Tag: account-based marketing

Account-based marketing (ABM) allows B2B marketers and sales professionals to target key accounts and drive revenue. However, there are a few challenges that come with implementing an ABM strategy. From lack of data to inefficient processes, B2B teams need to be aware of the hurdles they could face when launching an ABM campaign.

In this post, we’ll discuss the most common account-based marketing challenges and offer solutions to help you overcome them.

1. Aligning Your Sales and Marketing Teams

Account-based marketing is most known as a strategic approach to B2B marketing that involves aligning your sales and marketing teams in an effort to improve the quality of leads and increase the likelihood of them converting into customers.

Statistics back this assertion, with 72% of sales and marketing leaders agreeing that having a strong alignment between sales and marketing positively impacts overall performance. The proof is in the pudding, and the more aligned your sales and marketing teams are, the better the quality of leads and the greater the ROI:

• Aligning sales and marketing teams can help generate 209% more revenue from marketing efforts (Marketo)
• Aligning your teams could lead to 38% higher sales win rates (MarketingPros)
• Alignment between teams can help you become 67% better at closing deals (Marketo)

Solution: Get Them Working Together from the Start

To reap the rewards of alignment, you need to get started. Whether you’re a new organization or already established, the first step in aligning your teams is to get them working together. The sooner you get the two teams in the same room and brainstorm together, the sooner they can start co-building a strategy that will outline shared goals and objectives and methods of achieving them.

2. Building the Perfect ABM Tech Stack

One common problem that newly adopted account-based marketing (ABM) strategies face is the need for the right tools to help them execute their strategy. Quite a bit of technology goes into executing ABM successfully, which can be overwhelming for any organization. Not only can it be costly upfront, but it also requires a significant amount of ongoing training and support to ensure that the technology is being used correctly and to its fullest potential.

Solution: Start with the Basics and Add On As Needed 

The good news is that you don’t need a complicated tech stack to execute an ABM strategy. In fact, even as your business grows, your ABM tech stack should only grow as needed. A few must-haves you’ll want to include are:

• A CRM tool to keep all your contacts organized and easily accessible
• A demand gen tool to help identify accounts for you 
• Lead nurturing tools to help deliver personalized content and encourage engagement
• Automated retargeting tools to help you follow up with leads
• An automated data capture and analysis tool
• Website personalization tools to help you create a unique experience for each visitor, such as dynamic landing pages 

3. Knowing Who to Target

Account-based marketing is all about targeting the right accounts at the most opportune moment. It’s a fine line to walk. For more well-established companies, you may already have an extensive database of existing customers and potential customers that can be used as a foundation for your ABM strategy. But for those who don’t have a well-defined target audience, it can be difficult to identify the right accounts.

Solution: Start With Your Existing Customer Base

To find out who your target audience is, sit down with both your marketing and sales teams (again, why alignment is so important!) and discuss who seems to be actively engaging with your brand and who seems to be falling off. Once you have a clear idea of who your current customers are, you can work on developing a strategy to target similar accounts.  

4. Determining the Ideal Budget for ABM 

Determining the perfect budget for ABM adaptation and deployment can be challenging. That’s because there are several factors to consider when choosing how much you can spend and how to determine the ROI on ABM. If you’re looking for a clear-cut answer, one Forrester study showed that the average ABM budget in 2021 was roughly $590,000 (not including headcount costs).

Solution: Evaluate Your Current Cost Structure 

Evaluating your current cost structure can help you determine an ideal budget for your account-based marketing efforts. By understanding your existing cost structure, you can identify areas that are inefficient and need improvement, as well as areas that are over budget and can be reduced. 

Additionally, you can use this information to better understand your available budget for your ABM efforts and how much you should spend on each account. This will help you create a realistic and achievable budget and maximize ROI on your ABM efforts.

5. Determining How to Measure the Success of Your ABM

Determining a budget for ABM can be a challenge because there’s no single method to measure ABM’s success. Determining the ROI of your ABM efforts is difficult but possible. It will just depend on which metrics you choose to use. 

Solution: Transfer Your Attention Away from Vanity Metrics to the Metrics that Matter

When determining which metrics to track, you really want to move your attention away from vanity metrics such as page views, clicks, and social media likes or shares. These metrics can be useful when determining your ideal audience and their interests, but they’re less effective when determining how successful your ABM campaigns have been.

Instead, you’ll want to focus on more tangible metrics, like: 

• Marketing qualified leads (MQLs)
• Penetration within target accounts
• Pipelines created
• Target account engagement
• Target account revenue generated

Source: Ascend2 via Convince and Convert

6. Figuring Out How to Personalize Your Content Without Burning Out

Content creation is a labor-intensive process, and many marketers struggle to keep up with the sheer volume of content they need to create to keep up with the demands of their audience. 

When adopting an ABM strategy, the goal with content is to create account-focused materials that address the needs of each specific account. But there are only so many hours in a day, and trying to create personalized content for each individual account can quickly become overwhelming. 

Solution: Master the Art of Repurposing

Here’s the thing: You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when creating content. Repurposing content can leverage your existing content to reach new audiences. With the help of modern tools and automation, repurposing can be a quick and painless process. 

It’s not uncommon for brands to have different target accounts that fall within the same industry/niche. That means a lot of your existing content can be repurposed by simply adjusting a few elements to help address a new target audience – without having to try and pull new (possibly non-existent or irrelevant) information out of thin air.

Begin Your ABM Journey with Hushly 

ABM is a powerful tool to reach and engage target accounts. With Hushly, you can create tailored experiences to further engage target accounts and nurture them toward a sale. 

Hushly’s simple-to-use platform allows you to quickly create personalized experiences tailored to each target account. From adaptive content hubs to personalized experiences, Hushly can help you deliver the right message at the right time and drive real results. 

See how Hushly can help you create effective account-based experiences by scheduling your demo today. 

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a powerful strategy for B2B companies, but it’s not without its disadvantages. Before you invest in an ABM strategy, it’s essential to understand the pros and cons of this approach. By weighing up the positives and negatives of ABM, you can decide whether it’s worth investing in for your business.

Account-Based Marketing in 2023

The phrase account-based marketing was trending among B2B marketing professionals between 2019 and 2021, but then it trailed off a bit with all the news surrounding AI and machine learning in both content creation and marketing automation. 

So, where does ABM stand in 2023? According to research across several sources, ABM is thriving and set to grow even more in the years to come. According to a report by Ascend2, only 22% of companies report having a measurable ABM strategy already in place. Another 14% say they’re currently in the process of implementing one, while 34% of marketers say they’re planning to implement ABM in the near future.

Source: Ascend2 via Convince & Convert  

That’s quite a lot of companies looking to get on board with ABM, and for a good reason, as the global market for account-based marketing is projected to reach $1.6 billion by 2027. That means it will only become more popular as more businesses realize its potential, especially as more research shows the potential benefits of adopting an ABM strategy. 

In one study by MarketingProfs, companies with an aligned ABM strategy saw a 208% growth in their marketing revenue compared to companies that didn’t prioritize the alignment of their marketing and sales teams in their ABM strategy. 

However, to make ABM work for your business, you need to make some significant changes, such as altering your marketing and sales teams’ roles and strategies and even redefining what success actually looks like. 

With that in mind, it’s important to weigh the pros and cons of account-based marketing before deciding whether it’s worth investing in for your brand. 

What Are the Advantages of ABM?

Account-based marketing has made a name for itself by allowing brands to focus on creating personalized experiences and communications with their ideal accounts while their sales and marketing teams are aligned to drive more business. 

If you’ve debated the merits of account-based marketing, this is a great place to start. Here are some of the top benefits of adopting an account-based marketing approach: 

Align Marketing and Sales Team

One of the most talked about advantages of a full-scale account-based marketing strategy is that it allows your marketing and sales teams to work together more closely to ensure a more consistent, personalized experience throughout the buyer’s journey. 

This is crucial in today’s B2B environment, where buyer journeys are highly complex and multiple stakeholders and decision-makers are involved in every purchase. Instead of hoping that the marketing and sales teams are on the same page and able to deliver a consistent experience, ABM enables these two to work as one to provide a seamless experience. 

That means the marketing team can make sure that the right content is sent to the right contacts at the right time, while the sales team can efficiently address client needs and concerns as they come up during the sales process.

Build and Nurture Customer Relationships 

ABM is about building relationships with the right people at the right time. Instead of trying to reach out to a broader audience, you focus your time and attention only on the most relevant, sales-ready accounts. 

Once you’ve identified these accounts and the relevant stakeholders, you can nurture them with personalized content and messaging that directly addresses their unique needs and concerns, which goes a long way toward improving the customer experience and building a solid foundation for future business opportunities.

Save More Costs Than Other Marketing Approaches

An ABM strategy is more cost-effective than other marketing approaches because it focuses on the most relevant, sales-ready accounts. Investing time and resources in these accounts can reduce marketing costs and maximize the return on investment.

Bring Higher ROI Than Other Marketing Approaches 

While research varies on the exact ROI of ABM, it’s clear that this approach is capable of generating a higher ROI than other marketing approaches. One study by ITSMA found that 87% of marketers that measure ROI believe ABM has outperformed every other marketing investment they’ve tried. In another 2020 study by ABM Leadership Alliance and ITSMA, 75% of marketers surveyed said they achieved higher ROI using an ABM approach compared to any other marketing strategy. 

Close More Deals with Larger Payoffs

In one joint study by Marketo and Reachforce, by aligning their sales and marketing teams through their ABM efforts, marketers improved their closing rate by up to 67%. In another study, results showed that 91% of companies using ABM improved their average deal size, with roughly 25% of respondents saying that they saw an increase of 50% or more.

What Are the Disadvantages of ABM?

While it may seem like ABM is the go-to marketing strategy, it has its fair share of disadvantages you should be aware of before jumping in. Here are a few of the most talked about cons associated with ABM: 

Can Be Time-Consuming

Implementing an ABM strategy involves a lot of detailed audience and account research and training to align your marketing and sales teams. It also requires proper execution of the strategy to ensure success, which can take up a lot of valuable time. 

May Require You to Do Away with Your Go-To Vanity Metrics

Adopting an ABM approach means you must move away from generic vanity metrics and instead focus on more in-depth metrics such as:

• Target account revenue generated
• Average contract value 
• Penetration within target accounts 

Source: Ascend2 via Convince and Convert

This shift in focus is critical to the success of ABM as it allows you to measure the success of campaigns more accurately and identify what tactics are working. With more detailed metrics, you can better understand the ROI of your efforts and make more informed decisions. 

Additionally, you can track your performance against goals and objectives to ensure that your strategy is on the right track and you’re achieving the desired results.

Can Be Overwhelming 

Executing an ABM approach can be overwhelming at first, given the amount of time and resources it requires. 

It also requires a lot of planning and strategy. You must determine which accounts to target, create tailored campaigns and messages, and develop a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey. This can be incredibly daunting if you’re unfamiliar with the industry and have limited resources. 

Finally, it can be difficult to measure the success of an ABM approach, as it’s difficult to quantify the ROI of a campaign.

Start Creating Account-Based Experiences for Your Customers with Hushly

Account-based marketing is a strategy that helps you deliver personalized experiences to your customers. You can close more deals, increase revenue, and build long-lasting relationships by focusing your time and efforts on creating exceptional experiences for each of your B2B accounts. 

With Hushly, you can easily create and track highly targeted campaigns that engage and convert your customers while building a loyal community of brand advocates. Once you have these advocates to speak on your behalf, you’ll be amazed at the doors that begin to open. 

Are you ready to see how creating account-based experiences with Hushly can benefit your company? Request your demo today. 

The marketing world continues to evolve toward a value-driven approach that includes account-based marketing as a fundamental component.

More personalized and targeted ads that speak directly to unique customers slowly replace the traditional way of marketing which focused heavily on inbound mass-awareness tactics, like TV ads. Does this mean inbound marketing is going to disappear completely?

The answer is no. There’s still a time and place for inbound marketing strategies despite the rise of ABM.

However, marketers today need to understand the purpose of each so they can find the right balance for their business. To do this, we’ll walk you through the definition of each as well as the best ways to deploy them to help your business grow. Ultimately, we’ll provide a list of criteria you can use to determine which approach makes more sense for your unique situation.

What is Account-Based Marketing?

Account-based marketing is a marketing framework that aims to generate unique marketing materials aimed at individual buyers. Your goal with account-based marketing is to build long-term relationships with customers by engaging them at every step of the sales cycle, including post-sale where you will attempt to get them back into the top of your sales funnel with timely and relevant promotions.

Account-based marketing has grown in popularity in recent years thanks to the industry’s overall shift toward more human-centered marketing. This is because account-based marketing enables a higher level of personalization and targeting compared to traditional inbound marketing methods. Customers love personalization, and buyers from all industries are becoming used to it, meaning marketers have to adjust to stay competitive.

Examples of Account-Based Marketing

Generally, account-based marketing attempts to target unique buyers (or groups of buyers) based on the sellers’ confidence that they can add value to the buyers’ lives. Any marketing tactic which aims to provide value on a long-term basis, with a focus on partnership and mutual trust, could be considered account-based marketing.

Here are a couple of concrete examples:

• Personalized Storytelling: Who is your customer and what do they care about? Telling a story with the buyer at the center of the narrative is a great way to demonstrate that you’re aware of the customer, their interests, and most importantly the human factor behind their business.
• ABM Email Marketing: Designing personalized and targeted emails with unique messages is a simple and effective way to do ABM marketing. For example, a welcome message should be sent to new customers, which includes key information about them and their needs.

Is Account-Based Marketing Inbound?

Account-based marketing is generally not the same as inbound marketing. However, you can and should take steps to ensure that inbound leads are treated to a similar level of personalization that an outbound ABM campaign could provide. Examples include personalized websites and customer journeys.

Regardless of how a customer enters your sales funnel, you can use ABM techniques to keep them around for longer and increase their customer lifetime value.

Is Account-Based Marketing Outbound?

ABM is outbound marketing that is highly personalized. The goal of ABM is to keep customers interested in your business and provide constant reminders of how your company is invaluable to their growth.

You can achieve this through relevant and contextual advertising and communication that always centers on the customer and their needs.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on communicating with the entire marketplace at once instead of just a few targeted customers.

The idea behind inbound marketing is that if you broadcast your message widely enough, you will attract both customers who are ready to buy and those who are just interested in doing research for a possible future buy.

Examples of Inbound Marketing

Since inbound marketing is mostly focused on increasing brand awareness through mass-marketing tactics, any message that’s intended to reach an entire marketplace could be considered inbound marketing.

Here are four concrete examples of inbound marketing:

• Billboards, banner ads, and TV commercials advertise your brand and the general benefits of your product
• Non-targeted social media ads
• Influencer marketing, i.e., hiring influencers to promote your brand to their many followers
• In-store shopper marketing, where you place ads in-store strategically to draw attention and increase interest in your products

Can ABM Replace Your Inbound Marketing?

Most businesses will want to use a combination of inbound marketing and ABM. This is because, despite your best efforts, you can’t be aware of every customer in the marketplace. There may be valuable sources of revenue that you aren’t targeting simply because you don’t know they exist (and they may not know you exist, either).

Therefore, it makes sense to have a mixture of both inbound marketing that can generate awareness and create new leads for you to segment and an account-based approach that you can apply to your largest and most valuable customers.

3 Questions to Determine If You Should Use Account-Based or Inbound Marketing

Here are questions to ask that will help you decide if account-based or inbound marketing is better for your business.

1. What is Your Growth Strategy?

When thinking about your growth strategy, are you more interested in short-term growth to get your business off the ground and give you a foothold? If so, inbound marketing could be right. This is because inbound marketing will help you distribute your message to a wide audience, increasing the odds of contacting a few quality leads that you can then focus on building relationships with.

On the other hand, account-based marketing is best for developing business partners you can grow alongside. It will generate far fewer leads, but ideally far more high-quality leads.

2. How Strong is Your Understanding of the Market?

Do you have a solid grasp on who your ideal customers are and where to find them? Or do you feel that you’re in uncharted territory and aren’t sure who exactly your best business partners will be in the long term?

If you feel you know your market well and are ready to start developing those partnerships, ABM is the way to go. If you need more time to understand your customers and how your product best serves them, a traditional inbound approach can give you access to a wider variety of leads to learn from.

3. Is Your Product More Valuable in the Long Term or Short Term?

A simple way to determine if inbound or account-based marketing makes more sense is to ask yourself about your product.

If your product provides more value the longer you use it, then cultivating long-term customers who repeatedly buy and use upgrades is a fantastic strategy for building a steady revenue stream.

Alternatively, if your product is something customers buy and use quickly, then getting as many customers as possible is the best way to ensure you’re never running low on revenue.

Hushly Can Help You Combine Inbound and Account-Based Marketing Practices

It may not be necessary to entirely separate inbound and account-based marketing tactics.

At Hushly, we built our platform to maximize both worlds.

We do this by ensuring that each customer who comes into contact with your marketing content is treated to a personalized experience, regardless of how they got there.

By ensuring that all of your marketing content is relevant to buyers, whether they were targeted or not, Hushly can maximize your marketing efforts and help drive your growth.

Request a demo today to learn about how Hushly can partner with you to drive mutual growth.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.