Account-based marketing (ABM) is a targeted marketing strategy where you focus your outbound efforts on a pre-selected list of customers who fit well into your Ideal Customer Profile. ABM is an excellent choice for businesses of all sizes and shapes, but it is particularly well-suited for developer platforms and products.

Typically, your developer product can be used to accomplish a variety of scenarios. However, you've likely noticed that there are a handful of solutions for which your product is best suited and with which you are seeing the most traction. Instead of marketing to a wide audience, you focus your energy on specific accounts, and specific people within those accounts, who have the problem that you solve.

There are a few components of ABM that I will guide you through in this post:

1. Goals and metrics
2. Sales alignment
3. Customer targeting
4. Content creation
5. Multi-channel customer engagement
6. Measurement and ROI analysis

Let's tackle each of these in sequence.

Goals and metrics

Do you want to:

• Drive more qualified leads and opportunities?
• Increase engagement with target accounts?
• Accelerate the sales cycle and reduce time to close?
• Boost conversion among key accounts?

Identifying your goals, and the corresponding metrics you'd like to achieve, is essential to crafting the right target account list, messaging, and more.

For example, some key metrics you may want to aim for include:

• Accounts engaged with (for some definition of "engaged")
• Number of meetings booked
• Pipeline growth from the target account list
• Revenue from the target account list

These metrics will give you a "left-to-right" view of your ABM program and help you more effectively debug the components that require more attention.

Sales alignment

I'm assuming you've already defined your Ideal Customer Profile in concert with the rest of your executive team. You want to make sure sales, marketing, and product are all aligned on who, exactly, the company is targeting with its products and services. No amount of marketing can save you if you don't feel aligned on ICP. So, do yourself a favor and make sure you have rock solid agreement before proceeding.

Once aligned, you can coordinate efforts to build a target account list, content (including outbound email cadences), and training on product, competitive, and marketing materials to help everyone get on the same page.

Customer targeting

Your ICP will help you identify the characteristics of your best-fit customers based on factors like industry, company size, technology stack, and annual revenue. Other considerations related specifically to your product may also be relevant. For example, "the customer must already have a substantial investment in Snowflake or BigQuery."

Categories I've created for clients include:

• For a DevOps/SRE company: Companies in North America with over 500 engineers who deploy complex infrastructure on AWS
• For an AI Chatbot company: Commercial real estate management companies with at least one shopping center property in their portfolio
• For a new ELT company: Scale-ups with Snowflake and Kafka deployments on AWS

Based on your categories, you now need to dive deep into research to create a list of companies that fit your category. You should strive to be as precise as possible, and you should do this collaboratively with your sales and outbound team. They need to buy into your categorization.

It's a good idea to start small. Maybe experiment with 25 customers at first and then consider expanding later based on the results you see.

Following your ICP model, you must identify your product's target customer persona. For example, you don't want to spend effort reaching data scientists at ACME Corp if your product is best suited for data engineers. So, now build a list of titles (e.g., "VP of Engineering," "Director of Engineering," "Head of Engineering," and "CTO") interested in your product.

So, as a result of this exercise, you now have the following:

• An aligned understanding of your goals and target customer
• A list of target customers and titles

Now let's get to the really fun part.

Content creation

Don't skimp on customer research. For each customer in your target list, you want a deep understanding of their industry trends, pain points, recent news, competitive pressures, etc. Put yourself in the shoes of one of your target titles at this customer. What do they worry about daily that your product or service addresses? You must address a serious pain point to be considered a serious vendor.

From here, I then build a few targeted pieces of content that are customized for each customer in your list:

1. A blog post or whitepaper of deep technical interest to prospects in that industry
2. A case study from a prominent and well-known brand
3. (ideally) A case study video with the same customer
4. A landing page (or solution page) for the industry that identifies the pain points, manner in which my product solves those pains, and links to additional case studies
5. A demo tailored for the customer, recorded as a video and available to deliver in a first meeting
6. Docs or technical materials that the prospect can use to either try the product themselves or envision themselves using the product at a visceral level
7. First meeting slide deck
8. Datasheet PDF
9. (Optional) Scheduled webinar of interest to the industry

Yes, that is a ton of research and content just for one customer. But we're not even done yet.

Multi-channel customer engagement

The goal at this point is to predispose customers to respond to sales outbound activities. Think about it this way: how many cold emails do you receive daily? Now, what if you had heard of the sender's company already? What if you had already learned something from reading the aforementioned blog post? What if the subject of the webinar intrigued you in some fashion? You would be much more likely to respond to the cold email. We will use multiple channels to saturate our prospect list with the content we've written:

1. LinkedIn Single Image ads
2. LinkedIn thought leader ads
3. Retargeting ads (if your audience is large enough)
4. Direct mail
5. Outbound cadences/emails

All of this content must be thematically identical to the content you created before. If the blog post you chose to write was about "Identifying root causes of errors in Kubernetes deployments," then the LinkedIn ads and outbound sequences must also be related to the same. You want to align not only on ICP and target customers but also target messaging, and you want to be 100% consistent with everything you create.

One thing I do want to touch on is Direct Mail for high-impact accounts. In the days of remote work, Direct Mail has fallen into disfavor. But if you can figure out creative ways to obtain someone's address (by asking them, not by Internet stalking them! Don't be creepy!), a classy gift along with printed datasheets and booklets can be a great way to help your sales team start and progress in their outbound communications.

Execute the campaign

Whether you start with outbound cadences and layer in the LinkedIn component after, or vice versa, is a matter of personal preference. My view is that with the saturation of our email inboxes, I would rather give every email a better than fighting chance at being read. Thus, I prefer to "pre-load" the customer with knowledge about your product or service and then start the outbound sequence when they have already (and recently) heard of you.

Measurement and ROI

There is a whole industry built around ABM tools. I encourage you to do your due diligence on them. I personally have never used one, as I find the brute force analysis I can do with LinkedIn and Salesforce sufficient for early-stage startups. Plus, being forced to do the analysis myself puts me waist-deep in the data, ensuring I build a deep understanding of tactics and messaging that will work.

Things I start to monitor include:

• Email open rates
• LinkedIn ad performance
• Website visitors from my target accounts (I like to use tools like Koala)
• Content downloads or views (specifically, the content in your list above)
• Product sign-ups from target accounts
• Demo requests from target accounts
• (and, of course, meetings, opportunities, pipeline, and revenue)

Stay nimble and adjust your messaging and execution quickly to optimize for what drives meetings. Don't be afraid to move fast.

Keep your sales and product teams in the loop and fully aligned with your approach throughout the process. You want to lean on them to give you insight if you identify messaging that is working (or not working).

Summary

I am a huge fan of ABM for developer-focused products and customers. A targeted approach to potential customers can significantly improve your pipeline generation efforts. This is something I'm passionate about helping you with.