The Playbook for Individual-Based Marketing
Oct 30, 2025
Guide: Individual-Based Marketing
Who Is This For
This playbook is designed for organizations that rely on precision over volume and operate in high-stakes B2B sales environments.
Best suited for:
B2B companies selling complex, high-value solutions
Sales-led organizations where marketing supports outbound teams
Companies with long, multi-stakeholder sales cycles (12+ months)
Businesses with a limited Total Addressable Market (TAM) where every relationship counts
Introduction: Strategic Alignment First
Individual-Based Marketing (IBM) necessitates alignment between marketing and sales from the outset. Both teams must target the same individuals, share one unified narrative, and measure success using the same data.
This strategy turns traditional funnels into coordinated multi-channel buyer journeys—ads, social engagement, outreach, and CRM data all working together to build familiarity before outreach.
The goal is to create trust through repeated, personalized exposure before the first conversation ever takes place.
Step 1: Identify and Prioritize Target Accounts
Begin by defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) through both data and behavior. Move beyond surface-level filters:
Analyze your closed-won deals to understand real buyer traits.
If applicable, review competitor reviews on G2, Capterra, and Clutch for insight into buying patterns.
Study sales call notes to identify recurring triggers, objections, and motivators.
Categorize accounts into Tier 1–3, prioritizing Tier 1 for deeper personalization.
Step 2: Research Phase
Precision targeting starts with research.
Map each organization’s structure, strategic priorities, and buying committee. Identify decision-makers, influencers, and enablers—not just the C-level contacts.
Combine firmographic, technographic, and intent data to form a multi-dimensional picture.
Pro tip: Don’t chase only the obvious titles. Often, deals start with champions one or two levels below the final decision-maker.
Step 3: Data Sources
Collect and enrich your data using a layered approach. Your CRM should sit at the center of this ecosystem, serving as the master data layer that consolidates and validates all inputs from external sources.
By combining enrichment tools with your CRM, you create a single source of truth that allows for precise segmentation, attribution, and performance tracking throughout your individual-based marketing workflow.
Primary Sources: LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Clay, Retriever, Eivora, Crunchbase, Apollo, ZoomInfo, BuiltWith, Bolagsverket, PhantomBuster, Kaspr, Dux-Soup, Clearbit, Hunter, and others.
Your CRM (e.g., HubSpot or Salesforce) acts as the connective tissue, ensuring that enriched data, engagement metrics, and campaign activities remain synchronized and usable across teams.
Workflow Example
Scrape or export ICP companies via Apify or LinkedIn.
Enrich and verify data through Clay, validating contact information and firmographics.
Push enriched contacts and company records into your CRM as the central data layer. And hey, we have an app for that, Hey Sid HubSpot App.
Use waterfall enrichment (multiple providers) to increase verified email coverage by up to 40%.
Sync engagement data (ads, outreach, website visits) back to the CRM for unified tracking.
Validate all contact data for accuracy and deliverability before campaign activation.
This connected structure ensures that every data source contributes to a consistent, high-quality contact and account view—essential for personalized, scalable individual-based marketing.
Step 4: Collect Multiple Data Layers
Integrate several dimensions of data to create a holistic buyer profile:
Firmographics: turnover, size, and location
Technographics: tools, integrations, and platforms used
Contact data: verified email, LinkedIn, direct phone
Intent signals: ad impressions, website visits, content engagement
Contextual data: funding, product launches, or hiring trends
Pro Tip: Use PhantomBuster to extract verified email addresses and upload them to Meta Ads Custom Audiences for personalized, individual-level targeting.
Step 5: Build Awareness with Ads
Before any outreach, run a variety of ads towards these individuals. Image ads, video ads, text ads, etc., to build trust. On LinkedIn, you are also able to run Thought leadership ads; these are not sales pitches; they’re educational posts published through personal profiles (not company pages).
Focus on insights, not offers. Share frameworks, ROI tools, or original observations relevant to your audience.
Execution:
Upload enriched ICP lists to Meta Ads Manager and LinkedIn Campaign Manager
Optimize for 80%+ audience match rate
Target individuals 3–4 times per week for 2-3 months to build recognition
By the time outreach begins, prospects have already seen your brand multiple times and are significantly warmer.
Pro tip: Run ads that highlight your commercial team, show the actual faces behind your brand. Familiarity builds trust. Being recognized before reaching out makes every meeting request more likely to succeed.
Step 6: Data Integration and Activation
Integrate your data flow across tools:
Make sure to sync your LinkedIn ad impressions and engagement data to Clay
Match engaged contacts to enriched profiles in Clay using role, company, and intent data
Push records automatically into your CRM for tracking, attribution, and prioritization
This creates a single source of truth for marketing and sales, bridging the gap between impressions and conversations.
Pro tip: When you start seeing organic engagement alongside paid, the account is primed for outreach.
Step 7: Warm Multi-Channel Outreach
Once your audience has been exposed to your ads and thought leadership content, use Clay segmentation to identify the individuals showing the highest engagement and intent signals, or you can just sign up for Hey Sid.
Move these contacts into a multi-channel outreach sequence (for example, Precision Connect) to transition from awareness to conversation.
Example Outreach Sequence
Week 1: Send personalized LinkedIn connection requests to high-engagement contacts.
Pro tip: Avoid jumping straight into a message after connecting. Doing so can easily come across as overly sales-driven. Remember, the prospect likely doesn’t know you or your company yet. Focus on building familiarity first.
Week 1 – Ongoing: Continue running LinkedIn, Google, and Meta ads to maintain visibility and brand familiarity.
Week 1: Ensure your sales team is active on LinkedIn—posting, commenting, and engaging with relevant content. If bandwidth is limited, consider using Authority Builder, a done-for-you service for your commercial team.
Week 8: Send the first friendly, value-driven LinkedIn message focused on insight or relevance, not selling.
Week 9: Follow up on LinkedIn with a short, conversational check-in.
Week 10: Conclude with a personalized email summarizing value, relevance, and a clear call to action.
This structure blends automation with a human approach, allowing familiarity built through ads to translate into higher response and meeting rates.
Pro Tip: Encourage your commercial team to stay consistently active on LinkedIn by posting, engaging, and commenting within their networks. Authentic visibility boosts connection acceptance rates and increases trust among prospects who are already familiar with your brand.
At Hey Sid, we even incentivize our team to maintain a strong LinkedIn presence, because consistent engagement directly impacts outreach performance and pipeline quality.
Step 8: Measure, Learn, and Scale
Track your full-funnel metrics in a dashboard:
Impressions → Clicks → Meetings → Opportunities → Deals
Monitor engagement per account and per persona
Attribute revenue influence across ads, outreach, and meetings
Refine ICP definitions, messaging, and timing based on results. Scale what works without losing personalization.
Key Takeaways
ABM success depends on deep data accuracy, not large lead lists
Familiarity builds trust, use ads and organic engagement to warm before outreach
Integrate every signal between paid, CRM, and outbound tools
Prioritize quality engagement over volume for sustainable enterprise pipeline growth
Final note
If this sounds like a lot to coordinate manually, you’re not alone.
At Hey Sid, we’ve built a platform that automates and simplifies every step of the Individual-Based Marketing process, from data enrichment to outreach and reporting.
Book a demo today and see how you can launch personalized, high-impact campaigns without the operational hassle.
