Account-based marketing or ABM strategy is now used by many B2B companies as it has proven to drive better results. According to a survey by ITSMA, 87% of marketers say that ABM outperforms other marketing investments. ABM focuses on creating customized experiences for the target audience. If you are a B2B company, then it is important to invest in ABM strategy to create personalized content and engagement for your target audiences.
To implement ABM campaigns, you will need the right tools such as ABM software. This tool can make it easy for your team to complete various tasks and collaborate easily. Marketing automation is another tool to help implement various marketing campaigns seamlessly. When you use marketing automation with ABM, you can easily implement your ABM campaigns to drive better results. With automation you can target the right people at the right time while saving the time and efforts of your sales and marketing teams.
In this article, we will discuss how account-based marketing and automation can work together to deliver the best results.
How To Automate your ABM Strategy?
Build your Ideal Customer Profile
The first step to get started with your ABM strategy is to build your ideal customer profile. ICP is like a buyer persona, but it focuses on targeting an entire organization instead of just individuals. This is a fictional representation of the type of company that you want to target. To build your ICP, you can use firmographics that include company size and revenue, industry, and location.
If you use a software like HubSpot ABM software, you can leverage ICP templates. This can help you determine some common attributes that can organize companies in your database based on your ICP. Automation can help you identify your target accounts and organize them in your database. Sometimes your campaign goal could be to target only those accounts that are best fitted for your products or services and drive engagement. Hence, automated ICP workflow can help you target the right companies in your ABM campaigns.
Tag Accounts
After creating your ICP, you would be able to set up your target accounts in your ABM software. In the HubSpot ABM software you can tag target accounts so that you can manage them better. You can also rank these accounts with the ICP Tier property. This way your priority accounts will be marked Tier 1, while the less important ones will be marked Tier 3.
Your ABM account can also give you recommendations to help automate the process of researching these target accounts that are a good fit for your organization. This is a great tool to stay focused on the right accounts, segment and manage your audiences to help create more targeted ABM campaigns. The more targeted your campaigns are the better results you can expect to get.
Integration
It is a good practice to integrate your ABM software with your marketing automation and CRM software. Integrating all your marketing tools is key for the automation process. Integration with marketing software can help you automate various campaigns like emails or ads. Similarly, integrating your ABM software with your CRM can help you get all your contact data before you start with your ABM campaign. It can help you track your leads becoming target accounts and measure the results of your ABM campaigns.
Integrating all these tools can enable you to have all the information about your contacts and content essential for your ABM strategy in one place.
Set up workflows
To create personalized campaigns, it is important to first consider your customer journey. Customer journey starts from visitors, leads, marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, and finally customers. You will nurture your leads till they become customers. For your ABM strategy you can automate certain interactions to create a seamless experience for your audiences. For example, to nurture your leads you can automatically send them emails when taking certain actions on your website like downloading a piece of content.
When you set up automated workflows you don’t have to do those redundant tasks manually. It makes your sales teams more efficient as they spend their time on other important tasks. With automation you can interact with your audiences in a timely manner without missing out on anyone.
Personalize your content
ABM focuses on creating highly customized campaigns for your audiences. With the help of your ICP and target accounts you will be able segment your audiences. Based on your audiences you can create customized content which resonates with them. This content is geared toward those select accounts that you chose to target.
Your content should address the specific pain points or challenges your target accounts face. They are more likely to trust you and invest in your products or services when they see that you can solve their problems.
Tailored engagement
Along with your content you also need to tailor your engagement with your target accounts to provide them with the best experience. Collaboration with your sales team is needed so that they can interact successfully with the target accounts. Hence, CRM integration with your ABM software is important. With the help of CRM, you can track every interaction with your target accounts. In addition, you can automate certain interactions like follow up emails and other tasks.
It is easier for sales teams to maintain communication with their audiences. Automation can ensure that they do not miss sending emails or respond to any queries in a timely manner. Sales teams can use automation for many such tasks and interactions that help them create a seamless experience for target customers without having to do everything manually.
Measure your ABM efforts
Measuring your ABM strategy every step of the way is important to create successful campaigns. Setting up a dashboard can help you have all the insights related to your ABM strategy in one place. On this dashboard you can see key insights about your target accounts, company score, open deals, key stakeholders and more.
If you want to gauge how your content resonates with your audiences, you can do A/B testing. You can change certain elements of a content to see which version is more successful with your target accounts.
ABM strategy can become more seamless to implement when you use the right ABM software. With the help of this software, you can automate different processes, such as identifying the right target accounts, which can save a lot of time and effort while giving you the most accurate results. Integrating this software with your CRM makes it easy for you to manage your contacts and automate interactions with target accounts. With the right tools you can create successful ABM campaigns. Account-based marketing automation ensures that you implement your campaigns seamlessly and create more positive interactions with your target accounts.
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