Account-based marketing

What you should know before hiring an ABM agency

Who does ABM work best for?

Knowing when an ABM strategy can help your brand is important. Because an ABM strategy isn’t for every business. Small-to-midsize organizations looking to build long term customer relationships must already have three key things in place:

• Closely aligned marketing team: When there’s alignment and a shared vision, ABM strategies thrive. 
• Dedicated marketing ops team: ABM involves intricate management of technology, data, and processes, and this dedicated unit is instrumental in optimizing ABM campaigns and ensuring their efficiency
• Sophistication/maturity in sales-marketing alignment: Synergy empowers the identification of target accounts, creation of tailored content, and execution of personalized outreach strategies.

Our approach to ABM: How we work

ABM is like planting wasabi, the hardest plant to grow in the world, while traditional marketing is more like planting a more widely-farmed grain, like wheat. 

Wasabi is expensive and requires a decent investment to prep the ground and sow the seeds for growth. Success yields a high pay off, but every plant needs careful nurturing. It’s not enough to have a high percentage survive — every plant has to thrive as best as possible, to achieve the highest profit possible.  

That’s how we think about ABM at Velocity: It’s not good enough to harvest 10% — we need to look after the other 90%, too. 

Changing our mindset around how we nurture accounts means two things:

• We create super targeted content that only a key title with intent would click on, so every engagement becomes an insight. 
• We focus on deepening engagement with specific job titles to help us strengthen our participation on each account.

Talk to us

Our account-based marketing services

At Velocity, we group our account-based marketing services into two phases. All our ABM deliverables can be purchased as stand-alone services, but they all center on a good Target Account List: one that’s clean, accurate, well-analyzed, and updated regularly. 

If you don’t have one, don’t worry. We can help you set that up too.

Talk to us

Phase 1: Launchpad ABM

To help businesses prepare for ABM. This phase is focused on building awareness, gathering insights, and managing ongoing optimisation. 

Our Launchpad account-based marketing services include: 

1. Audit of your existing data, content and engagement: We focus on your target account list and include an audit of your sales and marketing alignment. 
2. ICP targeting workshop and research report: We deliver workshop findings, target account analysis, target persona analysis, and competitor analysis at this stage. 
3. ABM-specific content: New content tailored to the sales process, or repurposed content for new formats (like video, LinkedIn InMails, emails, events, etc.)  
4. ABM blueprint: Our metrics framework moves from ‘how many’ to ‘how well’ our audience engages, showing how we impact pipeline velocity and revenue. 
5. ABM-focused organic social strategy: This ABM service could include page optimisations and platform recommendations, content calendar/posting schedule, targeted post content, or CRM integrations.
6. Market or sector reports: Covering market size, market structure, current issues, future trends, suggested content topics/formats, and a SWOT analysis. 

Phase 2: High Velocity ABM

In the early stages of ABM, we look at ‘How Many’ metrics, i.e., the number of accounts with whom we’re improving relationships. At the High Velocity stage of our ABM strategy, we start to transition to ‘How Well’ metrics. We ask: are we moving the needle with individual accounts?

Our High Velocity account-based marketing services include: 

• Account plans: These are detailed reports on engaged accounts that outline the accounts’ details and a strategy for reaching each buying team. They include account data and research, a buying team map, and more. 
• Account plan content: We map content to the engagement we’ve gained so far across the buying team to improve the account relationship. Some examples of Action Plan content include: InMail/email sequences, post-call content and follow-up framework, event assets, personalized landing pages and ebooks, direct mail or gifts. 

Full ABM

The combination of the Launchpad ABM and High Velocity ABM. But all our deliverables can be offered as custom bundles, depending on your current understanding of the ABM undertaking, your existing engagement from key accounts, the structure of your MQL model, the length of your sales cycle, or if you already have a Target Account List. 

Speak to us, and we can help you get started.

Talk to us

Further reading for B2B nerds

Maybe you live, breathe and sleep B2B. Maybe you just want to sound smart at your next planning sesh. Either way: we have stuff for that.