account-based marketing (ABM)

What is account-based marketing (ABM)?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a business-to-business (B2B) strategy that focuses sales and marketing resources on target accounts within a specific market.

Instead of broad-reaching marketing campaigns that touch the largest possible number of prospective customers, an ABM strategy focuses resources for the book of business on a defined set of named accounts. Then, marketing team focus all their resources, budget and campaigns against the very specific list of target accounts to directly support sales efforts.

Why is ABM important?

An important goal of ABM is to identify employees at a specific company who are researching products and services, and then customize sales programs and marketing messages to meet their needs.

In the past, an ABM strategy was expensive. It required a lot of work and many components had tasks that needed to be done manually. Now, however, any company that uses marketing automation technology and customer relationship management (CRM) software can automate much of the tedious, time-consuming work involved in mining customer data and personalizing marketing messages to meet the specific needs of the named account that is being targeted.

In addition to traditional email promotions, ABM personalization may require content marketing, which involves creating and sharing information that is relevant to the potential customer's business and stage in the buyer journey.

Benefits of account-based marketing

One of the benefits of an ABM strategy is that it makes it easier for a vendor or service provider to see how money the company spends on marketing translates directly to closed sales and revenue.

By aligning sales and marketing resources and targeting accounts have been pre-qualified, an added benefit is that marketers begin to think more like sales representatives, focusing attention on the best way to bring a potential customer to the table and generate revenue.

How account-based marketing works

Although each business that initiates ABM will focus attention on the needs of their specific customer base, these parts of the process are common to all:

• Align sales and marketing teams.
• Mine data to identify named accounts.
• Determine who the decision makers and influencers are at the named account.
• Personalize messaging to address the named account's business challenges and needs.
• Identify which communication channels will be used to message the named account.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of messaging and sales efforts and make adjustments as necessary.

Editor's note: This article was written by Lauren Horwitz in 2016. TechTarget editors revised it in 2023 to improve the reader experience.

Editor's note: TechTarget offers ABM and project intelligence data, tools and services.