Digital media and high-speed internet connectivity are indeed making the world a smaller place. Naturally, with greater accessibility to brands and businesses worldwide, customer has a plethora of options at their disposal. This means merely capturing their attention will not be enough, especially for B2B marketers. The time has come for marketers involved in B2B marketing to deep dive into other more reliant marketing avenues.
For digital marketing personnel, account-based marketing is the next big thing to watch, and experts believe that ABM will revolutionize B2B marketing in the near future. But even the increasingly popular approach of account-based marketing needs a platform that can support a brand’s campaigns, leading it up the road to success. This is exactly where HubSpot’s marketing automation platform can help a B2B ABM campaign. Read on to find out how you can use HubSpot to run ABM marketing campaigns for your business successfully.
Before we dive any further into using HubSpot for running ABM campaigns, let’s quickly understand what account marketing is. Simply put, account-based marketing is a funnel-based approach that will zero in on accounts with the highest potential of closing and will focus their marketing efforts through targeted marketing strategies on those accounts. Essentially, account-based marketing uses data analytics to drive its marketing strategies and initiate personalization at scale.
If you aren’t sure whether account-based marketing is ideal for your organization, you should know that a study by ITSMA found that over 85% of marketers who measured ROI after adopting ABM found that an account-based marketing approach can generate higher returns in comparison to any other B2B marketing approach. Additionally, account-based marketing can help you eliminate unqualified, weaker leads and solely focus on high-quality leads that are more likely to give you their business.
Now let’s dive into the key steps you must follow for running successful ABM campaigns using HubSpot Inbound Marketing.
Know your ideal customer profile
To get started with your ABM campaign using HubSpot, you will need to undertake a few tasks. For starters, identify your ideal customer profile and your target accounts. Marketing and sales teams use the target accounts index page to monitor account progress. By identifying the next steps for each account, you can quickly filter through these accounts to identify what you need to do.
Once you have segregated the high-quality lead profile from the cold call profiles, HubSpot can help you create a workflow that can filter your leads based on your ideal customer criteria. This criterion can include anything from company size, industry, revenue, etc. Additionally, HubSpot will provide recommendations for other potential customers drawing from the attributes identified by your team.
Give your ABM strategy a timeline
This part defines your ABM campaign’s what, when, where, why, and how. With a timeline in place, your team and you will know exactly what campaigns to run, on which platforms, the duration of each campaign, the frequency of your communication, and the metrics for the end goals. Ideally, account-based marketing campaigns tend to run for anywhere between six to eight weeks. You can use HubSpot’s Campaigns tools to group any offers and channels. This will help your team track their campaign’s results over social media, emails, ads, landing pages, and any other outreach channels that were implemented. Having a timeline in mind allows your team to work backward and figure out the nitty-gritty of the marketing campaign.
Be ready to pass the baton to sales
Once you have caught the attention of a potential client, it won’t be very long before the sales team has to jump in. It is important to ensure that the transition process from the marketing to the sales team is seamless.
In general, the better aligned your sales and marketing teams are, the more likely you are to delight your prospects. The probability of organizations exceeding their revenue goals is 6% higher when their sales and marketing teams are closely aligned.
This transition is possible using a service level agreement between both teams so that there is a complete knowledge transfer and each team knows when to pass the baton.
Personalizing content to engage your customers
Since you are already making use of HubSpot’s workflow, you know your high potential target accounts. Now all you have to do is tweak your existing content and customize it so that the communication is relatable and suitable for that target accounts. You can doll out content on social media channels, share insightful blogs and e-books to reel in your customers, and also get them to sign up for webinars and newsletters. You can make use of HubSpot’s inbound marketing personalization tokens to tailor and tweak your messages and deliver personalized content relevant to specific personnel. Additionally, HubSpot’s monitoring tools that analyze buyer behavior can help you automate follow-up messages to reinforce your communication.
Track your KPIs with HubSpot Account Views
No ABM campaign is a success unless that success is measurable. With HubSpot’s dashboard, you can select specific metrics that you would want to measure the trajectory of your campaign. Additionally, HubSpot’s new ABM tool allows you to measure account penetration, deal-to-close time, account engagement rate, deal creation as well as net-new revenue.
Because ABM campaigns essentially are coordinated efforts between sales and marketing teams, it becomes imperative that they run through a single, open platform or use automation tools that can keep track of every step along the way. HubSpot’s marketing automation tools can not only help set up high potential ABM campaigns but can prove to be an end-to-end solution for B2B marketing.
