If your customer is a business, you may need to interact with a number of decision-makers and influencers. Because of this, a lot of groups implement an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy.

Marketers must then provide the experiences and content that are appropriate given the prospect’s stage in the buyer’s journey. This entails structuring your strategy around the different levels of target engagement that your marketing team achieves.

To begin, you must determine how many people within the organization you intend to communicate with regarding a specific message or experience. Then, match these strategies to actual businesses in your target market or region.

3 levels of targeted engagement

In order to structure your ABM strategy, consider the following three basic levels or flavors of engagement. Depending on the prospect’s level of interest, you will offer one-to-many, one-to-few, or one-to-one experiences.

Account (one-to-many)

These experiences are open to anyone in the organization. This is early in the buyer journey for your company, when individuals may be conducting their own research on your company’s offerings. They may also be researching your competitors or reading reviews posted by peers in the industry.

Your team can determine if the account is in-market and ready to buy based on the intent signals produced by these interactions. They could be looking for prices or expressing interest in other ways.

Demand Unit (one-to-few)

Important purchasing decisions are made by a smaller team within the company.

“When we have determined that an account is in-market, that is the catalyst for us to enter that demand unit or buying committee.

Instead of passively showing them ads on a peer review site, you will message these demand unit members on more individualized channels like social media or invite them to a webinar that provides them with more information about your company’s offerings.

Individual (one-to-one)

Further down the funnel, your ABM strategy will direct you to important executives with purchasing power. The sales team will also handle any personal calls or meetings. These messages will be personalized for marketing communications in order to convey the personalized service offered by a live agent.

Delivering the right experiences to key accounts

The levels of engagement are shaped like a pyramid, with many one-to-many experiences and only a few one-to-one messages delivered to the key individuals at the very top.

Paid media, display ads, retargeting, and emails designed to nurture all prospects within your target market are at the bottom of the pyramid.

As a result of these initial engagements across all target accounts, new experiences will be introduced higher up the pyramid. Your team will spend more time and resources on interacting with these higher-value contacts because there are fewer of them. The best approach is one-to-few because of this.

A product demo or a call blitz on these key individuals could be some of the actions that sales are taking as marketing now delivers more targeted campaigns.

More data and intelligence will then be used to further personalization at the top of the pyramid. These people can also be individually targeted with additional paid media.

When your ABM strategy is set up with these distinct tiers of engagement, your marketing resources can be distributed effectively to move customers through their journey.