based Marketing Best Practices: 5 Proven Strategies for B2B

Imagine identifying your top potential clients with laser precision, crafting personalised messages that speak directly to their challenges, and engaging them across multiple channels—all seamlessly aligned between your sales and marketing teams. This is the power of Account-Based Marketing (ABM) when done right.

But getting it right takes more than just strategy; it requires proven best practices that drive real results. In this post, we’ll dive into five game-changing ABM strategies that will elevate your B2B marketing efforts, ensuring you not only reach but also resonate with your high-value accounts.

 

Key Takeaways
Effective ABM starts with targeted account selection. Analysing your current customer base and market data helps identify accounts with the greatest growth potential.
Personalised messaging: Tailored to each account’s unique needs is essential for cutting through the noise and building strong connections.
A multi-channel engagement strategy: Increases your reach by meeting prospects where they prefer to engage, whether it’s email, social media, or events.
Close alignment between sales and marketing teams: Ensures consistent messaging and equips sales with the right tools to move prospects through the funnel.
Leveraging predictive analytics: Allows you to focus on accounts with the highest likelihood of conversion, driving better engagement and results.

 

Proven Account-Based Marketing Best Practices That Drive Results

 

Account Selection and Segmentation

In account-based marketing (ABM), precise targeting is critical, making the first step identifying and selecting the right accounts to focus on. However, rather than diving in blindly, begin by thoroughly analysing your existing customer base. Once you have a comprehensive understanding of who your current customers are, extend this analysis to the broader market. Conduct thorough market research, leveraging data-driven insights, and compare your findings with what you already know about your customers. This enables you to determine which potential accounts offer the greatest opportunity for revenue growth.

Once you’ve identified your high-potential target accounts, segmentation becomes your next priority. Start by considering broad factors like industry, company size, revenue, and purchasing behaviour. This initial top-level segmentation ensures you can tailor your approach and messaging effectively, enhancing your chances of success. As you begin to engage with these accounts, you’ll identify patterns, allowing you to refine your segmentation even further.

 

Personalised Messaging

A generic, one-size-fits-all approach simply doesn’t work in ABM. To engage effectively with your target accounts, personalised messaging is essential. This requires a deep understanding of each account’s unique pain points, challenges, and objectives. The more insight you gather, the more you can refine and personalise your communications to resonate with their specific needs.

But don’t forget—it’s the people within these accounts making the purchasing decisions. Every interaction is an opportunity to gather information that helps you personalise further. For example, if the CEO, Dave, was unavailable last week due to hiring new staff, send him a quick, digestible swipe file he can look over in his spare moments. If Claire in Marketing is hesitant after a poor experience with a previous vendor, offer her the chance to speak with one of your clients for reassurance. By addressing these individual concerns and needs, your personalised messages will cut through the noise, making a real impact and establishing a meaningful connection.

 

Multi-Channel Engagement

The days of relying on a single channel to reach your target accounts are over. In today’s highly connected digital landscape, a multi-channel engagement strategy is essential to ensure you’re meeting your audience where they prefer to engage. This includes email, social media, content marketing, events, and more. By spreading your message across various channels, you increase the likelihood of engaging and converting your target accounts.

Each channel has its own tone and user expectation, so get creative with your approach. You don’t need to just post the usual corporate announcements about your latest business partnership. Consider how you can bring a little nuance and authenticity to each platform, aligning your messages with how users prefer to interact within that environment.

 

Sales and Marketing Alignment

A successful ABM strategy relies heavily on close alignment between sales and marketing teams. Both must work together to share insights, coordinate strategies, and ensure a consistent experience for target accounts. This alignment guarantees that your messaging stays consistent and that the sales team is fully equipped with the right information to move prospects through the funnel effectively.

Sales and marketing alignment has significantly improved over recent years, leading to better outcomes for many organisations. With coordinated efforts, you’re setting the stage for deeper engagement and long-term success with your target accounts.

 

Predictive Analytics

One of the most advanced tools in ABM is predictive analytics. By leveraging data and sophisticated analytics techniques, you can uncover patterns and trends that indicate which accounts are most likely to convert. This allows you to focus your efforts on the accounts with the highest potential, maximising your impact. Additionally, predictive analytics empowers you to personalise your approach even further, tailoring your messaging based on predicted behaviours and interests. The result? Higher engagement and stronger conversion rates across your key accounts.

 

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a cornerstone of effective account-based marketing best practices. By crafting and distributing content that is both valuable and highly relevant, you position your brand as a trusted thought leader in your sector, while simultaneously building credibility with your target accounts. The power of content marketing lies in its ability to address specific pain points and challenges unique to each account, positioning your solution as the most suitable option. Whether through blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, or webinars, content marketing forms a key component of successful account based marketing strategies.

However, the effectiveness of your content depends on how well you understand your audience. Your target accounts will quickly dismiss content that comes across as patronising or shallow. The feedback from our Commerce Futures Community highlights this point—your audience wants to be educated, not lectured. Focus on helping them derive greater value from your product or service rather than telling them how to do their job. A tailored, empathetic approach will always resonate better. Food for thought when refining your ABM content strategy.

 

Measure Results & Optimise Campaigns

No account-based marketing strategy is complete without a rigorous approach to measuring results. This step is vital for evaluating the effectiveness of your campaigns and making informed, data-driven decisions that will guide future optimisation efforts. By systematically analysing key performance indicators (KPIs), you can identify specific areas for improvement and take deliberate actions to fine-tune your campaigns.

1. Identify Key Performance Metrics
   Start by defining which KPIs are most aligned with your account based marketing best practices. Common metrics include engagement rate, conversion rate, and average deal size. Focusing on these metrics helps you assess whether your campaigns are effectively reaching the desired accounts and achieving measurable outcomes.
2. Monitor Campaign Performance
   Consistent monitoring of your campaign’s performance is essential. Review KPIs at both an account and campaign level to gain insights into how well your content resonates with individual accounts. This approach provides a broader understanding of overall campaign success and reveals granular insights into account-specific engagement.
3. Conduct A/B Testing
   To push optimisation further, consider conducting A/B tests across various marketing assets. Create two versions of an asset—be it an email or landing page—with subtle variations in design, messaging, or calls-to-action (CTAs). The results will help you determine which version resonates best with your target accounts, refining your overall ABM strategy.

• Email Subject Lines: Test different subject lines that address specific pain points or challenges.
• Landing Page Design: Experiment with layout, visuals, and CTAs to find what drives the highest conversion rates.
• Personalisation: Evaluate the impact of varying degrees of personalisation, whether by using the recipient’s name or incorporating detailed references to their company or industry.

 

Testimonials and Case Studies

One of the most powerful tools in your ABM arsenal is the strategic use of testimonials and case studies. Showcasing how companies with similar challenges have benefitted from your product or service builds trust and credibility. When targeting accounts within account based marketing strategies, highlight success stories from industries or challenges that align closely with the accounts you’re trying to win over.

Case studies and testimonials do more than just tell a story—they provide proof that your solution works in real-world situations. Prospects see themselves in the success of others, making your offering more relatable and credible.

 

Go the Extra Mile with IRL Gifts

In some cases, personalised direct mail can be a game-changer for engaging high-value accounts. Sending well-researched, thoughtful gifts can create a tangible connection with key prospects and even get the whole company talking about your brand. The key to success here is research—send something you know will resonate personally with your prospect, ensuring it’s memorable and well-received.

You can take this a step further by combining your direct mail efforts with personalised video content. Encourage your sales reps to create one short video per recipient, introducing themselves and explaining the value of the gift. These personal touches not only make your outreach more distinctive but also allow you to track engagement effectively, as you’ll know who viewed the video and engaged with your asset.

 

 

ABM Best Practices for Personalising Outreach and Engagement

 

Harness Data Without Overwhelming

Personalisation starts with effective data use. By tapping into your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, you can gather essential insights about your prospects that enable precise and meaningful outreach. Focus on gathering:

• Industry Details: Tailor your messaging to the specific challenges and trends within their sector.
• Company Size: Adjust your communication style depending on whether you are engaging with a start-up or a large corporation.
• Job Role & Key Challenges: Recognise the recipient’s role to address their decision-making influence and pain points directly.
• Past Interactions: Referencing previous exchanges or visits to your website shows you’ve done your research.

However, avoid overwhelming your prospects with too much information. Keep it targeted and relevant to their needs—this is a vital aspect of adhering to account based marketing best practices.

 

Craft Tailored Subject Lines

Your subject line is the gateway to engagement—it determines whether your prospect opens the email or ignores it. Personalisation here is key, so avoid generic intros. Consider these approaches:

• Reference a shared contact: “Following up on [Mutual Contact]’s recommendation…”
• Highlight a key pain point: “Addressing inefficiencies in [Industry] sales.”
• Point out a relevant trend: “Leveraging [Industry Trend] with Salesloop.io.”
• Ask a specific question: “Is [Challenge] still holding back your team?”

An engaging subject line is critical for setting the tone of your outreach, aligning perfectly with best practices for ABM.

 

Go Beyond Name Recognition: Personalise with Depth

Personalisation should not end with a simple name check—it needs to demonstrate a clear understanding of the recipient’s unique circumstances. Incorporate meaningful details throughout the body of your email for maximum impact.

• Celebrate a recent milestone: “We noticed your achievement with [Company Milestone]—congratulations!”
• Reference specific content they engaged with: “I saw you recently showed interest in our blog on [Topic]…”
• Directly address a key need: “Given your industry, we believe Salesloop.io can support you with [Specific Need]…”

This level of personalisation builds trust and engages your audience, forming a key element of account based marketing strategies.

 

Comprehensive Strategies for Personalised Engagement

Utilising Data Analytics
Data analytics provides a wealth of information that helps you understand customer behaviours, preferences, and patterns. This insight is crucial in delivering personalised experiences that resonate.

By analysing data from various customer touchpoints—such as website interactions, purchase history, and social media engagement—you gain a deeper understanding of their needs. The key is to transform this raw data into actionable insights, guiding your content creation and engagement strategies to ensure relevance.

Steps to leverage data analytics for personalisation:

• Collect data from multiple customer interactions.
• Analyse these data points to uncover behavioural patterns.
• Use these insights in real time to adjust your engagement strategies.

Data analytics ensures you deliver a targeted experience that evolves alongside customer behaviour, making your communications not only appealing but highly relevant.

Leveraging AI for Customer Insights
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a powerful tool for enhancing personalised engagement. AI rapidly analyses large datasets to provide actionable insights into customer behaviours and preferences, enabling you to personalise interactions with greater precision.

Here are practical ways to use AI for personalisation:

• Implement machine learning algorithms to predict customer preferences and tailor interactions accordingly.
• Use natural language processing to analyse customer inquiries and respond with contextually accurate, personalised answers.
• Create intelligent conversation paths that adapt based on previous interactions and current interests.

This dynamic approach ensures every customer interaction is personal and engaging, aligning perfectly with account based marketing best practices.

Segmenting the Audience
Audience segmentation divides your customer base into distinct groups based on shared characteristics, such as demographics, behaviours, or purchase history. This segmentation is essential for personalising communication, allowing you to craft messages that are far more likely to engage each group.

Key benefits of audience segmentation:

• It ensures personalised communication, enhancing customer satisfaction and engagement.
• It increases the relevance of your messaging, thereby driving higher conversion rates.

Steps for effective segmentation:

• Identify key characteristics that differentiate customer groups, such as age, location, or buying behaviour.
• Develop detailed customer personas that reflect these traits, guiding your content and messaging strategies.
• Deliver targeted content that appeals to each segment’s specific needs and interests, ensuring your engagement efforts hit the mark.

Personalised Marketing Communications
Personalised marketing is about delivering tailored communications that reflect individual customer preferences and behaviours. This approach can include anything from customised email campaigns to personalised web content designed for specific visitors.

To effectively personalise your marketing communications:

• Implement dynamic email campaigns, where the content adapts based on the recipient’s previous interactions and data.
• Introduce personalised video messages that respond directly to a visitor’s actions on your website, ensuring continued engagement with your brand.

This level of personalisation enhances the connection between you and your customer, fostering trust and loyalty—a crucial part of any account based marketing strategy.

 

How to Align Sales and Marketing Teams Around ABM Best Practices

 

Meet Regularly

Effective collaboration between sales and marketing starts with prioritising regular communication. By meeting consistently, you can break down silos and ensure both teams are aligned. Here are a few essential steps:

• Onboarding Sales Reps with Smarketing Meetings: When a new salesperson joins, it’s vital to hold an initial “smarketing” meeting. This provides an opportunity to share key processes, resources, and account based marketing best practices. It also helps clarify how marketing will support sales in achieving shared goals. For larger teams, a monthly onboarding session ensures everyone stays on the same page.
• Attend Weekly Sales Meetings: Marketers should regularly attend sales team meetings to stay informed about quota progress and offer support where needed. This is also an excellent chance to share upcoming campaigns, promotions, and content, as well as gather insights and ideas from the sales team for future marketing initiatives.
• Monthly Meetings with Sales Managers: Sales and marketing managers must meet monthly to analyse results and review their service-level agreements (SLAs). Key metrics like lead generation, marketing qualified leads (MQLs), and conversion rates should be on the agenda, enabling both teams to refine their approach based on performance.
• Socialise at Events: Attending industry events or casual office gatherings together is another way to foster closer relationships between sales and marketing. These opportunities help build rapport in a more informal setting, reinforcing collaboration and trust outside the traditional work environment.

Create a Team Email
Set up a shared email alias for both sales and marketing teams. This allows important information to be shared easily between the two departments and facilitates external communication when necessary. It ensures both teams remain informed and connected, reinforcing account based marketing strategies in practice.

 

Define Your Content Creation Process

Sales reps are often in the best position to understand what excites leads about your product or service, but they rarely have time to document these insights. Marketing can help by developing a formal process for capturing this feedback:

• Brainstorm During Weekly Meetings: Dedicate five minutes in each sales meeting to gather content ideas or feedback on what prospects are interested in. This collaborative approach strengthens the bond between teams and ensures marketing content is tailored to real-world insights.
• Shared Google Document: Create a shared spreadsheet where sales reps can quickly add ideas or references for content creation. This system keeps the communication channels open, ensuring the latest insights are captured and acted upon promptly.

Coordinate Content Marketing with Sales

For effective account based marketing best practices, sales must be kept in the loop on current marketing initiatives. Coordination is key to ensuring they are equipped with the right information when speaking to prospects.

• Shared Promotion Calendar: Create a Google Calendar that includes every upcoming promotion, such as email campaigns, webinars, or social media initiatives. Include talking points, URLs, and a brief description for each event, and invite your sales team to access this calendar. This way, they can stay updated and prepared to engage with leads.
• Email Campaign Information to Sales: After each offer is launched, email the sales team with key talking points, lead lists, and a “quote of the week” they can use in conversations. The talking points should summarise the main benefits of the offer, while the quote provides relevant, data-driven insights to keep conversations fresh and up-to-date.
• Follow-up Email Templates: Build specific follow-up email templates for sales reps to use after promotions. These should directly address the offer and explain how your product or service can meet the prospect’s current needs.

Set Shared Goals

Historically, sales and marketing have focused on different KPIs, often working towards separate goals. However, a successful account based marketing strategy requires shared objectives. Identify KPIs that both teams can influence, such as conversion rates or lead value, and ensure these are central to your strategy. This approach fosters accountability and unity, allowing both teams to work together toward mutual success.

Share Reporting and Analysis

Both sales and marketing teams should openly share the metrics they track and analyse. By collaborating on their insights, teams can uncover valuable information from seemingly unrelated KPIs, improving their approach to best practices for ABM. For example, marketing might identify trends that inform better lead nurturing, while sales could pinpoint specific pain points during conversations with prospects. Sharing these insights helps both teams continuously improve their strategies.

 

Continuous Improvement Techniques for Refining ABM Over Time

 

1. Adopt Cross-Functional Teams

The adoption of cross-functional teams is becoming increasingly common in both startups and large enterprises, and for good reason. These teams enable faster and more agile work processes, providing a strong foundation for continuous improvement.

In traditional marketing structures, teams are often siloed, with specialists focusing on specific areas such as email marketing, communications, or creative. While specialisation has its benefits, this approach limits cross-departmental collaboration and prevents a broader understanding of other roles within the organisation. Cross-functional teams, on the other hand, bring together diverse expertise and allow individuals to contribute across different areas, not just their core function.

This collaborative structure fosters a dynamic environment where specialists can expand their skills beyond their initial focus, evolving into T-shaped professionals. To truly embrace account based marketing best practices, encourage your employees to develop capabilities in multiple areas, enabling them to make more strategic contributions wherever they’re most needed.

2. Employee Engagement

For continuous improvement to succeed, employee engagement is critical. Training staff to adopt continuous improvement methodologies such as Six Sigma or Lean can empower them to identify inefficiencies and drive innovation in their day-to-day tasks.

A prime example of this is the famous Post-it Note invention at 3M, where a frontline worker turned a simple idea into a global product through experimentation and innovation. Encouraging such a mindset within your teams can lead to breakthroughs that significantly enhance your ABM efforts.

3. Process Transparency

Transparency is vital for identifying bottlenecks and waste within your processes. By visualising workflows—using tools such as Kanban boards—you can identify areas where delays frequently occur and take steps to streamline these processes.

Clear visualisation of processes allows teams to spot inefficiencies early, improving both speed and effectiveness, essential components of account based marketing strategies focused on long-term growth.

4. Feedback Mechanisms

Effective feedback systems are crucial for capturing valuable insights from employees, who often have first-hand experience with process challenges. Regular brainstorming sessions or suggestion boxes can create a culture of continuous improvement where every team member feels empowered to contribute.

At Adobe, for example, the ‘Kickbox’ initiative provides employees with a box full of resources to develop their ideas, embodying the principle of continuous improvement. Implementing similar mechanisms can ensure your team continually seeks ways to enhance performance within your ABM framework.

5. Reward and Recognition

Recognising and rewarding improvements is a powerful motivator. When employees see their efforts acknowledged, they’re more likely to continue seeking out new ways to enhance their work. Google’s ‘20% time’—where employees spend one day a week on side projects—has led to groundbreaking innovations like Gmail and AdSense.

Incorporating a system that celebrates employee-driven improvements can lead to innovations that drive your best practices for ABM forward, helping you to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive market.

6. Customer-Centric Approach

Continuous improvement should always align with enhancing customer satisfaction. Amazon is an excellent example of this, consistently innovating with customer-centric solutions such as one-click shopping and personalised recommendations. These initiatives not only improve customer satisfaction but also contribute to long-term loyalty.

Incorporating a customer-focused lens into your continuous improvement strategy ensures that every innovation adds tangible value to your customers, a core principle of successful account based marketing strategies