Account-based marketing. We all know the pitch: it generates a better-quality pipeline, higher ROI and allows you to find the ever-elusive sweet-spot between marketing and sales. It’s no wonder that everyone wants to do it, but many marketers…don’t know what it is, exactly.

If this is you: worry not! You’re not alone. If you’re just dipping your toe into ABM, it can be daunting. It looks complicated, and a lot of the literature out there seems to imply you need to completely restructure your organisation or become a global enterprise in order to get started.

But this isn’t the case. An ABM approach is within reach of almost any B2B business, aspects can be implemented relatively simply, and best of all, an ABM approach can fit alongside your existing marketing and sales activity (and in a lot of cases, amplify its effectiveness).

There’s a lot of conflicting opinions about what ABM is, exactly, but we define ABM as any marketing activity that focusses on a specific or cluster of named companies or accounts – so if you know the companies you’re targeting, you’re likely already doing a form of ABM.

The tactics, methodologies and technologies involved in making this process more effective make up account-based marketing as we currently know it. It is not a set process that’s templated (although there are common threads and themes): tactics, channels, methodologies and technologies will differ from company to company and account to account.

So where to begin? As a very basic starting point, we suggest you start by thinking about three broad types of ABM: ‘one-to-one’, ‘one-to-few’, and ‘one-to-many’.

One-to-one ABM

Number of accounts: 1

One-to-one ABM or ‘strategic ABM’ or ‘pure ABM’ is about creating a highly personalised, tailored campaign around one, specific, high-value account.

This is the traditional ABM model that’s been used for decades, but was rarely used, and difficult to execute. It was extremely expensive, high risk and resource-intensive, only for massive corporates who had prospects worth millions. Now, marketing technologies make it possible for smaller B2B companies to run a one-to-one ABM campaign at a manageable budget.

One-to-few ABM

Number of accounts: up to 250

This is where the current interpretation of ABM begins, the middle ground. A hybrid of traditional marketing techniques and a one-to-one ABM approach.

It takes your traditional marketing approach and applies it to a sub-section of named accounts that have similar needs, meaning it’s personalised to a smaller sub-section.

You’re looking to identify a shared need or issue across a cluster of accounts, sometimes within a specific sector, and use your understanding of these accounts to create one marketing plan for each cluster.

For example, we worked on a one-to-few ABM campaign for a multi-national technology company who were targeting companies in the logistics and supply chain sector.

The 26 accounts targeted were known to be companies that did not have a fully automated supply-chain process. The content of the campaign was designed around this message, and the outreach was focussed around reaching decision makers in these accounts via LinkedIn, direct mail and email.

So, while this isn’t as a personal as a one-to-one ABM campaign, it is personalised to a level beyond “Logistics and Supply Chain” companies, drilling down into a sector-specific issue shared by the accounts.

One-to-many ABM

Number of accounts: Up to 1000

‘One-to-many’ ABM is the reason why ABM has exploded in popularity over the last few years. New technologies have allowed marketers to focus on a large number of named target companies and work to a very broad reach.

This is often derided by ABM purists as just being standard B2B marketing by a different name. There is some truth to that, one-to-many is much more of a numbers game than any other form of ABM, and there is an element of “put something out and see if it sticks”.

But using a one-to-many ABM approach has a number of benefits for B2B businesses. It’s less of a radical change from typical demand generation strategies, and focussing on a number of named accounts, rather than relying solely on inbound lead generation, allows greater insight and understanding, and will push you further towards marketing and sales alignment.

Which ABM strategy should you use?

So how do you choose between the ABM strategies? Well, you don’t. The ABM process is a traditional marketing funnel, just filtered through the lens of named accounts.

You might be familiar with the “flip my funnel” understanding of ABM, illustrated below:

But, really, if you think about the different types of ABM listed above, you’re actually looking at a traditional marketing funnel filtered through a named-account lens (rather than a spray-and-pray approach):

One-to-many can be used to reach campaigns that allow you to build a pipeline and identify companies of interest.

One-to-few is for accounts that have a shared issue within your target sectors or demographics, or are identified as being further along the buying journey than the awareness phase.

One-to-one is for high value accounts or accounts that are right at the point of sale and need to be pushed over the edge.

Seeing ABM in this way can help you develop a feeder approach that allows you to (almost) guarantee that the companies you focus on are high value enough and at the right point in time for you to invest in the additional time and effort required to develop an ABM strategy.

Getting started with ABM doesn’t need to be a daunting or expensive exercise, a few simple additions to your existing strategy can get you on the right track.

Bern & Gray is a boutique agency specialising in designing, implementing and deploying ABM and digital marketing for clients in B2B and professional services. If you need help starting an ABM campaign, or even exploring your options, contact us at hello@bernandgray.com