8 steps to build your account-based marketing strategy + recommended tools

A cybersecurity company turns its own name from an objection into an asset. A fintech startup rewrites the rules on SEO. The entire 2X team is smart, friendly and focused on quality deliverables . I find comfort knowing if I really need something last minute, they will be there to support my needs. Meet Aura, your always-on marketing, sales, and support team. As your business expands, send more, automate more and engage across new channels .

• Their personalized outreach, tailored to different leadership roles, increased engagement and ensured messaging resonated with key stakeholders.
• Then, you create highly personalized marketing campaigns just for those accounts.
• You can also partner with ClickUp’s built-in AI to extract account insights and create personalized campaign content faster.
• Finally, account-based marketing programs effectively give sales and marketing teams shared goals and alignment.
• While this versatile, profitable channel is often misunderstood, underused, and undervalued, the potential for success can be significant, and depends on the strategic resources marketing and sales leaders are willing to invest to make it work.

Furthermore, hosting a webinar can range in cost from $100 to $3,000, making it a relatively accessible option for many businesses. For instance, a tech company may hold a webinar centered on the most recent cybersecurity threats, showcasing industry specialists who share their insights and approaches. Webinars serve as a powerful tool for engaging target accounts by delivering valuable educational content tailored to their specific needs.

Integrated go-to-market planning means combining several of these strategies for maximum impact, and collaboration across marketing and sales teams is key. If the technologies and data needed to support ABM efforts are not connected to your broader marketing and sales platforms, you risk a disjointed customer experience and suboptimal results. This process can start by drafting an initial set of high-value target accounts, a key-account identification process, and a rich library of market-ready content to be used in personalized campaigns. This might include case studies from similar companies in their industry, white papers addressing their specific challenges, or ROI calculators using their industry benchmarks. LinkedIn is your friend here – follow your target companies and engage with content from their key stakeholders. Once you’ve defined your ICP, create a focused list of target accounts that match these criteria.

Well, it means that in account-based marketing, you select a few companies, say a 100 companies, who are the “ideal” or most profitable customers you could ever have. So here’s a primer on account-based marketing to help you understand what it is, how it’s done, if you should do it, and the tools you’ll need. And most of the marketers (85%) who use it find it to have higher returns than any other marketing approach they use … with about half of them reporting “significantly higher” ROI. 92% of B2B marketers find account-based marketing (or ABM) “extremely important in their overall marketing efforts.“ Done correctly, ABM can unite sales and marketing teams, increase ROI, maximize customer value, and attract the kind of customers you can confidently service for many years to come.

Promotion includes tactics that encourage short-term purchase, influence trial and quantity of purchase, and are very measurable in volume, share and profit. It helps marketers with lead generation, brand awareness, relationship building and more. Describes an unconventional and creative strategy intended to get maximum results from minimal resources. Nicknamed “viral” because the number of people exposed to a message mimics the process of passing a virus or disease from one person to another. With this, a brand inspires or compensates influencers (which can include celebrities, content creators, customer advocates, and employees) to get the word out on their behalf. This focuses on leveraging individuals who have influence over potential buyers and orienting activities around these individuals to drive a brand message to the larger market.

Many ABM teams use direct mail as a way to differentiate themselves from competitors and to capture the attention of their prospects. Account-based marketing tends to work best when you get a little creative and work outside the standard marketing conventions in today’s digital world. With this knowledge in hand, GumGum created an account-based marketing campaign that involved commissioning a custom comic book to play on that fact.

It enables teams to work together effectively, sharing insights, data, and strategies to create a cohesive, impactful customer journey. They expect vendors to understand their unique challenges and offer tailored solutions. It's a targeted, personalized approach that recognizes the unique needs of each account and creates bespoke marketing experiences that resonate. You'll discover how to identify and prioritize target accounts, develop personalized content, and align your sales and marketing teams for maximum impact. As more businesses recognize the power of ABM, the demand for effective strategies and tools continues to grow. Because that is the secret to doing ABM successfully — so that you can impress your prospects with every interaction and build the foundation for a long-lasting customer relationship.

Don’t forget about operations

Most importantly, pipeline and revenue impact (measured by ABM-influenced deals and conversion rates) determine the real return on investment. Account progression metrics also show how far targeted accounts move down the sales funnel, revealing whether your strategy effectively nurtures prospects. Now, let’s see how to choose channels based on the different buying stages. Email automation and AI-driven personalization allow businesses to scale ABM outreach efficiently while keeping engagement timely, relevant, and high-impact.

Get marketing and sales teams aligned

Or, if you don’t want to create individual landing pages, consider using dynamic landing pages. For example, you can use a free landing page builder to create landing pages for each target account. If you're not sure how to figure out all stakeholders or map specific roles, start with communication tracking.

Marketing and Sales Team Collaboration by Salsify

When I talked with Davidson and Wingrove, both stressed that in a comprehensive approach to ABM, marketing and sales must be on the same page. Aligning your sales and marketing team is critical for the success of your ABM strategies. To get started, let’s cover the framework for account-based marketing.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is revolutionizing how B2B companies approach their marketing strategies. But with a solid foundation and smart use of technology, you can create targeted campaigns that resonate Account-based marketing campaigns with your ideal accounts. Getting started with ABM takes planning and the right tools to execute your strategy effectively. Without a clear customer lifecycle marketing strategy, businesses risk losing long-term revenue potential.

Account-based marketing tactics include personalized email outreach, targeted LinkedIn ads, custom landing pages, direct mail campaigns, and tailored print content for buying groups. Overall, it enhances customer relationships, drives revenue, and aligns marketing and sales efforts effectively. The primary goal of account-based marketing is to create meaningful and long-lasting relationships with key accounts by treating them as individual markets of one. Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategic marketing approach that focuses on targeting and engaging specific high-value accounts or companies, rather than broad audience segments. Are you ready to take your account based marketing (ABM) campaigns to the next level?

Once you know the key stakeholders within each target account, map their roles, responsibilities, and influence. Try these value proposition templates to create useful and targeted value propositions for each of your target ABM accounts. This doesn’t mean you can’t create top-of-funnel content. Top-of-funnel marketing strategies are broad and brand-focused. So, review the following tactics and decide which approaches will work best for each of your target accounts.

Account-Based Marketing Framework

By automating campaign execution and leveraging machine learning for continuous optimization, Metadata helps B2B marketers streamline their ABM efforts. A standout feature was their use of “Door opener kits”—personalized content packages sent to prospects who hadn’t progressed in their buyer journey for 35 days. O2 led with value in their ABM campaign by creating personalized reports for over 2,000 employees at target companies.

It flexes with the business, holds brand consistency across every team, and turns creative capacity into something that grows with demand rather than fighting it. Since 2024, Column Five has run as a fixed-commitment creative production partner alongside Databricks’ internal creative operations studio. By the time competitors built chatbots, Drift wasn’t competing in “chatbots” — they’d defined a category where they were the obvious leader. Supporting content included the #LifeInsideDropbox video series — live-action pieces following employees’ daily commutes in Austin, Paris, and San Francisco.