Achieving Best-in-Class ABM Results Using HubSpot: A Comprehensive Guide to HubSpot Account-Based Marketing

Introduction

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has revolutionized the way businesses engage with their target customers. This focused approach allows companies to create personalized marketing campaigns, increasing the probability of conversions and boosting ROI. In this article, we will explore ABM tools, compare top vendors, delve into HubSpot's Target Accounts feature, and show how HubSpot customers can achieve best-in-class ABM results without any additional tools. Get ready to learn how to maximize your HubSpot ABM efforts.

What Do ABM Tools Do?

ABM tools are software solutions designed to help businesses identify, engage, and convert high-value accounts. These tools streamline the process of targeting key accounts, tracking engagement, and measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. With the assistance of ABM tools, businesses can:

1. Identify and prioritize target accounts
2. Personalize marketing content and messages
3. Manage and monitor multi-channel campaigns
4. Track engagement and analyze results
5. Optimize campaigns for better performance

Comprehensive List of ABM Software Vendors

Several ABM software vendors provide cutting-edge solutions for businesses looking to optimize their account-based marketing efforts. Here is a list of some popular vendors, including DemandBase, Terminus, and 6Sense:

1. HubSpot
2. DemandBase
3. Terminus
4. 6Sense
5. Engagio (now part of DemandBase)
6. Marketo (an Adobe Company)
7. RollWorks
8. Triblio
9. Madison Logic
10. LeanData

 Comparing ABM Vendors' Key Features

While most ABM vendors claim "personalization" features, it's important to note the difference between how those features are being presented and the true definition of the word.

It is wholly impossible to personalize advertising. Can you create a tight segment definition and target micro-audiences with highly relevant ads and content? Absolutely. And that is really valuable. But you cannot target a specific person with an ad anywhere. It doesn't matter what you read in the marketing materials. It cannot be done.

Outside of that feature set, however, you'll see that the tools in the market have total parity on the fundamentals.

HubSpot's Target Accounts Feature

HubSpot's Target Accounts feature enables businesses to streamline their ABM efforts within the HubSpot platform. And for that reason we strongly recommend HubSpot customers looking to develop ABM programs exhaust these features first before adding another toolkit. As we've laid out before, ABM is a strategy, not a tool.

With HubSpot's Target Accounts feature, you can:

1. Identify and prioritize target accounts
2. Create targeted marketing campaigns
3. Monitor account engagement across channels
4. Analyze the performance of your campaigns
5. Leverage HubSpot's CRM and marketing automation capabilities for a seamless ABM experience from awareness building through to customer onboarding

Why Many HubSpot Customers Can Achieve Best-in-Class ABM Results with HubSpot Alone

HubSpot customers can achieve best-in-class ABM results often without any additional tools. Remember, ABM is a strategy that boils down to focusing on your highest priority accounts and sharing that focus across both sales and marketing.

Setting Up Your HubSpot ABM Strategy

To set up a successful HubSpot ABM strategy, follow these steps:

• Identify Your Target Accounts: Using the target accounts HubSpot feature, create a list of high-value accounts based on criteria such as company size, revenue, and industry. Customize this list based on your company's ideal customer profile (ICP).
• Research and Segment Your Accounts: Gather relevant data on each target account, including decision-makers, their roles, and contact information. Utilize HubSpot's custom properties to create detailed profiles for each account, enabling personalized marketing efforts. This is a critical aspect of ABM or any version of personalized marketing. Things that you might want to include as custom properties keeping in mind that these custom properties can then be used as tokens in your marketing:
  • Headcount (perhaps even within a department)
  • Recent LinkedIn activity
  • Interests (ATC does this by analyzing prior engagement, LinkedIn data, and employer news)
  • Software in use (we're big fans of BuiltWith)
  • Competitors
  • Profile picture and company logo (Clearbit has a free API offering for logos)
  • Recommended content (this is our jam here at ATC)
• Develop Your Marketing Strategy: Identify goals and objectives for your HubSpot ABM campaign and outline the marketing tactics you will use to reach your target accounts. This can include email marketing, content marketing, paid ads, and social media outreach.
• Configure HubSpot ABM Tools: Leverage the built-in HubSpot ABM tools to track and manage your account-based marketing efforts. This includes setting up custom properties for your target accounts, creating lists of target accounts and contacts, and configuring your ABM dashboard.

Executing a Robust HubSpot ABM Program

Once your HubSpot ABM strategy is in place, follow these steps to execute a successful campaign:

• Personalize Your Marketing Content: Create personalized content tailored to your target accounts and their specific needs. Use HubSpot's personalization tokens to automatically insert account-specific and even person-specific information in your marketing materials, such as email campaigns and landing pages.
• Launch Multi-Channel Campaigns: Use HubSpot's marketing automation features to launch multi-channel campaigns targeting your target accounts. This can include email marketing, social media advertising, and content marketing initiatives. We also really like to boost content on LinkedIn that we know is going to resonate with a large proportion of the target audience. It's inexpensive, repeatable, and vastly increases the performance of your other touch points.
• Track and Measure Performance: Utilize HubSpot's ABM dashboard to monitor the performance of your campaigns in real-time. Analyze metrics such as engagement, conversions, and revenue to continually optimize your marketing efforts.

HubSpot ABM Example

Let's walk through a detailed example of how a HubSpot customer can set up and execute a robust ABM program:

• Identifying Target Accounts: A B2B SaaS company specializing in project management software identifies a list of 50 target accounts based on their ICP. They use HubSpot's target accounts feature to create a custom list of these high-value companies. This part of the process is so critical. Your ideal customers might be based on basic attributes like company revenue, headcount, industry, geography, title, years of experience, team headcount, and a lot more. But beyond that, be thoughtful about where in the funnel these accounts are. ABM works well for both unaware or low-awareness accounts, but note that the timeline from start to pipeline impact will be longer than targeting further based on things like intent data (Bombora, ZoomInfo, Apollo, and even LinkedIn now have data on this) and engagement (which you can get right in HubSpot!).
• Research and Segment Accounts: The company gathers information on key decision-makers within each target account and segments them based on their roles and responsibilities. They use HubSpot's custom properties to create detailed profiles for each contact. Great ABM programs don't just think about the account, but the buying committee within the account. Perhaps you have a department head who will own the contract, but do you need ROI content to influence the CFO, technical docs to support IT's evaluation, or use cases to help the day-to-day users see themselves in the product? Think of the broader buying org at this stage.
• Develop Marketing Strategy: The company decides to focus on personalized email campaigns, targeted content marketing, and LinkedIn advertising to reach their target accounts. Again, based on how "in-market" your ABM targets are, this could be a 6-9 month program and also include field marketing efforts ranging from major conferences to small group dinners.
• Configure HubSpot ABM Tools: The company sets up their HubSpot ABM dashboard and configures custom properties for target accounts and contacts. They also create segmented lists for their email campaigns. Segmenting by account, buying committee role, and position in the funnel are great places to start. Just make sure you're ready to measure how those things are going!
• Personalize Marketing Content: The company creates personalized email templates and landing pages using HubSpot's personalization tokens, tailoring their message to address the specific needs of the contact. At ATC we dynamically curate the best marketing content for each and every contact so that the complexity around segments and campaign branches is replaced by actual personalization, but other aspects of marketing efforts might be a landing page with the customer's logo, the contact's own profile picture, or a product image that unique speaks to the target segment pain that you solve.

Summary

Other ABM tools are great. They're powerful solutions to manage the complex omni-channel orchestration, particularly across paid channels, that large, well resourced ABM teams often find real value in.

The good news is that HubSpot can also deliver on a great deal of the promise of ABM. The key is to align, plan, source data, and execute. And, as always, that's not about tools. It's about people.

Onwards and upwards.