Enterprise Marketing: Cognism’s ABM Strategy

At the start of 2024, Cognism decided to start moving upmarket, targeting enterprise-sized organisations.

Why? After reviewing historic deal data, we could see that the enterprise-level companies we were able to secure deals with were generally larger deal sizes than SMBs and were generally more sticky.

More enterprise deals = more stable revenue. It was an easy decision!

But what is less easy is targeting them… Enterprise companies have 1.8x more companies targeting them, so capturing their attention in a meaningful way is tricky.

It didn’t take us long to create a functional and effective enterprise marketing strategy and enterprise marketing campaigns.

But here at Cognism, we’re always looking for ways to improve our sales and marketing processes. That’s why, in the year-and-a-bit, since we turned our focus to enterprise clients, our processes have already undergone big changes.

With the help of Tim Hughes, Cognism’s Demand Generation Lead, we’re sharing with you today an updated deep dive into our Enterprise ABM strategy. Let’s jump in!

What does Account Based Marketing mean to us?

Everyone seems to have a different definition of ABM and how to do it. Our approach is to start with a broad account base, which we filter using engagement data. We then increase the intensity of campaigning until we have highly personalised campaigns directed at specific accounts.

1:many ABM

Starting from the broadest of the campaign types, 1:many ABM is a mix of territory campaigns and vertical campaigns.

Territory campaigns will target a specific target account list sales are prioritising, while vertical campaigns will target a vertical we typically see the most success in (e.g., SaaS is where we naturally have the best product fit, higher ARR, and faster deal cycles).

So essentially, 1:many is broad targeting but really focused on a specific list of accounts where we can deliver specific messaging. 

These campaigns have a much broader reach than 1:few or 1:one and will contain limited personalisation, talking about specific industry pain points or trends versus calling out any specific company names.

For example, a campaign targeting companies in supply chain and logistics.

Our aim for these kinds of ABM campaigns is to create a multi-channel marketing strategy focusing on reach. This strategy will inform which accounts to funnel into our 1:few and 1:one campaigns later on.

We’ve made a few big changes to this process in the last year.

The first one is condensing the list of priority accounts.

Whereas before, we’d have our AEs and SDRs work with 2,000 accounts, we now condense these lists to 200-300 priority accounts.

We then segment these into high-priority accounts (ICP accounts with high engagement) and mid-priority accounts (ICP accounts with low engagement).

Each segment receives different messaging. High–priority accounts receive remarketing-style messaging with offers and testimonials to create urgency, while mid-priority accounts receive awareness-focused content.

By being fussier about who we target, we get much higher success rates.

Tim explains:

"Our data shows that SDRs have much higher success rates from working an account to meeting booked. Essentially, they have just better conversion rates to meeting booked when an account is over like 50%, 60% engagement."

1:few ABM

These campaigns are in the middle in terms of both reach and personalisation.

In other words, they will have a narrower reach than 1:many, with additional targeted messaging and low-touch personalisation where possible.

For example, our LeanData customer campaigns. Again, a small list of accounts that align with our sweet spot where we can show how our solution complements LeanData customers.

These campaigns can be very specific whilst having a number of different accounts be served the marketing content.

Since we began, we have optimised our 1:few approach. We now select a cohort of 15-20 accounts from our 1:many target account lists with similar characteristics or needs.

These might all be from the same industry, showing high engagement, demonstrating intent or hiring SDRs. We then create campaigns with a specific identity tailored to these shared characteristics, giving the accounts more cohesive and relevant messaging.

The shortlisting process for 1:few accounts includes scoring based on account targets and triggers.

👈 Skip to the ‘Create account plans’ section in the sidebar to learn more about targets and triggers.

Positive data signals contribute to an overall score, and the highest 20 accounts go into the 1:one ABM programme. 

We revisit the list on a fortnightly basis because critical data can change. For instance, a target signing a renewal with ZoomInfo – it would be a waste of time continuing to target them.

We’ll also look for cases where an SDR has completed a large number of tasks, driving up the engagement score, but for some reason, they haven’t moved into the funnel.

To try and crack the account, we provide the SDRs and AEs with comprehensive account insight documents, which include:

• Context from previous opportunities.
• The account’s tech stack.
• Relevant job postings.
• Recent hires (last 3 months).
• Buying committee mapping.
• Personalised templates and cadences specific to each account’s situation.

1:one ABM

1:one is the highest level of our ABM campaigns in terms of touch, personalisation and targeting.

We work closely with sales to ensure we can generate awareness within large enterprise accounts and engage as many buying committee members as possible.

That could look like…

To start with, we put loads of resources into net new accounts — but we weren’t seeing success. To improve that process, we are now only running 1:one campaigns for those accounts that move into opportunity from the 1:few accounts layer. 

Essentially, in any of the three types of ABM, we have taken our demand gen principles and applied them on a more personalised and targeted scale as we narrow in on who we want to engage.

One challenge is balancing volume with quality. Tim explained: 

“It’s balancing having enough there that we can build meaningful pipeline, but not enough that then the outreach, all the assets and outreach gets watered down.”

For those unfamiliar with Cognism’s marketing approach, we are a demand-gen-led organisation.

We run zero-gated eBook content download plays and instead focus on producing value-led content to introduce our ICP to Cognism, build trust and keep them in our orbit until they’re ready to buy.

Then, we will allow our target audiences to come inbound to us when they have a business need for a product like ours.

Listen to how enterprise marketing differs from marketing to SMBs 👇

How we target enterprise accounts with ABM: 6 steps

Now we’re all clear on how we define the different types of ABM, here’s our step-by-step on enterprise marketing strategy and how to implementing it in practice.

1. Identify your ICP

The first stage of any enterprise marketing plan is to have an ICP.

We did a revenue analysis to determine the industries from which we generate the most revenue (where we have the best product-market fit) and the company segments with which we have the most success.

With this criteria, we then combine with the target account list.

The target account list contains thousands of companies, so the revenue analysis and segment breakdown allow us to build an even more honed-in account list, which then runs throughout our whole ABM programme.

Then the goal is to move these great-fit accounts from 1:many all through to the 1:one programme.

Our data analysis has shown that we should prioritise:

• SaaS industry accounts (55% of enterprise close-won deals).
• Companies in the 1-5K employee segment (63% of our revenue).
• US-based companies with EMEA operations or EMEA-based companies (90% of our enterprise revenue).
• Companies with 5+ EMEA SDRs (higher ACVs).

We've found that enterprise SaaS accounts have a 70% higher ACV than our average, making them prime targets for our ABM funnel.

2. Identify hot accounts

The biggest unlock to our success in ABM has been our focus on the ‘who’ we are targeting.

So what have we done?

Alice de Courcy, Cognism’s Chief Marketing Officer said:

“Instead of sales dictating which accounts they want marketing to go after and target, we work together with sales and make our recommendations which are then validated by sales.”

When we first started out, we did this process the other way around - but we found that this was too ad hoc and lacking any real strategic process.

Now, we come up with recommendations based on using Qualified to track target accounts, measure their level of engagement and identify which companies are engaging with our ads and high-intent pages on our website.

This allows us to be hyper-focused and select the most active accounts.

We've substantially improved our approach to identifying high-priority accounts. Instead of relying on a single data source, we now use an unbundled ABM intelligence approach, aggregating signals from multiple platforms:

• Dreamdata for engagement scoring.
• Qualified for website engagement tracking.
• Bombora for intent data.
• Salesforce for CRM data.
• Cognism's own platform for additional insights.

Tim Hughes, Cognism’s Demand Generation Lead says:

“We look at which accounts in this category are surging—that is, which accounts were visiting our website the most and engaged with our content, pricing pages, etc. This allows us to focus very tightly on a narrow range of accounts.”

We then meet with the sales team to align and confirm whether these accounts are a good fit and create a joint account plan with weekly check-ins with the relevant account executives.

3. Create account plans

When building account plans, there are some key things to keep in mind:

• Have we spoken with the account before? If they were previously closed-lost, then why?
• What does current activity look like on the company level? What web pages are being visited?
• Can we use qualified to identify any user activity so we can then tailor the content strategy per persona. E.g UK Sales Director has visited a blueprint on commission plans.
• What ads are being engaged with?
• What personas are most active?

That’s where the demand generation lens comes in.

Because of our approach, we know what content these target accounts are looking at, and we can tailor our outreach based on what that company is doing and what they are engaging with, including what specific web pages the account is visiting.

We want our ABM to feel thoughtful, ensuring that the accounts we are targeting have shown intent and we understand what content they’re looking at.

This also means we get more buy-in from our sales team. Because marketing now approaches sales with a list of high-intent accounts and is seeing results at an accelerated rate, the sales team automatically wants to get involved and do more activity.

We've implemented a formal account selection process with a scoring system that evaluates both account targets (fit) and account triggers (intent):

Account Targets (Fit):

• Is the account in our ICP territory (US with EMEA operations or EMEA-based)?
• Are they from our ICP industry (SaaS or IT services)?
• Are they from our ICP segment (1-5K employees)?
• What's their EMEA SDR headcount? (20+ is ideal)
• Do they have a CRM/sales engagement tool?
• Do they have SDR or RevOps leaders based in EMEA?

Account Triggers (Intent):

• Are they showing intent from Bombora (B2B data, sales intelligence, etc.)?
• What's their engagement score via Dream Data (LinkedIn ads engagement)?
• What's their engagement score from Qualified (website activity)?
• Are they hiring for SDRs or RevOps people in EMEA?
• Have they made relevant new hires (SDR Director, RevOps)?
• Has the account been an opportunity within the last 12 months?
• If they were closed-lost, was it due to bad fit? (We avoid these)

4. Map out marketing touchpoints

This step can be broken down into a further three steps.

4.1. Content mapping

Start by looking at most engaged assets and map to relevant events and series that we can engage the relevant persona with.

At this stage, demand gen managers should work closely with the demand generation content team to understand if we should create any bespoke content.

In other words, do we need any new hyper-personalised messaging and content for unique users we’ve identified?

4.2. Activity and marketing channel mapping

What are the best B2B marketing channels to reach these target audiences on? And how do we maximise existing channels and explore new ones?

For example, could we:

• Ask any subject matter experts to connect with relevant contacts on LinkedIn.
• Use mutiny for personalisation.
• Utilise subject matter expert offering, such as offer 1-to-1 training with an expert.
• Send a Reachdesk gift.
• Create bespoke email marketing sequences.
• Create and capture demand paid ads.
• Use display ads.

For our 1:few campaigns, we've expanded our channel mix to include:

• Targeted ads relevant to specific industries (like SaaS)
• Mutiny pop-ups for website personalisation
• Sending marketing leaders a free copy of our CMO's book followed by a personalised interactive demo
• Cold calling championships with target accounts
• Industry-specific landing pages
• SDR alerts from Qualified and alerts on who's engaging with their ads

4.3. Activation plan

We then map out all activity via Asana (our chosen project management tool - use whatever you already have!) complete with deadlines.

At this stage you should also be 100% clear on your goals and how you are going to track results.

Campaigns should be checked and optimised weekly and the monthly report should look at all activities and results per channel and how this is impacting marketing goals.

In addition, regular check-ins with sales should now be scheduled. We've strengthened our sales collaboration with bi-weekly check-ins with SDRs, AEs and their managers, plus monthly territory-specific calls to review account prioritisation based on engagement signals.

This keeps our ABM efforts aligned with sales activities and remain focused on the highest-potential accounts.

This is because there needs to be a feedback loop between sales and marketing.

Any information that has been uncovered from initial conversations can be shared and then used in messaging.

5. Map out assets and requests for sales

This step involves providing the sales team with personalised sequences and content marketing. The goal is to align marketing touchpoints and content so that sales can convey a consistent message when speaking with prospects.

At the same time, working out what the marketing team might need from sales, such as demo videos of the product.

Here are a few examples of things that our marketing team would provide our sales team:

• A sales enablement briefing document which includes account research, personalised sequences, relevant messaging and proposed campaign plan.
• Content for digital sales room.

And here are a few examples of things that our sales team would provide our marketing team:

• Ask them to record personalised demo videos.
• We can also look to loop in CSMs at this point and brief them a use case to walk through.

This whole process would look a little like this:

Ultimately we want 1:one accounts moving into the funnel as quickly as possible but with enterprise that isn't always the case. So we use different leading and lagging indicators:

Leading indicators

• Engagement intent via qualified (have they moved from warm to hot/surging?).
• How many touchpoints are we getting within a specific time frame?
• Have the number of BOFU website visits increased since the campaign went live?
• % of the account we have penetrated.

Lagging indicators

• MQLs.
• SQO.
• Pipeline.
• Revenue ARR.

Of course, with any ABM campaign and tactics - you want a certain number of these target accounts closing, as then you know you have your account selection process down. And that you’re reaching them in a way that resonates.

If this is missing, it suggests there’s a need to go back to the drawing board to reassess your process. The closer you can be to the marketing data, the easier it is to make those data-driven decisions.

For us at Cognism, this reporting responsibility falls to both our demand generation managers and our paid team.

Cognism’s 1:one ABM strategy deep dive

1:one is really the core of what ABM is. The 1:few and 1:many are still important steps… but 1:one is where you can really get into the nuts and bolts of personalisation and targeting.

We use a number of different tactics as part of our 1:one program (and let’s be real, that's the juicy bit everyone wants to know anyways, right?!) So let's jump in.

1:one ABM: Creating microsites

Once we have a target account within our sights, we get to work building them a custom microsite.

These microsites call out the target company name on the web page in the heading, alongside specific pain points that we believe they’re having.

The next line on the web page explains how we can help them to solve these pain points. For example:

'We built you this microsite to show how Cognism can help [insert company name here] generate more pipeline and deliver new revenue, faster!'

Beneath the personalised heading, there’s a custom demo video which has been filmed to specifically discuss and show how the Cognism product would work for their needs.

To reinforce this, under the video we call out their pain points again. Saying ‘companies like yours are tackling problems like…’. And follow this up with social proof to solidify that we can do what we say we can.

And these microsites get really strong engagement from these target accounts. Here are the results we had from one of our recent personalised microsites:

• 5.6 minutes time on page.
• Over 70 website visits since August.
• 150+ views of the interactive demo.

Which tells us that there is some interest in how we could help them!

1:one ABM: Email nurtures

We send our target decision-makers within individual accounts these microsites via email nurtures. The aim is to build a relationship with their sales rep, by providing the sales rep with email templates and messaging they can use to provide potential customers with value.

We're seeing higher open rates with these emails than the standard emails the reps are normally sending.

Here’s an example:

1:one Targeted paid ads

Our ABM ads are an accumulation of all the intelligence gathered from the research phase, supplemented this with our product strengths to show the account where their gaps are.

When you listen to Gong calls from previous discussions it's quite easy to understand their pain points. We then relay that message through our ads.

Here are a few tactics we use in our ABM 1:one ads:

• Adding relevant social proof to emails, containing the same use cases and pain points as the target account to reinforce our message.
• Adding an image of the account rep. For accounts that have been in opportunity before they will likely recognise the account rep which may remind them to reach back out. Especially if timing is better. This also helps us to put a face to the brand.
• Creating ads that appeal to all teams. In other words, creating ads for each of the possible departments you could help. When an account has previously closed lost due to a lack of sales department need, we have been able to re-engage with them but through their marketing department need.

And we know our ads work!

We track our ads dwell time (the average time viewers spend on your ad before scrolling or clicking).

For our 1:one ABM ads the average dwell time is 5.2 seconds whereas dwell time on our normal always-on ads is 3.7 seconds.

Click through rate is also much higher on 1:one ABM ads (1.45%) versus always-on ads (0.82%).

This shows our ad engagement is much better when we run highly personalised ads.

Listen to how we create enterprise demand with 1:one ads 👇

1:one ABM: Using bespoke, exclusive dinners

Once we had a good idea of the accounts we were targeting with our ABM, we could then shape our in-person events strategy. More specifically, our bespoke in-person dinner strategy.

Some initial context first. We don’t attend a lot of events. We’re very selective about the ones we do attend as it's an expensive investment for an unguaranteed and very spiky return.

However, in-person events are a time when many decision-makers are in one place. And that presents an opportunity.

We can invite decision-makers from target accounts to join us in person for dinner with other decision-makers from enterprise companies. It’s a chance to network and socialise outside of the event schedule — and who doesn’t like a free dinner?

At the Forrester event, we hosted an exclusive, invite-only dinner with LeanData and invited a number of accounts we are targeting.

After the event had passed, we then sent them our CMO Alice de Courcy’s ‘Diary of a First Time CMO’ as a follow-up. This began our one-on-one personalised LinkedIn campaign, and increased our account penetration activities.

This resulted in a $75,000 opportunity.

This dinner helped move conversations into opportunities and opened up conversations with net new accounts and customers.

Similarly, at SaaStr, we also hosted a dinner with Gong, which resulted in 6 net new conversations initiated with senior decision-makers at enterprise businesses.

We're also exploring new in-person engagement strategies, such as advertising within account offices (like screens in lifts), and hosting lunch-and-learn sessions where we set up a portable booth and provide lunch while showcasing our platform to SDRs in detail. This human touch can make all the difference.

How we use Cognism for ABM

Now we couldn’t do a blog post all about our ABM strategy and not mention where we get the data.

Imagine if our sales teams didn’t use our own tool!

There are a number of steps in the process where Cognism comes into play. Here are some examples:

1.Targeted list building

Instead of relying on LinkedIn’s native targeting, Cognism allows marketers to overlay contact-level data on top of the account data to more effectively target specific audiences and reduce wasted ad budget targeting irrelevant people.

We use list building capabilities from Cognism to find the relevant job titles from ICP accounts based in specific locations, and stack additional signal data like intent, hiring, job join and technographics for precise B2B audience targeting.

By uploading Cognism data into LinkedIn, marketers can typically expect a 90% match rate, 63% increase in CTR and better Return on ad spend (ROAS).

Tim Hughes said:

"The success of ABM doesn’t come down to a $100k ABM platform. It comes down to the quality of the audience you’re targeting. Serving ABM ads leveraging Cognism’s data means we’re much more confident that we’re targeting the right audience."

2. Tactical email nurture programs

Cognism = data. Data = power!

We use Cognism’s B2B data to create target lists to fuel our tactical email nurture campaigns and programs.

Tactical email nurtures are sent early on in the 1:one program to see if we can capture low hanging fruit, sending only 2-3 emails using all the assets that we have created.

This just gives us another touchpoint in tandem with our LinkedIn paid activity.

We send them to 6-7 main decision-makers at that account, for example, SDR Directors, mainly in the EMEA region because that's where the use case is the best.

3. Job join triggers

Job join triggers are notifications when a person starts a new role at a target account or joins the target company.

You can upload a target account list as a CSV into Cognism, use the job join filter to find all the people who have either been promoted into a new role or joined the company, and then layer that list into your targeting.

Tim says:

“I use the job join triggers to identify if any new joiners have joined the company, which I then include in the enablement doc we pass to sales so they can reach out to them as low-hanging fruit.”

4. Intent topics

We also use intent topics to see if any warm accounts are searching for topics relating to our solution.

This helps us to validate whether we should be going after that account with personalised activity and can help us shape the messaging.

Our ABM results so far

There you have it, our enterprise marketing strategy. But how do we know that this approach is working?

Here are some of the results we have had so far.

Penetration rate

Here we are looking to validate our approach by measuring the penetration rate of accounts from a defined target account list which we are serving specific ads to.

Penetration rate is calculated on the number of marketing touch points it takes to move an account into opportunity.

As you can see from the graph, we launched the campaign in August and are seeing an incremental increase in penetration rate month on month.

As we want to build awareness and brand recognition at the 1:many stage this is a good way to show our impact.

Account engagement and intent signals

We look at the engagement intent of an account over time and how this is impacting accounts as they move through the funnel.

As you can see from the engagement graph, we saw one specific target account with a lot of touchpoints.

We could deduce by their engagement levels that this translated as signals of high intent and in June, it quickly became an opportunity and progressed to the validation stage.

And then you can see in early July, the intent and touchpoints increased again and the opportunity moved into the negotiation stage straight after.

This shows that ABM isn’t just there to bring an account into the sales funnel, it's there to move deals in opportunity through each stage faster.

BOFU web visits

To supplement this we then look at the increase in BOFU web visits. For example, we had no demo or pricing visits from a target account this year until the campaign went live in June.

Then we had 2 demo and pricing visits in June and 10 demo and pricing visits in July.

With this data and then the intent signals we can show marketing activity impact on bringing the account in-funnel and helping move that through the funnel.

The last word

So there you have it, Cognism’s effective enterprise marketing campaigns, strategies and tactics.

Our ABM marketing efforts have had a positive impact on our win rates. We have seen increased engagement, shorter sales cycles, and bigger deal sizes with significantly more potential customers involved in each deal through our strategies.

Marketing for enterprise companies isn't an easy task - but by following the data, it's much easier to narrow down your search to find the right accounts to focus your marketing efforts on.