How to Assess Your ABM Readiness

Who is this playbook for:

Marketers and teams using HubSpot that want to prioritize an Account Based Marketing motion.  

What you'll learn:

The steps you can take using Air Traffic Control and HubSpot to run ABM with your existing content.

What you'll need: 

HubSpot and a robust content volume. Content should address a variety of the needs and pain points for your prospects and customers from top, mid, and bottom of the funnel.

How long does it take to get set up

Within your two week free trial of Air Traffic Control you’ll be able to understand who in your database should receive what content to nurture their relationships as well as what content gaps you may have within your existing content repository. 

The Problem

Content has long been described as for either ‘marketing’ or ‘sales.’ For too long marketing teams have been in the habit of creating content purely for the top of the funnel. Why has that content been created in the first place? Sometimes it’s meant to drive SEO efforts. In the worst case scenarios it’s been created purely because someone on the sales or marketing team had a hypothesis about pain points that would be relevant to the ICP without proving that first. 

This often leaves sales with their own set of ‘content’ collaterals: one pagers, brochures, and decks which are often outdated and far too sales-forward to be used except at the very end of the sales funnel. 

It’s time to stop putting content in a marketing or sales silo. 

The Hypothesis

When marketing teams create content that fulfills an educational purpose for prospects, and sales and marketing both use that content for outreach and nurture campaigns, engagement and conversions will increase based on the level of relevance the content provides the prospect. 

The Solution

Using Air Traffic Control and HubSpot together maximizes the return on investment you receive from your content marketing efforts, shortens sales cycles, and more effectively enables marketing to nurture prospects within HubSpot.

Step by Step Prep

Start Small:

• Begin by making or selecting a list inside of HubSpot of target accounts you want to pursue. The personas you target should have common threads: the same type of personas, businesses, pain points. This list may be reflective of your core ICP or based on a smaller subset of it. 

Install Air Traffic Control:

• Via the HubSpot app marketplace. Within 48 hours after install, insights about your audience will start generating. Once those insights have loaded it's time to find out how well you know your audience. Inside Air Traffic Control's contact view, filter by the contact list you want to learn more about.

You can filter your list by insights to determine anyone in your audience that you need to learn more about. The less content insights a contact has the less personalized content recommendations Air Traffic Control will be able to generate. 

In this scenario, running a LinkedIn enrichment can be helpful. Select contacts with limited insights and click 'Socially Enrich' to pull in the last 90 days of their LinkedIn engagement history. These LinkedIn insights will be used to populate the contact's unique interest graph. 

Run Your Topic Reports

Once your data has populated into Air Traffic Control navigate over to Topic Reporting. You’ll be able to get an analysis of how relevant your content is to your audience and quickly assess whether the topics you’re creating content about are the same things your audience is engaging with. Lastly, you can find a complete list of every topic that has appeared in your content. 

This set of reports will give you a snapshot of what you currently have in your content repository to engage your audience. It will also show you gaps where you need to create additional content to address topics your audience is looking for. 

At a high level: Air Traffic Control topic reporting allows you to rapidly ascertain:

• What content you have to work with
• What additional subject matter you need to cover
  
• What subject matter may make for a good call to action in your marketing and sales material 
  

How should you use those insights?

• Going forward as you write additional content based on your topic reporting insights, cross-link to existing content with high relevance to your audience
  

Competitor Insights

Create a Production Schedule that gets you to Content Relevancy

With a clear line of sight into what content you need to create or improve you can put together a content production schedule that gets you to relevance. Using competitor insights you'll be able to determine what content spokes correspond to the primary topic hub. Any gaps in your existing content repository should be prioritized. 

You can also input competitor content links into your favorite generative AI tool to ensure you're using highly relevant inputs to speed up content creation and quality.

If you need assistance with content creation we can recommend some stellar content agencies that can take your challenge and run with it. 

What’s Next?

With relevant content at the ready the real fun ABM work begins: getting it in front of the right people at the right time. There are so many ways inside of HubSpot and beyond to share that content with your audience. 

We’d love to help you design a program that starts with sharing the right content and ends with an increased marketing pipeline. Get in touch with us to book a strategy session and let’s get you started with ABM.