The Art of the Deal: 6 Winning Strategies for Account-Based Marketing in Financial Services

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is no longer a buzzword du jour or the latest cool trend—it’s here to stay. It’s been vetted and proven to drive (1) better customer/account experiences and (2) revenue growth. ABM has become a must-have strategy for today’s financial services marketers.

The numbers don’t lie. A whopping 93% of surveyed marketers in financial service organizations say they’re already using Account-Based approaches, according to a Global Account-Based Marketing Benchmark. And while marketers and their organizations clearly recognize ABM’s potential, multiple obstacles nevertheless remain on the road to unlocking ABM’s full value. 

Far too many finserv organizations are stuck in the early stages of ABM, caught in ongoing cycles of “start and stop” and half measures, while struggling to scale ABM effectively to unleash its revenue-driving power.

But even if your finserv organization is still piloting ABM programs and refining approaches – you can pull yourself out of the “messy middle” of ABM implementation and continue driving towards success. How? By adopting account-based best practices that can immediately deliver superior client experiences and revenues. This blog post will show you how to build that momentum with ABM.

The What and Why of ABM for Financial Services

The business landscape that financial services operate in is only getting more complex. Incumbents are seeing:

• increasing competition from digital disruptors,
• ever-more demanding clients who demand personalized interactions and solutions tailored to their needs, and
• complex buyer journeys, at the individual and account level, across multiple channels, along with rapidly-shifting digital behaviors.

Your traditional marketing approaches, the ones where you spend your marketing budget on undifferentiated messaging that chases after anyone and everyone, no longer hit the mark – probably because you’re aiming at the side of a huge barn. Today’s clients don’t have time; they don’t want to hear about you and your offerings until you’ve first proven that you care enough to understand their needs and talk to them as individuals.

You can complain all you want about how demanding today’s clients are and how hard it is to grab their attention. You wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but you’d also be entirely irrelevant.

Enter ABM, a laser-focused, highly personalized engagement approach built to align with the unique needs of financial organizations and their high-value clients. Let’s unpack the essentials of effective ABM for financial marketers.

Today’s Digital Tsunami

The financial services sector has entered a new era of digital-first engagement. Your customers—whether they’re CFOs evaluating a treasury solution or everyday investors researching wealth management firms—expect seamless, tailored interactions with your brand, no matter where, when, and how they choose to engage with you. Your job isn’t to interrupt them with messages about your needs, but to understand and then address their needs with viable solutions.

But here’s the main challenge: you’re operating in an extremely noisy digital environment, making it both challenging and mission-critical for you and your customers to separate the signal from all the noise. As a marketing team, you need the ability to search through the digital haystack and find the needles – the buying intent signals – that help you understand client behavior and then personalize your next steps.

Between social platforms, search engines, website visits, downloads, and email, you and your prospects are awash in a tsunami of countless marketing messages. Generic messages and broad-based advertising campaigns (“look at me!”) just don’t gain people’s attention anymore, because everyone’s attention is (1) limited and (2) constantly under bombardment.

Breaking through all the noise and winning people’s attention requires relevance at scale, which must be fueled by intelligent data—and this is where Account-Based Marketing comes in.

With ABM, messaging is only secondarily about you because it’s primarily about them – your target customers – and how you can help address their needs right now.

ABM: A Truly Personalized Approach

At its core, ABM is about personalization. We’re not talking about the fake “personalization” from a decade ago, marked by parlor tricks like inserting a prospect’s first name into an email (“Hi Sally, have you heard about our latest offering?”). Buyers hate generic messages blasted out and intended for everyone.

ABM integrates deep account insights, dynamic content, and omnichannel delivery for an entirely bespoke experience that gets people’s attention because it’s built around a client’s dynamic needs. You actually know something about Sally and what she’s been researching online, and your messaging can reflect that knowledge to gain Sally’s attention. You can still use her name, but you can also name her latest challenges and begin helping her resolve it.

Financial services organizations, with their complex customer bases, have the most to gain from this “deep personalization at scale” model. Sally has a lot to gain too, by the way – a partner in addressing her needs (that’s you).

Some key principles of ABM:

• A Focus on Quality Over Quantity: ABM shifts resources away from “chasing after anyone and everyone” to targeting high-potential accounts instead. In terms of driving effectiveness and ROI, stretching your marketing teams and budgets thin across unqualified leads sounds like the worst idea possible (second only to tossing money out a window).
• Unified Sales and Marketing Efforts: ABM is built on coordination and collaboration. Financial services marketers and sales teams must align to develop precise targeting, shared goals, and mutual accountability throughout the buyer’s cycle. That alignment across teams and around the customer is exactly what ABM delivers.
• Data-Driven Insights: Comprehensive account data is the foundation for effective targeting. ABM leans on market intelligence, financial reports, and behavioral data to develop campaigns that meet prospects exactly where they are.

6 Tailored Strategies for ABM in Financial Services

To make ABM work in financial services, you must dispense with generic playbooks and “fake” personalization efforts. Here are 6 strategies designed specifically for your industry:

1. Target High-Value Accounts with Precision

High-value customers such as institutional investors and enterprise clients require different strategies compared to individuals with smaller portfolios. Leverage detailed data analytics to zero in on the accounts with the highest revenue potential or cross-sell/up-sell opportunities. Use AI-driven predictive models to score opportunities and prioritize outreach accordingly. You don’t merely chase after success you hone in and achieve it.

2. Develop Customer-Centric Campaign Messaging

The financial sector demands credibility and expertise. Content must be highly-targeted to each account/client, highlighting business outcomes, specific use cases relevant for the recipient, and tailored solutions that address identified challenges. For example, wealth management firms might benefit from campaigns emphasizing personalized investment strategies, while banks targeting SMEs could focus on efficient cash flow solutions.

3. Use Data to Drive Personalization

Financial marketers have access to a treasure trove of data—transaction records, industry-specific benchmarks, and real-time market trends, to name just a few. Integrate and leverage all this available data to fuel ABM strategies. Personalize your outreach based on a prospect’s financial pain points, even pegging your outreach to industry trends or even recent company milestones like IPOs or acquisitions.

4. Multichannel Outreach for Maximum Impact

Engage your audience wherever they are and where they’re most active. For example:

• Use LinkedIn to connect with business decision-makers (either as individuals or as members of an account group) and share timely thought leadership articles with them.
• Deploy email campaigns with insights tailored to their segment and industry. Watch your open and click-thru rates soar, along with conversion.
• Host webinars that resonate because they address critical and current challenges like regulatory compliance or market volatility.

5. Strengthen Relationships with Existing Clients

ABM isn’t just for acquiring net-new business—it’s also a great tool for building client trust over time, for retaining and expanding existing relationships. Develop thoughtful upsell campaigns or client loyalty programs, and always highlight the tangible ROI your solutions can deliver to your clients.

Boosting customer lifetime value (CLV) with ABM is a game-changer for growing finserv revenues: according to a study by Bain & Company, increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can lead to a 25-95% increase in profits.

6. Measure Success the Right Way

Vanity metrics like impressions or clicks are insufficient for ABM in financial services. Success in ABM is measured by depth (quality over quantity) —so what matters most in ABM are revenue-related metrics like account engagement, new opportunities generated, deal velocity, and customer retention.

The ABM Advantage

Why should financial services marketers invest in ABM? Because it works, period. When executed well, ABM delivers a higher ROI than any other B2B marketing strategy—by as much as 97% according to recent research.

But the advantages of ABM go beyond “just” numbers to include:

• Stronger Relationships: Personalized communication builds trust, the bedrock of financial services.
• Efficient Resource Allocation: The targeted nature of ABM eliminates wasted time and money, allowing you to focus time and money on the accounts that truly matter.
• Accelerated Deal Cycles: By aligning closely with sales and addressing specific pain points earlier in the buyer’s cycle, ABM campaigns can move prospects through the funnel faster.
• Higher Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): ABM nurtures high-value, long-term relationships that go far beyond the initial transaction.

ABM is not merely about generating leads—it’s about creating meaningful conversations, delivering measurable results, and driving long-term business growth.

Become an ABM Trailblazer

Mastering ABM requires the right tools, alignment, and strategy. You can start by:

• unifying your marketing and sales teams around shared data and shared tools (and around your customers),
• leveraging deep account insights that unlock dynamic opportunities to address client needs, and
• crafting campaigns that resonate with the right people at the right time with the right solution on an account-specific level.

Consider exploring tools and platforms designed and purpose-built to streamline ABM efforts for the financial services industry, including tools offering data insights, dynamic personalization capabilities, and multi-channel deployment options.

By adopting ABM, you’re not just staying competitive—you’re going where your clients are headed next. It’s time to meet them and lead the charge in addressing their dynamic needs.