Tag: account-based marketing

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Don’t Be Afraid to Start Small

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

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

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

3. Create Excellent Buyer Personas

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

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

4. Consider Account-Based Marketing Platforms Like Hushly

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

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

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

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

5. Focus on Dynamic Personalization

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

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

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

6. Try Gift Giving

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

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

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

7. Form a Comprehensive Data Management Program

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

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

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

8. Constantly Reiterate, Update, and Optimize

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

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

9. Evaluate Your Technology Stack

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

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

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

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

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

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

11. Use Technology and Data to Pick Targets

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

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

12. Aim for Comprehensive Customer Journeys

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

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

13. Create Omnichannel Content

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

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

14. Know What Success Looks Like

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

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

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

Final Tip: Be Patient

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Meaning of ABM

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

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

Account-Based Marketing Examples

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

Robin

Robin designs office spaces for companies.

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

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

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

GumGum

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

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

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

8 Steps to Building Your Own ABM Program

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

1. Target Your First Accounts

You’ll need to start with some research.

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

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

2. Categorize Targets into a Tier List

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

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

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

3. Profile Your Buyers

Create some buyer personas.

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

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

4. Assign Your ABM Managers

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

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

5. Define a Broad Strategy, Then Get Specific

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

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

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

6. Determine What Success Looks Like

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

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

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

7. Optimize and Reiterate

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

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

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

8. Try Out a Platform Like Hushly

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

Hushly can help you:

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

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

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

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

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

If you’re just starting out on your ABM journey, you may be wondering how to scale an operation that is specifically designed to produce unique outcomes for each customer.

It may seem counterintuitive, but these unique results can be reproduced with some simple heuristics that can be repeated endlessly.

By mastering these heuristics through time and practice, you’ll easily be able to handle ABM and personalization at any scale required to grow your business.

The easiest way to start is by picking your targets wisely. We’ll discuss how to do that and then reveal what simple steps you can follow to endlessly iterate your ABM and personalization strategy for maximum effectiveness.

3 Ways to Deploy ABM at Scale

The best way to ensure scalability is to have a concrete plan for each new target your company decides to aim for. In general, this should start with a list of ideal companies which is then broken down by other factors relevant to you and your customers.

Here are three steps that could be part of any scalable ABM strategy.

1. Create a List of Target Accounts

We recommend bringing your sales team in on this step and making it a joint effort. Sales will want to have input on which whales they’ll be hunting and which smaller accounts are going to be worth the effort.

Once you have a list of accounts, you should organize them into tiers based on their priority.

At the top of your tier list will be the accounts for which true 1:1 ABM marketing will be necessary. This means the ground-up construction of bespoke campaigns for unique buyers.

Lower on the tier list will be companies you can group by certain other attributes, such as their unique pain points.

2. Group Accounts by Pain Points

Only you know what needs your company can solve, and in what unique way, you can be valuable to your targets. Many companies might fit the definition of an ideal business partner from this point of view.

Though it’s not true 1:1 ABM marketing, 1:few is still a great way to squeeze some extra personalization and targeting into your marketing efforts.

You may also want to group accounts by expected sales cycle or around their specific stage in the pipeline.

3. Group Targets Around Pipeline Stage or Sales Cycle Length

Sales will have input on this part, since they will be best positioned to predict the stage of the sales cycle your targets are in, as well as how long it might take to push them over the line.

If it makes more sense for your operation, try grouping companies based on the time and resources you expect to expend converting them.

4 Ways to Personalize ABM at Scale

Though ABM and personalization go hand in hand, they’re not synonymous.

Personalization is the act of creating and pushing marketing materials that are specifically designed for unique buyers. Deploying ABM at scale will include personalization and the step that comes before: namely, deciding which accounts to target for maximum marketing ROI.

When it comes to personalization, there are some great heuristics you can follow to get the process right every time regardless of what scale you’re operating at.

1. Create an Execution Strategy

Work with leaders from both departments to craft an execution strategy that can be iterated across a wide number of targets. Your ABM at scale strategy should include some of the following elements:

• Synchronization: To achieve harmonious marketing and sales orchestration, every member of your team should be aware of not just their own role, but the role of their teammates and leadership. Trust and communication are key to ensure proper synchronization.
• Repeatability: Your strategy (though not the outcome) should look the same for every target account. This eliminates confusion and speeds up tactics.
• Accountability: Cross-department accountability and communication are key.
• Open to Change: No process is perfect. After a few runs, review your execution strategy and see how well it’s being carried out. This is the only way to perfect your execution strategy.

2. Decide the Level of Personalization by Account

The largest and most valuable accounts will likely call for a deep level of personalization. This means custom marketing materials, delivery, and sales communications.

To speed this process up, determine some objective measurements that will guide this decision. Though that metric may end up being arbitrary and imperfect, you can always change it later on. The key to scalability is streamlining your process by eliminating as many small decisions and crossroads as possible.

3. Start with Low Hanging Fruit

1:1 marketing is not just a revolution in the way sales are pursued, but a big shift in the internal philosophy of your sales and marketing teams. The first time you transition might not go perfectly. The point is to learn from mistakes and improve the next time.

Start with your lowest-hanging fruit: the companies for which you already have some relevant and useful marketing materials.

You could also make a unique grouping of companies that you consider good first-time targets regardless of size, giving your team the freedom to practice 1:1, 1:few, and 1:many tactics all at the same time.

4. Consider Outside Help from a Content Platform like Hushly

There’s no question that ABM and personalization are effective strategies. There’s also no question that they require not just different marketing efforts, but in many ways more challenging marketing efforts, with fewer opportunities for big mistakes.

Small and medium-sized companies may wonder how they can afford the extra time and resources required to actively manage an ABM strategy.

Even if you’re in charge of a larger company with generous marketing budgets, you’ll eventually be looking for ways to streamline your process and reduce costs to increase marketing ROI.

For each of these scenarios, Hushly is positioned to make your life easier.

Your buyers are unique individuals who need unique attention, but you’re still running a company, and you need to prioritize your attention and resources to stay competitive.

Hushly can help you:

• Create dynamic content hubs that change based on who is visiting.
• Create custom landing pages for your targeted accounts that will help you stand out.
• Create and manage custom email campaigns that improve click-throughs and lead to more conversions.
• Keep track of important data you can use to reiterate and optimize your strategy.

Best of all, Hushly doesn’t require any technical expertise to use. You can accomplish all of your ABM personalization goals by just dragging and dropping simple elements on our advanced platform.

Combine Your ABM and Personalization Efforts for Best Results

They’re unique concepts that go hand in hand, so they’re best considered with one another.

Determining which accounts you target will depend on the level of effort you plan to put into personalizing their marketing materials. On the flip side, you’ll want to avoid spending the time and energy needed to create bespoke advertising campaigns for companies whose returns simply won’t justify it.

The best way to ensure both of these valuable goals is to combine your ABM and personalization efforts into a united front that you can endlessly repeat and scale at the right time.

To learn more about how to scale your ABM efforts as you grow, check out our free eBook, “Efficient Growth at Scale.”