How to Build an ABM Content Program: A Step-by-Step Guide

ABM can offer some distinct and compelling advantages to sales and marketing teams in businesses where the products, pricing and buyers fit Abm content planning the ABM model. In essence, ABM doesn’t just ‘flip the funnel’, it flips the agenda – because it’s no longer about generating leads, but about personally targeting and nurturing specific accounts and contacts. ABM may be focused on the objective of protecting and growing existing accounts, or on winning new business from specific target accounts – or on a combination of both. ABM is a strategic marketing approach jointly implemented by sales and marketing that focuses on key, targeted accounts (whether they’re existing customers or not). Any winning ABM marketing strategy starts with pinpointing exactly who to target.

While most sales teams tend to spend hours analyzing the prospects sent by their marketing teams, 70% of our respondents said ABM helps align sales and marketing so both can operate more efficiently. By aligning sales and marketing teams through ABM, companies experience stronger, more qualified leads and client engagement. Thanks to closer work between sales and marketing, 61% of companies have reported that the key benefit of ABM is an increase in pipeline opportunities, quality, or both. This openness with target accounts leads to strong, trusting relationships that last.

Today, organizations aren't just "doing ABM"; they're building structured ABM systems. This is where the marketing team, with insights and inputs from all relevant stakeholders, creates a meticulously designed content plan. Key to this alignment is the critical role played by the marketing team in creating content and messaging even before the sales professionals start their outreach.

RollWorks is an account-based marketing software that aligns marketing and sales teams, enabling B2B companies to identify, engage, and grow revenue from high-value accounts. Traditional account based marketing focuses primarily on top-of-funnel activation, identifying and engaging target accounts before the sale. It requires marketing and sales teams to collaborate on identifying key accounts, understanding their needs and challenges, and building closer relationships through custom content and personal interaction. Key tools in your tech stack should include CRM systems for account data management, marketing automation platforms for personalized content delivery, and intent data tools for identifying high-potential accounts. By addressing critical questions, you’ll identify potential gaps and opportunities for improvement.

Users looking to enhance their campaign performance can also leverage HubSpot’s ‘Adaptive Testing’, which automatically optimizes content variations to identify the most effective approach. With HubSpot, users can create advanced workflows that automate repetitive tasks and nurture leads effectively. The platform integrates a suite of tools—including email marketing, social media management, content creation, and analytics. Triblio’s ‘Orchestration Canvas’ often takes the spotlight as a visual campaign builder that allows users to design and execute complex, multi-step ABM campaigns across various channels. With this, organizations can extend the platform’s capabilities, integrating seamlessly with existing systems. The platform is built to accommodate businesses of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises, allowing users to tailor functionalities to meet specific industry needs and business processes.

If your ROI proves the ABM tactics you used worked, use that data to propel your strategy forward. ABM allows you to angle your business in a way that makes it the most relevant and ideal choice for your target accounts. For Davidson, that means using all the tools available from personalized ads to dynamic landing pages.

The Challenge: Scattered Efforts, Missed Opportunities

This will allow you to make your strategy more effective for your business, marketing and sales teams, and accounts. But you’ll get the best results through the most relevant channels to your target accounts and contacts. You can attract contacts from your high-quality target accounts in a few ways. Next, you’ll want to attract the buying committee members and stakeholders of your target accounts.

Implementation & ROI Timeline

This includes program structure, success metrics, and a clear plan for activation, all grounded in what’s realistic to execute and scale. We develop formal ABM strategies and roadmaps that help you define your target accounts and how they will be prioritized, engaged, and progressed over time. With this cutting-edge technology, Gums helps T-Man get the word out about a better network provider — T-Mobile. Within 11 months of starting their ABM program, Personify began seeing results. Personify is a Constituent Management & Engagement (CME) platform that provides holistic views of organization members.

Adapt.io is a business intelligence solution that offers a large database of 250 million business contacts, enabling users to discover, target, and engage with potential customers. It provides users with real-time access to a database of business contacts, including verified email addresses and phone numbers. The algorithm is also customizable, allowing organizations to tailor it to their unique business processes and requirements. This ensures that sales representatives have a complete view of their accounts, reducing the chances of duplicate work and enhancing the quality of lead management. With its ‘Matching Algorithm’ feature, LeanData utilizes advanced ‘fuzzy logic’ to connect leads with the appropriate accounts within Salesforce.

• These are complex power structures that involve multiple stakeholders, each with their own degree of influence over larger purchasing decisions.
• Establish a regular meeting cadence between sales and marketing leadership to stay in lockstep.
• Owler is a community-powered intelligence platform that provides comprehensive company profiles, competitive insights, and real-time news updates.
• Refining your ABM strategy makes it easy for your marketing and sales teams to attract and retain high-value customers.
• While there are several ways to determine the strength of your assets, you’ll eliminate much of the guesswork by looking at the historical data around past asset performance from previous campaigns or nurture programs.

By emphasising relevance and value, we foster deeper connections with target accounts.Get In Touch Personalised content that resonates with target accounts is only possible when you have thoroughly researched their needs, pain points, and preferences. An effective ABM content strategy starts with a deep understanding of your audience. It operates alongside other tactics such as social media outreach, email campaigns, influencer engagement, and search engine marketing, each designed to connect with and engage potential clients. In this post, we’ll explore how to align your content with ABM principles, tailor it to resonate with your ideal clients, and ensure it drives meaningful engagement that leads to conversions. Dan Hieb is a writer and editor who has worked with B2B sales and marketing teams for over a decade to help build pipeline through storytelling and digital strategy.

Connecting specific marketing activities to ultimate sales outcomes across extended buying cycles requires sophisticated tracking systems and analytical capabilities that many organizations lack experience implementing. Rather than relying on single intelligence platforms and databases, they integrate multiple intelligence sources and establish regular data quality reviews that maintain accuracy over time. Successful organizations address data challenges through systematic data auditing, multiple source validation, and continuous updating processes. Integration APIs ensure these tools work together as a unified system. When marketing identifies new buying committee members at target accounts, they automatically populate in CRM.

Establish Your Budget and Resource Allocation

Traditional demand-gen lives or dies by how many leads hit the spreadsheet. Emilia (their VP of Marketing) said, “Don’t even think about starting ABM without a marketing ops manager, as the amount of ops work is brutal.” LinkedIn campaign manager didn’t provide it natively (at least till now).

Stop switching between tools to understand what’s happening. Kordiam is built to support any team facing complex planning challenges. Kordiam is the content planning software built for exactly that complexity.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

"With any tool, the ability to bring sales and marketing teams together so they're working cohesively is not easy. That's really the crux of the issue." "Sometimes the technology vendor gets blamed when really it's the fact that the people and process elements are not in place," he said. Some companies treat ABM like a marketing-led, more personalized form of demand generation that doesn't involve sales and marketing working closely, Pun said. Getting marketing and sales to work well together is perhaps the biggest challenge of ABM.