This article was originally published in the Elevate Your Marketing newsletter and has been repurposed and republished here with the author’s permission. Here is the link to the original article. 

Account Based Marketing or ABM continues to be the focus for many B2B companies in 2023. While spray and pray methods bring in a large volume of leads, they fail the test in meeting the desired quality. Hence, there is no surprise why ABM and ABX (Account Based Experience) are creating a buzz.

But is ABM only about sending email campaigns, conducting roundtables, and running LinkedIn ads? Is personalization limited to using the recipient’s first and last names in emails?

In this blog post, we shatter many of these conventional beliefs about ABM. More importantly, we will discuss how to ‘think ABM’ across the marketing and sales funnel (and not just the middle or bottom of the funnel). In that sense, this blog post touches upon multiple dimensions of ABM. So, buckle yourself up for an enriching read.

Before we start

ABM is a topic that I have touched upon multiple times in other articles. I recommend that you check them out if you wish to learn more about some of the other dimensions of ABM. Here are the links to the articles:

What is account based marketing and what is an ABM platform?

The benefits of using an ABM platform

Why [And How] ABM And SEO Should Work Together

Account Based Marketing Strategies: 12 Ways To Find Target Accounts

Setting the context in detail

To most B2B marketers today, ABM is about sending emails to their target accounts. At best, they would follow up those emails with cold calls.

Then there are more advanced B2B marketers who think a little beyond emails. They start with creating awareness among their accounts – mostly using LinkedIn ads. They also leverage offline events to set up meetings with potential customers. These techniques are combined with emails and cold calling to continue nurturing and engaging the leads.

While the second method is more effective than the first, that too lacks the ‘reach’ the modern B2B buyer journey demands (check out the article on multi-dimensional funnel to learn how the modern B2B buying journey has changed).

A Gartner research finds that when B2B buyers are considering a purchase‚ they spend only 17% of that time meeting with potential suppliers. In addition, B2B buyers are increasingly turning to communities, organic social media content, peer suggestions, etc., for selecting a supplier or vendor.

This shift in buying behavior requires you to be ‘present’ where your potential customers are. And that’s not limited to LinkedIn ads or emails. You need to ‘expand the horizon’ of your ABM efforts to create a marketing plan that will help you to get seen on those platforms.

Expanding the horizon of Account Based Marketing

When we discuss ABM, the narrative is usually around making your efforts super-targeted. It involves selecting a narrow set of accounts and running campaigns to them. While this works for the middle and bottom of the funnel, it is not as effective for creating demand at the top of the funnel. And we see this as a huge gap in ABM today.

This is not to say that you should stop having that laser-sharp focus. This is rather to force you to think in the direction of expanding your target bucket from specific accounts to certain types of accounts when it comes to creating demand.

Let me explain.

In this approach, you do two things in parallel:

1. Continue with your targeted approach to a select list of accounts
2. Reach these and similar accounts that might be interested in what you offer using other channels like communities, organic social media, LinkedIn Live, etc.

What do I mean by hyper-personalization here?

Let’s not deviate from the title of this article. As I mentioned, the idea of this new approach is to plan every marketing activity and create every piece of content as if they are targeted at your ideal customer profile or account. Even this is ABM.

But the question is, how can you personalize your campaigns and content for all these accounts?

The thing is, personalization doesn’t always have to be for one person. I think the concept of writing copy or creating content for 1 person – that many copywriters are a big proponent of – is not a scalable approach. You can personalize for a segment of your audience or a group of accounts too. Hyper personalization means you personalize the message to all the accounts or individuals you want to target in all possible ways. We will look at more examples of this as we go into the details.

Hyper-personalized ABM throughout the funnel

Whenever I describe an approach, I break it down into multiple easy-to-understand steps. Let us do it the same way this time as well. As we see it, there are 7 steps to creating a hyper-personalized ABM approach for the entire marketing and sales funnel:

7 steps to creating a hyper-personalized ABM approach

1. Deep account and ICP research and understanding
2. Crafting the right positioning and messaging
3. Identifying the top of the funnel, middle of the fennel, and bottom of the funnel channels for ‘showing up.’
4. Designing the right funnel or sequence of channels
5. Listing down personalization elements
6. Creating truly personalized content
7. Building a supporting tech stack for personalization

1. Deep account and ICP research and understanding

This is fundamental to not just ABM but almost every activity in marketing and sales, and business in general. But here, one of the key objectives is to identify elements of personalization by deeply understanding your potential customers.

Some of the pieces of information you need to find out and list down are:

• Firmographic criteria of your target accounts: revenue, industry, sub-industry, region, number of employees, etc.
• Funding/IPO details (relevant for startups and early-stage businesses)
• IT budget (relevant in the case of a company selling IT solutions): this involves defining a range – say, companies with a minimum IT spend of $5M per year.
• The key decision makers and influencers in your target accounts.
• Their pain points with respect to what problem your products or services solve: you can have different pain points stated for different categories or segments. This could also change based on the individual persona you target.

Remember, here we are not going deep into every individual account. Rather, we are trying to find segments of your target audience with common characteristics and group them into logical categories.

2. Crafting the right positioning and messaging for account based marketing

This, again, is not an activity specific to ABM alone. But this is one of the foundational elements of account based marketing. If you have to hyper-personalize your ABM efforts, you need to first know where your products or services stand in the market.

1. What are the unique features and benefits your solution brings to the table?
2. How will they positively impact your customers’ lives?
3. Why is it better than what some of your competitors offer?

You need to answer these questions to position yourself in the market so that you stand out. As you do this, keep step #1 in mind. In fact, you can perform both steps in parallel.

If your solution requires you to position it differently for different target segments, do that too.

3. Identifying the top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel channels for ‘showing up’

When we say you need to find channels for each stage of the funnel, it doesn’t necessarily mean you need to bucketise them. Many a time, there is a thin line between them. In addition, the multi-dimensional funnel doesn’t visualize the funnel in 3 different layers.