What is account-based marketing?

Account-based marketing, or ABM, is a strategy that aligns marketing efforts with sales goals by using information about specific accounts and the people involved in their buying process. Customer Insights - Journeys is well suited to this approach because its marketing automation tools can use the underlying data available in Dynamics 365 Sales or your CRM. That lets you incorporate account, contact, opportunity, and other sales information into your marketing strategy. Rather than treating every prospect the same, ABM lets you focus your marketing around the accounts that matter to your organization and use the information you already have about them to make your outreach more relevant.

Understand the three levels of ABM

There are three general approaches to account-based marketing: one-to-one, one-to-few, and one-to-many.

One-to-one, or Strategic ABM

One-to-one ABM is the most personalized approach. It's designed around a single, high-value account and works well for large, complex deals with multiple people involved in the buying process. For example, you might take all the contacts associated with one high-value account and divide them into smaller buying groups based on their:

• Role in the buying process
• Level of influence
• Interests
• Goals

Marketing can then deliver different content to those groups even though everyone belongs to the same organization.

One-to-few, or ABM Lite

One-to-few ABM targets a small group of similar accounts and provides a balance between personalization and efficiency. These campaigns might focus on five to ten accounts that share characteristics such as:

• Industry
• Company size
• Business challenges
• Buying requirements
• Buying behaviors

For example, you might target ten companies in the same industry and of a similar size because those organizations are likely to have overlapping needs.

One-to-many, or Programmatic ABM

One-to-many ABM is easier to scale and automate. It's generally used for broader pipeline awareness and top-of-funnel marketing. Your audience is still targeted, but the content isn't as heavily personalized to individual accounts. Many of your organization's existing B2B marketing activities may already fit into this category.

How is ABM different from demand generation?

Demand generation typically relies heavily on buyer attributes and behaviors when determining who belongs in an audience. ABM puts greater emphasis on account and firmographic data. That could include information such as:

• Company size
• Industry
• Decision makers
• Purchase cycles
• Deal size
• Account relationships

ABM is particularly useful for B2B organizations with high-value deals, longer sales cycles, or sales processes where multiple stakeholders need to be involved before a deal can move forward. The more your Dynamics 365 environment is customized around your actual sales process, the more organization-specific data you can potentially incorporate into these marketing strategies.

Personalize emails using account roles

One way to support a one-to-one ABM strategy is with conditional content in Customer Insights - Journeys. Suppose you have an Account Role field that categorizes contacts as:

• Decision Maker
• Influencer
• Employee

You want everyone at a particular target account to receive the same general marketing email, but you don't want every person to receive exactly the same content. Conditional content allows you to create different versions of a section based on the recipient's attributes. For example, a decision maker may be looking for social proof, so you could provide a call to action to download a case study. An influencer might be more interested in researching the topic, so you could direct that person to your blog or other educational resources. You can configure versions for Decision Maker and Influencer while maintaining a default version for recipients who don't meet either condition.

Personalize subject lines with inline conditional content

Inline conditional content provides another way to personalize the same email. Rather than replacing an entire section, inline conditional content uses if-then-else logic to change specific pieces of content when particular criteria are true or false. For example, your subject line could change based on Account Role:

• Decision Maker: Essential tools for your entire organization
• Influencer: Your process might need this
• Other roles: Could your organization use a hand?

This makes conditional and inline conditional content valuable when you're targeting one account but want different people within that account to receive messaging that's more appropriate for their role.

Build segments using account-level activity

Segments provide another opportunity to incorporate sales and account data into your ABM strategy. For example, you could create a contact-based segment targeting contacts at accounts that had an opportunity opened at least 90 days ago but haven't had an opportunity within the past 30 days. The relationship path can start with Opportunity, move through Account, and end at Contact. The resulting segment is still contact-based, but you're using account and opportunity information to determine which contacts belong in it. This can be useful when it doesn't matter which individual at the account was originally associated with an opportunity. What matters for your marketing strategy is the activity of the account as a whole.

Refine the segment with firmographic data

You can refine this audience further by adding account attributes. For example, you might only want contacts at companies with more than 500 employees. Your resulting audience could include contacts whose accounts:

• Have an opportunity that wasn't lost
• Had that opportunity 90 or more days ago
• Haven't had an opportunity within the past 30 days
• Have 501 or more employees

The exact fields available will depend on your Dynamics 365 environment. Custom fields that reflect the way your organization actually qualifies and manages accounts can make your ABM segments considerably more specific.

Use custom views to surface useful ABM information

Segments are useful when building journey audiences, but you may also want an easier way to monitor important account information without opening individual segments. Custom Dynamics 365 views can make that information more accessible. For example, you could build a contact view and add columns for:

• Account Role
• Customer Size
• Industry
• Account Owner
• Subscription Renewal Date
• Lifetime Customer Value
• History of purchasing seasonal products

This can give marketing users a quick way to identify decision makers or influencers at particular types of accounts and stay aware of account-level changes.

Filter custom views with related data

You don't necessarily have to display every piece of information as a column. Related entity data can also be incorporated into filters. For example, you might want to identify contacts associated with accounts receiving particular discounts or billing rates. You could filter the view using Price List information, even if the price list isn't displayed as one of the view's columns. Incorporating account-level fields, custom fields, and related CRM data into your views can help your marketing team stay current on important account developments without manually inspecting records or asking the sales team whether something has changed.

Connect marketing activity to Sales Accelerator

You can take the connection between sales and marketing another step further by integrating Customer Insights - Journeys with Sales Accelerator. Using Power Automate and custom triggers, leads or contacts can be added to sales sequences when certain activities are completed or criteria are met. For example, this could provide a way to move a marketing-qualified lead into a sales sequence. A sales sequence provides a predetermined path for sellers to follow as the lead progresses through the sales cycle. Connecting marketing qualification to that process can help create a more structured handoff between marketing and sales.

Put your Dynamics 365 account data to work

Customer Insights - Journeys can support account-based marketing at several levels, whether you're creating highly personalized outreach for one strategic account or scalable campaigns intended to keep your organization top of mind across a broader audience. The key is making use of the account and sales information already available in Dynamics 365. Conditional email content can personalize messaging for different stakeholders, segments can identify audiences using account-level activity, custom views can surface important account information, and Sales Accelerator integration can help move qualified prospects into the sales process. Together, these tools can help your marketing and sales teams work from the same data and keep their strategies more closely aligned.