2021 Blog

7 Account-Based Marketing Email Examples

Combining account-based marketing and email marketing is a powerful duo. Each is a perfect way to center customers and focus on providing value upfront. Since the marketing world is constantly shifting toward more human-centered approaches, any ABM marketer should focus on mastering the art of ABM emails.

We’ll discuss what you need to know about account-based marketing emails and give you seven of Hushly’s best tips on constructing your own in today’s article.

What is Account-Based Marketing?

Account-based marketing is the practice of tailoring marketing content toward individual buyers instead of trying to generate mass appeal.

The goal of account-based marketing is to develop long-term relationships and emphasize mutual growth. By establishing these types of trust-based partnerships, account-based marketing will increase ROI through higher customer lifetime value and lower churn rate.

How Do You Write an ABM Email?

Writing a great ABM email consistently will take time and practice. Here are four account-based marketing tactics to follow when designing emails:

Focus on the Customer

Email marketing works because customers see it as personal and trustworthy. It’s like having a conversation with the company. In addition, marketing emails reach customers where they are. In fact, 99% of customers check their emails daily, meaning that your subject line is bound to cross the eyes of countless customers.

Remember that you’re trying to reach this customer on a personal level. Keep the tone of your copy friendly, inviting, and conversational. Just like if you were writing an email to an existing business contact who you already have a relationship with.

Demonstrate Value Upfront

Don’t make the customer scroll through a long and winding email or click through just to get the value you’ve promised. Demonstrate that it exists right away to get the customer’s attention and hold it while you make your pitch.

Keep Your Targeting Precise

Sending emails to the wrong targets will lower key metrics, like open rate and response rate, and increase the odds of ending up in the spam filter.

Avoid this by carefully selecting the targets of every email campaign. Make sure each recipient will greatly benefit from the content and that they have a high chance of converting.

Keep Track of Your Performance

Finally, keep track of how well you’re doing with hard data. No matter how well you think you’re getting your message across, you can’t know for sure unless the numbers are on your side.

Keep track of metrics like click-through rate, conversion rates, and leads generated to ensure your content is reaching the right targets and convincing them your company is right for them.

7 Examples of Account-Based Marketing Emails

If you’d like further inspiration for designing your own ABM emails, here are seven of our favorite examples that you can copy and make use of.

1. Personalized Content

To go along with the most important ABM email marketing principle, try creating custom content for the buyers you’d like to speak to. Here’s a simple example from Airbnb:

Notice that this email hits all of the major principles:

The video is produced for a specific segmented audience. In other words, it’s targeted.
The content is readily available. There’s no click-through or long scrolling required to get a taste of the value.
Recipients know that this video will address them directly and hopefully address some key issues they have right away.
There’s an actionable click-through call-to-action that will produce useful data for the marketers to go over.

2. Gifts

Gifts are a great way to ingratiate yourself and immediately demonstrate value to any customer.

Make sure that the gift you give is relevant to the customer. Find out what they care about and what sort of gift you can give that will improve their lives immediately. Doing this is a great way to improve your conversions. Think of it as another investment, one that is highly likely to grab a customer’s attention and make them feel gratitude and camaraderie.

3. Free Food

Free food is a simple but effective gift that oozes a “low-pressure” vibe.

An offer to buy lunch with no strings attached is a relationship-building move. It signals to the customer that you’re interested in getting to know them and the problems they face earnestly. It’s recognizing that you understand the customer’s time is valuable and important, and that you’re grateful for the opportunity to take some of it.

4. Breaking News

New product launch? New location? New brand? Each of these is ripe for a “breaking news” style email marketing campaign that can generate urgency. It’s also a great reason to email the customer and keep your brand name in their mind.

A controlled and confident news announcement signals to the customer that your company is still innovating and always looking for new ways to deliver value and grow the company.

Here’s an example of a news announcement from Patagonia, wherein they inform customers that an item is back in stock:

5. Welcome Message

Once you’ve captured a customer’s information for the first time, it’s a good idea to send out a welcome message.

These are easily personalized since all you need to do is say hello! You should have all of the relevant information (name, email, business, and industry) from your lead capture forms.

Keep these short and sweet. You can certainly include any product information or content you think will be relevant to the customer. However, focus on a conversational tone and a welcoming vibe that will lay the foundation for a fruitful partnership.

6. Custom Sale

You can always design custom sales for any customer or segment of customers you serve. Announce these sales with a personalized marketing email that lets the customers know what the sale is for, how long it lasts, and, of course, the fact that you designed it just for them.

A custom sale is a perfect way to demonstrate to a customer just how well you know their business and how effectively you can propose solutions that matter to them.

7. Thank You Note

In addition to a great welcome note, a personalized and heartfelt thank you note can go a long way.

Just like in non-commercial relationships, gratitude is a great way to ingratiate yourself with another person. An earnest message of thanks is an opportunity to let the customer know that their business means more to you than just the effect on your bottom line. You’re focused on building partnerships with other companies that are looking to grow and thrive long-term. Use thank-you notes to project this value and set a standard that other companies will need to beat.

Hushly Can Help You Design and Optimize ABM Emails

Hushly’s platform is dedicated to creating unique and powerful account-based experiences anywhere you reach customers, including email.

With Hushly, you can design custom email templates and use them on a massive scale to speak to more customers and drive conversions.

We will also help you load these emails with effective CTAs that will enable you to keep track of the performance of your campaigns so you can always get one step closer to complete optimization.

Request a demo of Hushly today to see how we can improve your ABM email marketing.

account-based marketing

4 Tips to Develop a Successful ABM Buyer Journey

A customer who first encounters your company is just getting started on their ABM buyer journey. This journey will either lead them to the checkout screen or the big red X at the top corner of their screen. The difference can mean everything to your business’s bottom line.

The first thing to realize is that the buyer journey is going to happen whether you intentionally design the experience or just let the chips fall where they may. When you go out of your way to develop your buyer’s journey and make sure it’s as streamlined as possible, you immediately increase the odds of converting that customer.

However, the age of personalization is upon us. This means that it’s no longer enough to simply place marketing content on your website and hope customers find it. Some might, but many won’t. Instead, using the principles of account-based marketing, you should aim to develop a web of multi-channel experiences that will guide the customer from beginning to end.

Today’s blog will explain exactly what we mean when we talk about an ABM buyer journey, the benefits of creating one intentionally, and some tips for mastering your ABM buyer journey and increasing conversions.

What is a B2B ABM Buyer Journey?

Imagine searching the web for a software program that will help your business develop new leads and scale the management of those leads with automation.

The first few links you come across look good: The websites are well designed, and there’s a lot of content on the blogs that you could spend some time searching through. Depending on the level of research you’re performing, you may even decide to spend some time reading case studies before moving on to the next potential links.

Then, you come across a link for a company that has intentionally developed a buyer journey from scratch.

From the moment you land, you’re greeted by a personalized webpage that already has information on your company, the business you conduct, and the identified pain points that you’re looking for remedies for. Not stopping there, the website recommends several pieces of content in the form of videos, blogs, and infographics that quickly display their recommended solutions and the estimated ROI their product could bring you.

Notice the difference?

In both cases, you’ve experienced a buyer journey. However, only in the second experience did you require little to no effort before you were already being suggested solutions and hard data that could influence your decision. This is a perfect example of an intentionally designed buyer journey that will increase interest in a product and drive conversions.

Buyer Journey vs. Sales Funnel

The sales funnel is an important concept to understand, but it’s distinct from the buyer journey.

The buyer journey is essentially the experience a customer has when traveling through your sales funnel. A customer shouldn’t realize they’re in a sales funnel at all. Instead, they should experience a seamless transition from awareness to evaluation that feels natural and personalized to their unique needs.

Why Should You Intentionally Develop an ABM Buyer Journey?

The marketing world is shifting toward personalization more and more.

As technology makes a higher level of personalization possible, more customers will get to experience it. Once these buyers have a taste for this experience, the demand for it’s only going to grow.

This is because personalization solves many problems from a customer’s standpoint:

Customers don’t know if the time they spend researching your product is going to be worth their time. They could spend hours reading case studies and blogs only to decide they don’t like your content or the vision you have for your partnerships. This is wasted time. The possibility of this wasted time means customers have to be selective over what they read and how long they spend on each product.
There’s too much information online to know for sure when you’ve searched hard enough. Essentially, customers have to eventually settle on the best option they find, which may not be their best choice.
New solutions advance so quickly that potential customers may not even know they exist. This gives a natural edge to early adopters and those targeted effectively by ads.
B2B buyers need to focus on long-term growth to stay competitive. This means relationship-building is more valuable than one-off transactions that may or may not boost marketing ROI right away.

Since personalization is so valuable, it makes sense that a personalized journey is the best way to demonstrate value and knowledge to customers immediately, without the need for them to invest too many resources to find out if your company is a good fit.

4 Tips for a Successful ABM Buyer Journey

Now that you have an idea of the ABM buyer journey framework and why it matters, here are four actionable tips you can use to start developing an ABM buyer journey today.

1. Focus on Personalization

The biggest edge you can give your business is a level of personalization that will impress every customer. This means identifying pain points, unique challenges, and presenting solutions that will increase ROI in the long and short term. Support your claims with data and evidence proving that your methods will work for this company.

When personalizing content and marketing, focus on telling stories that place the buyer at the center of the narrative. The more easily you can trigger the pain points that your customers struggle with daily, the more effective your proposed solutions will feel.

2. Engage Accounts on a Human Level

Remember that account-based marketing is meant to work on building relationships instead of just increasing conversions. Focus on developing the company at the level of a partnership. This will improve your credibility and trustworthiness in the eyes of your customers.

3. Map the Journey from Awareness to Evaluation

Your journey should be deliberate and carefully crafted from beginning to end. Put yourself in the shoes of your ideal customer to find out how they might become aware of your product and navigate through your website.

Combine this hands-on approach with a deep analysis of data and metrics to ensure you’re on the right track.

4. Track Data and Metrics to Push Toward Optimization

Your ABM marketing campaigns will never be 100% perfect. Instead, you should look at every customer journey (whether it leads to a sale or not) as an opportunity to find out more about how your customers shop, what needs they have, and how you can better communicate your solutions to them.

Do this by tracking data from beginning to end. Focus on metrics like website engagement, content performance, and customer lifetime value or churn rate. These kinds of hard data combined with marketing expertise will give you indicators of where you need to improve.

Bonus Tip: Use an ABM Content Platform Like Hushly

Our final recommendation is to invest in an ABM content platform like ours here at Hushly.

An ABM content platform can do much of the hard work of designing and executing ABM for you, including:

Automatically engaging leads in real time
Developing personalized web experiences with 0 technical knowledge required
Nurturing leads by deploying relevant and contextual marketing content
Improving your website with dynamic content hubs that can change based on the unique stage of the buyer’s journey.

Request a demo of Hushly today and find out how an ABM content platform like ours can help you develop excellent buyer journeys.

account-based marketing

How to Build Your Perfect ABM Tech Stack

Building a great ABM tech stack shouldn’t be complicated.

Since the entire goal of automated account-based marketing is to reduce the time and effort it takes to personalize your marketing campaigns, all technology you employ should make your life easier.

To ensure that the marketing technology you invest in is truly going to simplify your account-based marketing efforts, you’ll need to know some key details about what account-based marketing technology does and why it’s necessary.

We’ll cover all of this and include a list of the key features you need to include in your ABM tech stack in today’s article.

What is Account-Based Marketing?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a concept that’s growing in popularity with the shift toward more human-centered marketing efforts.

Instead of attempting to persuade the entire marketplace that yours is the best product on the market, account-based marketing techniques seek to convince only certain targeted, highly valuable accounts.

By changing the scope of advertising from mass appealing to an entire customer base to communicating with individuals, marketers can also shift their focus onto building long-lasting partnerships instead of closing one-off transactions.

The Benefits of ABM

Here are just a few key benefits of ABM as compared to traditional mass awareness marketing techniques:

ABM helps you prioritize relationship-building instead of spending so much time attracting new leads. By focusing on increasing customer lifetime value and decreasing churn, ABM can significantly increase your marketing ROI.
ABM saves time and resources by ensuring that you’re only targeting valuable and ready-to-buy accounts.
ABM helps improve your website’s authority by emphasizing the creation of high-quality educational materials that speak directly to potential customers’ pain points.
ABM is a more personal way to advertise. This can have some significant effects on not only your bottom line but also the human experience of marketing and running a business.

Tools Every Marketer Needs in Their ABM Tech Stack

There are hundreds of tools available online that promise to help you build the perfect ABM campaign.

Here are a few key tools that every marketer needs to have.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

A CRM platform is a tool that helps marketers keep track of individual customers and things that have taken place on their account. This can include things like times the customer was contacted, the information given or received, and their estimated place in the sales cycle.

Without a proper CRM platform, ABM marketing will be much harder than it needs to be. This is because ABM as a concept is based on the idea that the customer will always receive the support and marketing materials needed for whatever stage of the buyer journey you find them in. If you fail to accurately track this, then you can never really be sure you’re planning and executing your ABM strategies at the right time and place.

Demand Gen

It’s tremendously helpful to have a tool that can identify accounts for you based on preselected criteria. Ideally, you should be able to use your account targeting platform to find accounts that are good fits for your business and ready to buy now.

Automated Engagement (Lead Nurturing)

You’re far more likely to convert a lead when you respond to their lead capture immediately. Waiting even one hour can drastically reduce the odds of converting that lead.

Therefore, it’s necessary to automate the process of lead nurturing as early as possible. Ideally, you can respond instantly to lead capture using an automated tool.

The best automated lead nurturing platform should respond to leads with a fast email or even automated chat support. In addition to the fast response, you should be able to customize these messages for each customer you encounter, ensuring that your leads are nurtured using information that’s contextual and relevant.

Website Personalization

A key aspect of any account-based experience is making sure your customers receive unique and relevant messages every time they come into contact with you. This includes any time they open your website or see a message from you.

Imagine going to a website that included your company’s logo at the top right next to the seller’s. This would indicate that they were already aware of your operations and even predicted that you might make the journey to their website one day. This is bound to impress. It displays a level of awareness and diligence that you just won’t be able to replicate without the help of automation.

Dynamic Web Experiences

In addition to the personalized website, your web content should be adaptive to the buying cycle and industry of the customer who comes across it. This means automating things like displayed content, landing pages, and even the way leads are nurtured.

A great example of this is automated content hubs. Think of this like Netflix for your marketing materials.

Customers should be able to come to your website and be greeted with a treasure trove of valuable information on your product and how to use it. These offerings should be multi-channel so that any buyer who needs to reference them can do so at their leisure and through any channel they prefer (meaning video, blogs, images, or even audio).

Automated Data Capture and Analysis

No ABM campaign is ever completely optimal.

Each customer will have unique needs and pain points that your company can resolve. Though your message may be effective and wide-reaching, there’s always going to be room to improve it and convert even more customers.

For this reason, you need to have some way to track and analyze the data generated during an ABM campaign.

You should be able to easily find information like:

Who are your website’s visitors? What are their demographics and buying intent?
How engaging is your website’s content?
Which content is performing the best?
Are your targeted marketing materials effective?
Where do visitors navigate most often, and how long do they stay?
What’s your best source of website traffic?

Ideally, your ABM technology won’t just keep track of this data but help you optimize your strategy in real time by providing live updates and automated improvements along the way.

The less work you have to do to keep your ABM updated and efficient, the more time you can spend cultivating the human relationships behind the companies. This is the path toward long-term partnerships and mutual growth.

Looking for a New ABM Platform? Try Hushly

Hushly is a perfect addition to any existing ABM tech stack because our interface is simple and flexible.

Regardless of your level of technical ability, you’ll easily be able to design and customize ABM materials with just a few button clicks. Hushly includes the ability to:

Design automated content hubs that adapt to unique visitors and their stage in the buying cycle.
Craft unique, self-nurturing landing pages that ensure you’ll never again lose a lead for lack of a fast response.
Plan and execute personalized web experiences. Our tool allows you to customize banners, website text, calls to action, and more. Each of these elements can update in real time to ensure your highest-value customers are always receiving the best experience possible.

If you’re ready to get started with one of the most powerful account-based marketing tools available, get in touch with us today to try out a demo of Hushly.

account-based marketing

15 Account-Based Marketing Metrics You Should Track

It’s becoming more and more difficult for mass-awareness tactics to compete with the automated account-based marketing that’s happening on huge scales in 2023.

As a modern marketer, you know that personalized, account-based B2B marketing is the wave of the future. If you’ve already taken the steps toward designing your own ABM campaigns and are using them in the field, the next step you’ll need to take is learning how to analyze the effectiveness of those campaigns.

Here are 15 of our account-based marketing KPIs and metrics to track when performing account-based marketing:

1. Return on Investment

The classic marketing metric: ROI is the revenue generated from your ABM efforts divided by the amount you invested in them.

ROI is important because it will help you understand if your account-based marketing efforts are bearing fruit. A negative ROI means you’ll need to reevaluate your strategy from the ground up. However, even a positive ROI has room for improvement.

There are multiple ways to increase ROI. You can focus on increasing the size of your deals, increasing the volume of your deals, or becoming more efficient and reducing your investment. The following metrics can help you decide which of these strategies is best for increasing ROI.

2. Churn Rate

Churn rate measures how many of your customers are leaving during a given period. This is most often tracked in the form of subscriptions to a software service.

Churn rate is also incredibly important because maintaining existing customers can be almost as valuable as attracting new ones.

In addition, a high churn rate could point to some problems with your ABM efforts once the prospect has come out of the bottom of your funnel. Increasing churn rate means finding a way to keep those customers satisfied for longer.

3. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

CAC is similar to ROI. It’s the measure of how many dollars you spend on marketing divided by the number of new customers gained over a specific period.

You should optimize your CAC metric by including only the cost of top-of-funnel advertising. This ensures that you’re only keeping track of relevant spending. After all, money spent to keep an existing customer is money well spent but won’t increase your CAC.

4. Conversion Rate (Win Rate)

Your win rate is the number of deals you successfully convert divided by the number of deals you had the opportunity to convert.

Conversion rate is somewhat flexible: You can define an opportunity in any way that makes sense to you. In general, if you feel that a sales representative had a legitimate chance to convert the sale, this should count toward your win rate.

5. Social Media Engagement

Engagement is fairly easy to track when it comes to social media. Take a look at your social media’s likes, comments, shares, followers, and subscribers. In general, more is better!

However, make sure to keep track of your sentiment as well. You may be getting a ton of comments on your new ABM campaign materials, but are they positive or negative comments? A human touch is required here.

6. Campaign Engagement

You can measure ABM campaign engagement in many ways. Take the example of email marketing, where the following metrics can help you gauge your campaign engagement:

Email open rate
Email response rate
Email click-through rate

Though these examples are specific to emails, the idea of tracking campaign engagement can be extended to any advertising campaign, like website banner ads or even paid search results.

7. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

CLV is a measure of how much revenue you’re getting from a customer during their entire lifecycle, from the moment they first come on board to when you part ways. Increasing CLV can be just as valuable as attracting new customers.

8. Customer Satisfaction

Closely related to CLV is customer satisfaction: How happy are your current customers, and how likely are they to remain that way?

9. Pipeline Engagement or Pipeline Influence

It’s important to keep track of whether your marketing materials are accurately directing customers into your sales pipeline.

To check this, just keep track of how often your ABM materials are creating opportunities.

10. Total Available Market (TAM)

This metric tracks how much available revenue there is in your industry. Essentially, how much revenue would your company gain if you managed to convert every company in your niche and box out all your competitors?

11. Buyer Persona

Your buyer persona is somewhat abstract, but you can make several concrete observations about them that will help you gauge their effectiveness:

What’s the ROI on your personas? How much effort are you putting into creating them vs. how often their use leads to conversions?
Are there commonalities across many customers that should be added to your ideal buyer persona?
How likely are your ideal customers to convert? A low rate may tell you if your industry is highly saturated or if your persona needs updating.

12. In-Market Accounts

Similar to TAM, you can keep track of in-market accounts by noticing how many companies exist in your industry that display an interest in buying your product (or a similar one).

Deciding the number of accounts you’re going after can help you decide if you should use a one-to-one, one-to-few, or one-to-many ABM approach.

13. Average Deal Size

Take your total revenue over a given period and divide it by the number of deals you made to get your average deal size.

Deal size is a great lever to push if you’re looking to quickly increase your ROI. Just make sure it’s not coming at the expense of lengthening your sales cycle too much.

14. Sales Cycle Length

How long does it take to convert a buyer from prospect to customer?

This should be measured from the first contact to the time the customer checks out.

Shorter is better, but don’t be too discouraged if your sales cycle takes a long time. It’s better to compare yourself to other companies in your industry to see if you’re converting customers quickly relative to others who sell a similar product.

15. Website Engagement

How often are your targeted accounts engaging with your website?

This can include things like click-throughs, browsing time, content engagement, and lead captures.

If your website is dynamic and automated, each new customer should see a personalized and targeted homepage. If you’re wondering how to achieve that at any scale, Hushly can help.

Hushly Can Make It Easy to Track and Analyze ABM Metrics

Hushly’s automated system is the best tool on the market for keeping track of the massive amounts of data needed to design and maintain excellent ABM campaigns.

We understand that optimization is a moving target. No matter how well you think you understand your target accounts or the strategy you’re using to reach them, there’s always room for a little more improvement.

In addition to our suite of automation tools, we employ sophisticated data analysis tools to help you build your ABM strategies from the ground up and keep them optimized for all of your customers.

Ready to learn more about how Hushly can help? Request a demo so we can get started on the path to mutual growth.

account-based marketing

What is ABM Software?

Account-based marketing is the practice of tailoring your marketing efforts toward individual accounts instead of using traditional mass awareness tactics.

Instead of trying to convince the entire marketplace to buy your product, you instead try to convince only specific buyers. These buyers can be large companies or, sometimes, even just individuals within that company who have the power to make buying decisions.

There’s a growing trend toward this kind of relationship-building in marketing. Instead of trying to attract as many customers as possible for a simple one-off transaction, practices like ABM are making it easier and more profitable to focus on long-term mutual growth between business partners.

To successfully execute account-based marketing, it’s recommended that you invest in some ABM software.

But what does ABM software offer you that you can’t accomplish on your own? How does it work? And where can you find the best ABM platform that will help your business grow?

To help you navigate this evolving landscape, we’ll answer all of those questions and more.

What is Account-Based Marketing Software?

To properly execute an ABM strategy, your business will need to do each of the following for every account (or group of accounts) you plan to target:

Preselect targets based on criteria that make sense for your industry, niche, and scale.
Plan marketing campaigns for these target accounts.
Execute those plans. This includes everything from designing materials to reaching out to potential customers, and every step on the way to checkout.
Tracking and analyzing data improve the efficiency of your program.

Account-based marketing software, also known as an ABM platform, will help you accomplish all of these tasks in an automated way.

Automation in this context can range from full automation, where you don’t ever have to think about or make any adjustments, to partially automated systems that you can update with just a few clicks.

In any case, the purpose of ABM software is to help your business scale your account-based marketing efforts and pave the way for your growth.

What to Look For in an ABM Platform

There are dozens of ABM platforms on the internet. Each of them will claim to provide certain benefits and solutions that will help your company scale your account-based marketing efforts.

So how can you sort through all of the offerings and pick the software that’s best suited to help your company grow?

Look for some of the following features in your ABM platform.

Display targeted marketing materials that are designed and approved for specific buyers.
Syndicate your content across multiple channels and platforms to ensure the intended audience always has your materials at their fingertips.
Perform full campaigns, such as email marketing campaigns. This means generating and sending emails, and keeping track of important metrics like open rate, response rate, and click-through rates.
Create lists of ABM target accounts and help you narrow these lists down for optimization.
Facilitate your sales and marketing pipelines by ensuring prospects always have access to contextual and relevant content.
Produce and analyze large amounts of data that will help you optimize your strategy and ensure you’re always moving the revenue needle in the right direction.

The goal of your ABM software is to make it easy for your business to design targeted and personalized marketing campaigns for one-to-one, one-to-few, and one-to-many strategies. Most importantly, your ABM software should be capable of performing these activities automatically.

What are the Benefits of ABM Software?

Designing personalized, targeted marketing campaigns for your ideal customers is a time-consuming process.

You’ll need to first identify the right targets. Then, you should segment them based on things like business needs, pain points, or unique industry problems that your company can help solve. Then, designing and executing each individual marketing campaign will dominate your focus.

It’s easy to see how all of these tasks can take many weeks or even months for the largest accounts. How can you hope to accomplish this level of ABM marketing at scale? The only way is through automation.

Automating problems like creating unique web pages, lead capture forms, dynamic content hubs, targeted email marketing campaigns, and instant lead nurturing are all benefits of ABM software. Automating these tasks gives your marketing team the freedom to focus their efforts on the actual marketing: designing great campaigns, telling powerful stories, and establishing genuine human connections with the companies you hope to work with.

How ABM Software Can Support Sales and Marketing

ABM software is, as the title suggests, primarily a marketing tool.

Designing and executing personalized account-based experiences at a wide scale is the key reason to invest in an ABM platform. However, you should also know that the leading ABM software platforms also include tools that will support your sales staff and accelerate your sales pipeline.

ABM software companies do this by automating simple but time-consuming sales tasks like:

Monitoring web traffic for targeted, high-value accounts
Notifying sales reps when leads are captured so that relationship-building can start immediately
Helping your sales team focus their efforts on the highest-value accounts without any overlap
Instantly responding to lead captures, ensuring that leads are nurtured from the moment they come in

Web Personalization vs. Account-Based Marketing Software

Web personalization is the process of creating unique webpages for individual visitors.

Dynamic aspects of a website can include things like:

Displaying different company logos to different visitors
Adapting content hubs to display only content that’s most relevant to that visitor
Adapting lead capture forms for individuals
Offering automated notifications when a targeted account visits your website, giving you the chance to establish a human connection immediately

While a great account-based marketing platform will include these aspects of web personalization, they’re separate concepts.

ABM software is, by contrast, much more wide-ranging and capable than simple web-personalization software. This is because an ABM platform should facilitate every aspect of the account-based marketing experience, from lead capture through checkout and data analysis.

Hushly is a Must-Try ABM Software Platform

Hushly is an industry leader in marketing automation and account-based marketing experiences.

We believe in a few fundamental principles that lend themselves to account-based marketing and show up in everything we do:

We believe in providing value upfront and asking for payment later. This helps us build long-term partnerships with our clients that result in mutual growth.
Our data capture and analysis are some of the best in the business. We track metrics that can help you understand your website’s visitors, marketing performance, and attribute leads.
Our easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface means there’s no technical experience required to design dynamic, fully personalized account experiences for any number of accounts.
The simple interface also helps you flexibly design content based on anything, from the stage of the buying process to unique industries.
Hushly can integrate with any existing technology stack because we’re focused on providing our users with the smoothest experience possible.

At Hushly, we believe our software is as creative and flexible as your marketing vision.

Request a demo of Hushly today to get started on your journey of creating automated account-based marketing experiences.

account-based marketing

3 Types of Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing, also known as ABM, is a hot topic in the marketing world. This is because your best customers deserve your full attention. At the very least, they need to feel like they can rely on you to understand their business perspective and how best to help them achieve their goals.

The best way to achieve this mutual understanding is by demonstrating your value upfront with the three types of account-based marketing strategies. As the entire industry shifts toward a more human-centered approach to marketing, designing personalized marketing materials for important accounts will soon become a requirement.

Before you get started designing your own ABM campaigns, you should know some of the basics, like the three main types of account-based marketing and how to use them. We’ll also include some key tips on how you can use automation to develop and scale your ABM efforts.

What is B2B Account-Based Marketing?

B2B account-based marketing is a form of marketing that relies on tailoring your efforts toward specific accounts or buyers. In other words, rather than designing marketing materials for mass appeal to a wide audience, you’ll focus instead on delivering the right message to the right buyer in the hopes of securing larger deals and long-lasting relationships.

Account-based marketing doesn’t just need to be on a one-to-one basis, as we’ll discuss later. Instead, there are multiple great ways to design ABM strategies that will work no matter the scale you’re operating at.

What are the Components of Account-Based Marketing?

There’s no right way to do ABM, so the components of your program could end up looking different than what we describe in today’s article.

However, to get you started on the right path, here are a few components we believe every ABM campaign should include:

Targets that are chosen deliberately by using buyer personas or industry insights
Marketing materials that seek to address specific and unique pain points on a per-business basis
Automated, self-updating marketing that will vary based on who is viewing it
A personalized approach that aims to establish long-term relationships based on trust and understanding, rather than aiming for a one-off sale

What is an Account-Based Marketing Strategy?

Account-based marketing strategy varies from traditional marketing in the following ways:

Instead of aiming for mass awareness, top-of-funnel ABM advertising can focus on building rapport and trust from the outset of communications.
Account-based marketing is more involved on a per-customer basis than traditional marketing. You’ll need to put in the work to maintain the relationships you create.
Since ABM is aimed at developing long-term relationships with buyers, you will spend more time creating marketing strategies that appeal to your existing customers. This means thinking of ways to upsell and keep those customers happy through service and support.

What is an Example of Account-Based Marketing?

Using automation and a commitment to personalization are two key examples of account-based marketing that any business can use and succeed with.

TechTarget came to Hushly looking for a way to automate their targeted marketing materials on a bigger scale. TechTarget’s business was based on creating unique advertising and educational materials that spoke to customers on a personal level, which on its own is a perfect example of account-based marketing.

TechTarget knew they needed a way to scale these efforts, however. At a certain point of growth, it becomes more and more difficult to keep designing 1:1 ABM for each new customer without the help of automation. That’s where Hushly came in to streamline the ABM process.

What are the Types of Account-Based Marketing?

Now that you have a foothold in the basic account-based marketing framework, here are three different account-based marketing examples you can use to start targeting buyers today.

1. One-to-One ABM

One-to-one (1:1) is the form of account-based marketing where you design all marketing materials and sales pitches for an individual customer. Given the level of detail you can generate when you’re working with just a single customer, one-to-one marketing is best for the largest clients that you want to make the biggest impression on.

One-to-one ABM works by isolating your ideal customer from the outset. You can do this in many ways, the simplest of these is creating a customer or buyer persona.

You can create a buyer persona based on an ideal but fictionalized business or focus on a real-world example and try to build a persona based on details you already have. For example, who at the business is responsible for buying decisions? What does this person do within their company, and how can you best communicate your vision with them?

Once you’ve got your persona, your marketing and sales teams will be responsible for developing the account from the ground up. This can include everything from how you will orchestrate first contact to what additional items you’ll try to sell to the buyer persona after they become a customer.

2. One-to-Few ABM

In one-to-few (1:few) ABM, you’ll design marketing and sales pitches for multiple businesses at once. Multiple in this case generally means few enough that a highly personalized pitch can be made to each one, without necessarily devoting the time or effort to create any 1:1 pitches.

One-to-few is a good strategy for targeting between 5 and 10 medium-sized businesses that occupy the same niche. These businesses may be competitors, and that’s a good way to tell if they’ll each benefit from your product.

Construct 1:few marketing materials based on the customer’s needs and pain points rather than any specific personal pitches. If you’ve chosen your targets wisely, each of these businesses should be suffering from the same problems that you can offer solutions to. Designing sales and marketing materials that conjure this pain and promise to remedy it’s the best way to conduct 1:few ABM efforts.

3. One-to-Many ABM

Here, you’ll develop marketing and sales pitches that double as mass appeal efforts. One-to-many (1:many) is a great way to design personalized, top-of-funnel marketing materials that still appeal to many businesses in your niche.

Similar to 1:few marketing, you’ll want to personalize your treatment of each account as much as possible while still reserving resources for other marketing efforts. The companies in your 1:many ABM strategies are ones that you’re eager to work with but aren’t willing to invest a heavy amount of time on individual marketing.

One-to-many ABM is challenging if you’re working without the use of account-based marketing platforms like Hushly.

How Hushly Can Automate Your ABM at Any Scale

Hushly specializes in account-based marketing automation which can help your business grow regardless of its current scale. From 1:1 to 1:many ABM, Hushly has account-based marketing tools that can help:

Design personalized, dynamic webpages for potential clients with just a few clicks.
Organize automated content hubs that present marketing materials that address any pain points or industry challenges to the right prospects.
Create and nurture new leads with proven lead capture forms and techniques that will draw the attention of any business you hope to work with.
Keep track of lead data from start to finish.

At Hushly, we understand that marketing is never fully optimized. You must take small steps with each new iteration to come closer to the ideal. The best way to achieve this is by tracking data and constantly refining your process.

Let’s talk about how Hushly can improve your automated ABM efforts. Request a demo today.

account-based marketing b2b marketing

14 Account-Based Marketing Best Practices to Follow

Account-based marketing is part of a more fundamental shift toward consumer-focused marketing strategies.

Gone are the days when marketing could be mass-produced like a shotgun blast. Instead, today’s customers expect the precision of a sniper. They want personalized marketing, educational content, and genuine human relationships with their partners.

Account-based marketing is the strongest strategy to ensure this type of precision marketing.

If you’re working on perfecting your own ABM strategy for the years to come, you’ll need to know some of the industry’s best account-based marketing ideas so you can avoid common pitfalls.

Here are 14 account-based marketing best practices we suggest to ensure your efforts succeed.

1. Make Sure ABM is a Joint Effort Between Sales and Marketing

Every stakeholder in your organization should be on board with your strategy. To achieve this, it’s best not to develop a strategy without those stakeholders involved.

Give sales and marketing a fair chance to speak up about what they expect and need from the program before finalizing it. This will generate buy-in and keep enthusiasm for the project high.

2. Don’t Be Afraid to Start Small

If your business is new to ABM, it’s a great idea to start small and build up to a more full-scale ABM strategy.

We recommend picking a list of ideal candidates from every segment of business you plan to market to. If possible, try and find a few accounts of all sizes to work with.

These will be great opportunities for your sales and marketing teams to get comfortable with the new motions expected of them without too much pressure.

3. Create Excellent Buyer Personas

There are many great and unique ways to build an ABM program, but every single one of them will include buyer personas.

A buyer persona is a profile of the buyer at your target company that you hope to convert. It should include information like what their personal goals are, how they hope to benefit their company, the types of issues they face, and the concrete ways your company can help them.

4. Consider Account-Based Marketing Platforms Like Hushly

Since each of your ABM targets will expect a unique experience, you’ll need to be able to deliver that and continue to deliver it as you scale up.

Unfortunately, the more you commit to ABM, the more custom assets and content you’ll need.

Hushly’s advanced account-based marketing tools make it easy to manage your ABM campaigns because our system requires zero technical expertise.

An automated content platform like ours can cut the time and resources you spend on your ABM marketing dramatically.

5. Focus on Dynamic Personalization

A great way to impress your customers is to give them unique experiences. One fantastic example of this is dynamic content hubs and custom landing pages.

Dynamic elements of these assets should include details like company logos, slogans, and content.

With an adequate tech stack (like Hushly’s platform), creating these dynamic content hubs and other account-based marketing examples is as easy as dragging and dropping a few elements.

6. Try Gift Giving

Forming one-to-one relationships with employees of your target organization is a key aspect of a successful ABM program.

It’s on the nose, but gift-giving is a great way to ingratiate yourself with the prospect that you hope to get into your account-based marketing funnel.

Small gifts that speak directly to the person you’re trying to reach on a personal level can build trust and serve as an excellent icebreaker.

7. Form a Comprehensive Data Management Program

To adequately evaluate your ABM program, you’ll need a lot of high-quality data from every step of the process.

Assign someone in your organization who’s responsible for the management and analysis of data. This will be your source of truth and information.

Use them wisely: Only by properly interpreting the past can you plan for the future.

8. Constantly Reiterate, Update, and Optimize

Use that data to refine your process constantly. Don’t get so excited about a plan or aspect of your plan that you forget the larger picture.

Every piece of your ABM program should be on the chopping block at all times if performance isn’t where you need it to be.

9. Evaluate Your Technology Stack

Is your technology up to the task of managing your ABM campaigns? There’s a lot of incredible software online that will make your life easier when it comes to ABM.

You need hardware and software that are capable of quickly creating, editing, and managing ABM elements like custom landing and webpages.

In addition, the ability to quickly alter copy and marketing content for specific targets is a key task that your tech stack will need to be capable of.

10. Don’t Get Too Comfortable with Your Current Customers

With all the talk of targeting new customers and generating new demand and leads with ABM, it can be easy to forget that the whole point of ABM is to get more value out of the customers you do convert.

Stay focused on the accounts part of the account-based marketing playbook. Building up those long-term relationships is the biggest strength of ABM.

11. Use Technology and Data to Pick Targets

Don’t just rely on gut feelings or your hopes and dreams when selecting ABM targets. Your data management and analysis program should be capable of producing information that will guide your target picks.

Moby-Dick is out there, but don’t forget what happened to Ahab! Sometimes choosing a smaller target will be more efficient in the long run.

12. Aim for Comprehensive Customer Journeys

Your marketing content should be ready to guide customers to conversion regardless of where they’re at in the sales cycle.

Whether a customer needs just a small push or will spend months in the pipeline, your content needs to be ready to produce a seamless customer journey from discovery to checkout.

13. Create Omnichannel Content

Just like the content needs to be relevant to every stage of the sales cycle, it also needs to be capable of reaching your customers on any channel they prefer to engage in.

You’ll want to be able to engage through all account-based marketing channels: video, text, audio, and everything in between.

14. Know What Success Looks Like

Perhaps the most important part of designing your account-based marketing framework is to articulate what you hope to achieve with it.

Don’t forget that ABM is absolutely a team game.

Bring all stakeholders in on this part. Everyone involved in your ABM push should understand what the goals are, why they exist, and how you all plan to work together to achieve them.

Final Tip: Be Patient

Switching from traditional inbound/outbound marketing strategies to a comprehensive ABM strategy will not be easy, no matter how well you prepare. There will be unforeseen challenges along the way, and growing pains that no article or expert can prepare you for.

Don’t despair: The results will come if you stick to the fundamentals. There’s a reason that most marketers are switching to ABM techniques. It’s because ABM works and customers love it.

Give your team, and their results, time to develop. Keep in mind that ABM is naturally a slower marketing tactic as well. Your goal is to build long-term relationships and trust with your customers.

No matter how well you plan, success will require time to materialize.

Hushly is ready to assist you in implementing these best practices today. Learn how easy our platform makes it to manage your ABM strategy.

account-based marketing

8 Steps to Get Your ABM Program Started

Businesses with long sales cycles have learned that account-based marketing is the most powerful strategy for long-term growth and customer satisfaction. ABM programs have several strengths that make them invaluable tools for any B2B marketing team.

For one, they’re more flexible than they may seem. In fact, a proper ABM program should be capable of guiding marketing campaigns for businesses of any size or scale.

Secondly, they naturally lend themselves to personalization. B2B customers today have access to more relevant and contextual advertising and information than ever before. If your marketing content and delivery channels don’t meet their unique desires, they’ll be able to find someone who does.

We’ll discuss the fundamentals of ABM and give you an 8-step guide for kick-starting your own ABM program in today’s blog.

The Meaning of ABM

ABM is short for account-based marketing. This is the practice of tailoring marketing strategies, materials, and resource investments to individual customers.

In essence, adopting ABM will mean your marketing strategy will look slightly different for each customer or segment you come up with.

Account-Based Marketing Examples

If you’re still unsure what we mean by account-based marketing, here are a couple of examples to clarify:

Robin

Robin designs office spaces for companies.

They utilized account-based principles to design a social media campaign that highlights some of their finest creations. By showing off their product (designs) in their most relevant and contextual state, Robin can target their advertising towards businesses that operate in similar areas and industries.

Shouting out their best customers is also a great way to build that relationship and deepen the trust between the two companies.

Practicing ABM made it easy for Robin to show customers what their office could look like if they work with them.

GumGum

GumGum is a marketing company that specializes in placing ads in places where customers are most likely to see them.

In 2018, they designed custom temporary tattoos that doubled as QR codes. When viewed through the GumGum app, these tattoos would become animated. They distributed these tattoos at Clorox’s annual iConnect conference, to a great reception.

GumGum’s commitment to ABM marketing meant they spent a lot of time and effort developing this idea for a single client. Their success proves the underlying principles of ABM.

8 Steps to Building Your Own ABM Program

Now that you know what ABM is and what it can look like, here are eight steps you can implement today to build your own ABM program.

1. Target Your First Accounts

You’ll need to start with some research.

Begin by finding a list of companies you would love to work with. Make sure this part is a joint effort between sales and marketing. Sales will want to be involved because they’re the ones hunting down those large targets.

These can be large companies, small companies, and every company in between. Don’t worry about finding the perfect match right away. This is just the information-gathering stage.

2. Categorize Targets into a Tier List

Next, you’ll want to categorize these potential targets based on a few parameters you can decide on in advance.

Think of things like how long the sales cycle is expected to take, how well you’re already positioned to take on this client, and how well your solutions fit with their pain points.

You can also consider the size of the company and whether you’ll be engaging in full 1:1 ABM marketing or taking a 1:few or 1:many approach.

3. Profile Your Buyers

Create some buyer personas.

These are profiles of the buyers involved in the decision-making process at the companies you plan to target.

ABM is all about forming real, human connections, so this part has to go right. If you do nothing else during the profiling stage, at least make sure you know who within the company is responsible for decision-making. This is your real target.

4. Assign Your ABM Managers

Once you know about your buyers, you can start assigning the ABM managers best suited to treat them.

This is where knowledge of your own company comes into play. Which of your marketing managers is right for each of your targets? There won’t be easy or clear answers here. You’ll need to go with your best judgment on who is right to connect with each buyer based on experience and expertise.

5. Define a Broad Strategy, Then Get Specific

One important factor when designing an ABM program is how well it will scale as you grow.

Your ABM program needs to have some broad strategies that apply to every customer. Things like researching the client first to determine who the buyers are is a great example. This step needs to take place every time but will yield different results for each company.

Your ABM philosophy should be shared by all of your employees. Make sure everyone is on the same page.

6. Determine What Success Looks Like

You’ll need to define some concrete metrics that will let you know if your plans are working or not.

Some of the best metrics to track when evaluating your ABM program are:

Content Engagement: How well are your buyers responding to your content? Are they spending time with it? Learning from it? Sharing and engaging?
Conversion Rate: A simple measure of how many prospects convert into buyers.
Average Contract Value (ACV): An ideal metric for ABM. With ACV, you can track how much value you’re getting from each closed deal.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Closely related to ACV, CLV is a measure of how much value you’re getting out of each customer based on their lifecycle in your company. This number should grow over time if you’re holding onto your customers.

7. Optimize and Reiterate

No matter how well you design and implement your initial plan, it will never be perfect.

You should be gathering data from every step of the process to measure how well you’re performing and how smoothly your marketing and sales teams are adjusting to the transition.

Never be afraid to make quick and decisive changes if things aren’t working. The more data you have available to you, the easier it will be to tell when a new direction is needed.

8. Try Out a Platform Like Hushly

A content experience platform like Hushly can make creating and managing ABM campaigns incredibly easy. Our ABM tools enable easy creation and management of ABM assets.

Hushly can help you:

Create custom landing pages
Create dynamic webpages
Target customers with pinpoint ABM email campaigns that speak directly to their pain points
Keep track of huge quantities of valuable data and analyze that data for you, making sure your process is always becoming more optimized over time

Developing Your Own Account-Based Marketing Framework is Easier Than You Think

Although switching from traditional inbound/outbound marketing tactics to a full-scale ABM program will come with growing pains, the statistics surrounding ABM’s effectiveness are clear.

Once you’ve become comfortable with the system you create, the results will speak for themselves. In this way, you’ll find that overcoming the inertia and committing to the switch is actually the most difficult part.

Hushly is ready to help you design and manage an effective ABM campaign. Find out how we develop excellent ABM experiences for our clients.

account-based marketing

B2B Growth Hacking Guide for Marketers

The beginning stages of B2B growth are critical. You have to find a way to get off the ground quickly without sacrificing too much of your budget marketing an unproven product.

There are growing pains to any growth story, but there are also some incredible techniques that marketers have come up with to solve short-term growth needs in creative ways.

We refer to these types of short-term growth techniques as B2B growth hacking.

Though they are unconventional by definition, there’s a spirit of entrepreneurship and creativity behind each of the examples we’ll present today that should inspire your own growth hacking techniques.

Understanding the goals behind growth hacking and how others have approached it should also demystify the process and give you a roadmap to your own successful growth hacking.

What is Growth Hacking in Business?

B2B growth hacking is closely embedded in the concept of B2B growth marketing strategy.

At the beginning of your business journey, growth will be more difficult. Getting off the ground requires overcoming a great deal of inertia, uncertainty, and roadblocks.

“Hacking” this stage of growth is focused on short-term, unconventional strategies designed to kick-start your growth and ease your transition into more traditional long-term growth strategies.

What is an Example of Growth Hacking?

Growth hacking is naturally unconventional. This means there are strategies you can easily implement on your own product without much change.

Then there are the rare moments of brilliance that aren’t exactly repeatable but can point you toward the spirit of inspiration.

Here are some examples of each of these:

Airbnb’s Craigslist Hack

Airbnb’s marketers realized that customers looking for short-term accommodation often searched Craigslist in addition to regular search engines. In a stroke of genius, Airbnb figured out how to provide an option for Airbnb owners to copy their ads directly to Craigslist when making a new posting.

This simple extra step put their product in front of countless more consumers, immediately increasing demand and driving growth.

Hacking the Fundamentals Like Knudge and Instagram

Knudge and Instagram are two examples of products that developers poured their heart and soul into before launch.

According to Knudge’s blog on the subject, the company spent $0 on marketing but still managed to drive over 1 million installs in six months. Instagram found a similar level of success, seeing 10,000 users just hours after launch and rapidly growing ever since.

Each company focused on doing the little things right: optimizing their app store presence with great titles, banners, and marketing copy. In addition to this, they painstakingly designed products with consumer feedback that ensured using their app was easy and fun.

Gmail and Facebook Used Exclusivity to Trigger FOMO

Two great examples of tech companies that launched their products behind a wall of exclusivity are Gmail and Facebook.

In both instances, the company put a wall between users of its website and those on the outside.

In Gmail’s case, users initially needed an invite to use the platform, and could only be invited by someone who already had an account. This not only encouraged networking but made Gmail a key piece of that networking connection.

Facebook gated their product behind a wall that required exclusive membership from the get-go, namely a college email.

As cheap as it might seem, tapping into this feeling of exclusivity accomplishes many things that can quickly hack growth. Namely, it taps into a primal fear of missing out, which means even people who aren’t that interested in your product will want a piece of it, just so they can say they did.

What is a Growth-Hacking Technique?

A growth-hacking technique is a short-term solution to growth that is generally used by companies that are still trying to get their business off the ground.

When formulating your own growth hacking strategy, focus on ways you can get customers interested in your product without having to spend money on advertising.

These techniques are fantastic for initial growth, but you’ll eventually need to settle into more stable, long-term growth strategies once you’ve got some momentum.

What Skills Do Growth Hackers Need?

B2B growth hacking efforts need to be creative, diligent, resourceful, and capable of determining which risks are worth the effort.

That last one is particularly difficult, but when your company is at the beginning stages of growth, it can sometimes take that extra level of brashness to get it kick-started.

A few skills every growth hacker needs are:

Research: Growth hackers need to know their customers inside and out, so they can design hacks that will work on the psychology of their customer base for minimal cost.
Problem Solving: There is no problem more important to solve for early businesses than “How can we get people interested in our product?” Generating this interest will look different depending on everything from your product, business history, experience, funding, and customer base.
Data Analysis: You’ll need to get constant feedback from your customers and business metrics to keep track of your performance. If something isn’t working, growth hackers must be able to identify this quickly and shift gears before any damage is done.

3 Ways to Make Your Own Growth Hacks for B2B SaaS

Here are three things you can do to begin your own growth hacking journey.

1. Learn About Your Customer

To drive fast short-term growth, you need to solve a simple psychological problem: How can we convince our target customers they need to try our product? The only way to know this for sure is to know your customer inside and out.

2. Study Your Competition

Your competitors, especially those who are already well established, will have encountered the same kinds of roadblocks you’re experiencing. Find out how they dealt with those problems to avoid them entirely.

3. Brainstorm with a Team

Brainstorming a strategy for B2B growth hacking is not easy.

If it were, it wouldn’t be a hack anymore.

Marketers looking to develop B2B growth hacks should involve as many unique voices and feedback as possible to ensure their hack will be effective and, more importantly, set them up for a transition to stable long-term growth.

Why Growth Hacking is the Best

Slow and steady only wins the race if the race is long enough.

In business, you don’t always have the luxury of making up for a bad start. Not when competition is fierce and customers are more demanding than ever before.

The new B2B growth equation involves rapid short-term growth hacking, followed by a transition to more reliable long-term growth strategies.

Hushly Can Help You Grow in the Short and Long Term

Whether you’re focused on developing short-term growth hacks or are ready to transition into long-term growth strategies, a content platform like Hushly can help.

The principle behind content marketing is that customers will see the value you can provide for free and become more interested in the value they’ll have to pay for.

We focus on driving growth by optimizing your content marketing from top to bottom. We believe that providing value upfront to customers is the best way to build relationships and drive growth. We also believe in tracking data and optimizing your content marketing constantly – it’s the only way to ensure you’ll stay ahead of the curve for long.

Hack your short-term growth and transition into long-term growth by checking out our “What is B2B Growth Marketing? And How Can It Help You?” eBook.

b2b growth

What’s New (and Outdated) in Demand Gen Marketing?

Demand gen marketing is a fascinating field to work in. As a naturally innovative space, there are always new techniques, technologies, and strategies to implement that promise to yield unprecedented growth and generate massive demand.

Alongside this are old strategies that no longer fit with the expectations of modern consumers.

The demand generation marketing job description is constantly changing. The amount of information available online makes it difficult for marketing leaders to stay up to date.

To help, we here at Hushly have collected a few examples of exciting new demand-generation processes that you should be focused on, and we also suggest some old ways of doing things that might need to be retired.

What is Demand Generation Strategy?

Demand generation is a marketing practice focused on building demand. Demand is defined as high brand awareness and interest that turns prospects into high-quality leads.

It’s important not to confuse demand gen marketing with lead gen marketing.

Demand Gen vs. Lead Gen

Leads are prospects that your sales team will attempt to convert into sales, while demand is the level of interest those prospects have in your product.

What’s New in Demand Gen Marketing?

We at Hushly are on top of the changes in the marketing world so you don’t have to be. Here are three ways we’ve found demand gen marketing is evolving for the better.

Playing the Long Game with ABM and Personalization

There’s a seismic shift happening in B2B demand generation towards customer-focused strategies that form valuable relationships that lead to partnerships and mutual growth.

Today’s B2B customers (and even an increasing number of B2C customers) are demanding a higher level of personalization. This includes ads that speak directly to their pain points and propose solutions they can act on immediately.

In 2022 and beyond, the best demand gen strategies will be ones that focus on the long-term goals of relationship and credibility building.

Featuring Target Companies in Ad Materials

One specific way to begin building relationships with companies you want to work with is by featuring them in your marketing and demand gen content.

By this, we don’t mean flattering companies unnecessarily. This will be transparent and could even have negative effects.

Instead, focus on the things you genuinely admire about the company and how you can help them grow. Feature them as an example of a company that’s doing things right and that you’re working to emulate in your own operations.

This type of good-faith callout works on two levels: It shows the target company you know them well. It also shows other companies your good nature and shows a willingness on your part to give credit where it’s due and adopt successful strategies regardless of who is coming up with them.

Better Creativity

Part of the shift towards customer-focused demand gen and marketing means a shift towards human-centered communication.

Too often do marketers forget that the buyers they’re speaking to aren’t just representatives of their companies, but real people with specific desires, needs, and dreams your company can help achieve. Speaking to these buyers on a human level requires a great deal of creativity and expertise.

Creative efforts in 2022 and beyond should be focused on creating content that’s not just informative and attention-grabbing, but genuinely entertaining and engaging.

There’s no doubt this extra layer of creativity is more difficult to achieve, but as buyers grow more and more used to this level of marketing, it will only become more prevalent.

What Needs to Go: Outdated Demand Gen Marketing Tactics

Here are a few tactics that don’t fit with the modern demand gen landscape.

Assuming Everyone is Ready to Buy

It’s a mistake to assume that every buyer you engage with is at the same stage of their buying process. Sales teams know that not all MQLs are created equal, and that means you shouldn’t treat them like they are.

If your marketing content doesn’t have pieces that fit into every stage of the sales cycle, you’re missing out on conversions from buyers who may be qualified but just not ready to buy yet.

The best practice is to nurture leads continuously. Start by engaging them right away – ideally within one hour of receiving their information – and continue to nurture them by providing a steady stream of relevant and contextual content that will convince them to buy your solution.

Demo Request CTAs

CTAs that direct users to demo your solution may be unnecessary.

There are two main reasons for this:

Customers who are signing up for demos have already done extensive research in most cases. In other words, your first impression has already been made.
Customers who are signing up for demos already know how to find them. Your CTA could be more efficiently used to promote other content.

Demos are still great ways to introduce your product to customers and get them comfortable with it before they buy. However, your CTAs should be used to promote content or links that will drive conversions.

Ads for Gated Content

Fitting with the shift towards customer-focused demand gen marketing, ads that lead to gated content should be a thing of the past.

There’s a simple reason for this: There’s so much information available online for any subject you can imagine that buyers simply don’t need to have the patience required to get through your gate. They’re far more likely to just close the page and find another free resource that won’t demand anything from them upfront.

Instead, you should be focused on demonstrating value upfront without asking anything back. This will build trust, loyalty, and the benefit of keeping prospects on your web assets for longer.

Top Demand Gen Stats for B2B Marketers to Know in 2022

Demand Gen Report recently produced its 2022 Demand Generation Benchmark Survey. Here are some key statistics from the survey that highlight the direction that most demand gen marketers are taking.

Use these stats to inform your own strategy and compare yourself against your competitors.

Content marketing is king: 58% of respondents plan to increase content creation budgets.
49% of respondents say email is still the top lead generation channel.
39% of respondents plan to deploy marketing automation tools.
32% plan to deploy ABM.
29% plan to execute multichannel lead nurturing.
31% of marketers plan to increase revenue by more than 20%.

A Demand Generation Marketing Manager Like Hushly Can Keep You Ahead of the Curve

As demand generation tools continue to evolve, there will always be new strategies and directions for your company to consider.

That’s why it may be best to work with a content experience platform like Hushly to manage your demand gen needs.

Hushly specializes in customer-focused demand generation through ABM and personalization. Our automated platform uses sophisticated data analytics to ensure your leads are always converting at a high rate.

Our drag-and-drop platform also requires no technical expertise to use, so adjusting your strategy on the fly is as easy as clicking a few buttons.

We’ve been advocating for more personal, long-term, relationship-building approach to demand gen for years, so we’re well positioned to provide support for your demand gen efforts.

See how Hushly can help build demand gen using innovative techniques that will boost your marketing ROI and build long-term customer relationships.

demand generation