hAD enough of"spray and pray"paid marketing campaigns?

ABM stands for Account Based Marketing solutions. It’s a strategic approach in B2B marketing used to target specific accounts with highly personalized motions in order to lead them down the funnel. At Envy, as an ABM agency, we help tech companies reach scary goals by shifting their focus from lead quantity to target account quality.

Account Based Marketing solutions are especially beneficial when your aim is to close deals faster and drive a higher ROI. It allows companies to allocate funds to target specific companies that meet their ideal customer profile. Then they can target relevant and specific content at these companies to raise awareness and slowly bring them down the funnel to conversion. This is where ABM differs from other B2B marketing strategies, like lead generation, which focus on attracting wider groups of leads. Read more about ABM vs. traditional approaches.

Many people make the mistake of measuring their Account Based Marketing motions on how many leads they generate. But since ABM is all about targeting highly specific accounts which should ideally have engaged with you in the past and be on your CRM, like HubSpot, already. And when you know who your leads are, the aim is engagement with these leads –  through organic or paid user acquisition campaigns, lots of tailored content, email marketing etc.

So which ABM KPIs should you look for? Ultimately, you are looking for shorter sales cycles and ROI; following on from that, your indicators for successful AMB campaigns are higher engagement with your content and activities. If you are sending your target audience to your website you want to be monitoring their time on blog/time on site and conversion rate. If you’re sending out emails, you want to monitor the open and response rates.

Something we’re paying attention to as an ABM agency, KPIs will be quite different depending on which stage of the funnel you’re looking at, for example bottom of the funnel KPIs can be the time to close the deal, the length of the sales cycle, and the volume of the deal.

With well executed ABM solutions (and that’s where an ABM agency comes in 😉), you should expect to see a shorter sales cycle and higher engagement.

We’re an ABM agency, of course we’ll recommend our account based marketing services–but we actually wouldn’t recommend restricting to account based marketing only. If the time is right, definitely devote a significant proportion of your budget to it BUT also run general awareness campaigns too. Why? Because then you expand your reach and awareness beyond these companies, building your audience for the future.

Sales <> Marketing <> C-level Alignment. This is something that we’ve been seeing a lot as an agency. The three teams need to work in unison on ensuring that only the targeted ICPs are engaged and measured. Without it your ABM campaigns are doomed to failure, so start working on that from day 1 and you will see your chances of success rise significantly. We’ve written more about other reasons why your Account Based Marketing tactics might fail here.

ABM works best when you have a select number of accounts that you choose to target and you target well. This means the list of target accounts should be in the low 1000s (max); you want to be able to keep the messaging as personalized as possible.

To run a successful Account Based Marketing campaign, you’ll need (minimum) a CRM like HubSpot, website visit analytics like LeadFeeder, person-based ads software like Influ2, data tools like ZoomInfo and of course, a platform to publish the ads on, like LinkedIn, X, Google. Those are your baseline and then the list could go on and on….. We’ve written more about ABM on HubSpot here.