ABM Campaign Planning Tool

Your Problem

You need to plan successful account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns for each of your target accounts.

Our Solution

Our ABM Campaign Planning Tool was designed to help you plan successful ABM campaigns and ensure that you execute them flawlessly. 

Use this template to document marketing campaign details such as:

• Campaign Name & Timeframe
• Overview
• Objectives
• Budget
• Success Goal
• Channels
• Key Message
• Personas
• Buying Stage
• Target Audience Size & Location
• Project Team
• Touchpoints
• Message/Offer
• Landing Pages

There is also a campaign execution checklist to ensure you don't miss anything critical when launching your ABM campaign.

Key Benefits

• can be easily customized
• save hours of time formatting
• follows ABM best practices
• easy to use Excel template
• great communication tool

Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet

Estimated Time Required: 2 Hours

Skills Required: Excel (Advanced)

Background

Only after the ABM team has completed the critical tasks in the account planning phase can successful buyer engagement happen. With this groundwork complete, the team moves on to purposefully designing personalized campaigns for each ABM tier. The milestones the ABM team reaches in the engagement phase are content, orchestration, and delivery. The following tasks constitute the engagement phase of ABM.

Once you know your customer needs and what solution you’ll offer, nail down the specifics of the campaign. These include

• Campaign Theme: What is the core message your campaign aims to send to targeted accounts? What are the sub-messages you also aim to send?
• Timeline: Which message will the customer receive, and when? Perhaps in the early stages of engagement, you’ll target more general messages (we make shipping easy), and once they engage, your message becomes more specific (our custom shipping software solution cuts turnaround time in half). Base your timeline on calendar dates or target milestones (once the buyer demonstrates X behavior, we implement Y tactic).
• Content: What content assets will you create to win your customers? Create tier-specific content, and your budget for each tier will dictate your content creation parameters. In some cases, a single piece of very effective content is the bulk of an ABM campaign, such as GumGum Inc.’s comic book. Consider other content you can customize for an account or tier of accounts: an e-book that details how a software solution solves problems specific to one account, a VR product demo, or a webinar just for the buying team, for example. Campaign orchestration requires content and topic planning with a set timeline for when specific messages will reach the market.
• Channels: Which ones will your campaign use, and when? A channel that is appropriate early in the campaign, such as e-mail, may lack the personalization options a later stage requires.

A simple campaign planning test is to ask ABM team members to complete this sentence for each stage of the campaign:

At ______ point in time, we’ll deliver ________ piece of content via ________ channel.

This fill-in-the-blank test is an easy way to ensure the team is on the same page for a campaign. Once the campaign plan is in place, revisit ownership roles to be sure that each team member can not only complete the sentence but also knows who is responsible for that stage of the campaign. Campaign planning boils down to identifying your buyer needs, brainstorming campaign themes that revolve around those needs, and then creating a thought-provoking message to put into market.

Visit our Demand Generation & ABM Hub for other great resources.