How to Plan an ABM Strategy Step by Step

Do you think account-based marketing might be right for your B2B business but you're not sure how to design and develop an ABM strategy?

After having listed the key benefits of ABM and seen how ABM and Inbound can act in a complementary way, we will help you define an account-based marketing strategy step by step.

1 - Ensure organizational alignment around ABM

Before we start defining the specific tactics that will make up your account-based marketing strategy, it's crucial that internal teams are on the same page when it comes to ABM.

This will enable your company to create a more consistent, holistic and therefore more efficient ABM strategy. In practice, this alignment means that professionals - marketing and sales professionals - know who will be directly involved in developing the strategy, what resources and budget are required, what objectives and KPIs will be monitored, among others.

2 - Building your ABM team

Following the previous step, it is necessary to identify who will be directly involved in the account-based marketing strategy, typically professionals from the marketing and sales departments.

These stakeholders will be responsible, on the one hand, for the creation of contents and campaigns that will impact the target accounts and then, on the other hand, for the commercial interactions with potential customers.

3 - Identify your target accounts

The third step in an ABM strategy is to identify the high-value accounts that will be targeted by account-based marketing tactics.

Some tips for this choice might be: look for profiles of your ideal client on LinkedIn; choose target accounts based on specific industries or geographic location (those that are a better fit for your business); build on past business that has gone well and been important to your company and then look for profiles of similar clients (industry, company size, etc); analyse any leads that are already engaged with your company.

4 - Attracting high quality accounts

Once the target accounts have been identified, it is time to start impacting the different stakeholders with decision-making power (buying roles) within those accounts.

And here the key element is personalization. By developing content and resources that are highly customized to the reality of the organization you want to attract, you will increase the awareness of your business and position it as a possible solution to solve a certain need of that target account.

This can be done through social media engagement, through targeted campaigns or inMail messages on LinkedIn, by communicating useful content on channels relevant to the target accounts (media, social media, blogs, website, etc), by holding events, by sending personalized communications to existing leads, among other actions.

5 - Building relationships of trust with the different stakeholders

Once you have attracted high-value accounts through your marketing actions, you now need to establish relationships of trust that involve different buying roles. In this context, keep in mind that this engagement phase can take months or even years!

These solid, trusting relationships can be developed through interactions that communicate the value of your product/service, through highly personalized content that demonstrates your company's authority in your business area, and through a whole host of 1:1 communications and meetings that contribute to that consistency and relevance.