Published 21 December 2021

Campaign Ideas For Account Based Marketing To Expand Your Pipeline In 2022

Account-based marketing (ABM) is now the go-to strategy for modern marketers, embraced by over 70% of marketers in 2021. But effectively executing ABM campaigns for optimal results can be challenging. This post explores the top 5 high ROI account-based marketing campaigns for 2022. These include targeted content, personalized emails, partner programs, targeted events, and social media leverage. Supported by real-world examples from Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, Cisco, and Moz, you'll find the inspiration you need to choose an ABM campaign strategy that aligns with your goals and drives impactful results in the coming year.

Introduction

Account-based marketing is a go-to marketing strategy for modern marketers. It is the futuristic marketing weapon that has been used by over 70% of marketers in 2021.

Today, marketers are well-aware of account-based marketing benefits. But they are facing problems in deploying the right ABM campaigns to drive maximum results.

Therefore, we have created this post to discuss the top 5 account-based marketing campaigns for high ROI in 2022. We will walk you through the best ABM campaigns with relevant examples to grow your pipeline. So, let’s get moving.

Why Should You Invest in Account-based Marketing Campaigns?

According to a study conducted in 2019, 92% of marketers consider ABM campaigns either “extremely” or “very” important for their business growth. The reason?

It helps to build coordination between sales and marketing teams to create a targeted accounts list. This, in return, saves a company’s time and resources to grow its sales pipeline.

Here are a few reasons that will help you understand why account-based marketing campaigns are the first choice of marketers today:

Targeted Approach

In ABM, marketers can know what customers want, and based on that information; they can invest in marketing resources. This marketing strategy will remove the guesswork from marketing operations. This, in return, saves time and resources for a firm to focus only on the result-driven marketing strategies.

Streamline Operations

Account-based marketing is the collective efforts of sales and marketing teams. Under the ABM framework, sales and marketing departments work together to recognize targeted accounts, create account-based marketing campaigns and walk leads to the sales pipeline.

Shorten Sales Cycle

In account-based marketing, you are targeting the potential leads only. This practice reduces all the jargon of capturing and nurturing irrelevant leads. Further, it will shorten the customer’s journey and allow marketers to prioritize leads based on their intent data.

Better ROI

It is found that when marketers and salespeople work together on creating account-based marketing campaigns, it can improve revenue growth by 6%. Additionally, this will allow businesses to invest in different marketing channels without raising their marketing budget.

Maximum Results

ABM aligns the entire organization’s resources to focus on the accounts, which can actually bring any value. This way, businesses can personalize marketing campaigns to drive maximum results.

5 Account-based Marketing Campaigns to Grow Your Sales Funnel in 2022

As you can see, account-based marketing is precise and targeted. Therefore, when you deploy ABM campaigns correctly, they can generate relevant leads and stimulate your sales to funnel.

Over the years, marketers have practiced a variety of ABM strategies to grow their pipelines like direct email, events, and more.

But if we consider upcoming marketing challenges and trends, account-based marketing campaigns in 2022 need to be more personal, innovative, and powerful. Based on that, here are the top 5 ABM campaigns that can do wonders in 2022:

1. Use Targeted Content

One of the best account-based marketing campaign ideas is publishing targeted content on your website or social media. Content marketing is already a big part of digital marketing because it engages and motivates leads.

In ABM, marketers can use buyer’s intent data to understand what content topics their potential customers explore. And accordingly, they can develop targeted content marketing strategies.

Salesforce is doing a great job in harnessing ABM-based content marketing strategy. This CRM brand has a wide content base, including blogs, ebooks, whitepapers, case studies, and whatnot.

The Salesforce marketing team constantly taps into their core users’ minds to target customer-specific content. In fact, they even use each content piece to target a specific audience group.

For example, Salesforce ebooks are compiled for easy to convert customers or existing customers. Therefore, ebook topics are direct promotional and helpful, like “Help Every Department Get the Most Out of Salesforce” or “The Salesforce Playbook for Customer Success.”

source: Professional-Services

This helps Salesforce to make a final sales pitch to customers who are ready to get the product but just need a small nudge.

On the flip side, the Salesforce blog section targets generic topics to drive potential customers to the sales pipeline for further nurturing.

source: blog

Taking inspiration from Salesforce, first, gather your potential buyer’s intent data and then produce different content pieces to target separate customer groups.

2. Direct And Personal Emails

Direct and personalized emails are the finest account-based marketing campaign strategy. According to GetResponse, a personalized email body has a 5.03% click-through rate and 29.95% open rate.

But there’s a catch. If your ABM emails don’t end up in the right recipient’s inbox, it will provide zero results.

There are many things that ABM marketers must consider to improve their email campaigns ROI, such as:

Segment Subscribers

First of all, you need to segment your email subscriber list based on separate categories like geographic, age, income, active, etc. This will help marketers to personalize email content targeting a group of subscribers.

Formulate Email Body

The sales team has to provide marketers with the right input to create an email’s body in this step. For example, if salespeople say that a certain group of subscribers will easily convert by offering some lucrative benefits, marketers have to come up with an email offer to convert those subscribers. Here coordination between sales and marketing departments plays a key role.

Miscellaneous Factors

Many miscellaneous factors also contribute to the success of personalized emails, such as email templates, the timing for sending emails, tracking, your response timing, and more.

Personalized emails are used by numerous B2B brands today to better connect with their customers. So, you will find many personalized email examples to take ideas for your ABM direct email campaigns. But we would like to discuss the Marketo ABM email strategy.

The brand used gifts to grab marketers’ attention and thank them for being loyal customers. These types of emails are perfect for retaining your existing customers.

source: ABM Email-example

3. Introduce Partner Program

Data is the backbone of account-based marketing campaigns. Whether you want to run email or content marketing campaigns, authentic customer data is highly important to support ABM.

Nowadays, ABM marketers use different tactics to scrap real-time buyer data from the internet like cookies, web trackers, and more. In fact, some marketers even purchase email lists and buyer’s intent data.

But unfortunately, all this offers limited results only. Additionally, Google changing its privacy policy in 2022 and the death of cookies will make data scraping a lot harder for you.

Thus, it is time to find a better and solid way to gather customers’ data. In fact, 65% of customers are willing to share personal information with brands to get better services in return.

That means if you collect users’ data in the right manner, they won’t have any problem sharing it with you. And this fact is proven by HubSpot.

HubSpot has introduced a series of partnership programs to connect with different audiences and gather information from them, such as:

source: Partners

App Partner Program to target developers and companies that want to develop apps on HubSpot.
Solutions Partner Program to connect with experts like marketers, salespeople, designers, and others.
Startup Partner Program to promote HubSpot Growth Stack, programming, and educational content.
Education Partner Program for colleges and universities who want to teach technical and marketing to their students.
Affiliate Partner Program for bloggers and other content creators to promote HubSpot services and make money.

All these partner programs provide tons of data to HubSpot without going anywhere else. Now, isn’t that great?

4. Host Events For the Targeted Audience

Data is a very important part of account-based marketing campaigns. But, we should not forget that customers are human beings—a person whose feelings, emotions, and buying habits can change at any time.

Therefore, merely relying upon data will not provide a competitive edge to your account-based marketing campaigns in 2022. You have to think beyond the data and establish a personal connection with your targeted audience.

For this, you can host an event for your targeted customers. This will allow you to understand their customers’ preferences in real-time. Additionally, you can interact with your potential customers and use different tactics to convert them like hand gestures, facial features, emotional tone, etc.

Today, marketers have numerous opportunities to host events for their audiences like in-person, virtual events, hybrid, or webinars.

Due to the pandemic, it is not possible to host in-person customer events in many parts of the world. Therefore, you should organize virtual events or webinars to engage with your audience around the globe.

Here are a few tips for hosting an online event for your potential customer:

Define Goals

Foremost, decide what you want to achieve from the event? For example, getting customers’ insight, introducing a new product/service, generating UGC, Q/A session, and more.

Try Different Formats

Don’t stick to one type of online event. You should experiment with different styles of event format to keep your audience engaged and interested. Also, monitor each event’s progress and host the event that brings more value to your organization.

Promote Your Events

If you want more people to attend your event, use social media, TV ads, digital ads, and other mediums to promote your event.

Increase Attendance Rate

This one is a very vital point to consider. That’s because not all registered participants will attend your online event. Thus, you should try different tactics to increase your event’s attendance rate, like:

Make event paid
Host events on different time slots
Special Q/A session at the end
Gifts or freebies for attendees, etc.

Co-Partner With Other Brands

By co-partnering with other brands, you can increase excitement about your event even more. Especially if you are a startup brand, it will be great for you to partner with other popular brands to drive relevant leads your way.

Series of Events

You can turn your event into a series of events to keep your audience constantly engaged with your brand. You can create a series like podcasts or web shows where the audience can constantly learn new things about your products or services.

Centralize All Events in One Place

If you plan to create a series of events, it is important to organize all your events in one place so that people can access them anytime. Here, having a website is a great place to host your events. Otherwise, you can use Zoom, Eventbrite, or other apps to host your events.

Cisco is a perfect example of this account-based marketing campaign.

source: Training-Events.

The company has a dedicated event page on their website where they host a variety of online events for their target audience. You can find demo-based events, informative events, and many more on the Cisco website.

5. Leverage Social Media

Social media is a powerful account-based marketing campaign. By monitoring your targeted audience’s social media posts, you can gather tons of valuable data without having personal interaction.

People often share their problems and challenges on social media. That will give a golden opportunity to respond with valuable content and understand your customers.

All the social media platforms have dynamic tools to generate data. But Twitter does a fantastic job in building lists and monitoring your targeted ABM accounts. You can create a targeted profiles list in your Twitter account to know what types of content your audience follows and produce content based on your research.

Additionally, social media offers various ways to interact with your audience, like:

Direct messaging helps to develop personalized relationships with leads.

Comments and likes can allow you to harness potential customers at an early stage.

Take a look at Moz’s Twitter account to better understand ABM’s social media campaigns. They frequently tweet engaging, promotional, and event-related posts multiple times a day.

source: Moz

This one is an awesome engagement post to gather customer data by Moz. Polls always help to generate buzz and data on social media.

Which Is Your Favorite Account-based Marketing Campaign Idea?

There you go! You have learned the top 5 account-based marketing campaigns to use in 2022.

You now know how to leverage events to establish in-person relationships with your targeted audience. You have also seen how emails, content, and social media can blaze your pipeline. And you can’t forget the partner program to scrape authentic data on the internet.

So, now we would like to know which one is your favorite ABM campaign strategy that you can’t wait to try in 2022?

Also, if you have any personal favorite ABM campaign strategy that has brought loads of leads your way, we would like to know your business secret too. Let’s rave in the comments section.