Account-based marketing for maritime: list construction and reporting

ABM as a discipline has been over-marketed and under-implemented in maritime. Most accounts that say they “do ABM” are running broad LinkedIn campaigns against industry-and-seniority filters and calling that account-based. Real ABM is a tighter discipline: a defined list of target accounts, a buying-committee map for each, coordinated outbound and paid distribution plus reporting that actually measures account-level engagement and pipeline progression.

The good news is that maritime is a sector where ABM works well. The buying universe is small (a few thousand companies globally for most service categories), the named decision-makers are stable and the deal sizes justify the operational overhead.

The work is in the list and the reporting. The campaigns are the easy part.

List construction

A useful ABM list is sized to your sales capacity, not to your marketing ambition. If the sales team has bandwidth to run 30 active accounts at any time, the ABM list should be 60 to 120 accounts (cycle the inactive ones in as the active ones progress or close).

For a typical maritime services business, list construction proceeds in three layers.

Layer 1: ideal customer profile (ICP)

Define the ICP precisely. Useful dimensions:

• Vessel segment: tanker (and which tanker types: VLCC, Suezmax, Aframax, MR, chemical), bulker (Capesize, Panamax, Handymax), container, gas, offshore support, ferry, specialist
• Fleet size: not vessels under management but vessels that fall in your services scope. A 200-vessel ship management group running a service line you do not serve is not really a 200-vessel target
• Geography of fleet operation: trade lanes, port calls, registry jurisdiction, technical management base
• Buying mode: in-house procurement, distributed (each ship manager decides), centralised (group procurement)
• Existing supplier relationships: who you know they currently use, where the contract lengths are
• Deal-value potential: realistic 24-month revenue if won

Most maritime services businesses can describe an ICP that yields 200 to 800 candidate accounts globally. Work from this universe, not from broad lists.

Layer 2: tiering

Within the candidate universe, tier:

• Tier 1: 30 to 60 accounts where the strategic fit is strongest, the buying-committee is mappable and the deal value justifies dedicated effort. Each gets a named account manager and a documented account plan.
• Tier 2: 60 to 150 accounts where the fit is good but the engagement is opportunistic. Treated as a pooled prospecting universe with shared outbound and dedicated paid coverage.
• Tier 3: 150 to 400 accounts where the fit is plausible but you do not have specific intent to pursue them. Receive light-touch demand-gen coverage and inbound capture.

The tiers determine resource allocation across sales and marketing.

Layer 3: buying-committee mapping

For tier-1 accounts only, build a buying-committee map. For each account, list named individuals at the seniority and function relevant to the decision. Typical maritime committees include:

• Fleet director or technical director (the budget owner)
• Technical superintendent or marine superintendent (the operational user)
• Procurement lead (the process owner)
• CFO or finance director (for any deal above a certain threshold)
• Group head of fleet (if subsidiaries roll up)

Build this map in the CRM with LinkedIn URLs, current titles, tenure and any prior contact history. Update quarterly.

Paid coverage matched to the list

Once the list and the maps are in place, paid coverage stratifies by tier.

• Tier 1: matched-audience LinkedIn campaigns at the named-individual level where possible, named-account targeting where not. Both an awareness campaign and a direct-response campaign per tier-1 account or cluster.
• Tier 2: matched-audience LinkedIn campaigns at the company level, segmented by ICP cluster. Search retargeting against this cluster as well.
• Tier 3: broad LinkedIn industry-and-seniority campaigns, plus search and YouTube against custom audiences built from maritime-news domain visits and search-behaviour signals.

Most maritime ABM accounts allocate 40% to 55% of LinkedIn budget to tier-1 work, 25% to 40% to tier 2 and 10% to 25% to tier 3.

Reporting that does not flatter

The standard ABM reporting tells you that “engagement is up across target accounts” without telling you whether that engagement is converting into anything. The reporting that actually matters tracks account-level progression through a defined funnel.

A workable maritime ABM funnel:

• Targeted: in the list (count of accounts)
• Reached: at least one impression on a target individual in the last 90 days (count and %)
• Engaged: at least one click or video view from a target individual in the last 90 days
• Active: in active outbound conversation by sales (with proof of human contact)
• Open: open opportunity in CRM with a value
• Won: closed-won

Report monthly on the count of accounts at each stage, and on the conversion rates between stages. The conversion rate from “engaged” to “active” is the metric that tells you whether the engagement is real or vanity. Healthy maritime ABM programmes see 8% to 18% engaged-to-active conversion in any rolling 90-day window.

Report on revenue and pipeline per target account, not just per channel. ABM is sold internally on the basis that it produces deals from named accounts; the reporting needs to demonstrate that.

The discipline test

Maritime ABM is operationally heavier than the equivalent broad-targeted campaigns and it produces materially better results when the list is built carefully and the reporting is honest. Skip the operational discipline and you have a regular paid-media account with an ABM label, which is what most accounts that claim to “do ABM” in this sector are actually running.