Practice · 7 November 2026 · 4 minute read
Account-based marketing: turning your website into a measuring point
Account-based marketing focuses on selected companies. How to define target accounts, plan content and use your website to measure whether it works.
Traditional marketing casts a wide net and hopes that suitable companies get caught in it. Account-based marketing (ABM) turns this around: you first decide which companies you want to win. Then you align content, channels and sales precisely with them. This reduces wasted reach. But you need a way to measure whether the selected companies respond at all.
Three variants
| Form | Number of target companies | Effort per company | Typical for |
|---|---|---|---|
| One to one | 5 to 20 | High, separate content for each company | Large contracts, long sales cycles |
| One to few | 20 to 200 | Medium, content per industry or group | Mid-sized providers with a clear niche |
| One to many | Several hundred | Low, automated | Software and services with many similar customers |
For most small and mid-sized companies, „one to few“ is the sensible starting point.
The first programme in four steps
1. Choose target accounts
Look at your best existing customers: which industry, which size, which region, which occasion led to the purchase? This gives you a profile. With the profile you choose a list of specific companies. Sales and marketing define the list together. Otherwise everyone ends up working on their own.
2. Understand the buying centre
In B2B, one person rarely decides alone. Usually the specialist department, IT, purchasing and management are involved. Note down the question each role has: the specialist department wants to know whether it works. Purchasing wants to know what it costs. IT wants to know how it can be integrated.
3. Plan content
For every role and every phase you need suitable content: specialist articles for the introduction, case studies from the same industry, a clear pricing page, documents for IT. With „one to few“, one page per industry with fitting examples is often enough.
4. Deliver
Content reaches the target companies through ads in networks that offer audiences by company, through trade media, events, post and the sales team. For direct outreach, the rules from Cold outreach in B2B: what is allowed in Germany, Austria and Switzerland apply.
The website as a measuring point
Every ABM programme has the same weak spot: for a long time you do not know whether it works. It often takes months until a target company gets in touch. An earlier measuring point is your own website: are the selected companies coming? Which pages do they read? Do they come back?
Three metrics suit this:
- Coverage: How many of the target companies were on the website at least once in the last 90 days?
- Depth: How many target companies read more than one page or on more than one day?
- Closeness to purchase: How many target companies visited pricing, reference or contact pages?
A visitor identification tool shows company visits if the visit comes from the company's network. Many tools let you create the target list as an audience and receive a notification when one of them visits. In the Whovisit help centre this is described under Creating audiences: marking matching companies. Bear the limits in mind: anyone reading from a home office does not appear as a company. Coverage is therefore a lower bound, not a complete picture. More on this in Home office, VPN and mobile networks: who you cannot see.
Typical mistakes
Lists that are too long. Anyone who wants to work 2,000 companies „in a targeted way“ is doing traditional marketing under a different name.
Ads only. ABM is not a channel but an alignment between marketing and sales. Without a sales team that reacts to signals, the effect fizzles out.
Measuring only by enquiries. Enquiries come late. Anyone who counts only those ends good programmes too early.
Frequently asked questions
Is ABM worthwhile for small companies? Yes, especially when the market is manageable and every customer is worth a lot. A list of 50 companies and three good pieces of content are enough to start.
What role does lead scoring play? It helps to set the order within the target list. See Lead scoring in B2B: a simple model based on website signals.
How long does it take for ABM to work? You will see first signals on the website after a few weeks. Conversations and orders follow the sales cycle of your industry, often three to twelve months.
