There’s a crisp autumn chill in the air. The leaves are changing, and starting to fall.
At the office, you’re putting pumpkin spice creamer in your coffee. At home, you’ve stocked up on candy for the trick-or-treaters who’ll come calling Halloween night.
Some October evenings, you might swear you can hear a wolf man howl as the moon rises. But besides that, you’ve probably outgrown your childhood fears of vampires, witches, and other ghoulish figures at Halloween.
Any ghost story author worth their salt will tell you the only thing adults really fear is the unknown. Of course, any B2B marketer worth their salt will tell you sometimes, there’s good reason for that.
Make B2B marketing unknowns disappear with ABM. ![👻]()
A broad-based marketing approach can be fraught with unknowns. Are you reaching your target audience? Do these prospects really need your products? Will they be a high-ROI customer?
Great leads often emerge from the unknown and marketing analytics can help you refine and improve your demand generation strategy. That’s why this approach will always be essential. However, targeting specific kinds of high-value leads can also be extremely rewarding for B2B marketers.
That’s where ABM (Account-Based Marketing) comes in. Marketing directly to qualified account leads — with strong ROI potential — eliminates unknowns while helping you save time, drive pipeline, and increase revenue.
ABM is especially helpful when it’s powered by AI like Einstein, allowing you to intelligently automate and personalize interactions with high-value targets.
To get started, follow these four pillars of a successful ABM strategy:
Identify the right accounts. ![🎃]()
Since ABM is all about focusing on high-value customers, it’s essential to choose the right accounts to target. This is just like choosing the right pumpkin to carve. Selecting the most valuable accounts lets you build relationships with customers that will drive great results for your business. Of course, selecting the right pumpkin lets you carve a spooktacular jack-o-lantern.
While you may have to rely on your intuition in a pumpkin patch, using a predictive lead scoring tool can give you insights on which accounts are the highest-value prospects. Reporting on your existing customers to find trends can also help you to identify those target prospects.
Once you’ve picked out your prospects, you can connect your marketing and sales teams to those accounts. If those prospects turn out to be great customers, you can even develop lookalike accounts to find new customers with similar ROI potential.
Improve customer engagement. ![🏚]()
Strong customer engagement is a core component of any ABM strategy. Think of it like running a haunted house. Your brand’s messaging has to drive positive interactions with your high-value accounts to keep them coming back — just like a haunted house has to provide its visitors with high-quality spooks to keep them coming back.
Personalization is key to creating campaigns that resonate with customers. This rings just as true in the world of B2B as in B2C (although personalization has received mixed reviews in the world of haunted houses). Still, your brand should try to personalize every message to your high-value prospects, and nurture each account relationship.
With Einstein Behavior Scoring and Lead Scoring, you can ensure that you deliver the right message at the right time and design personalized customer journeys that carry your accounts through every step of an automated sales process tailored specifically to them.
Align sales and marketing. ![🔮]()
Sales and marketing need to work together to drive the best results from your high-value accounts. In a way, this is similar to how old movie monsters used to be paired together to drive bigger box office results. Why see Frankenstein or the Wolf Man alone when you could see them meet?
So, break down the silos, and unify B2B marketing and sales across a single platform experience with Pardot in Salesforce Lightning. Deep, real-time data insights will empower both teams to work together to personalize marketing relationships with your high-value accounts and generate strong sales for your B2B products at scale.
Measure and optimize campaign performance. ![🍬]()
As you focus on marketing to high-value B2B accounts, it’s important to continually collect data and refine your campaigns to deliver the best messaging to your customers. This is a lot like measuring and optimizing your candy haul after a night of trick-or-treating. You toss what’s not working for you (circus peanuts, wax lips) and keep what is (normal, good candy).
With B2B Marketing Analytics, you can track campaign performance through every channel, track how prospects move through the sales funnel, and easily optimize your campaign content based on real-time insights.
Each one of these four pillars of ABM helps you understand everything about the accounts you’re marketing to — eliminating spooky B2B marketing unknowns and allowing your brand to focus on leads of real value.
Happy Halloween from Pardot!
Here are some extra resources on ABM:
- Pardot ABM Guide
- Power ABM with AI: 5 Exclusive Strategies for Smarter Marketing
- How to Take Pardot to New Heights with ABM
