Account-Based Marketing (ABM).

Classic B2B marketing casts a wide net and then sorts the prospects. ABM turns that around: first you decide which companies you want to win as customers, often only twenty to a hundred. Then the relevant people in each company are identified — management, purchasing and the specialist department, for instance — and approached specifically with suitable content. The term became known in the early 2000s and is now widespread in B2B sales.

Typical channels are LinkedIn Ads targeted at specific companies, personal emails, case studies from the same industry, invitations to small events and landing pages tailored to an industry or even a single company. What is measured is not the number of leads but whether the target companies respond, conversations take place and orders follow.

An example: a Swiss software house for planning software defines 40 medium-sized construction companies as target customers. For each firm the team researches the contacts, runs LinkedIn ads targeted only at those firms, sends a short case study from a comparable business and invites them to a demo. Sales knows at all times which company has seen which content.

ABM pays off when a single customer is worth a lot, the buying decision involves several people and the market is manageable. For offers with a small order value and many potential customers, the effort per company is too high; there, broad channels such as search and content are more efficient. In the Swiss B2B environment, LinkedIn is often the most important channel for it (LinkedIn marketing); pages for individual target customers follow the rules of conversion rate optimisation.