Tag: account-based marketing strategy

How to Choose the Right Account-Based Marketing Software for ROI

Account-based marketing has become all but mandatory over the last few years – and it’s all thanks to accessible technology.

Unsurprisingly, 68% of marketers say their account-based marketing strategy relies on automation.

AI-driven tools and software – along with high-quality content – form the backbone of ABM. With the right account-based marketing software stack, you can:

Keep your lead database clean and free from missing, incorrect, or outdated information.
Prevent website abandonment and encourage engagement.
Create a personalized content experience filled with relevant blogs, eBooks, podcasts, etc.
Offer dynamically personalized landing pages for specific accounts or market segments.
Create a website experience that meets leads where they’re at and gently guides them down the sales funnel.

Picking the right ABM tool is vital for driving the exceptional ROI ABM is famous for. Here’s how.

What to Do Before Investing in Account-Based Marketing Software

At Hushly, we notice that marketers come to us with bloated martech stacks. They overspend on marketing technology, don’t use every product’s key features, and don’t train employees to use the technology properly.

Run through this checklist to audit your current stack before adding new account-based marketing software to the list:

What tools are you currently using?
How much are you spending per month?
What features does each ABM tool offer?
What features do you actually use?
What capabilities do you believe you need?
Who uses each tool?

It’s important to thoroughly evaluate your needs, goals, and current tech before adding anything to the mix.

7 Capabilities You Should Look for in Account-Based Marketing Software

Any piece of account-based marketing software you buy should help you stretch your budget. B2Bs love ABM because, when done right, it drives incredible ROI.

You need a tool with the right capabilities to help you reach your goals. Here are a few things to look for.

1. Lead Verification and Management Tools

Gartner expects 80% of brands to abandon their personalization by 2025 due to low ROI and bad data.

Bad data is a serious problem in B2B organizations, and you just can’t afford it in your account-based marketing strategy. In fact, up to 88% of your form information could be obsolete or flat out incorrect.

Lead verification tools are vital for capturing and vetting leads. Your ABM tool should:

Prevent competitors
Propagate firmographic details automatically
Prevent role-based emails
Update lead data as needed
Provide analytics and insights on leads

You can’t make smart decisions without the highest quality data and insights.

2. Dynamic Landing Page Builder

When a visitor arrives at your website, don’t you want to provide the most personalized experience possible? Ideally, you’d like to create custom landing pages for each account complete with branding, content, and personalized offers.

With today’s technology, you can create personalized landing pages either for individual organizations or verticals. Using AI, your website can detect which organization a visitor belongs to and provide the relevant landing page.

3. Comprehensive Tools to Prevent Abandonment

Your account-based marketing software should offer innovative engagement tools to detect exit intent and prevent abandonment.

Typical abandonment plugins that flash lead forms aren’t enough. No one wants to hand over their personal information as they’re trying to leave a website.

Instead, an ABM tool should prevent abandonment with personalized content recommendations. An AI-driven tool uses behavioral data to offer account- or industry-specific blogs, eBooks, podcasts, videos, or web pages.

4. Personalized Content Hubs

73% of buyers say they have less time for research these days – but 58% are willing to spend up to 20 minutes bingeing interactive content.

An ABM tool should empower you to create a personalized and interactive content experience for every visitor. Artificial intelligence and machine learning make it easy to customize each experience based on behavior. Visitors will spend more time on your site because they’ll see the most relevant piece of content every time.

You invest so much time and energy into creating relevant content for accounts. Don’t bury it. Use an AI-driven ABM tool to leverage it.

5. Custom Smart Lead Forms

No one ever enjoys filling out a lead form to access digital content. Visitors know that once they give you their email, your sales team will follow up.

Instead, your account-based marketing software should offer halfway ungated content so visitors can decide which pieces of content are worth providing an email.

Rather than an invasive form asking for every piece of firmographic data, your ABM software should only ask for a business email and pre-propagate the country based on IP. Using AI, your ABM software should fill in the lead’s firmographic details based on info from LinkedIn and other data sources.

Smart micro lead forms ensure that your visitors receive a seamless web experience and you only retain accurate data.

6. Powerful Integration Across Your Website and Other Tools

Data is the name of the game with ABM. Bad intel throws off every marketing objective, from content creation to social media targeting.

Your ABM tools should reduce friction between one another through integration. APIs make it easy to integrate between tools and share data so you can draw the most accurate insights.

7. Self-Nurturing Capabilities Across Your Website

Your leads spend 45% of their journey conducting research – mostly online. They only spend 17% of their time meeting with potential sales teams. In fact, your individual sales team only gets about 5% of a buyer’s time.

You need account-based marketing software that allows leads to self-nurture.

Similar to how Netflix and Spotify offer recommendations that guide you through series and discographies, your website should gently nudge buyers down the sales funnel via recommended content.

Target accounts should be able to self-nurture at their own pace without needing to speak with sales.

Boost Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy with Personalized Landing Pages

You need an ABM tool with a wide range of capabilities to help you personalize the experience, nurture leads on-site, and improve lead quality. Hushly offers a wide range of account-based marketing software to create the modern personalized experience your buyers expect.

Hushly’s dynamic landing pages offer templates you can customize one-on-one for each account or by industry, so each visitor receives a completely unique – and relevant – experience.

Connect with your visitors with Hushly’s innovative ABM landing pages and tools.

What’s Wrong with Your ABM Content Marketing?

Content is an essential component of every successful account-based marketing strategy.

You need ABM content marketing to:

Familiarize key accounts with your company, product/services, and culture.
Demonstrate your industry authority and expertise.
Empower leads to solve problems, research, and address pain points.
Help customers use your product/services and solve problems as they arise.

Since content is so vital to the ROI and success of your ABM strategy, it’s important to take your content marketing strategy seriously as well.

Less than half of B2Bs classify their content marketing as “sophisticated.” However, 92% of B2Bs say they’re running an ABM strategy. This implies that plenty of organizations are relying on generic, low-quality, or unfocused content to fuel their ABM – not good.

7 Mistakes Holding Back Your ABM Content Marketing Results

Ten years ago, ABM wasn’t available to small startups and mid-size companies. Most companies have only had ABM strategies in place for less than five years.

Five years is nowhere near enough time to structure, launch, and fully optimize your ABM content marketing. Even tech giants like Microsoft still adjusts, changes, and updates to their ABM strategies and tactics.

1. No Coherent and Scalable Strategy

Only 21% of B2Bs with the least successful content marketing have a documented strategy. However, 60% of B2Bs with high-performing content definitely do.

A documented strategy is crucial for ABM content marketing success because so much hinges on research. Specifically, your strategy must explain in detail who you’re targeting, keywords, pain points, promotion channels, and more.

An editorial calendar is essential for bringing your content marketing strategy to life. Only half of B2Bs with low-success content marketing use an editorial calendar but a whopping 80% of high-performers do.

Your editorial calendar puts your content strategy into action.

Make sure your content marketing strategy is scalable too. Once you publish content and track your ABM results, you’ll need to pivot and adapt. Certain accounts and roles will require more attention, others less.

2. Unclear ABM Content Marketing Goals

You should already have goals mapped out for your general ABM strategy. However, you can’t just transfer them over to content marketing and hope to deliver ROI.

Everyone wants more leads and sales. Those goals aren’t specific enough to drive a successful ABM content marketing strategy.

Consider your distinct goals for each account, stage of the journey, and role when you create every piece of content. What action do you want the reader/viewer/listener to take after consuming each piece of content?

3. Creating the Wrong Types of Content for Each Segment

Even within each account, different roles need specific types of content at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Unfortunately, 66% of buyers say companies already provide too much content and most of it is totally useless.

Buyers need content that empowers them. They definitely don’t want product promotions, long-form content, and sales pitches.

Instead, focus on product comparisons, podcasts, videos, and concise eBooks. Do your research though. Figure out who you’re targeting within each account and what type of content they’d prefer.

Your goal is to make their job easier through content.

4. Neglecting Pain Points in Your ABM Content Marketing

How can you show accounts that your organization is capable of solving their problems? ABM content marketing solves their problems.

68% of buyers say they’d like to see content organized by pain point on your website so it’s easy to find exactly what they need seamlessly.

Use your content to give away your expertise and advice. Every organization has individual experts in certain fields. Put their experience and skill into your content.

Keyword research is useful for identifying pain points and problems. Long-tail keywords are especially handy for understanding the context behind each search.

Platforms like LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, and other forum-type websites – especially anonymous ones – offer a glimpse into the mind of your target audience segments. Look for ways to apply the research to your ABM content.

5. No Personalized and Interactive Interface

Your accounts simply don’t have time for generic and unengaging content.

Leads don’t want to search through your blog and landing pages for something relevant. They know the technology exists to create a hyper-personalized content recommendation experience and they expect you to deliver it.

It’s no surprise that nearly 70% of B2Bs say they expect an Amazon-like experience from business websites.

Your content experience should offer personalized content recommendations based on browsing behavior and intent data. Interactive elements are important too for encouraging engagement and spending more time on your site.

6. Untargeted and Generic Landing Pages

Traditional landing pages just don’t work for ABM: They’re static and purposely generic to appeal to a wide audience.

Instead, use dynamic technology to offer a personalized experience. Hushly’s special ABM tool, for example, lets you design hyper-personalized landing pages for each account complete with their logo, branding, content, and unique offers.

Artificial intelligence detects which account each visitor belongs to and provides them a personalized landing page.

7. Gating All Your ABM Content Marketing

When you fully gate all your content, everything you’ve invested into your ABM content marketing goes to waste.

Not everyone is prepared to hand over their email address the first time they interact with your brand. They need some convincing first if you want to earn a spot in their valuable inbox real estate.

How can they learn to trust your business if they can’t consume any of your content?

Instead, either allow your visitors to consume all your content freely or offer decent samples so they can see what they’re getting before they commit. You can still collect emails but with much smaller (and smarter) microforms and your leads won’t feel bribed into providing their contact info.

Give Each Account the Personalized Web Experience They Expect

When accounts arrive at your website, what type of experience do you provide? Do you offer dynamic content personalized for every account or generic content for different industries?

Hushly’s platform accelerates your ABM content marketing with a hyper-personalized and interactive experience for each visitor. Instead of traditional landing pages, Hushly pages detect the specific company of each visitor to provide personalized branding, content marketing, promotions, and other tools.

Learn how Hushly’s innovative ABM-specific dynamic landing pages work.