Put your VIP list together. Pick out your most important prospects – the ones that can really make a difference to your bottom line. These VIPs are your focus.
Get your ABM strategy up and running and learn how to scale ABM for profound results. This is particularly helpful for marketers working with 1:many ABM programs.
We’ll talk you through the steps of creating ideal long-form ABM content and easily applying automated personalization.
First, let’s explain some ABM basics.
ABM targets specific high-value accounts with personalized content and engagement, focusing on their unique needs. It aligns sales and marketing efforts for tailored outreach, to boost engagement and potential revenue.
Think of it as the ‘VIP treatment’. Get to know your target accounts, make them feel important and valued, and guide them toward becoming your biggest supporters. Let’s walk you through how ABM works.
ABM is a strategy that’s well-suited to companies dealing with complex B2B sales cycles, where a smaller number of high-value accounts can have a significant impact on revenue. In B2B scenarios, decision-making processes often involve multiple stakeholders, making personalized engagement crucial. Due to its high-growth outcomes, outbound ABM is ideal for SaaS businesses looking to gain traction quickly.
However, the principles of ABM can also be adapted and applied in B2C contexts, although with some modifications. While B2C marketing tends to involve targeting a larger audience, certain B2C companies that have a high-value customer segment, or are in industries with a longer decision-making process, can also benefit from an ABM-like approach.
Put your VIP list together. Pick out your most important prospects – the ones that can really make a difference to your bottom line. These VIPs are your focus.
Get to know them. Put on your detective hat and uncover their likes, dislikes and pain points. This helps you to create messages that really speak their language.
Get personal. Now you know what makes them tick (and not tick!), start building specific messages and content just for them. You have their needs in mind - let them know that.
Teamwork makes the dream work. Marketing and sales teams join forces to make sure these messages aren’t too hot, aren’t too cold - but just right.
Message delivery. Use different channels such as emails, social media and more, to send your personalized content (work out their most used channels to really hit the mark). This way, your messages reach them wherever they are.
Message delivery. Use different channels such as emails, social media and more, to send your personalized content (work out their most used channels to really hit the mark). This way, your messages reach them wherever they are.
Capturing interest. The more personalized your content is, the more engagement it will spark. It will encourage your VIPs to like, comment - and show interest in what you’re saying. (It's like they're nodding and saying, "Tell me more!")
Guided journey. Consider this the breadcrumb stage! As you drip-feed personalized content that quickly addresses their pain points, goals, etc. - they begin to see how your solution can solve their problems. It's like you’re helping them to find their own dream gingerbread house (witch-free, of course).
Turning fans into friends. As they get more interested - keep building the relationship. This is where your sales wizards work their magic, having conversations and showing them how your business is the answer they've been looking for.
Happy ending. Et voilà! These VIPs have become your biggest fans. They trust you; they want what you offer, and they become long-term friends of your business. But don’t rest on your laurels, happy ‘endings’ are more about ongoing relationships. The next step from here is to continue to anticipate their future needs, which will develop your relationship with them further.
Customer journey mapping will help you create the right content for funnel stages. By creating a visual representation of the customer journey, or the steps an account takes before becoming a paying customer, you can better understand the needs of your VIPs.
During this process, put yourself in the customer’s shoes to identify their pain points and remove any areas of friction.
Turtl’s guide to content mapping gives content marketers a framework for mapping content experiences to ABM funnel stages.
Top tip: An ABM platform will help make this process easier and more effective. It can offer smart automation and AI-driven segmentation tools – and can complement CRM by aligning sales and marketing intelligence.
For instance, ABM software enriches CRM data with specific account behavior, helping teams make informed decisions and boosting efficiency in nurturing and closing deals.
Let’s dive into the details…
Pinpoint high-value accounts aligned with your business goals, considering factors such as industry, company size, and challenges. Make sure your marketing and sales teams are involved.
Tools that can help identify these high-value accounts include:
Using these tools can be like putting on your glasses – suddenly you have a much clearer idea of what your VIPs look like, helping you prioritize and target them better. Knowledge is power!
Thoroughly researching a target account’s online presence for ABM involves a strategic approach.
Begin with their official website, exploring products, leadership and news
Analyze their social media profiles to understand engagement and company culture
Scrutinize LinkedIn for key stakeholders and connections
Investigate content consumption patterns and industry involvement, gauging interests
Assess competitor online presence to grasp the competitive landscape
Monitor online reviews for reputation insights
Use technology tracking tools to identify their tech stack
Use social listening tools to gauge public sentiment
Consider event participation for industry insights
This research is as crucial to your ABM strategy as a sleigh is to Santa. Without it – you get nowhere.
Use your research to personalize your outreach – it will increase the likelihood of meaningful engagement and conversions.
Create detailed profiles for each target account. Identify key decision-makers, influencers and their roles. Document their challenges and goals to really get to grips with each account.
Your research has laid the foundations. Now it’s time to build personalized content for each account. Craft content such as emails, blog posts, videos and social media messages that address their challenges head-on and waffle-free. Hit that nerve and prescribe them your solution.
Choose the most appropriate communication channels to reach each account. This might include email, LinkedIn, X (was Twitter ), or even personalized direct mail, depending on their preferences.
Begin conversations with your target accounts by distributing your tailored content. Engage with their social media posts, share relevant insights and send interactive, personalized emails to kickstart conversations.
Determine the best strategies in which your marketing and sales teams can engage accounts and guide them through the process.
Develop special offers or deals tailored to the unique needs of each account. Provide solutions that align with their requirements and demonstrate your value.
Use analytics tools to track engagement and responses from your ABM efforts. Identify which accounts are showing the most interest and assess the effectiveness of your strategies. Do you need to make any changes?
HubSpot – offers insights into campaign performance and lead interactions.
Demandbase – is an ABM, advertising, sales intelligence and data company. It provides B2B companies sales and marketing support that helps users discover, manage and measure target audiences.
Terminus – provides account-level metrics and engagement data. This tool helps go-to-market teams identify and understand their next best customers, prioritize accounts based on intent, engage buyers across the most native channels and measure pipeline and revenue impact across the entire lifecycle.
RollWorks – offers a complete ABM platform to help you identify ideal accounts, engage with them and measure the effectiveness of your ABM programs.
Turtl – our content creation platform can personalize highly engaging content at scale.
Turtl’s Analytics Dashboard helps users see intent signals and engagement metrics at a significant level. You can integrate Turtl with CRMs to automate lead scoring and trigger personalized content workflows.
Continue nurturing leads even beyond the initial engagement. Send personalized follow-ups and relevant updates to showcase ongoing support. Segment and tag your audience by interest and funnel stage, and send them timely content that you know they’ll prefer.
Acknowledge your successes when target accounts convert into loyal customers. Share these stories internally to motivate your team and refine your ABM tactics for future campaigns.
ABM benefits can span across a wide range of key areas within your business.
Enhanced sales and marketing alignment
ABM encourages close collaboration between sales and marketing teams. They work together to target and engage high-value accounts, ensuring everyone is on the same page and focused on the same goals.
ABM allows you to create content and messages tailored to the specific needs and challenges of each target account. This personal touch increases the likelihood of capturing their interest and engagement.
Strategicabm catapulted its ABM efforts using Turtl. Normally, scaling personalized content to hundreds or thousands of accounts isn’t possible due to time constraints and the complexity of having segmented prospects at varying funnel stages.
Turtl’s Personalization Engine can scale personalized content for super-targeted ABM automation in minutes. You can read how strategicabm did this – and integrated tools to help teams create better content for different audience segments.
By focusing on individual accounts, ABM helps build stronger and more meaningful relationships. The personalized approach shows that you genuinely understand and care about their unique needs.
Since ABM targets accounts with a high potential for conversion, the conversion rates tend to be higher. The tailored content and engagement efforts increase the chances of turning prospects into customers.
ABM’s targeted nature ensures you’re investing resources where they matter most. This results in a higher return on investment as you focus on accounts that can bring substantial revenue.
Because ABM targets accounts that are already a good fit, the sales cycle tends to be shorter. The personalized approach means you’re addressing their specific pain points and needs, making the decision-making process more efficient.
The personalized attention and solutions provided through ABM create a sense of loyalty among your target accounts. This loyalty often translates into repeat business and even advocacy within their networks.
ABM requires a deep understanding of each account, leading to more accurate insights about their preferences and behaviors. This data can be used to refine your strategies and drive future success.
ABM ensures you’re investing your resources – time, energy and budget – where they have the most impact. Rather than casting a wide net, you’re focusing on the accounts with the greatest potential.
ABM allows you to align your marketing efforts with the specific stages of the buyer’s journey for each account. This means delivering the right content at the right time and guiding them toward conversion.
As you can see, ABM offers a range of benefits that cater to both the marketing and sales sides of your business. The personalized, targeted approach not only boosts engagement and conversion rates but also encourages stronger, long-lasting relationships with your most valuable accounts.
Now we know how ABM can tease more business your way, you need to decide which type of ABM best suits your goals.
Let’s look at the three different types of ABM, the goals they suit best and what type of content you’d produce for each.
ABM goals: Do you have target accounts that are most likely to move the revenue needle? These will be highly researched or known accounts that you know are the best in terms of fit and future opportunities.
This intensive operating model targets single high-value accounts at a time, so needs a highly personal, human element. One person in your team will handle a very small number of these strategic accounts, focusing heavily on existing opportunities.
Types of content: Highly customized account-specific thought leadership, individual emails, private events, and one-on-one meetings.
ABM goals: In ABM lite, a small group of accounts or a handful of similar accounts are clustered together for targeted campaigns. There might be five to ten accounts in each cluster, with each cluster receiving very similar content.
Focus is split roughly 50/50 on existing and new opportunities with programs being arguably as resource-heavy as 1:1 ABM. The goal is to deepen relationships with a small number of new and existing accounts and identify key accounts.
1:few has a flexible approach that can pivot according to results, so it’s perfect for companies with agile resources. Often an ABM manager will handle around 20 1:few accounts at a time.
Types of content: Customized long-form content, email marketing, one-to-one meetings, and retargeting campaigns.
ABM goals: 1:many ABM targets multiple accounts (think hundreds or thousands) at the same time, relying on technology to support complex, automated campaigns.
You’d start with firmographic data (things like job title, industry, tech used, revenue and client base) to target accounts and can build on content intent signals to refine campaigns. This is because once engaged with and data around touchpoints is collected, you’ll see how to pivot campaigns to gain more traction.
Types of content: Customized long-form content, ebooks, thought leadership, email marketing, blogs, social media, webinars, podcasts, one-to-one meetings, and retargeting campaigns.
1:many ABM is perfect for those looking to boost inbound lead generation, conversions and brand awareness.
ABM metrics serve as real-time indicators of strategy success.
These metrics can guide decisions, ensuring your strategy aligns with your goals. Adjustments can be made based on these insights, enabling continuous improvement.
We’ve compiled a detailed breakdown of the ABM metrics to use as your compass for growth.
Content platforms have evolved to support the latest ABM tactics for effective, smart 1:many ABM. Fasten your seatbelt, we’re about to give you the low-down on the secret weapon to ABM at scale: automated personalization.
What’s in a name? 1:many ABM, one-to-many marketing, one-to-many ABM, programmatic ABM – whatever term you use, the results are sweet. As 1:many ABM needs to reach a high volume of accounts, it relies on technology and automation to work. And really smart 1:many automates content workflows from live triggers on the go.
Like all account-based marketing, 1:many ABM uses personalization to capture prospects’ attention, though to a lesser extent than the other two types of ABM.
Buyers in the awareness or engagement journey stage typically benefit from 1:many ABM, but as they move down the funnel into MQL/SQL stages, marketing and sales teams can apply a 1:few or 1:1 campaign approach to suit specific journeys.
1:many ABM is the most cost-efficient option for companies looking to ramp growth through ABM efforts. Investing in new technologies can be daunting but it’s an essential step to reaping the rewards of ABM.
A clearly defined strategy that all stakeholders and executors are aligned to and mitigate the risk involved in adopting new tech.
Other than the initial investment in new technology, the resources needed for 1:many ABM are relatively low. This makes it ideal for smaller companies wanting quick growth.
Because the technology is doing the heavy lifting through automation, there’s no need to create individual campaigns for each account – which reduces the manpower needed to create assets.
1:many ABM is well-suited to:
Set goals for these different opportunities across your business. One-to-many ABM works for lead acquisition because you’re releasing content to a large pool of people. But you can also use ABM for your current database.
Cross-sell and upsell are ideal streams for 1:many, which gives you a framework to organize, segment and scale upsell campaigns across thousands of contacts at once. If you’re looking to sell into new departments and teams, 1:many ABM delivers personalized offers based on the intel you already have about your existing customers.
Get creative and encourage user-generated content or social sharing. Perhaps your customers would like your product to have a new feature?
You could invite fresh target accounts to a new beta launch of your product – once you’ve built it, of course! Maybe you have a compelling case study? Use quotes or a testimonial video in your case study content and send it to new target accounts in the same organization.
Silos has left the building. All too often, there’s a disconnect between your internal teams – but for your ABM to be successful, cohesion between these teams is essential.
Deciding on which accounts to target should be collaborative, using clear, shared commercial objectives that underpin your ABM strategy.
Sales know every battle-tested objection and exactly why people are keen to become your customers. Customer Success understands why people churn or why they advocate.
These teams know what drives buying committees and users to your brand better than anyone. They can survey people for marketing intelligence and introduce the best candidates for testimonials.
A fluid discourse between all teams will neatly direct better handovers, CRM – and future acquisition.
Input from sales and marketing is invaluable but data should ultimately inform decisions about target accounts.
Best practice is to use a variety of data points, so don’t just rely on your CRM for the answers. See first-party intent data from engagement and use other third-party data sources to see a clearer picture of who to pursue.
By asking the right questions, it’s possible to tease intent signals at a very compelling level, so be sure to use surveys, polls, and feedback where it matters most.
With a smaller pool of accounts, delivering high conversion rates on campaigns is critical. One way to drive up conversions is by creating tailored offers for target accounts.
Understanding your ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer personas within your target accounts helps you present them with offers you know will pique their interest.
Ideally, we want to start conversations with C-suite and decision-makers because they hold the keys to the kingdom. But don’t discount more operational-level contacts. Users of your offer will become fans who influence budget-holders.
Any kind of attention from target account organizations is positive so keep this audience in mind when creating ABM campaigns and doors may open in ways you don’t expect.
Deciding on target accounts isn’t a one-and-done exercise. Monitoring engagement and performance regularly helps you to identify which accounts should be downgraded and which should move up to a more deeply personalized journey. Successful ABM hinges on prioritizing the right accounts.
Use the expertise of your digital and email marketing teams to keep your company in your target accounts’ eyeline.
Strategic paid advertising efforts and well-timed retargeting campaigns improve brand recall and nudge your prospects in the right direction.
The fundamentals of ABM are relevance and personalization. Prospects don’t just want tailored experiences, they expect them.
Personalized content marketing, landing pages, and email campaigns show prospects that you understand their interests, needs and frustrations.
Depending on your resources and a prospect’s priority, you can create tailored content that incorporates data about interests. Or you can create something that’s super-relevant based on what others with the same buyer persona have previously engaged with.
Personalization is a hot topic but practically speaking, what does it mean? Put simply, it’s about showing your prospects that you know who they are and what they care about.
Personalized content experiences are the cornerstone of ABM – without it, high-value accounts take significantly more time and effort to close.
By personalizing content, we open conversations with prospects by showcasing our knowledge and understanding of them. Our personalization data report shows exactly how impactful personalized content is.
Personalized content performs better. We’ll let the experts explain how far personalization has come today.
We’d also like to show you how some of our clients are using Turtl for outstanding ABM results. Finally, we’ll share how easy it is to scale automated, personalized ABM with Turtl’s patented Personalization Engine.
Target accounts for 1:many ABM are usually found at enterprise-level organizations – environments that are notoriously fast-paced. Prospects don’t have time to sift through pages of information about your company.
They want quick access to relevant content, a clear value proposition, and an incentive to engage with you again. These accounts often need several touchpoints before taking any action. Using personalization in account-based marketing helps to make the journey quicker and smoother.
The best ABM tactics incorporate personalization to build credibility with your prospects. Personalized content helps you to showcase products that are relevant for the specific business and decision-makers there, making it more likely they’ll book that demo/call. Tailored recommendations make your offering seem like an easy choice.
Personalization in one-to-many ABM puts the onus on technology to drive targeted content creation. With machines at the wheel, wasted efforts are reduced.
Capacity is opened up to work on refining ICPs, brainstorming creative campaign ideas, improving strategy – and collaborating across the business. This is how you reach the most desirable outcomes – to ensure the outcome of ABM personalization is increased conversions and high ROI.
Watch to understand how personalization works in Turtl.
Turtl has been an extremely vital tool for the ABM team at Jabra…Using Turtl's personalisation Engine, we are now able to generate highly engaging, customized customer-facing documentation in minutes, rather than hours. We have seen the amount of time it takes to deliver a piece of content decrease by about 80-90%, giving us time to focus on delivering additional value to our account teams and customers.
ABM tactics are incredibly effective when they’re included in an inbound lead generation strategy, but it can be difficult to scale ABM successfully.
Many companies start small with a few personalized campaigns to key accounts, experience the benefits of this approach, and are eager to scale ABM. But as they do, they meet some challenges.
Problem: Creating enough content for each account
Solution: Modular content
Creating personalized content for hundreds of target accounts sounds like a behemoth undertaking. But there’s a simple solution that will have you churning out tailored content in no time: modular content.
Modular content is collateral that works as standalone stand-alone pieces or that combine to create a cohesive body of content. Each piece can be swapped in and out without any impact on the content’s clarity or continuity.
This structure lends itself perfectly to personalization, enabling teams to create customized, highly relevant content quickly and efficiently. On top of this, only a few modules are needed to generate a high volume of content. If you want to scale ABM, modular content is pivotal.
Problem: ABM personalization at scale
Solution: Automated 1:many personalization
As ABM scales, you have two options:
As with any part of your business, it’s hard to get the budget to increase headcount – particularly if a department is in its scale-up stage. And as your ABM activities continue to grow, this becomes a less and less sustainable approach.
For this reason, most companies turn to technology to scale ABM. Today’s rise in demand for customized content experiences brings with it a total transformation of personalization technology in recent years – as it races to keep up with buyer behavior. With the right software for automated ABM personalization, you can generate 1:many ABM content with ease.
Turtl empowers its customers to drive their reader engagement to the next level with tailored content to the target audience. Personalization can be easily set up to drive ABM at scale, creating custom material from user selections, file upload or even automatically driven from a CRM /Marketing automation tool to provide the full streamlined experience.
Problem: Poor visibility over accounts
Solution: Good CRM habits
As you scale ABM, it can be easy to lose track of what stage prospects are at, what contact they’ve had, and what content they’ve gotten. Avoid any mishaps by keeping your CRM in check.
Your CRM is where marketing and sales come to collaborate and good CRM habits give your teams visibility over accounts’ progress – and what action needs to be taken to keep them moving through the pipeline.
Encourage good data and reporting habits from the get-go so that as you scale, no clarity is lost on what accounts you’re targeting, how, and when.
Problem: Spending time on the wrong accounts
Solution: Clear strategy and tier system
What was your account that got away? Do they still cross your mind from time to time?
Don’t put yourself through the pain again; dedicate time to defining an ABM strategy and designing a tier system for your accounts.
An effective ABM strategy aligns itself with commercial objectives and uses ABM tactics to drive progress towards them. Make sure to regularly review the direction of your one:many ABM to keep it on course to further business goals.
One:many ABM is a prioritization game – and by tiering accounts, you’ll make sure your resources are prioritized wisely. Improve your lead scoring to identify the high-intent, high-readiness accounts that will make up the top tiers of your system.
We spoke to ABM experts for our on-demand webinar: How ABM leaders drive success at scale. You’ll learn exactly how ABM thought leaders deliver fantastic results.
The webinar features Kate Terry, former Head of Demand at Turtl, Jamie King ABM Manager at Jabra, Neil Berry, former Global Head of Accounts and Deal Based Marketing at Atos and Declan Mulkeen, CMO at Strategicabm.
It’s a tired record but one that rings true – you can’t have good results with one:many ABM without personalization. In fact, a staggering 77% of B2B buyers will not make a purchase without personalized content (Gitnux).
The power of personalization is not to be underestimated. Let’s check out companies who’ve embraced account-based marketing personalization to gain solid results.
Fundraising and donor management company GiveSmart used automated personalization in Turtl to transform the content journey for prospects at the bottom of the funnel – and to seriously scale ABM.
Previously, post-demo prospects were sent a generic follow-up document that saw low engagement levels. But, by adopting account-based marketing personalization, they began sending content that included only relevant information to each individual prospect.
The result? Their bounce rate dropped by 50% and read time skyrocketed within 2 weeks of their new approach to one-to-many marketing.
Redstor is the leading UK provider of data management, offering cloud backup, disaster recovery, archiving, search, and data migration to partners across the globe.
By adopting personalization with Turtl, Redstor streamlined content production for one-to-many ABM.
The issue Redstor faced was needing to scale ABM programs while continuing to personalize in detail as they did for 1:1 ABM programs.
Using Turtl’s Personalization Engine, they reached key target personas within each target account without any restrictions around scale.
As a result of automated personalization, the size of the pipeline generated for the business increased, as did the volume of booked business after the first program.
I think Turtl’s personalization features are the real sweet spot for us. It’s great for outreach because you can quickly build a piece of content and then automate it so that every recipient sees a personalized video on the cover page, for example. Having all of these custom elements appear automatically throughout the document is really powerful on a one-to-many scale.
Turtl’s Personalization Engine combines automation, analytics and integrations to simplify personalization at scale. By bringing automated personalization on board, customers can scale ABM in minutes, with ease.
The Personalization Engine enables you to produce hundreds of personalized content offerings quickly. in minutes. And because Turtl’s format supports a modular content structure, it’s simple to create customized documents for prospects that only feature relevant content.
Let’s show you how easy it is to set up personalized content in Turtl.
A Master Doc is the document to which you add all content you want available when personalizing content offerings. It’s then used as a base to enable personalization.
Then, define the content that can be personalized using features like tokens, personalization forms, and page rules.
You can now personalize new Docs with internal forms, reader forms, file uploads, or your existing client database – all from the content in the Master Doc.
Use Turtl’s Analytics Dashboard to get a deeper understanding of users’ interests based on their interactions with features in each chapter of the Doc – such as videos, polls, and call-to-actions. Optimize future content by incorporating these insights.
Finally, you can use content to draw intent insights from content to help inform account scoring and readiness.
Watch the video and find out how the Turtl Marketing Team uses engagement metrics to learn more about prospects for complex ABM account management.
Turtl’s Personalization Engine simplifies content personalization at scale by enabling quick and easy configuration of interactive, modular content – all without requiring design or coding skills. The teams sharing the content can then effortlessly personalize it in seconds, without having to worry about creating or editing the central documents.
Prefer to watch how it’s done? Check out the tutorial:
You can scale your personalization activities even further with Turtl with batch personalization via file upload or with API personalization via the client database.
Batch personalization
With batch personalization, you can create a large number of personalizations at a time (up to 25,000) and send them simultaneously to a large number of recipients via your email automation platform or your CRM.
To learn more, check out this article or watch the tutorial:
API personalization
This type of Turtl personalization works via a client database and allows you to scale personalization on a whole other level.
You can automatically generate personalized Turtl Docs based on the data that lives within your CRM, and push these personalizations back into the CRM via Turtl’s API.
Find out more in this article or watch the tutorial:
Read this Turtl Doc for a taste of how Turtl helps ABM, who our clients are, and what they say about Turtl.
If you’d like to try Turtl, once you’re in your Workspace, you’ll find templates to get you started.
You can sign up for no charge and without a credit card.
If you already have ABM content you’d like to use, why not upload a PDF and we’ll transform it into high-performing content for you?
Simply upload a PDF brochure, ebook, white paper – or any type of long-form content. We’ll send you a Turtl Doc with all branding, images and text pulled through. We’ll also show you how to polish your Turtl Doc for outstanding results.
