Tag: account-based marketing

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.”

Creating personalized ABM content has never been more important for B2B marketers.

Hushly advocates for in-depth account-based marketing, which means spending a lot of time and effort crafting bespoke marketing campaigns for ideal buyers that your company dreams of working with.

This time and effort can seem daunting, but there are some surefire steps you can follow that will streamline the process and make it easy to learn how to build an ABM strategy.

You should start by identifying your ideal companies, and who within those companies you’ll need to convince to close the deal. Then, personalizing content for these buyers, determining the right content channel, and tracking the performance of that content will be your main goals.

As you learn each of these steps more in depth, your ABM content marketing process will become easier and easier.

Start by putting together a list of companies you’d love to form a relationship with.

1. Target Your Ideal Companies

The first step in creating ABM content is to identify who you’re making the content for.

This should begin with a process of identifying a large number of potential target accounts. These potential targets should represent a range of companies, from the largest and most desirable accounts to smaller accounts that will take less time but yield less revenue.

Proceed by categorizing these potential accounts according to the criteria you’ve defined. Aim for a tier system that you can easily sort companies into and that will provide quick insights to sales and marketing teams.

At the top of the tier list should be those companies for whom you’ll spend the most time developing bespoke marketing campaigns and content. At the bottom of the tier list will be companies for whom you’ll still rely on more traditional 1:many marketing strategies.

2. Identify Key Personas

The next step is to find out who in these organizations has the authority to buy. This step matters a great deal because the whole point of ABM is to design personalized and targeted advertising. Knowing who you’re speaking to is a crucial part of this.

Part of the process of organizing your target companies into their tiers should include evaluating the accessibility of those in charge of buying decisions. Existing relationships, the length of sales cycles, and expected lifetime value are key factors when determining your ideal buyers.

3. Strategize for New Target Accounts

Once you’ve identified your target companies and who you’ll be speaking with, it’s time to determine your ABM tactics. To do this, ask yourself a few questions about your ideal buyers.

• Who is your persona and who will they be consulting with to make their decision?
• What can they gain by choosing to work with you?
• How will they justify their decision to higher-ups?
• Is there anyone in their organization on your side that can leverage their position to help you close the deal?

Forming a relationship with your buyer is a key part of account-based marketing. Learn what the buyer likes, what goals they have personally, and how they hope to benefit their company. Knowing this information will make designing content for them much simpler.

4. Personalize Content

Now that you’ve established an ABM playbook, you can begin the process of designing personalized content around it.

When crafting content, remember that you’re speaking to a human being. Use the information from the previous step to develop a unique voice for that client that speaks to their unique needs.

Don’t be afraid to be too specific. Speak directly to what the buyer needs, wants, and hopes to achieve. Most importantly, focus on why your company is well positioned to help them achieve their own personal goals as well as benefit their organization.

5. Create Omnichannel Content

Your content should reach your buyer where they are.

B2B buyers research more extensively and engage through more channels than ever before. Your content should meet them at any time and in any format they prefer.

Try to create content that meets the definition of omnichannel. This means:

• Written Content: Blogs, email campaigns, case studies, and similar types should be consistent with your brand messaging and targeted to the buyer.
• Media: Each type of content like video, social media, and podcasts has its own strengths and weaknesses. Make sure the themes of the content are appropriate for the channel they’re on.
• Images: Imagery, including infographics, banners, and website ads, are critical. They’re the fastest way to gain someone’s attention and wow them with some interesting bit of personalization.
• Personalized Web Assets: You should focus on designing personalized landing pages and dynamic webpages that automatically change based on who is visiting. Creating custom microsites or webpages for unique customers is an easy way to stand out from your competition.

Ultimately, the best type of content will depend on your persona. Hopefully, during the process of identifying your buyer and researching them, the best type of content to reach them will become apparent. In any case, focusing on casting a wide net by creating omnichannel content should cover any base.

6. Update or Remove Existing Content

One of the most useful account-based marketing steps is to frequently review your content for possible updates, removals, and remakes.

Customers expect up-to-date information and content, regardless of what form it takes. Take the time to go through your content archives and figure out what’s still relevant, what needs an update, and if anything needs to be cut entirely.

A regular “content cull” can serve as a controlled burn and clear the deadwood away from your marketing operation, keeping it clean, up-to-date, and relevant for any potential buyer that happens across it.

Reviewing old content is also a great way to farm ideas for new content, making it easier to have a steady stream of updated content to entertain and educate buyers.

7. Try a Content Experience Platform Like Hushly

The easiest way to create and maintain ABM content is to use a platform like Hushly’s.

Hushly specializes in creating state-of-the-art ABM content on all channels. We believe in the principle of providing value upfront, gaining the trust of buyers, and building relationships based on that trust.

Hushly can help you:

• Create self-nurturing landing pages and dynamic webpages that dynamically display different assets and marketing information based on visitor information.
• Craft custom ABM email campaigns that will target buyers and speak to them on a personal level.
• Create adaptive content hubs which also display unique information based on visitors. These content hubs are like rabbit holes of information for your buyers to dive into.
• Keep track of data and use it to optimize your ABM content experience from top to bottom.

Bonus Tip: Evaluate Content Based on Performance

Keeping track of how well your content is performing will provide some valuable insight. Namely, what types of content does your audience respond best to and how can you continue to reach new customers with that same message?

By identifying which content is working, and which content isn’t, you’ll make the task of coming up with new account-based marketing ideas easy and scalable.

Your ability to create engaging and effective ABM content will depend on the time and resources your company invests in the effort. In short, you get out what you put in.

For marketers in small and medium-sized businesses who are unsure they can manage the added expense required for true ABM, Hushly is here to help.

Learn how Hushly can manage your ABM content for you to maximize your marketing efforts.

Account-based marketing took off during the pandemic. During this time, businesses everywhere were cutting back and adjusting to new consumer spending habits. In the shuffle, ABM emerged as the best way to offer a new and improved level of personalization in marketing.

While it may have been a necessity that caused the switch, the return on investment is what kept ABM around.

With the rise of personalization in marketing and the need to be more efficient than ever with your advertising dollars, it’s our opinion that ABM is the way of the future.

Yet the transition from traditional inbound and outbound campaigns to a full-scale ABM strategy is bound to uncover some problems. There are some great insight-generating questions you can ask yourself before switching that will make the transition as smooth as possible.

First, let’s talk about why you should consider making the transition to ABM.

Simple Reasons to Make the ABM Journey If You Haven’t Already

76% of B2B marketers agree that ABM delivers better ROI than other marketing tactics. Here are two reasons why.

More Effective Personalization

Account-based marketing means targeting the best accounts and tailoring marketing for them. As part of this process, you’ll naturally learn more about those customers and how to speak with them.

As personalization in advertising becomes more common, more customers will come to expect it.

Mastering personalization is one of the most important factors in a successful ABM strategy.

Better Data Management

Designing advertising campaigns for individual buyers means you’ll be generating only the most relevant data points for each of those buyers.

ROI and other key metrics can be tracked on a per-buyer basis with a strong ABM strategy.

The data afforded by this kind of strategy can be used to optimize the campaigns even further, strengthening the system in a closed loop.

These are just a couple of the strengths of a good ABM strategy. However, implementing them isn’t always easy.

Challenges When Shifting to Account-Based Marketing

Switching from traditional marketing strategies, which typically conform to a one-size fits all approach, to targeted account-based strategies will come with some growing pains. Here are a few to look out for when you’re making the ABM journey.

A New Marketing Mindset is Required

Your sales and marketing teams will need to get used to the updated philosophy. No longer is every customer treated with a similar level of attention. Instead, your best accounts will receive the lion’s share of attention and resources, not to mention a level of personalization that wasn’t required before.

Front-line sales and marketing reps will have to get used to the segmentation, personalization, and priority that will be given to the largest accounts.

New Reporting Systems

Since the philosophy is changing, so will the reporting and accountability system you’ll have in place. Quotas for each of your account segments (from emerging businesses to large enterprises) will probably change, and so too will the expectations on those responsible for managing these segments.

Change means managing egos and keeping the team on track – two major challenges to a successful ABM switch.

Adjusting Marketing Platforms

Your new strategy will call for updated customer profiles that you’ll need to keep track of within your marketing platform.

Managing this data can take time and resources even if you aren’t making major changes, so a big company-wide shift to ABM will necessitate a good deal of data management and review.

3 Questions to Help Clarify Your ABM Map

Though there will be growing pains on your ABM journey, making the switch to full-scale ABM is important. ABM is more effective and efficient at personalizing ads and optimizing itself with reams of valuable data. Before long, most or all B2B marketing will be done on a one-to-one basis.

Here are three questions to begin with that will help illuminate the path toward ABM and ensure a smooth and effective transition.

1. Do You Need Outside Input?

If your company is new to ABM strategies, it may be a good idea to get someone with some experience to guide the transition.

Regardless of how well you think you understand the process, there will always be a big gulf between preparing for action and undertaking it. If you and your marketing or sales team are new to the process of full-scale ABM strategy, hiring an outside expert could be the best move.

Alternatively, there are many programs and ABM certifications online that your employees could benefit from.

Start with an internal diagnostic that evaluates the speed and effectiveness of your one-to-one marketing strategies.

2. What Skills Do You Need for ABM?

Whether you get help or choose to do it alone, asking questions such as these should help you find the correct path:

• How effectively are you targeting high-value accounts?
• What is the state of your preferred metrics, and where do you want to end up?
• Is your technology modern and dynamic enough to sustain your vision?
• How well is your current one-to-one strategy being executed?
• How will you measure success?

3. How Many Accounts Should You Target with ABM?

When it comes to which accounts to target or how many of them, the answer is dependent on how effectively your marketing effort will scale.

We recommend starting by prospecting the largest and most valuable enterprise accounts you can. Not only are these the most worthwhile efforts, but the effort alone will teach you a great deal about how to market to companies in your ecosystem.

You’ll also learn more about what makes your company attractive to potential buyers and, maybe more importantly, what shortfalls your company needs to make up for.

Regardless of what kinds of accounts you plan to target, these general tips should help you clarify your objectives:

• Your ABM strategy should be tailored to your unique business objectives. A great ABM strategy is flexible, meaning you can adjust it over time as your business needs evolve.
• Design account-based plays that emphasize the unique aspects of each targeted company, as well as the strengths of your company. Your go-to-market motions should be similarly account-based.
• Measure execution and success by tracking data and constantly improving your process. No plan is perfect. No matter how well optimized you think you made it the first time around, there will always be room for improvement.

Hushly Can Make Your ABM Journey Easy

Hushly’s unique platform is designed from the ground up to facilitate easy account-based marketing.

Our interface is simple to learn and use. With drag-and-drop features, you can create, update, and maintain account-based landing and webpages in just a few clicks.

Hushly can help you design custom ABM email campaigns and templates and include targeted brand elements that will help you stand out among the competition.

Best of all, our platform can help you measure the performance of your ABM with closed-loop data attribution and scale your campaigns alongside your growth.

Whether you’re looking for the expertise and flexibility that would justify the cost of switching to ABM or better ways to scale your ABM efforts, Hushly can help.

If you’d like Hushly to help manage your ABM campaigns, request a demo of our platform.

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

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

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

What is ABM?

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

What is an ABM Campaign?

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

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

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

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

5 Steps to Create and Run an ABM Campaign

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

1. Target Buyers

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

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

2. Personalize Content

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

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

3. Engage Through Multiple Channels

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

4. Synchronize Sales and Marketing

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

5. Define Success

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

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

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

Examples of Successful ABM Campaigns

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

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

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

Mindtickle

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

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

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

Smart Selling Tools

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

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

NVIDIA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is an ABM Experience?

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

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

How Does ABM Experience Work?

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

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

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

A Different Philosophy

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

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

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

Flexible and Powerful

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

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

8 Ways to Optimize Your ABM Experience

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

1. Make Sure Your Data is in Order

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

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

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

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

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

2. Define Success

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

3. Target the Right Accounts

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

4. Identify Key Personnel

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

5. Choose the Right Messenger

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

6. Use Multi-Channel Content

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

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

7. Measure Results and Take Stock

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

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

8. Try Hushly

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

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

ABM Scales with You

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

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

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

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