In B2B marketing, success isn’t about casting the widest net – it’s about targeting the right companies with the right message. Targeting companies with ads (or account-based advertising) rather than industries means that you can reach the right companies.
Over the past decade, I’ve watched the rise of account-based advertising (or ABM advertising) transform demand generation.
By focusing our ad spend on high-value target accounts, we’ve consistently seen higher ROI and win rates than broad, spray-and-pray approaches.
In fact, companies aligning account-based marketing with targeted advertising have reported 60% higher win rates and significantly higher ROI (singlegrain.com.)
The reason is simple: when you concentrate on the accounts that matter most, every impression and click works harder toward pipeline and revenue.
At Radiate B2B, we’ve put this strategy into practice and the results speak volumes.
In one manufacturing-sector campaign, 65% of targeted companies visited the website, and those accounts were twice as likely to convert into customers compared to others. In a tech industry campaign, accounts we targeted with personalised ads were 2x more likely to reach a product demo stage, and their deal opportunities came in at 2.67x the size of the control group’s.
Even more striking, these account-focused campaigns didn’t just drive direct ad conversions – they lifted performance across multiple channels (more on that later), creating broader pipeline momentum.
So, how can demand generation marketers replicate this kind of advertising success?
It starts with strategy and discipline.
Below, I’ll share five best practices – drawn from both my personal experience and Radiate B2B’s client case studies – to help you target companies effectively with B2B ads.
These practices will show you how to focus on high-value accounts, personalise your outreach, measure what matters, align with sales, and amplify your impact across channels.
Let’s dive in.
Best Practice 1: Focus on High-Value Accounts with Firmographic Targeting
The foundation of account-based advertising is precisely targeting the right companies.
That means defining your ideal customer profile (ICP) and using firmographic data – such as industry, company size, location, and other traits – to build a focused target account list.
Rather than wasting budget on random clicks, you concentrate your ads on the companies most likely to turn into pipeline and revenue. Most companies don’t want to target an entire industry, but a subset.
This laser focus dramatically improves efficiency: you’re only paying to reach decision-makers at organisations that fit your sweet spot.
In practice, firmographic targeting can be done through account based advertising platforms like Radiate B2B’s advertising platform across Display or LinkedIn.
The goal is to ensure only the companies you care about will see your ads, and even within those companies, you can often target specific roles (e.g. only marketing and procurement roles at SaaS companies). By zeroing in like this, every impression builds awareness with a relevant audience.
Modern B2B ad platforms allow you to select exactly which accounts and buyer roles to include in a campaign. In the example above, the marketer is targeting a curated Account List (in this case, a set of insurance companies) and further refining by geography (specific regions) and job function (e.g. Human Resources).
This kind of interface makes it straightforward to apply firmographic criteria so that your ads reach only the high-value prospects that match your ICP.
The result: your budget isn’t spent on irrelevant companies, and your message is delivered to the organisations that truly matter for your pipeline.
Targeting high-value accounts pays off. When we ran a focused ad campaign for a manufacturing client aiming to break into the construction industry, the impact was dramatic.
The campaign broke into two of the world’s largest construction firms within three months and accelerated expansion in other major accounts.
Overall, 65% of the targeted companies ended up visiting the site, and nearly half of those became sales opportunities.
Most importantly, the accounts we targeted with ads ultimately proved far more likely to close business – they were twice as likely to convert to won deals as those not exposed to the ads.
That campaign was on track to deliver a seven-figure revenue gain from a mere five-figure ad investment. These results underscore the power of focusing on the right accounts: by concentrating our firepower on a defined list of high-potential companies, we dramatically amplified pipeline outcomes while minimising waste.
Why this works: Firmographic targeting ensures your message isn’t lost in the void of general advertising. You’re deliberately getting in front of companies that have the profile of your best customers.
For a demand gen marketer, it means higher quality leads and opportunities – the kind that sales actually wants to follow up on. It’s the classic quality-over-quantity play.
As a result, your campaigns generate outsized ROI because every impression and click is more likely to move a meaningful account toward a deal.
When you start with a sharp focus on who you want to reach, you set the stage for all the other best practices to shine.
Best Practice 2: Personalise Your Advertising at the Account Level
Once you know which companies you’re targeting, the next step is to make sure your message resonates with those companies.
In B2B advertising, one-size-fits-all messaging just doesn’t cut it – especially when you’re trying to engage hard-won target accounts. I’ve found that the more you can personalise and tailor your ads to each account (or cluster of similar accounts), the stronger your engagement will be.
This means crafting ads that speak directly to the target company’s industry, pain points, or even referencing their specific situation. You want the decision-makers at that account to think, “Wow, this ad is talking to me – they understand what I care about.”
Today’s B2B buyers expect this level of relevance. Research backs it up: account-based marketing personalisation is critical for engaging modern B2B buyers, who have grown to expect relevant, contextual experiences from vendors (singlegrain.com).
In practical terms, personalisation can involve the insertion of industry-specific messaging in the ad copy or displaying content (like case studies, testimonials, or value propositions) that align with that account’s needs.
If you’re targeting a financial services company, for example, your ad might highlight a solution’s impact on regulatory compliance or cost reduction, versus a different ad for a tech company that emphasises scalability and innovation.
The tone, imagery, and offer should feel bespoke to the account or at least to that segment.
A great example comes from a SaaS campaign we ran targeting enterprise retail companies. We didn’t just run generic product ads.
Instead, we created personalized advertising and even dedicated landing pages for those retail prospects.
The ads referenced retail-specific challenges and used imagery the retailers could relate to, and the landing page continued that tailored narrative.
This account-specific approach yielded fantastic engagement – the targeted retail accounts were highly responsive. In fact, the accounts we hit with those personalised ads were 2x more likely to progress to a product demo compared to a control group that didn’t see the ads.
Personalisation helped grab their attention and move them further down the funnel. Even better, when those targeted accounts turned into opportunities, they tended to be much larger deals – on average 2.67x the size of opportunities from the untargeted group. That makes sense, because the campaign was attracting the big fish and speaking to them in a language that resonated.
So, how can you implement account-level personalisation? One approach is to segment your target accounts into clusters by industry or persona and develop custom ad creatives for each segment.
For higher-value accounts (tier 1 accounts), you might even build completely unique ads or offers. And extend the personalisation beyond the ad click – ensure the landing page or follow-up content is also tailored to that account or segment, providing a seamless, relevant journey.
Yes, this takes extra work, but it’s worth it. I often say: better to deeply engage a smaller set of the right people than to mildly interest a larger crowd.
When a prospect sees an ad that truly reflects their world and challenges, you’ve achieved the holy grail of marketing – making them feel understood. And that’s what drives them to engage and, ultimately, to buy.
Best Practice 3: Measure Success at the Account Level (Company-Level Reporting)
With account-based ads, success isn’t measured by the usual vanity metrics.
Click-through rates and raw lead counts won’t give you the full picture. Instead, you need to track and analyse engagement on a per-account basis.
In an ABM approach, the account (the company) is the unit of focus – so your metrics and reporting should answer questions like: Which target accounts are seeing our ads? Which accounts are engaging (visiting the website, downloading content, etc.)? Are those accounts moving down the funnel?
By shifting the lens to account-level impact, you get a much clearer read on whether your advertising is influencing the companies you care about.
Traditional advertising platforms don’t always make this easy, but modern ABM ad solutions (including our own Radiate B2B Ad platform) are built for company-level reporting.
For example, rather than just reporting “100 clicks” in aggregate, an ABM platform will show you which accounts those clicks came from.
You might learn that 5 of your target accounts saw at least 10 impressions each, and 3 of them clicked through to your site. That kind of insight is pure gold for demand gen marketers. It tells you exactly where to focus your follow-up and which accounts are heating up.
The dashboard above illustrates how company-level metrics can be presented. Instead of generic totals, you see which accounts have been reached and engaged.
For instance, it might show that you reached 82.1% of your target accounts this period, and 43.6% of them engaged (clicked or visited) – up from last period.
Below the charts, there’s a breakdown by account: you can see each target Account (e.g., VF Corporation, P&G, Unilever, 3M), how many People at that account were served ads, how many Impressions and Clicks they generated, and even how many Web Visits resulted and the Time on Website per account.
This level of granularity allows you to attribute pipeline influence to the ad campaign at the account level.
For example, if Unilever engaged and spent 5 minutes on the website, you know that the account is showing intent.
Meanwhile, if another target account shows zero engagement, that’s a signal to adjust your approach for that account (or perhaps flag it for additional tactics).
By measuring what matters – account engagement and progression – you can make smarter decisions mid-campaign and prove impact after the campaign.
I recommend setting up a framework of account-centric KPIs. This could include metrics like account reach (% of target accounts that saw an ad at least X times), account engagement rate (% of target accounts that clicked or visited), and account pipeline influence (how many opportunities or pipeline $$ came from the targeted accounts).
Also look at lift metrics: Did the targeted accounts engage more than similar accounts that weren’t targeted?
In one of our case studies, we saw targeted accounts were far more likely to progress through each stage of the funnel than non-targeted accounts – a clear validation that the ads made a difference.
Focusing on account-level reporting not only demonstrates the value of your advertising to executives (who ultimately care about accounts and revenue), but it also helps align your marketing efforts with sales (since sales teams think in terms of accounts too).
It bridges the gap between ad spend and pipeline by translating ad performance into the language of account development.
In summary, treat the account as the unit of success – track it, report on it, and optimise for it. That’s how you’ll know if your B2B ads are truly driving account-based success.
Best Practice 4: Integrate Account-based Advertising Insights with Your CRM and Sales Workflow
Account-based advertising, or ABM Advertising, works best when it’s not an isolated tactic, but part of a coordinated effort between marketing and sales.
To achieve this, it’s critical to integrate your advertising insights into your CRM and overall sales workflow.
In practical terms, this means syncing data about target account engagement (from your ads and website) into the systems where your sales team lives – typically the CRM (like HubSpot, Pipedrive etc.) or your marketing automation platform. The goal is for sales reps to have real-time visibility into which target accounts are “heating up” due to your ad campaigns, so they can prioritise and tailor outreach to those accounts at just the right time.
Why is this so important? Imagine you’re running ads to Acme Corp (one of your target accounts), and multiple people from Acme have been clicking the ads and visiting your site in the past week. That’s a strong attention signal.
But if that information stays trapped in the ad platform’s dashboard, your sales team might never know!
However, if you’ve integrated those signals into the CRM, the sales rep owning Acme Corp can get an alert or see on the account timeline that “Acme visited the website via our ad campaign yesterday.”
Now sales can take action – maybe reach out with a tailored message referencing the content they viewed. This kind of marketing-sales coordination can dramatically increase your conversion of engagement into pipeline, because you’re following up when interest is high and doing so in a relevant way.
The Radiate B2B platform can do this across both Display and LinkedIn Ad channels.
From my experience, this tight integration fosters true sales and marketing alignment. We’ve seen it directly in our campaigns – one “soft” benefit of our account-based advertising programs has been how it brings teams together.
In one case, the company’s Senior Digital Marketer noted that, as a result of the ABM initiative, “there are now a lot more ways we have of passing on quality leads… we actually spend time sitting together to work out what represents a really high quality lead”.
Marketing and sales started collaborating more closely, and although they might pass fewer leads overall, those leads are much higher quality and more likely to turn into customers. This speaks to the alignment that happens when both sides are focused on the same target accounts and have shared data to discuss.
To implement this best practice, work with your ops team or vendors to connect your advertising platform to your CRM or marketing automation.
Radiate B2B, for example, provides native integrations that sync display and LinkedIn ad engagement data into CRM systems automatically.
If an integration isn’t available out-of-the-box, even a simple approach like weekly reports of engaged accounts from marketing to sales is better than nothing.
The key is to ensure no hot account falls through the cracks. When salespeople know an account has been interacting with marketing content (even if it’s just passive ad views or website visits), they can approach those accounts with context – often referencing the content the prospect saw, or simply recognising that “this account seems to be researching us, let’s reach out.”
Over time, this closes the loop between ad spend and pipeline by directly linking ad engagement to sales actions. It also helps marketing prove its impact: when a deal from a target account closes, you can trace back and show that the account engaged with your ads early on – a credit that marketing rightly deserves.
In summary, integrating your account-based advertising efforts with your CRM and sales process ensures that the valuable signals generated by your ads are acted upon.
It turns marketing data into sales intelligence. The payoff is faster follow-ups, more personalised outreach, and ultimately, higher conversion from interest to opportunity. Advertising isn’t just a marketing strategy; it’s a sales strategy too, and CRM integration is what connects the two.
Best Practice 5: Leverage Multi-Channel Synergy and Track the Uplift
One of the most exciting (and often under-appreciated) aspects of account-based advertising is how it can boost the performance of your other marketing and sales channels.
When done right, targeted ads don’t operate in a vacuum – they create a halo effect that lifts your entire account-based marketing effort.
Think about it: when a target account starts seeing your ads everywhere (on industry sites, in their LinkedIn feed, etc.), your company becomes more familiar to them.
Even if they don’t click an ad, they might later Google your company (organic search), visit your website directly, start following your LinkedIn page, or pay more attention to that email your SDR sends. In other words, the ad impressions plant seeds that can sprout through multiple channels.
As a best practice, demand gen marketers should embrace a multi-channel approach when targeting accounts, and be sure to measure the cross-channel impact.
Don’t judge your account-based ads solely by last-click attribution (e.g., direct click-to-lead conversions); you’ll undervalue their contribution.
Instead, look at how accounts exposed to ads engage across various touchpoints over time. In our experience at Radiate B2B, accounts reached by advertising tend to show increased engagement in channels like search, social, and email compared to accounts not reached by ads.
One industry survey even found that an orchestrated, multi-channel ABM program can yield 97% higher ROI than a single-channel approach (singlegrain.com). The reason is synergy – the channels reinforce each other and collectively drive the account forward in their buying journey.
We’ve collected hard data on this multi-channel uplift. In a recent campaign, we tracked the behaviour of target accounts not just on the ad platform but across our web analytics and other channels.
The results were telling: the accounts we targeted with ads later showed a spike in organic and direct website traffic, search engine queries, social engagement, and email interactions.
To quantify it, for the targeted accounts we observed: organic search traffic jumped 41%, paid search ad clicks/sessions increased 21%, social media engagement rose 17%, and email marketing engagement grew by 28% – all compared to baseline or to accounts not exposed to the ads.
In short, our ads made our target audience more likely to seek us out and engage through other channels, even if they never directly clicked on an ad banner.
This insight has a couple of implications for best practice.
First, plan your campaigns in a multi-channel mindset. Coordinate your messaging and timing so that your ads and other touches complement each other.
For example, if your ads are running this month to a set of target accounts, make sure your content team publishes a relevant thought leadership piece that those accounts might find (perhaps via search or on social).
Or have your BDRs/Sales send outreach emails referencing the same themes your ads are highlighting.
When a target account sees a consistent, reinforcing message on multiple fronts, it dramatically increases their likelihood of responding. It also provides multiple entry points: maybe they ignore the ad but click the LinkedIn post, or they miss the webinar invite email but later see a retargeting ad and sign up.
Second, measure holistically. When you review campaign performance, look at account engagement across all channels, not just the ad platform.
One practical tip: create a custom segment in your web analytics for “target accounts” (if you can identify them by IP, or better, by them being in your CRM).
Watch their web activity during the campaign period. Do you see lifts in direct visits or organic visits from those companies?
Track email response rates for those accounts versus others.
Over time, you can build an attribution model that assigns some credit to the ads for those indirect boosts.
In essence, account-based advertising should be viewed as a force multiplier for your entire go-to-market effort. It’s not just about driving a click – it’s about raising awareness and interest within the accounts you care about, so that all your other outreach (sales calls, emails, content marketing, events) gets better traction.
By leveraging this multi-channel synergy, you ensure no stone is unturned in engaging your top prospects. The payoff is a cohesive, surround-sound experience for the buyer and significantly improved pipeline results for you.
After all, our ultimate goal in demand gen is not clicks, or even leads – it’s to generate revenue. And revenue comes from a concerted, multi-touch journey that account-based ads can kickstart and accelerate.
Conclusion
Account-based advertising has proven to be a game-changer for B2B demand generation.
By targeting the right companies with precision, personalising your message to win their engagement, measuring success at the account level, aligning closely with sales via CRM integration, and harnessing multi-channel synergies, you create a recipe for outsized impact on pipeline and revenue.
These best practices work together – neglect one, and the whole strategy weakens. But execute them in concert, and you’ll maximise the return on every advertising dollar and every sales effort.
I’ve had the privilege of seeing this approach transform marketing outcomes first-hand. At Radiate B2B, we’ve watched clients go from struggling to get the attention of a handful of big accounts, to suddenly engaging dozens of target companies that never knew them before.
We’ve seen marketing teams earn a seat at the revenue table by delivering tangible pipeline growth from ABM campaigns, and sales teams become raving fans of marketing because they’re finally getting warm doors opened at their key accounts.
When you adopt an account-based mindset for advertising, you’re essentially saying: “We’re going to invest our resources where it counts the most.” That focus yields better leads, bigger deals, and faster sales cycles – the things every demand gen marketer dreams of.
As you apply these best practices, remember that account-based success is a journey of continuous learning. Use your account-level data to iterate: which accounts are engaging and why, which messages are resonating, which channels are lighting up?
Partner closely with your sales colleagues and share insights both ways. Celebrate the wins – like that moment when a target client’s logo moves from your wish list to your customer list – and analyse the losses for lessons. With each campaign, you’ll refine your targeting, personalisation, and coordination, and your results will only improve.
In the modern B2B landscape, buyers are more selective and harder to reach than ever. But by putting these practices into action, you’re stacking the deck in your favour.
You’re ensuring that your marketing is not just noise, but a welcome signal to the accounts that matter. And ultimately, you’re driving the kind of pipeline that fuels meaningful business growth.
That’s the power of account-based advertising done right – it’s not about more ads, it’s about smarter ads that build real relationships with the companies you want to win.
Good luck, and happy targeting!