# 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.

Quelle: https://whovisit.app/en/blog/account-based-marketing-website
Veröffentlicht: 2026-11-07
Herausgeber: Whovisit (ARAVILO, Innsbruck)

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](https://whovisit.app/blog/kaltakquise-b2b-erlaubt) 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](https://whovisit.app/hilfe/zielgruppen-anlegen). 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](https://whovisit.app/blog/homeoffice-vpn-mobilfunk-besuchererkennung).

## 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](https://whovisit.app/blog/lead-scoring-b2b).

**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.