If your sales cycle is longer than 6 months with multiple buyer groups involved, or if your ACV is pretty high but there aren't THAT many opportunities on the market, ABM is for you. And what better place to orchestrate your ABM motion than on HubSpot?
Simply put, Account Based Marketing (ABM) is an approach to B2B marketing that focuses on building engagement with specific target accounts within a market. It relies on highly personalized campaigns in order to spark interest within those accounts that are most likely to close fastest and with the highest ROI.
We've written a lot about Account Based Marketing (ABM) services by now, but probably the biggest misconception about ABM motions (that we're still hearing) is that it's a stand-alone practice. And it isn’t! ABM integrates all of your marketing stack - the market research that will help you determine the audience and its size, the content you need to create to interest your target audience, the paid and organic campaigns you’ll activate to reach them, the signals you’ll collect to empower your sales teams to engage with them, the technology that will trace, monitor, nurture and report on the KPIs.
ABM has been here for quite a while, so why the buzz around ABM now? In the "ever-evolving digital landscape..." and mass advertising (aka AI-generated ToF content), personalized communication stands out more than ever. It sharpens your messages, your content, and your overall engagement, helping your leads move through the funnel smoothly. But remember, don't think of it in terms of B2B ABM vs. traditional marketing – that's not everything.
Figuring out what’s what amidst all the ABM tools available on the market today can feel like a trip down a rabbit hole. After all, it’s been years since the first marketing automation tool was released and some people still remain its loyal customers (we’re looking at you, Eloqua and Marketo users).
In order to maximize the potential for your Account Based Marketing, you’ll need to choose and implement a solution that can easily scale with your organization, and one that enables your marketing, sales and C-level management teams to work in unison. And for B2B marketers, HubSpot shines as the most comprehensive choice (we might be biased - we’re HubSpot Diamond Partner after all!) HubSpot understands the need for a symbiotic relationship between the three and offers an extraordinarily unified suite of tools to facilitate this harmony.
Other reasons why we love running ABM campaigns on HubSpot are:
The HubSpot Account Based Marketing Paradigm is divided into different phases, including a measurement phase that’s extended throughout the campaign. We’ve written more about these stages of an ABM strategy in detail.
So let's get straight to it. Here's how you start with your ABM on HubSpot.
Target Accounts under the Contacts tab (or under Companies in the new navigation) is HubSpot’s version of an Account Based Marketing dashboard. From here, you can view campaign-related information such as:
This is the place where both marketing and sales teams can keep track of the accounts you want to target in your ABM, any logged calls or meetings, and their latest engagements with your campaign. Thanks to this, you’ll be able to know exactly how each target account is performing in accordance with your strategy. But before that, you’ll need to create a list of your target accounts - you can either upload an existing list, or add contacts manually.
HubSpot’s ABM workflows allow you to automate operations and tasks, which help you save time and resources. The default workflow sorts companies by ideal customer profile fit, which splits your companies into three tiers:
You can assign a tier value yourself, for example based on a company’s annual revenue value. You can also choose from different templates, like scoring companies by their ICP score (the higher match to your expectations = the higher score) which allows you to spot common traits that can later be used to classify companies in your database by how well they match your ICP.
Within all workflows, you can add internal notifications that’ll alert specific team members whenever a new company is added and should be acted on.
Paid campaigns are essential to any Account Based Marketing strategy as they help drive leads by engaging with new audiences, and keeping existing contacts in the loop as they go through different stages of the ABM funnel. Plus, integrating your HubSpot with LinkedIn or Google Ads Manager makes managing your paid campaigns really easy.
Through HubSpot, you can use demographic information to send highly personalized messages to target accounts – even if the contacts within that account are outside of your database. From that level you can also reach your target companies with relevant messaging throughout all stages of the buyer’s journey.
This one’s a real treat especially for the marketing folks in your ABM team, although HubSpot’s Campaigns view works great for keeping your sales team and C-level management in the loop as well. From this view, you can keep track of all the assets being used for specific campaigns, as well as the overall performance of the campaign, and attribution to individual elements.
And by the way, did you know that one of HubSpot’s latest features (currently only available for CTA tools, but should come to other areas soon) allows you to truly segment your audiences and offer different content depending on their previous interactions?
As with any approach, measuring your progress is important to building and maintaining efficiency. For this reason, your Account Based Marketing campaign needs to include actionable and available results – and we recommend agreeing on what those will be as early on as possible.
Since account engagement is required to be one of the main success metrics for Account Based Marketing that both sales and marketing must adopt, your campaign should also be able to measure overall account-level engagement across specific and multiple accounts.
HubSpot makes this really easy. By measuring, analyzing, and optimizing your metrics, you’ll be able to understand your ABM campaign's revenue impact. Some of the reports available for use in Account Based Marketing campaigns include:
One thing to add here, what makes HubSpot a powerful tool for your ABM campaigns is the integration with even more versatile platforms for intent signals, such as 6sense, G2 or even ZoomInfo or Apollo. To measure engagement and intent in detail, you might want to consider synching HubSpot with other tools for best ABM results.
Running your ABM campaign on HubSpot will offer a direct line to your most valuable leads, fostering relationships that are not only more profitable but also more sustainable. Dig into the data, personalize at scale, add the human touch, align your teams, and never stop learning.
Ready to take the lead? We’re here to help. Schedule a free consultation with one of our ABM experts and we’ll take it from there.