Personalization is the name of the game in today’s marketing. It all boils down to putting yourself in front of the right people at the right time. Account-based marketing (ABM) is no exception, and it has grown in popularity in recent years. To help this process go smoothly, it’s a good idea to leverage marketing automation, segmentation and ABM tools. In the sections below, we’ll look at how to automate your account-based marketing strategy.
Account-based marketing efforts exceed other marketing initiatives, according to 87 percent of account-based marketers. In addition, one out of every five accounts targeted using ABM becomes a qualified sales opportunity.
As a result, ABM is a crucial technique to implement if you offer high-value B2B products or services to a limited number of enterprises with a multi-person buying committee and require personalized content and contact through segmentation.
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As a marketer, it may appear to be a challenging task since you’ve undoubtedly been frustrated by difficult-to-use technology that didn’t interface with your systems or made team communication difficult.
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Automated Account-Based Marketing
1. Create A Customer Profile That Is Ideal For You (ICP)
Before you can use ABM, you must first develop your consumer profile. This is similar to a buyer persona, except instead of focusing on people, it focuses on companies as a whole. You’ll need to decide what kind of companies you want to target. Your organization’s size, income, industry, and location, for example, should all be included in your ICP.
This is called segmentation.
The practice of segmenting a company’s target market into groups of prospective consumers with similar demands and behaviors is known as segmentation.
ICP process templates may be used in software like HubSpot’s ABM software to help you discover common traits that can be used to categorize businesses in your database depending on how they fit your ICP.
Finally, segmentation and automation should help you recognize and organize your target accounts. You should be able to use your ICP to manage your audience in your ABM program once you’ve developed it.
2. Make A List Of The Accounts You’d Want To Reach Out To.
Once you’ve created your ICP, you should be able to organize your target accounts in the ABM program. If you tag “Target accounts” in your program, you may govern your audience from a Target Accounts dashboard. In HubSpot’s ABM platform, for example, you may classify accounts as target accounts and then rate them using the ICP Tier characteristic. Accounts in Tier 1 will be identified as such, while accounts in Tier 3 will be labeled as such.
Furthermore, a strong ABM program will use AI-powered target account suggestions to automate the process of identifying companies or segmentation that are a suitable fit. These tools will help you segment and manage your lists so that you can deliver targeted messages to your target accounts.
3. Integrate Your ABM, Marketing Automation, And Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems.
Before you can start generating ABM campaigns, you’ll need to connect your ABM software to your marketing automation software and CRM. Many of the ABM software capabilities may be used if you have HubSpot Marketing or Sales Pro, for example.
It’s vital to do segmentation and incorporate your marketing tools during the automation process. If your ABM software doesn’t interact with your email marketing software or advertising tools, you won’t be able to automate the process.
It will also be hard to measure the ROI of an account-based campaign if it does not interact with your CRM. If you connect these platforms, you’ll have all of your ICP research, target accounts, content, and CRM in one place.
4. Design Your Own Advertising Campaigns
After you’ve set up your ABM software and marketing tools, it’s time to start developing campaigns. To begin, decide which channels by segmentation to utilize and which behaviors will trigger an automated workflow.
To begin, look at your target accounts to discover how they spend their time online. You may construct an ad campaign based on people’s job titles or firms on LinkedIn and Facebook, for example.
Then you should think about your customer’s journey and set up automated processes. You may create a task for a sales rep when someone from one of your target accounts interacts with an email, your website, or blog material, for example.
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5. Personalize Your Content
Most likely, you started utilizing ABM to personalize your marketing initiatives. To do so, you’ll need to create content and use automated technology to segment your audience.
With HubSpot’s ABM platform, you can leverage company lists to create an ad audience or use corporate ad targeting for your LinkedIn advertising.
Once you’ve set up your ICP, developing content for your target audience should be straightforward. With the exception that you’ll be targeting individual accounts and organizations, the substance of your ABM campaigns will be identical to that of other marketing efforts.
Finally, your messaging should address particular pain points and appeal to your target account’s difficulties.
6. Personalize Your Engagement
Collaboration with your sales force will be an important part of your ABM strategy, as it will help them to better interact with target accounts. Automation tools are also a great way to do this. That’s why it’s vital that your CRM and ABM systems work together.
Using HubSpot’s ABM tools and Sales Hub, for example, you can automate your follow-up emails and tasks based on prospect behavior. Even if you’re focusing on automation at the moment, you should still personalize your sales outreach and content.
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7. Make A Progress Dashboard To Keep Track Of Your Progress.
The next stage in automating your ABM method is to track and measure your efforts. You’ll want to use your ABM software to see information at a glance. For example, you might populate your dashboards with information about your target clients, such as their business score, open deals, total pipeline, and the number of decision-makers identified.
If your ABM program supports it, you should employ corporate scoring. This is similar to lead scoring, in which you award a score depending on the qualities of your software. When you initially start implementing ABM automation, A/B testing to see what messaging connects with your ICP is a good idea.
While ABM involves careful planning and coordination, using ABM software — preferably one that integrates with your CRM and marketing automation software — may help you automate and grow your approach.
Segmentation is also a big help in making progress in dashboards. The technique of splitting consumers into groups based on common criteria is known as customer segmentation.
