What is ABM? We’ll tell you everything you need to know.

In today’s ever-changing marketing landscape, account-based marketing (ABM) is on the rise. Read on to learn the basics of launching an ABM campaign, and how you can leverage this type of marketing program to your advantage.

What is ABM?

ABM is a powerful B2B marketing and sales strategy in which you deliver personalized campaigns to a set of target accounts. By developing a strategic ABM program, you can identify and reach the prospects and customers you value most—and move them along the sales funnel. This multi-pronged approach is particularly valuable within today’s marketing and sales space, as the customer journey has continued to moved online.

Where should you start?

Before you can begin launching ABM campaigns, you must develop your strategy and the necessary processes for content creation and measurement.

Follow these steps:

1. Create your target lists: Which brands will be your top priority? Which industries are you targeting first?

2. Develop a cross-department plan: How will your marketing and sales teams work together to ensure your ABM campaigns are successful?

3. Determine your value proposition: How do your products and services uniquely solve your target audience’s challenges? What messaging will you use throughout your campaign?

4. Define your metrics: How will you measure the success of your campaigns? What are your KPIs?

5. Review your data: Were your campaigns effective? Were they worth your investment in time and resources?

6. Refine your list: Which brands do you want to target in your next campaign?

What types of ABM assets can you create?

Your ABM campaigns can incorporate a variety of different content types—from emails and online ads to personalized landing pages and webinars. In particular, video assets can play an extremely important role in your ABM program, as this medium empowers you to build trust and make a more personal connection with your audience. After all, when prospects and customers can see and hear you talking, your message will resonate with them on a more emotional level.

Looking for some inspiration? Here are a few examples of how you incorporate video into your ABM strategy:

Employee bio videos

At Brightcove, we create Meet Your AM (account manager) videos, in which our account team members introduce themselves to customers, define their role, and highlight how brands can leverage our video suite to grow their businesses. The goal of these videos is to nurture and expand our existing customer base, and we leverage these assets in a variety of different ways. Account managers incorporate this content into their signature lines and email signatures—and we also use these videos in our ABM advertising campaigns that are targeted at our customer base.

Here’s how it works: We use Demandbase code to trigger the personalization for the video. So when a customer clicks on our ABM ad ("Hey [customer name], did you know you are a customer of Brightcove? Meet your AM."), they go to a personalized landing page. This page includes the embedded Meet Your AM video, plus links to relevant, valuable content. The personalization logic is as follows: If account manager = Hamish, play Hamish's video (with the video ID provided by the Brightcove tool).

Overall, these ABM campaigns are really valuable because they expose our customers to the people behind the brand, and help them become familiar with their specific point of contact.

Personalized bumpers

Another scalable approach is to create personalized bumpers for any industry-focused videos you produce. You can add these bumpers to the beginning or end of the video—while keeping the bulk of the content the same.

For instance, if you’re targeting financial services companies, you can create one standard video that outlines how your product suite helps this particular audience innovate and stay ahead of their competitors. And then you can end that video with a bumper that provides logos of some of your top (and most recognizable) financial customers, as well as any associated statistics or other information that highlights your value proposition.

These types of assets help you drive home the point that you understand this particular audience’s challenges and how to overcome them.

Interactivity

Another way to add dynamic personalization into your ABM videos is to incorporate interactivity. At the most basic level, you can use this technology to simply call out the target’s name, account name, or industry. These simple touches can make a video seem like it was made just for this target account, and intended specifically for this one use case. But you can also go a step further by adding CTAs, links, polls, forms, chaptering, and more.

Thankfully, incorporating these elements into your video content has never been easier. Companies like HapYak provide the tools and insights you need to create powerful interactive content—and measure the results. These types of personalized videos put the viewer in control of the content experience, which leads to increased engagement and a stronger emotional connection.

Over recent years, it’s become abundantly clear that ABM can be a powerful tool for reaching your target audience and moving them along the sales funnel. Now that you know all the basics, you can begin launching your campaigns with ease.