How to Automate Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy

In today's day and age, marketing is all about personalization.

It's about reaching the right people in the right place at the right time. Account-based marketing (ABM) is no different and has been growing in popularity in recent years.

In fact, 87% of account-based marketers say that ABM initiatives outperform other marketing investments.

Plus, one in five accounts targeted through ABM becomes considered a qualified sales opportunity.

That's why ABM is an important tactic to implement if you sell high value B2B products or services to a finite number of companies who have a multi-person buying committee and require personalized content and engagement.

As a marketer, that might seem like a daunting task, because you've probably felt the pain of tools that were hard to use, didn't integrate with your systems, or made collaboration among teams hard.

That's why using marketing automation and ABM software to make the process seamless is a good idea.

Below, let's review how to automate your account-based marketing strategy.

1. Create your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

Before you can get started with ABM, you'll need to define your ideal customer profile. This is similar to a buyer persona, except it's built around targeting entire organizations, rather than individuals.

You'll want to know what types of companies you want to target. For example, your ICP should include information on company size, revenue, industry, and location.

With software, like HubSpot's ABM software, you can use ICP workflow templates to help you spot common traits that can be used to classify companies in your database by how well they match your ICP.

Ultimately, automation should help you identify and organize your target accounts. Once you've created your ICP, you should be able to use this information in your ABM software to manage your audience.

2. Set up your target accounts.

Once you've created your ICP, you should be able to set up your target accounts in your ABM software.

Target accounts will allow you to manage your audience. For example, with HubSpot's ABM software, you can use the ICP Tier property to rank your accounts. Your priority accounts will be marked Tier 1, while lower priority accounts will be marked Tier 3.

Additionally, a great ABM software will use AI-powered target account recommendations to automate the process of researching companies that are a good fit.

These types of tools will help you manage and then segment your lists so you can deliver personalized content to your target accounts.

3. Integrate your ABM and marketing automation software.

Before you can build your ABM campaigns, you'll want to integrate your ABM software with your marketing automation software.

For example, with HubSpot, you can use many of the ABM software features if you have Marketing and Sales Pro.

Integrating your marketing tools is important in the automation process. If your ABM software doesn't interact with your email marketing software or your ads tools, then you won't be able to automate the process.

By integrating these tools, you'll have your ICP research, target accounts, and content all in one place.

4. Build your campaigns.

When you have your ABM software and marketing tools set up, it's time to create your campaigns.

To start, you'll want to decide what channels you want to use and what actions will trigger an automated workflow.

First, look at your target accounts and find out where they spend their time online. For example, you can build an ad campaign based on people's job title or company on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Then, you'll want to think about your customer journey and set up automated workflows. For instance, you can have a task created for a sales rep when someone who works at one of your target accounts interacts with an email, your website, or blog content.

5. Personalize your content.

You probably got started with ABM so you could personalize your marketing campaigns. To do this, you'll want to create your content, and use your automation tools to segment your audience.

For example, with HubSpot's ABM software, you can use company lists to create an ad audience or use company ad targeting for your LinkedIn ads.

With your ICP set up, it should be easy to create your content based on your target audience. The content in your ABM campaigns will be similar to other marketing content, except that you're now targeting specific accounts and companies.

Ultimately, your messaging should address specific pain points, and appeal to solving your target account's problems.

6. Set up a dashboard to assess ongoing efforts.

The last step to automating your ABM strategy is to track and measure your efforts. With your ABM software, you'll want to see information at-a-glance.

For instance, on your dashboard, you might include information on your target accounts such as company score, open deals, total pipeline, and the number of decision makers identified.

If your ABM software has company scoring available, you should use it. This is similar to lead scoring, where you assign a score based on the properties in your software.

Additionally, you should consider running A/B tests when you get started with ABM automation so you can see what messaging appeals to your ICP.

While ABM might seem difficult to implement, when it works with your marketing automation software, you can collaborate with other teams and track your progress.

For more information on HubSpot's ABM software, read about HubSpot's Marketing Hub Enterprise.

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