Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Account-Based Marketing is one of the three pillars of the Marketing department, alongside our Content Strategy and Events programs. Where content and events cast a wide net, ABM focuses marketing and sales effort on a defined list of high-value target accounts.

Where ABM shows up today

ABM at FlowFuse is currently expressed through a few concrete activities rather than a single dedicated program page:

  • Paid advertising: targeted ABM campaigns on LinkedIn and Google Ads are run as part of Demand Generation to reach specific target accounts, drive traffic to key content, and generate MQLs.
  • Intent signals: ad interaction data from ABM platforms (e.g. ZenABM) is one of the behavioral signals used to classify Intent Outbound leads, alongside website visit tracking (HubSpot Intent, Warmly) and content engagement patterns.
  • Sales execution: Account Executives are directly responsible for targeting key accounts using an ABM approach in their region — see the Account Executive job description for the EMEA, US, and other regional variants.
  • Digital marketing skills: familiarity with LinkedIn ABM tooling is listed as a core skill for the Developer Relations Advocate role, reflecting how ABM campaigns are supported cross-functionally.

How it fits together

  1. Sales and marketing agree on a target account list, based on our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
  2. Marketing runs targeted paid campaigns (LinkedIn, Google Ads) against that account list as part of Demand Generation.
  3. Engagement and ad-interaction data from ABM tooling feeds into lead scoring, surfacing accounts as Intent Outbound leads for sales follow-up.
  4. Account Executives use ABM to prioritize and engage these key accounts directly, tracking outcomes in HubSpot.

Loading the target lists into LinkedIn

HubSpot maintains two related target lists for ABM:

  • The target account list — the companies sales and marketing have agreed to target.
  • The target contact list — the individual contacts at those companies, used to build the LinkedIn Matched Audience.

LinkedIn ABM campaigns target a Matched Audience built from the target contact list. To (re)load the list:

  1. In HubSpot, open the target contact list and export it as a CSV, including the following columns: first name, last name, email, job title, country, Google Advertising ID (googleaid), and company (from the contact's company property, used as the company name).
  2. Rename the exported columns to the headers LinkedIn expects: email, firstname, lastname, jobtitle, employeecompany, country, and googleaid.
  3. In LinkedIn Campaign Manager, go to Plan > Audiences.
  4. Select the existing ABM target account audience (or create one if it doesn't exist yet) and choose to match on a company/contact source.
  5. Upload the renamed CSV to update the audience.
  6. Confirm the upload — LinkedIn will match contacts from the list against its own member database and refresh the audience once matching completes (this can take up to a day).
  7. Check that the active ABM campaigns are still targeting this audience after the refresh.

Both the target account list and target contact list are dynamic — accounts and contacts are added and removed by sales and marketing as the ICP fit and pipeline priorities change. Because LinkedIn does not sync the list automatically, the operator running ABM campaigns must repeat these steps weekly to re-export the latest contact list from HubSpot and re-upload it, so LinkedIn targeting stays in sync with the current target accounts.

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