HubSpot is not often advertised as a platform to support account-based marketing. Therefore many businesses don’t consider it when they transition into ABM strategies — that is, targeting specific accounts rather than casting a wide net. But did you know HubSpot has a range of capabilities for ABM?
Besides integrating with other industry-leading ABM platforms and tools, HubSpot’s CRM can be used to identify, capture, nurture, and close leads from target accounts. Here are some of the ways HubSpot can be used for ABM.
87% of B2B marketers have agreed ABM delivers a higher ROI than other marketing activities. – ITSMA
The first advantage of HubSpot for ABM is its extensive yet easy reporting. Using HubSpot’s reporting dashboard, you can identify which channels, emails, and landing pages generate and engage leads from your high-value accounts.
Some reports that are especially helpful to ABM include:
By keeping a dashboard of your handiest reports, your team can make unanimous decisions. For example, you can answer questions like, where do our hot leads fall in the pipeline? Which campaign is generating the most ROI? How are our landing pages performing, and which ones are underperforming? What is the outcome of our email A/B test?
By A/B testing everything with HubSpot’s built-in testing tools, you’ll gain insights quickly about which landing page, email subject line, and call-to-action button resonates with targeted stakeholders.
Furthermore, HubSpot offers sales tools to stay on top of target accounts. Sales teams can create tasks for themselves which the whole team can see. For example, they can create a task to send more informational content, record a custom video, or set up a demo time for their target accounts. All of these tasks are stored in one clear dashboard, that links to individual lead records and their companies so all your information is at the ready. These tools can aid in process design for ABM operations.
Sales reps can also get desktop, email, and/or HubSpot-native notifications at the moment their target lead engages. With ABM, momentum is critical when your target leads visit your website. And since HubSpot is a CRM but also an all-in-one marketing platform, you’ll get notifications for all your online actions instantly.
HubSpot's website CMS platform allows for dynamic personalization. This personalization allows your website to play a deeper role in ABM efforts--targeting select accounts and roles with key messages, content, and calls-to-action.
A platform that integrates marketing and sales is one major feature that many businesses seek out for ABM. With HubSpot’s new updates to the platform, marketing and sales share one central database for all lead and account information. So your team can watch contact progression in one combined marketing and sales record.
For instance, every single contact has a unique contact record. This page documents every engagement you have with that lead — such as how they first came to become a lead, which content offers they have read, how many emails they’ve opened, videos they’ve watched, and which drip campaigns they are enrolled in. Sales engagements, from call notes to emails, can also be logged in this same record. As a result, both marketing and sales teams can work cohesively and avoid over-communicating with target leads.
Read more: How a CRM Can Help Align Marketing and Sales
HubSpot also pulls together leads automatically into a Company record. It will use its extensive database to populate some known information on the company, including revenue, location, number of employees, time zone and more. You can watch companies progress down the deal pipeline and create customized deal stages so both marketing and sales can monitor progress of target leads.
Hyper-targeting is the backbone of successful ABM. Generic messages are unsuccessful in winning target accounts. So ABM marketers are always looking for ways to tailor their content marketing and messaging to get the most impact.
HubSpot has two main ways to directly contact your leads with targeted information: On the marketing side, you can send automated email drip campaigns. This allows you to build customized marketing email tracks for specifical leads, ensuring you are always in touch in a relevant way. And on the sales side you can enable one-to-one sales sequences. Both can be highly customized and personalized.
You have the richness of your CRM data right there at your fingertips to craft custom campaigns. For example, you can include personalization tokens to automatically pull in lead information like job title, pain point, company name, and more. Any information a lead has provided you is fair game to automate for HubSpot correspondence.
Sales sequences are basically like templates for one-to-one outreach. They come directly from a sales rep to a prospect, but they are automated so your reps never miss a beat. You can even include steps to remind you to call or leave a note. With a combination of marketing drip campaigns (known as Workflows) and sales sequences, you can nurture and qualify target prospects from one central location. And rich analytics tell you what’s working and why.
Being educational and building relationships with prospects is another foundation of ABM. In HubSpot you can easily queue up your content marketing — like case studies, sales one-pagers, and helpful eBooks — in your sales sequences to educate your prospects. Write a specific version of a presentation for this target account? No problem, it’s right there in your file manager.
Using HubSpot’s Documents tool, you can see how much the lead engaged with that particular content piece. For example, how many pages did they read, and which slide did they spend the most time on? This will help you further tailor your sales outreach around what that prospect really wants. You’ll also understand the ROI of individual content pieces.
Read more: How to Nurture Content Leads
HubSpot also offers Smart Content, which is basically the ability to rewrite your website or email content for a specific lead or lead type. For example, you can show a different value proposition and conversion button for new leads vs. highly engaged leads. Or you can differentiate your email copy based on someone’s job role. All these tactics, when used together, are highly effective at educating and converting your target accounts.
HubSpot also offers third-party integrations with other ABM platforms like Engagio and Terminus, plus native integrations with ad platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook. As ABM marketers know, good outreach targets leads in multiple places, from different angles. So you’ll definitely want to include different forms of advertising and remarketing into the mix. With hundreds of integrations and more rolling out all the time, HubSpot is a leader in keeping your campaign data centralized.
Read more: How to Succeed With ABM on LinkedIn
While HubSpot can be great for running wide-net inbound marketing campaigns, it’s also effective at targeting specific accounts for an ABM strategy. The most important key is getting your marketing and sales team on board with the platform, and developing a playbook to use all of its tools to the fullest.
Sources
ITSMA, ABM Beyond Revenue, July 2017
B2B Marketing and Growth Agency.
Grow your B2B business boldly. Ironpaper is a B2B marketing agency. We build growth engines for marketing and sales success. We power demand generation campaigns, ABM programs, create B2B content, strengthen sales enablement, generate qualified leads, and improve B2B marketing efforts.
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