25 ABM Use Cases and Ideas To Provide ABM Inspiration

Whether you are working on how to get started or scaling up your ABM program, I hope that this list of ABM Use Cases will give you new ideas and inspiration.

By the way, I will be adding to this list as I learn about new ones.

The ABM Use Case and ABM Examples List

1. Providing In-market Alerts to SDRs - (A great ABM Use case to try first)

You can do this without an ABM platform. You license intent data from either Bombora or Zoominfo and set up the appropriate topics and filters to identify in-market healthcare organizations. Then integrate this into your CRM and create an in-market report that shows who is showing interest in relevant topics.

2. Building your Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs)?

This is a foundational step in creating an ABM strategy. This blog post describes how to do this. This post provides a healthcare market segmentation that will be valuable in defining the target market.

3. Determining If Third-party Intent Data Can Reach Your Market

Third-party data from firms like Bombora and ZoomInfo, can be like magic in identifying in-market prospects. However, it’s not for everyone. If you operate in a very small niche, they may not cover your most relevant topics. You can determine if your topic is covered by examining the vendor’s topic list. Here is Bombora’s list.

4. Using First-party Intent Data to Cross-sell to Existing Customers (One of My Favorite ABM Uses Cases)

This is an underutilized ABM Use Case. Intent Data will help you identify new in-market prospects, and it can very helpful in helping you identify opportunities to sell your existing customers more products and services. You can do this in your ABM platform, your CRM, or the third-party intent data platform. Create a list of current customers who have not purchased a particular product. Determine intent topics for this product. Then configure the system to determine and identify which of these customers is showing intent for this product.

5. Using Gifting to Engage High Priority Target Accounts

In this increasingly digital world, old-school tactics like sending physical mail or gifts have gone out of vogue. Companies like Sendoso make it simple to send gifts to high-value prospects.

6. Run ABM Campaigns in Hubspot

Firms like Demandbase, Terminus, and 6Sense are designed for ABM. Hubspot is getting in the game and, in the two years, has improved its system to make it a viable way to run your ABM program. This post goes into how.

7. Determining your Best-Fit Customer Profile

Once you have developed your ICP, you must determine what a best-fit customer is. This is nuanced. Here is an example from my experience doing this [video case] [blog post]. This post explains how to do it dynamically using Demandbase’s FIRE framework.

8. Developing Qualifying Questions Best Fit Accounts

And once you have determined your best fit accounts, the next thing is to develop a set of questions to qualify them. For example, if you have a novel solution and run a start-up, ask the buyers how many startup solutions they have purchased in the last two years.

9. Using Intent Data to Target In-Market Prospects Via an ABM Platform (A Widely Used Example of ABM)?

One of the reasons many organizations buy an ABM platform like Terminus is to run targeted ABM advertising. This is a very common ABM Use Case. These platforms enable you to run display ad campaigns to select targets, for example, based on intent for certain topics. In this case study, Nuvolo explains how they use this 1:Many technique as part of a competitive switching program.

10. Building Sales and Marketing Alignment With a 1:1 ABM Pilot

The single biggest reason ABM programs fail is through poor alignment between sales and marketing. One way to build this from the start is to pilot 1:1 ABM with a simple pilot targeting a few accounts. Sales and marketing partner to identify which accounts to target first and then develop a program to test this out.

11. Targeting In-market Prospects with LinkedIn Ads

This is one of my favorite simple ABM Use Cases. You can still run an ABM ad campaign if you have licensed intent data but don’t have an ABM platform. First, create a list of accounts that are in-market for your solutions. Then import this list into the LinkedIn Marketing Platform and create a campaign. Select relevant titles and run your ads exclusively to the list of in-market accounts.

12. Creating Personalized Pages for Top Prospects (I love this ABM Example)

If you have an email list of contacts from your ABM Target Account List, you can target them with a personalized experience by using a Personalized URL. This sends these contacts a link to a web page with a personalized URL, e.g., johnsmith.healthlaunchpad.com. You can do this typically in marketing automation systems like ontraport. The web page should be curated to address their needs. For example, we recently ran a campaign targeting hospital accounts that switched to Epic in the last two years. The content and offerings were exclusively about issues faced by new Epic customers. The email performed 2-3X baseline open and clickthrough rates.

13. Engaging Top Target Accounts With Customzied Resource Pages

You can also create customized and branded pages for your highest priority accounts. In this case study, Nuvolo explains how this is part of their approach to 1:1 ABM. It's a creat example of a strategic ABM Use Case.

14. Targeting Accounts Based on Interest in Key Categories

One of the approaches to ABM is 1:Few or Segment-based. Typically, this targets sub-segments of an ICP, e.g., West Coast-based IDNs. Another example is segmenting based on need. For example, if a company sells solutions that address Remote Patient Monitoring, Telehealth, Language Services and Physician credentialing, you can segment your intent topics for these separate categories. When an account appears interested in one of the categories, for example, language services, you can “drop” key contacts from this account into a language services campaign or email sequence.

15. Running a Competitive Switching Program

One ABM Use Case I am asked about frequently is how to use ABM for competitive switching. If you have a list of accounts that are running your competitors' solution, you can run a campaign targeting these accounts with a competitive switching message. You can do this through an ABM platform or simply via LinkedIn ads. Here is how Nuvolo does this.

16. Advertising to Epic Customers

Epic makes its customer list publicly available. If you have an offering that is hyper-relevant to Epic customers or a recent case study, you can use this list to run a targeted ABM campaign.

17. Using LinkedIn to Nurture Relationships with High Priority Target Accounts

LinkedIn is an effective platform for building relationships with prospects. In an ABM program, you can use it to make connections and nurture relationships with contacts at high-priority accounts.

18. Running a LinkedIn InMail Ad Campaign to High Priority Target Accounts

One of the challenges with LinkedIn is that most people won’t accept your invitation. We have found that acceptance rates run from as low as 15% to as high as 40%. This means you won’t be able to directly nurture relationships with 60-85% of your prospects. This is where InMail comes in. While I don’t like getting InMail solicitations, I don’t mind sponsored ads via InMail. This is at least a more honest way of trying to get a message in front of me.

19. Creating a Simple ABM Dashboard

If you haven’t adopted an ABM platform and your CRM is not well-suited to creating an ABM dashboard, you can create a Google Sheet to track account engagement. For example, if you are running a 1:1 campaign to 20 accounts, you can create a dashboard that tracks engagement across all your tactics, e.g., ad engagement, email CTRs, downloads, LinkedIn acceptances, and score the 20 accounts based on aggregate engagement.?

20. Using an ABM Platform to Measure the Impact of Your ABM Campaign

If you have adopted an ABM platform, you will want to create a more sophisticated ABM dashboard that will enable you to build a set of ABM of KPIs. This post explains the ABM measurement framework.?

21. Using Content To Identify In-Market Prospects with Netline

One of my favorite B2B marketing tools that is perfect for ABM is Netline. It's a great example of how to execute ABM without limited resources. This B2B content syndication platform enables you to get your long-form downloadable content in front of your audience using first-party data to target them.

22. Identifying At-Risk Customers with Intent Data

One ABM Use Case you may not have considered is how to use ABM as a retention tool. While ABM and Intent Data are typically associated with account growth, you can also use them to retain customers. For example, if you sell Telehealth Solutions, you can monitor your current customers to see if they show “spikes” for Telehealth intent topics. This may signal that they are actively looking to switch.

23. Using Intent Data to Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy

Many are unfamiliar with ABM Use Case: how to use intent data in your content strategy. Intent Data signals what customers are interested in. For example, you can monitor a long list of topics for your target account list. If you notice that many are spiking for a specific topic, e.g., cybersecurity, adjust your content marketing strategy and focus on marketing your cybersecurity content or creating new content.?

24. How to Make Your Personas ABM-ready

I always feel that the most valuable thing about your personas is understanding their buyer journey. This includes understanding their questions at each stage of the buyer's journey. One way to make this more ABM-ready is to add intent topics that are most likely to be relevant at each stage too

25. How to Design an ABM Pilot

ABM is hard to do well. It takes time to perfect. The first step is to run a pilot. In the ABM Resource Center, you will find the tools, templates, and guidance on how to create a 90-day ABM Pilot.

And Lest I Forget

I hope you found these ABM Use Cases helpful. I can help you grow your healthcare customer business. To get started check out the ABM Resource Center. It is chock-full of templates, tools, and ideas to get you started on your ABM journey.

Also published on my blog.