In the current day and age, marketing is all about personalization.
It’s about reaching the best people in the right place in the right time. Account-based advertising (ABM) is no different and it has been growing in popularity in recent years.
Actually 87% of account-based internet marketers say ABM initiatives outperform other marketing investments.
In addition, one in five balances targeted through ABM becomes considered a qualified sales possibility.
That’s why ABM is an important approach to implement if you sell high value B2B products or services to some finite number of companies who have a multi-person buying committee and require personalized content material and engagement.
As a marketer, that might seem like a daunting job, because you’ve probably felt the pain of tools that were hard to use, didn’t integrate together with your systems, or made collaboration among teams hard.
Essential using marketing automation and ABM software to make the procedure seamless is a good idea.
Below, let’s review how to automate your account-based marketing strategy.
1 . Create your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
Before you can get started with ABM, you’ll need to define your perfect customer profile. This is much like a buyer persona, other than it’s built around focusing on entire organizations rather than individuals.
You’ll want to know what types of businesses you want to target. For example , your own ICP should include information on organization size, revenue, industry, plus location.
With software, like HubSpot’s ABM software, you can use ICP workflow templates to help you spot common traits which you can use to classify companies within your database by how nicely they match your ICP.
Ultimately, automation should help you identify and organize your target accounts. Once you’ve created your ICP, you should be in a position to use this information in your ABM software to manage your target audience.
2 . Set up your focus on accounts.
Once you’ve created your own ICP, you should be able to set up your target accounts within your ABM software.
Tagging “Target accounts” in your software may enable you to manage your viewers from a Target Accounts dashboard. For example , with HubSpot’s ABM software, you can tag balances as target accounts and after that rank them with the ICP Tier property. Your concern accounts will be marked Rate 1, while lower priority accounts will be marked Tier 3.
Additionally , a great ABM software will use AI-powered focus on account recommendations to automate the process of researching companies which are a good fit.
These types of tools will help you manage and then segment your lists so you can provide personalized content to your target accounts.
3. Integrate your ABM, marketing automation software, and CRM.
Before you can build your ABM campaigns, you’ll want to integrate your ABM software with your marketing automation software and your CRM.
For example , with HubSpot, you can use many of the ABM software program features if you have Marketing or even Sales Pro.
Integrating your marketing tools is important in the automation process. If your ABM software doesn’t interact with your email marketing software or your own ads tools, then you will not be able to automate the process.
In addition , if it doesn’t interact with your CRM, it’ll be impossible to learn if leads become accounts and track the ROI of an account-based campaign.
Simply by integrating these tools, you’ll have your ICP research, target balances, content, and CRM all in one place.
4. Build your strategies.
When you have your ABM software program and marketing tools setup, it’s time to create your campaigns.
To start, you’ll want to determine what channels you want to use and what actions will trigger an automated workflow.
Initial, look at your target accounts and find out where they spend their time online. For instance , you can build an ad campaign based on people’s job name or company on LinkedIn and Facebook.
Then, an individual think about your customer journey and set up automated workflows. For instance, you can have a task designed for a sales rep when someone who works at one of your target accounts interacts with an e-mail, your website, or blog content material.
5. Personalize your content.
You most likely got started with ABM which means you could personalize your advertising campaigns. To do this, you’ll want to develop your content, and use your automation tools to segment your own audience.
For example , with HubSpot’s ABM software, you can use company lists to create an advertisement audience or use firm ad targeting for your LinkedIn ads.
With your ICP setup, it should be easy to create your content based on your target audience. The content in your ABM campaigns is going to be similar to other marketing content, except that you’re now focusing on specific accounts and businesses.
Ultimately, your messaging need to address specific pain points, and appeal to solving your own target account’s problems.
six. Tailor your engagement.
An additional aspect of your ABM strategy will be collaborating with your sales team so they can tailor their engagement with target accounts.
A great way to do this is through automation tools. That’s why it’s important for the CRM and ABM software program to work together.
For example , along with HubSpot’s ABM software and Sales Hub, you can automate your follow up emails and tasks based on prospect habits.
However , remember that even though if you’re focusing on automation right now, your own sales outreach and content material should still be personalized.
7. Set up a dashboard in order to assess ongoing efforts.
The final step to automating your ABM strategy is to monitor and measure your efforts. Together with your ABM software, you’ll want to see information at-a-glance.
For instance, on the dashboard, you might include home elevators your target accounts like company score, open deals, total pipeline, and the amount of decision makers identified.
In case your ABM software has business scoring available, you should use it. This is similar to lead scoring, where you assign a rating based on the properties in your software.
Additionally , you should consider running A/B tests when you get started with ABM automation so you can see exactly what messaging appeals to your ICP.
While ABM does require thoughtful planning and dexterity, using ABM software tools — ideally ones that will integrate with your CRM plus marketing automation tools — can help you automate and range your strategy.
For more information on HubSpot’s offerings, read about the ABM software.
Editor’s note: This post was initially published in May 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.