Tag: account-based marketing

Account-based marketing is a strategy that involves tailoring marketing content to specific accounts, or buyers, that your company has identified as being high-value.

The idea is that a few high-quality, loyal, and scalable partners are more valuable than many smaller partnerships that don’t develop over time. To keep clients interested in doing business with you long-term, you need to keep them coming back to you with individualized treatment and content. In other words, account-based marketing (ABM).

ABM campaigns can take many forms, but all of them have a few key features in common. We’ll go over the broad details of ABM campaigns, how to create one, and the steps you should take when running one for the first time.

What is ABM?

ABM stands for account-based marketing. It’s a marketing strategy predicated on the concept that each buyer, even B2B buyers, are individuals with unique desires and needs. Catering to these needs is the best way to deliver value to these buyers and convert them from prospects into buyers.

What is an ABM Campaign?

An ABM campaign is a concerted effort on the part of a marketing team to create content and marketing materials directly targeted to convert idealized buyers.

Account-based means each prospective buyer you’re working with should receive unique information and communications. These communications should be tailored to the business’s specific needs and the things the buyer has indicated are important to them.

It’s important to conceive ABM campaigns because, ideally, a prospect should find themselves on a journey that starts with them encountering customized content that addresses their specific problems and promises solutions. Then, a natural stream of content should unfold that proves your in-depth knowledge of the customer’s pain points and why your solutions are proven to work.

At the end of the campaign, the customer should trust that your solution is right for them and be ready to buy.

5 Steps to Create and Run an ABM Campaign

If you’re going to market soon and are interested in creating your own ABM campaign, here are a few things to plan for when starting.

1. Target Buyers

Your list of ideal buyers will be unique based on your industry and products. To keep it simple, try to identify which portion of your customer base is most valuable. This should be based on things like loyalty, scalability, and how confident you are in your ability to solve problems for that client.

Once you have a list of companies, you can decide if true one-to-one marketing or a one-to-few approach makes more sense.

2. Personalize Content

Next, you’ll need to work on creating personalized content that users will engage with. This content should be tailored to these buyers.

If using a one-to-one approach, you can speak directly to the buyer who the content is for. One-to-many marketing will require a more general message – be careful it doesn’t get watered down too much by trying to speak to too many people at once.

3. Engage Through Multiple Channels

There is no best way to reach buyers. This means you should try and cast a wide net. Your content should reach buyers through ABM email campaigns, texts, phone calls, organic search results, and more.

4. Synchronize Sales and Marketing

Regardless of how you get them on board, your sales team needs to be in sync with your marketing strategy. Make sure sales leaders understand the process you’re using to capture and enrich leads, and implement their feedback to make the process as smooth as possible for all involved.

5. Define Success

Finally, you’ll need to make sure all parties involved in the creation of the strategy understand what success looks like for them. This may mean picking and choosing certain metrics that everyone agrees are important.

No matter how you define success, ensure that everyone understands their role and is held accountable for it before starting any strategy.

Tip: You can create ABM campaigns with an account-based experience platform like Hushly. Hushly makes it easy to create self-nurturing landing pages, dynamic web pages, and deep customer insights that will help you tailor products and content to drive conversions.

Examples of Successful ABM Campaigns

What does an ABM campaign look like? There is no right answer to this question because each ABM campaign should be unique to your company, buyers, and industry at any given time.

ABM campaigns are right for B2B sales at any scale and in any industry. This is because the basic principle behind ABM is customer focused. Since every industry has customers, every industry is capable of catering content and marketing directly to consumers with their best interests in mind.

We’ve collected three examples of companies that hired Hushly to be their ABM campaign manager. These examples provide proof of concept. They could also serve to inspire your next ABM campaign.

Mindtickle

Mindtickle’s goal was to increase the rate at which prospects consumed content to quickly eliminate obstacles to the buying decision. The challenge here is that while your content might be valuable no matter who is reading it, not every customer consumes content at the same rate or with the same interest.

Together with Hushly, Mindtickle created visitor and account-based personalized websites, landing pages, and content experiences. These personalized landing pages and websites were designed to improve the customer experience and drive engagement.

The result was an impressive 50% rate of click-throughs on landing pages and content.

Smart Selling Tools

Smart Selling Tools realized independently that individualized landing pages made sense from a customer point of view. However, as their number of clients grew, founder Nancy Nardin realized she couldn’t justify spending the time it would take to customize hundreds of landing pages herself.

Not willing to give up, Smart Selling Tools hired Hushly, which made it easy to turn one landing page into many distinct ones with just a few button clicks. The result was conversion rates 8x higher than the industry average and an increase in leads and lead quality thanks to Hushly’s unique back-end enrichment process.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA knew that personalizing content for individual users was the best way to improve lead capture, lead quality, and get those leads into the hands of sales to drive conversions. Hushly made it easy for them to create self-nurturing landing pages, personalized webpages, and dynamic websites that can be tailored to speak to individual buyers and customers.

Moreover, NVIDIA was able to implement Hushly’s solution across their entire organization with no pain points.

Account-Based Marketing Isn’t Going Anywhere – It’s Time to Join In

Customers’ expectations regarding content quality, ease of access, and value are only going up. The day may come when all customers, B2B and B2C alike, demand personalized content everywhere they go.

Until that day comes, companies and marketers who use proven ABM campaign techniques will have a leg up on their competition.

Hushly can help take your content marketing to the next level with easy-to-create ABM campaigns. Request a demo, and see how Hushly can help your business grow.

You may be totally confident in your ABM experience strategy today and unsure of how it’s going to scale tomorrow. This is a reality many small-to-medium business owners and marketing executives face and brings the problem of scalability into sharp focus.

For decades, companies have relied on traditional lead generation in the form of regular advertising and content marketing. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach. In fact, it’s still a great way to generate sales and is the bread and butter for many industries and companies.

However, as your revenue increases, so too will the cost of generating a high volume of decent-quality leads.

As knowledge of how to create and execute scalable account-based marketing (ABM) improves, it becomes more important that companies targeting B2B clients at least try them out.

In today’s list, you’ll find information on how ABM works and eight actionable steps you can take to begin the process of optimizing ABM experiences today.

What is an ABM Experience?

Account-based marketing is the practice of crafting marketing content, sales strategies, and experiences tailored to individual B2B buyers. The main idea behind the ABM experience is to keep your biggest and best customers happy long term. These are your partners who you should be growing alongside, hopefully becoming indispensable to them in the process.

A company using ABM will hope to build these relationships with the effort of the entire sales and marketing departments.

How Does ABM Experience Work?

Targeting high-quality clients with customer-focused engagement strategies represents a big shift in the traditional attitude towards marketing.

In the past, the sales funnel involved generating as many leads as possible and converting the small percentage of them who will go on to become customers. The process of generating leads can be costly and, more importantly, inconsistent with regard to quality.

The ebbs and flows of lead quality, combined with similar fluctuations in content quality, economic conditions, and sales and marketing performance, can all contribute to a lack of accountability among sales and marketing teams.

A Different Philosophy

ABM is all about flipping the sales funnel on its head.

Instead of generating many leads and hoping that a few of them will close, ABM strategies identify and go after the largest targets in their industry.

In doing so, they pick up invaluable insights into market conditions, the happiness of their customers, and any growing needs that new or improved products could address.

Flexible and Powerful

The beauty of ABM experiences is in their adaptability. By definition, you’ll be catering experiences to individual B2B customers. This allows you a lot of room to sculpt messages, branding, and even products for those buyers.

This level of commitment is a form of marketing all on its own: Imagine the impression you’d leave on a buyer if your company created a whole new product just to make their lives easier.

8 Ways to Optimize Your ABM Experience

Keeping your best customers happy is not as easy as it sounds. But there are ways you can improve the ABM experience for your customers:

1. Make Sure Your Data is in Order

If you’re relying on first-party B2B data that’s been generated with landing pages or by other means, you need to be aware that your data could be unreliable.

Even if you invest in third-party data to shore up your own reserves, it’s important to parse that data to ensure its quality is high enough to act on.

Remember that you’re flipping the sales funnel on its head: You can no longer count on a high volume of leads to offset a low conversion rate. ABM is about targeting the accounts you really want, meaning each one is critical to the success of your business.

Asking these few questions each time you uncover a promising ABM lead can help offset the effects of unreliable data:

• How old is the data?
• Are key personnel at my target company still the same?
• How certain are we of their intent?
• Are our solutions still right for this company’s niche?

2. Define Success

While it’s important to be open-minded and patient with a large shift in strategy, you also need to know what your goals are. These should be established well in advance, ideally with the input of all who have skin in the game. This means marketing and sales working in concert with senior management.

3. Target the Right Accounts

Selling to the wrong account will offset all of the great work your sales and marketing team will put into the campaign. If your company’s solution doesn’t address any of the pain points the client cares about, you won’t make the sale. The specificity of ABM campaigns means these kinds of interactions can make or break the sale.

4. Identify Key Personnel

Once you’re certain the company is a good fit, you need to know who to impress at that company to make the sale. Find the decision-makers and get them involved as soon as possible. These are the people ABM is meant to work on, so focus on building this relationship first and foremost.

5. Choose the Right Messenger

Just like your client has key decision-makers, your own company has personnel whose strengths lie in account management. If you have contacts in your own organization familiar with your target, get them involved. A friendly face can go a long way towards closing a sale of any size.

6. Use Multi-Channel Content

Focus on creating a mix of content that works through multiple channels. Mix emails with videos and personalized written content. Utilize social media, your blog, and other resources.

When coordinating this content creation, always keep in mind who you’re marketing to. You should also aim to coordinate the timing of these campaigns for maximum impact.

7. Measure Results and Take Stock

Stay accountable to your original plan. If you decided on metrics in advance, now is the time to measure those and take stock of how well your strategy is performing.

Though ABM strategies close at a far higher rate than traditional leads, they will still be less than 100%. Look at where your failures are coming from, and you’ll see the clearest paths toward improvement.

8. Try Hushly

A content marketing and management platform like Hushly can eliminate the stress of creating ABM experiences for clients. Hushly makes it easy to deliver personalized account experiences with our platform.

Our solutions will scale with you, adapt to meet your needs and those of your customers, and promise to create unique account experiences for every client you approach.

ABM Scales with You

ABM experiences do not need to be a costly investment or even a major commitment.

They can start simply with just a few personnel on your side finding key targets and potential problems those targets may have. From there, you can set yourself to convince the target that your solution is the best one they’re ever going to find.

Once you’ve landed a few key targets, the ABM experience can begin in earnest because you can really begin to impress your new client with the level of effort and dedication to their growth. Your own growth will naturally come as a result, which makes ABM an easy choice for scalable marketing solutions.

Check out Hushly’s eBook, Efficient Growth at Scale, for more information on how to maximize your ABM experiences.

By now, you’ve no doubt heard about the benefits of account-based marketing on ROI.

The returns are most of the appeal.

After all, 87% of marketers say ABM outperforms their other tactics while 91% say ABM helps them increase average deal size.

Those 13% and 9% minority groups saying otherwise probably either:

• Aren’t running the best ABM strategy
• Don’t understand their ideal target accounts
• Aren’t using the right tools correctly
• Or don’t have the best product/service/mission to begin with.

When done right, ABM’s ROI is unmatched – but the real question is, why?

Unearth that “why” and you’ll find a whole range of account-based marketing benefits. You’ll also realize how ABM revolutionizes the entire B2B marketing process.

What is Account-Based Marketing (ABM)?

Instead of throwing a bunch of marketing material at the proverbial wall and focusing on what sticks, ABM changes how you approach the entire process.

You identify the target accounts first and work backward:

G2

Since you’re targeting specific accounts instead of entire markets, your process instantly becomes more efficient. No generic content. No tossing around multiple pain points and use cases. Just laser-focused marketing material that either appeals to accounts or doesn’t.

ABM is really the natural progression of personalized B2B marketing under the age of AI and automation.

With so much data available and automation tools at your fingertips, why even bother with the old clunky tactics?

Plus, the early research stages of ABM help you figure out whether accounts are even the right fit for your brand to begin with. Transparency is critical for trust today in B2B so half of your job is knowing who not to target and nurture as well.

You’re not the best solution for everyone and ABM forces you to confront that and deal with it properly. That’s a good thing!

8 Benefits of Account-Based Marketing That Don’t Get Enough Attention

Digging deeper into the “why” behind ABM’s massive ROI uncovers a ton of awesome benefits. Remember, these benefits of account-based marketing only happen when you run an optimized strategy with the right tools.

1. Uniting Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service

ABM really forces companies to address the disconnect between departments.

One of the best benefits of account-based marketing (and main goals) is customer retention, for example. You can’t effectively retain customers with customer service and marketing working in isolation.

Sales, marketing, and customer service need to develop almost a diplomatic channel for communication where they can evaluate data together and decide the best course of action.

The benefits of this honest and open communication ultimately flow over into every activity by encouraging goal-focused cooperation.

2. Engaging Stakeholders

Most ABM strategies identify, create content for, and engage key stakeholders at the target company. If your marketing team manages to earn the attention of a well-known company leader, don’t you think your own leadership might pay more attention too?

Of course, your company’s stakeholders aren’t marketers but they’d certainly pay more attention to what marketing is up to and why your activities are critical to business growth.

Not only is this useful for marketing but engaged stakeholders on both sides can lead to better long-term planning at your company so you can position yourself as a solution.

3. A Better Website Experience Overall

ABM eliminates the need to gate your entire content inventory, demanding contact details in exchange for access.

You already know who you’re targeting!

Instead, you can let visitors freely browse your website with minimal intrusion. Everyone gets a better website experience from you.

4. More and Better Personalization

Account-based marketing is personalization. That’s why you work backward, identifying your target accounts, teams, and individuals.

Business 2 Community

You already have your segments laid out. You just need to personalize the content, experience, offers, and service to fit.

And when you optimize the personalization for your ABM, you collect data to help you improve personalization for everyone.

5. Better Understanding of Your Market

B2Bs often struggle today because they don’t properly understand the daily problems of their target audience – much less niche teams and individuals.

Data and research are the backbone of successful ABM.

We’re still witnessing the infancy of widespread ABM. After optimizing your ABM for years, your analytics will reveal patterns that tell a story about your target market’s experience.

6. Deeper Understanding of Your Own Mission

Naturally, by understanding your target audience and competition on a deeper level, you’ll have a better grasp of how your company fits into the equation.

This perspective puts you in a better situation to plan your long-term goals. Long-term planning like this matters tremendously to high-value clients and enterprises.

Ultimately, you’ll know how to position your company as the perfect solution for years or decades of benefits.

7. Streamlining Automation

You can’t run a successful ABM without AI and automation. There’s just no efficient way to personalize the experience for each account or individual without AI-powered features like:

• Custom ABM campaign pages
• Content recommendation engines
• Embedded content streams
• Minimalist smart forms
• Lead verification

Ideally, your ABM strategy should also implement automation for internal processes too. Data collection, analysis, and contact management can all benefit from AI help.

8. Reduced Waste and Inefficiencies

A focused team is an efficient team. With well-researched ABM, you’ll never invest in content you don’t need, generic material, or dead-end conversations.

You understand the account’s pain points, needs, and goals. Every action from there out – whether sales, marketing, or customer service – should serve a specific purpose and make total sense in that moment.

Those benefits of account-based marketing from waste reduction only get better with time too.

Reap the Full Benefits of Account-Based Marketing with the Right Tools

Marketers can only enjoy the benefits of ABM today – including ROI – thanks to the growing accessibility of AI, automation, and data integration.

The tools you choose make successful ABM possible. Without them, you wouldn’t be able to manage data from multiple sources, draw insights, create engaging content, and reach accounts at the right moment.

That’s why so many B2B marketing teams trust Hushly for their most important account-based marketing tools like ABM campaign pages, website content personalization, abandonment popups, and minimalist smart forms.

See how Hushly’s all-in-one platform can skyrocket your ABM engagement and retention.

Imagine how you feel when you open an email from your favorite brand.

It mentions your first name in the To field. The subject line is something simple like “Happy Friday.”

The body is filled with personalized clothing recommendations based on what you’ve bought and browsed before. They might even let you know the expensive piece you’ve had your eye on for months dropped in price this week.

Although almost every part of that email was automated, it still feels personal.

Most importantly, it’s relevant and useful.

You can achieve a similar feeling and result for your B2B clients through account-based marketing.

Following these account-based marketing basics ensures your content and messages are always completely relevant and useful.

What is Account-Based Marketing?

You’ll often see ABM described as an inverted funnel:

G2

Instead of casting a wide net to lure prospects and nurture leads, you identify target accounts and leads first. Building backward, you study each individually.

Your account-based marketing framework can focus on an entire organization, segments of the team, or individual employees. It all depends on what you know about the account, how your brand fits in, and what you want to achieve.

Business 2 Community

You create relevant content, engage leads earn their trust, and hopefully convert them into customers.

Finally, you use what you’ve learned about each account and any new data to build their loyalty and keep their business.

ABM is much more sustainable than traditional marketing because it incorporates post-purchase nurturing in a way other strategies can’t.

In 2019, nearly a quarter of marketers said they had no active ABM strategy. By the same time next year, less than 6% reported to have no ABM. 

This surge in adaptation – during the squeeze of a global pandemic no less – just proves the benefits of ABM like:

• Increased ROI compared to traditional B2B marketing
• Retaining existing customers and improving customer service
• Accelerating the sales funnel and improving nurturing

Furthermore, successful ABM requires that sales, marketing, and customer service don’t just play nice but remain actively engaged in each other’s work. As you can imagine, that benefit reverberates throughout your entire organization in more ways than you can quantify.

How to Set Up Your Account-Based Marketing Framework and Tactics

Even ten years ago, small- and mid-size businesses would never even dream of launching ABM. Only major corporations with massive budgets could afford spending the time and resources targeting specific accounts.

Today, AI-driven technology and automation make it easy for anyone to develop an account-based marketing framework.

Here are the account-based marketing basics every marketer needs to know if they want to see results.

1. Select Your Target Accounts

Think long-term here. One high-value sale sounds nice but with ABM, you want long-term customer retention. It’s just more cost-effective and efficient.

As you build your list of potential target accounts (which can range from 50 to over 1,000), ask questions like:

• What is the account’s estimated lifetime value?
• What kind of post-purchase customer service and support will they need?
• How much will it cost and how long will it take to win this account?

2. Create Personas for Each Account and Segment

Your personas depend on which type of ABM you run:

• One-to-one
• One-to-few
• One-to-many

With your type of account-based marketing framework in mind, you can figure out whether you need to build hyper-focused personas for individuals, teams, or more general personas for accounts.

Of course, more details are always better but when you’re targeting hundreds of accounts, you can only do so much.

3. Unite Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service

Of all the account-based marketing basics, this one is the most important.

Why? Well, ABM is not like traditional marketing tactics, so a traditional team approach won’t work either.

Consider just the customer retention stage of ABM:

• Customer service reps are the first human touchpoint for questions/concerns – not sales.
• Marketing must produce educational content that reduces the need to contact customer service.
• Sales must coordinate with marketing and customer service for upsells and renewals.

Ongoing conversations and internal educational content are key to pulling off successful ABM.

4. Research and Develop a Content Strategy

Your account persona research should drive your content. Your biggest job now is to set KPIs for your content and plan the strategy.

With ABM, there’s no excuse for generic content because you already know who you’re targeting. Make sure to include details like:

• How you can help them reduce costs, using case studies for similar accounts as examples.
• Why you can solve their specific problems better than the competition.
• How you can scale and grow with them long-term.

5. Optimize Your Website for User Experience

Personalization is a top priority here.

When someone from a target account visits your website, you ideally want them to see a custom version with all the content, discounts, service, and pricing you’ve created just for them.

An AI content recommendation engine helps here.

The AI system will study which case studies, topics, and other pieces of content a visitor browses. The AI notes the specific industry, account, and stage of the funnel to suggest the next best piece of content.

Custom ABM campaign pages are also important.

Use templates to personalize content assets, case studies, pricing, and offers by industry. Then break the pages down further for each target account – complete with logo and an assigned rep. Like so:

Hushly

6. Launch, Connect, Measure, and Adjust

The personal nature of ABM means there’s plenty of room for mistakes – or improvement depending on how you look at it.

Evaluate your engagement/awareness KPIs after a month or two and your sales/retention figures quarterly. Don’t forget to rerun your account research before tweaking content or overhauling your landing pages.

Account-Based Marketing Basics: Start with the Right Tools

Behind every winning account-based marketing framework you’ll find carefully configured tools. For countless B2Bs, Hushly powers the bulk of their ABM tools.

From customizable ABM campaign pages and AI-powered content recommendation engines to smart microforms and engaging exit-intent popups, we always have your back and your audience’s best interests in mind.

Rethink personalization with Hushly’s customizable ABM Campaign Pages and templates.