14 Creative ABM Tactics to Fall For16 min read

This article is for scrappy founders looking for the most unhinged yet effective ways to do ABM.

Some of these are very clever ‘AI + webhook multi-application automations’, while others are totally different ideas altogether.

So, let’s explore 14 creative ABM tactics I fell for and maybe you’d too.

14 Creative ABM Tactics to Fall For: Quick Summary

1. Automated ABM workflows: Streamline research, list-building, data enrichment, and outreach.
2. CRM automation with LinkedIn ads: Automatically sync LinkedIn ad engagement to CRM via ZenABM.
3. Custom GPT copilot: Deploy tailored GPT models for personalized outreach and account research.
4. Meme-driven marketing: Leverage relatable memes to boost brand visibility and engagement.
5. Multi-channel pod attacks: Coordinate simultaneous messaging across multiple channels.
6. Hyper-personalized ads & landing pages: Use targeted logos and customized microsites.
7. Community engagement: Embed your brand authentically in relevant online communities.
8. Data-driven storytelling: Create customized narratives addressing target account pain points.
9. Account-aware chatbots: Personalize visitor experiences based on their company.
10. Real-time social listening: Engage prospects actively and relevantly on social media.
11. Signal-triggered outreach: Instantly launch tailored campaigns triggered by real-time events.
12. Micro-events: Host intimate, targeted networking events or workshops.
13. Executive dinners and experiential stunts: Leverage high-impact, memorable experiences to engage the C-suite.
14. Embedded intent in ads: Capture account intent directly via targeted ad creative using ZenABM.

Tactic#1: Automating Different Parts of Your ABM Motion

Well, ‘multiple applications tied with AI + webhook/zap’ type of automations – LinkedIn is rife with these.

Here are the top 8 examples:

Automate Sales’ Research Before a Call with a New Prospect

George Chasiotis (Co-founder at Restartt GTM agency) shared this amazing workflow on LinkedIn:

It automates the background research that your Sales team has to do before hopping on a call booked by a new prospect in Calendly (or whatever you prefer – just swap it).

The workflow:

• When a new prospect books a demo/call in Calendly, a new deal is created in the CRM (Attio in his case).
• This also triggers a notification in Slack.
• Then, an Attio workflow pushes the prospect data to a pre-built Clay table, and Clay does the enrichment.
• After enrichment, the data is pushed back to Attio.
• Now the sales peeps can refer to the enriched info about the prospect before they attend the call.

Job-Opening Based TAL Building and Enrichment for ABM

This one again is from George.

This automation finds companies hiring for job roles related to the services you provide and enriches them.

Here’s the workflow:

• Perplexity analyses recurring keywords and their frequencies in job postings for a certain job role.
• These keywords are fed to a Warmly orchestration to build a list of companies hiring for that role.
• The account list is pushed to Clay, where it’s enriched, and the accounts are also lodged into the CRM.
• Finally, there’s a notification in Slack for all the new active prospects added to the CRM.

Now, if a company is running ABM campaigns, the resultant enriched account list in the CRM will add to a perfect TAL.

Meta Ads Performance Tracking Chatbot

Performance marketing and growth specialist Parvezalam Shaikh, in her LinkedIn post, made a Chatbot that tracks each ad’s daily performance and calculates metrics like ROAS, ROI, etc.

This ensures marketers need not constantly hop between Ads Manager, Sheets, dashboards, and reports, and their ABM strategy on Meta becomes easier 🙂

Turning LinkedIn Into a Search Engine for Building ABM TAL

Philip Lakin (Enterprise Innovation lead at Zapier) built a workaround to make the best use of his existing LinkedIn network for ABM.

He imported his entire LinkedIn network into a Zapier Table for enrichment with details such as company size and job title.

He then connected a Zapier AI Agent to the table, enabling him to ask questions in natural language, like “Show me every Executive Assistant or Chief of Staff linked to a CEO within my network.”

The agent provided a precisely filtered list, essentially building a custom LinkedIn search engine.

His team could now pinpoint prospects based on specific roles, company size, or even their most recent interactions.

The best part?

There’s no need to send them connection requests. They are part of the existing network and may be Philip’s acquaintances too!

Finding People Interacting with Relevant LinkedIn Posts (We Use This Ourselves)

We are a LinkedIn ads ABM tool.

So ABM professionals actively engaging with LinkedIn posts talking about ABM via LinkedIn ads are our perfect pre-leads.

Here’s how we do it:

1. Scrape likes/comments from competitors’ and ABM experts’ LinkedIn posts using MeetAlfred
2. Push engagement data into Clay, which filters the data by job titles (to match ICP) and identifies if accounts use HubSpot, Salesforce, or other key tools. This gives us a filtered list of ABM professionals who actively engage with ABM-related posts on LinkedIn.
3. We even go further (from here it’s not automated). We Cross-check companies on the LinkedIn Ads Library to see if they’re running paid campaigns (a strong intent signal).
4. Enrich contact data and find verified emails.
5. Send warm leads to Smartlead for email campaigns and MeetAlfred again for LinkedIn outreach sequences.

As a result, this is what our outreach looks like:

You can tweak it like this for ABM: Once you filter out the companies running LinkedIn ads in step 3, put them on your ABM TAL. Ofc you’ll have to tweak the topic of LinkedIn posts being monitored based on your business.

Clay-Powered Automated ABM Workflows

Clay, I’d say, has become indispensable in AI-driven automation workflows thanks to its intuitive UI and a huge number of integrations (over 100) for enriching leads.

I mean, it was part of most of the above workflows as well.

And expectedly, LinkedIn marketers are actively showcasing innovative methods they’ve used Clay to elevate their ABM and rev ops strategies.

Below are 7 outstanding examples:

Use Case	Clay’s Role	Real-world Example
Building Targeted Account Lists	Aggregates data from over 100 sources like LinkedIn and Crunchbase to curate precise account lists	Combined Apify and Clay to extract targeted Instagram leads for niche outreach
Identifying Competitors’ Customers	Extracts and enriches client details listed on competitors’ websites	Leveraged Claygent to scrape and enrich competitors’ case-study customer lists
Cleaning & Validating Lead Data	Real-time email verification, duplicate removal, and lead information updates	Verified and sanitized scraped leads, extracting accurate URLs for direct outreach
Enriching Leads with Multiple Data Points	Pulls information such as job titles, funding stages, and technology stacks from diverse enrichment APIs	Enhanced podcast and software-related leads through comprehensive data integration for improved segmentation
Scoring and Prioritizing Accounts	Develops lead-scoring criteria based on roles, funding status, and engagement indicators	Implemented sophisticated scoring to prioritize leads using role-based, funding, and intent signals
Generating Personalized Copy at Scale	Integrates ChatGPT with dynamic data fields to automate creation of personalized emails or landing pages	Crafted AI-driven customized outreach emails and landing pages leveraging CRM data
End-to-End ABM Workflow Orchestration	Consolidates enrichment, scoring, and campaign execution into a single unified workflow	Used Clay as a comprehensive hub to streamline enrichment, scoring, and outbound campaign activities seamlessly

If you want to dig deeper, here’s our Clay for ABM guide.

AI-Powered CRM Cleaner

ABM ops are already brutal.

And false enquiries, dodging captchas and spam filters, can make it even worse.

Here’s Tarek Reda’s (Founder at Blue Pencil Marketing Agency) workflow for automated CRM cleaning:

• Creates a list in HubSpot for leads added in the previous day.
• Pushes this data to Gumloop
• Then, AI reviews each one based on criteria like personal email, random strings, missing owner, etc. and labels each record as “spam” or “legit”
• Finally, the CRM is updated with the labels

This workflow runs quietly in the background and keeps your data healthy without extra effort, so you can concentrate on more meaningful stuff – ABM.

Tactic#2: Automate Syncing LinkedIn Ad Engagement Data to Your CRM

If you are running ABM on LinkedIn, having company-level engagement data for each LinkedIn ad campaign automatically pushed as company properties to your CRM can save you hours of ops.

ZenABM does exactly that:

ZenABM also automatically scores your target accounts based on their current and historic engagement rate with your LinkedIn ads:

and tracks their ABM stage based on the engagement thresholds you set:

Also, as soon as an account reaches the ‘interested’ stage, ZenABM assigns a BDR to that account in your CRM:

Tactic#3: Custom GPTs as Your ABM Copilot

ChatGPT’s custom GPTs weren’t that great before because of an outdated AI model and many other limitations.

The biggest limitation was the inability to teach go-to-market science to your AI and make it act like an ABM/GTM pro.

But not anymore.

Now you can upload a whole knowledge base and select the model of your choice (even smart ones like o3):

And actions, aka integrations with other tools, were already there.

So?

Now, you can build entire GTM workflows using Custom GPTS and API integrations/webhooks – a literal ABM semi-copilot (‘semi’ because a bit of human supervision is still needed).

Teams are training GPTs on their ICP criteria and buyer signals so the AI can suggest the hottest accounts and write first-draft emails/LinkedIn outreach messages, etc.

In fact, most of the automations in the previous section can be built using Custom GPTs too.

Tactic#4: Memes

See, memes are too mainstream now and have entered the boardroom.

I mean, B2B is boring, but memes could help 🙂

Memes help you present your value proposition in the most relatable language possible.

Will Atiken, who generated 22 million impressions for himself and B2B brands using memes, suggests that memes are not about immediate conversions, but they help you impress the algorithm, so future educational and promotional content reaches your audience.

And he says consuming memes on Instagram and Reddit is the secret behind his 22 million impressions from a B2B audience.

And if you want to automate meme-posting on LinkedIn, Tarke Reda built a workflow for it:

• Trigger: A team member posts a message in a specific Slack channel.
• Content Selection: The platform randomly chooses an article from a collection of over 400 niche-specific blog articles.
• Brand Alignment: It reviews your brand guidelines document to maintain consistency with your voice and messaging.
• Style Analysis: The tool examines detailed LinkedIn posting guidelines and assesses 20 existing posts matching your preferred writing style.
• Post Creation: All the compiled data is inputted into a GPT model, producing a draft for a LinkedIn post.
• Title Generation: The draft is condensed into a brief, impactful title of 3-4 words.
• Meme Integration: Leveraging the Supermeme.ai API, the system retrieves a suitable meme based on the generated title.
• Final Delivery: The completed LinkedIn post draft, including the meme, is shared back in the original Slack channel for team review.

Note: Please put credits when you share memes, or else it can land you in legal trouble!

Tactic#5: Multi-Channel Pod Attack

We know ABM is about DMUs/buying committees and not individual leads.

And the best way to target these committees is to go fully multi-channel with personalized emails, LinkedIn ads, LinkedIn InMails, retargeted ads, etc.

In fact, Usergems mentions how launching sales and marketing campaigns worked better for them instead of warming up accounts for 1-2 weeks and reaching out to them with sales pitches only after the warming-up period.

Tactic#6: Logo-Powered, One-to-One Ads & Landers

With so many ads all over one’s feed and browser, people have become desensitized to banners (they call it banner blindness).

But you can attract the prospect’s attention with 1:1 hyper-personalization now by adding target company logos.

And when someone from the target account clicks, they must have a personalized microsite/landing page with the company logo again.

An example:

Tactic#7: Community Hubs & Niche Groups

ABM doesn’t have to live in your silo.

Build or infiltrate the communities where your targets spend time.

Whether it’s industry Slack groups, LinkedIn circles, Discord servers, subreddits, or invite-only forums, planting your brand amidst peers will drive real influence.

Note: Brand presence in communities and niche groups isn’t about spamming comments on over-enthusiastic reactions to every thread of conversation. It’s about adding real value while subtly promoting your business.

Also, we have our own Slack community too at ZenABM. Join now!

Tactic#8: Data-Driven Storytelling

Research suggests that storytelling can help increase conversion rates by 30%.

And this applies to ABM too.

Especially for Tier 1 and Tier 2 accounts, making case studies and white-papers that address their specific pain points can be a lucrative ABM tactic.

In fact, you can go even further with personalized and creative data-driven storytelling like GumGum.

The GumGum team had T-Mobile on its target list, but instead of throwing out generic ads or sales pitches at them, they figured out that T-Mobile’s CEO loved Batman, and they sent him a comic book about T-Mobile:

Tactic#9: Account-Aware Chatbots

Chatbot icons can now be found at the bottom right corners of most home-pages.

But for ABM, you’ll have to go a step further and make them ‘Account-aware.’

For example, imagine a bot that says, “Hey ACME Corp! Glad you’re here” with preloaded talking points about ACME’s challenges and solutions when someone from ACME visits your site.

You can do this using IP matching tools that deanonymize the company of a visitor.

Tactic#10: Social Listening in Real-Time

You would have seen many company profile pages replying to thought leader posts or LinkedIn, or the Duolingo bot putting ‘savage’ comments on Instagram posts.

This creative ABM tactic can actually help with driving specific accounts into the pipeline.

Like you can monitor certain target accounts’ posts and react/comment to them immediately (ofc where relevant).

Say the CFO at your target account puts a LinkedIn post in frustration about legacy tech; you can jump in with a meme or case study on how Company X solved that exact issue with your solution.

In fact, you don’t have to talk about your business every time. Staying at the top of mind is the goal here.

Pro Tip: Select Tier 1 accounts that deserve this level of effort and ask your entire employee base to interact with the account and its members’ posts to stay at the top of mind.

Tactic#11: Signal-Triggered Content Drops

This ceative ABM tactic is about letting real-time signals be your campaign triggers.

Like you can set up alerts on funding rounds, new C‑suite hires, big social media buzz, etc., and auto-launch mini-campaigns the instant they fire.

For instance, if a prospect just landed venture funding, send congratulations with a relevant case study attached.

Or when a known champion from an account takes a new role, immediately email them with a welcome-back note and a custom pitch.

This “newsjacking” tactic ensures your outreach is perfectly timed.

Tactic#12: Live Niche Micro-Events

Spraying salesy small-talk in a huge trade show where everyone is in a hurry makes no sense.

Emilia Korczynska (VP of Marketing), for instance, says big conferences fall on all fronts.

She says the multi-threaded short conversations don’t lead you anywhere, nor bring in a single intelligent insight, and adds that these events don’t help with networking either:

“Networking opportunity? If better seems bigger because of the larger catchment area, consider all the time you will spend queuing for the bathroom, and not being able to find that overpriced hotdog stand where you’re meeting someone from LinkedIn who agreed to you ‘stealing 5 minutes of their time’. Everyone’s running somewhere, tired, irritable, and no one really has the time for meaningful conversations.”

And I agree!

Niche events like SaaStanak that more and more SaaS folks are tuning to make more sense – you have a greater chance of meeting and having a genuine conversation with your ICP in a live niche micro-event than a huge conference.

In fact, you can host mini-events or roundtables exclusively for your targets. This could be a private workshop with 5–10 execs from different key accounts, a virtual VIP summit, or an invite-only webinar with a hot industry thought leader. The intimacy makes it special (and share-worthy on LinkedIn).

Tactic#13: Executive Dinner & Experiential Stunts

Sometimes, the old-school in-person touch still seals the deal.

Like, maybe invite a CEO for a private dinner.

Or if you’re really bold, launch a public stunt aimed at a big fish.

For example, development shop Intridea once hung a cheeky billboard right outside Ogilvy’s NYC office reading “ogle this, Ogilvy” and linking to a custom URL with funny GIFs and a pitch.

It was so audacious it begged for a response, and it worked.

Tactic#14: Intent-Based ABM via Intent Embedded in Ads

Many tools brag features like account intent analysis, giving you third-party data about what the members at your target accounts are searching for on the web.

Yes, this helps understand their pain points and if they are in-market for your product/service.

But what if I tell you that instead of using third-party intent data, you can know what about your product/services resonates with each of your prospects by embedding intent in ads themselves.

You can make different ad creatives showcasing different features of your product/service.

Then you can group ads having similar intent (i.e. feature/quality being advertised by the ad) into campaign groups.

For instance, if you sell a product management tool, you can have three different campaign groups showing different intents (e.g., product analytics, user-onboarding, and all-in-one).

Something like this:

And then ZenABM will track each account’s engagement with each of your ad campaigns and campaign groups and put all companies showing similar intent in one place:

Plus, it will push intent as a company property to your CRM:

This will help your BDRs know what to talk about while reaching out to hot accounts instead of blasting generic pitches.

Over to You

The ABM landscape rewards boldness, creativity, and precision. These 14 innovative tactics will ensure your brand cuts through the noise, making memorable impressions that lead directly to high-value conversions. But to execute seamlessly, you need the right tools, especially when integrating complex data-driven approaches.

With ZenABM, you gain unparalleled visibility into your ABM campaigns on LinkedIn. Track real-time engagement, automate intent signals directly into your CRM, and effortlessly orchestrate your outreach.

Ready to supercharge your ABM campaigns?

Try ZenABM today!