How to Build an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Strategy on HubSpot

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy that focuses on targeting high-value accounts by tailoring marketing and sales efforts to meet their specific needs. The goal is to create personalized experiences for each account, build stronger relationships, and ultimately increase revenue. ABM has gained popularity in recent years due to its effectiveness in reaching key decision-makers and generating higher quality leads.

HubSpot, a leading inbound marketing and sales platform, offers a range of tools and features that can be used to implement an ABM strategy. In this blog post, we will explore how to build an ABM strategy on HubSpot, from defining your target accounts to measuring the success of your efforts. 

Summary

1. Identify Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
2. Develop Your ABM Strategy
3. Build Your ABM Campaigns
4. Measure and Optimize Your ABM Efforts
5. Endnotes

Identify Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

To implement a successful Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy, it is important to first identify your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Complementary to the Persona, an ICP is a detailed description of your ideal target customer that your business wants to acquire. Identifying your ICP is critical as it allows you to focus on the accounts that are most likely to become your customers, and prioritize your efforts and resources accordingly. Here are some steps to create an ICP for your ABM strategy:

1. Analyze Your Existing Customer Base: Take a close look at your current customer base and identify patterns and similarities between them. Look at factors such as company size, industry, revenue, job title, and pain points.
2. Conduct Market Research: Conduct thorough market research to gain insight into the industries, markets, and regions that are most likely to benefit from your product or service.
3. Build Your Ideal Customer Profile: Based on the information you have gathered, create a detailed profile of your ideal target customer. This should include company size, industry, revenue, geographic location, job title, pain points, goals, and challenges.
4. Identify Target Accounts: Once you have created your ICP, you can use it to identify target accounts that fit your criteria. HubSpot's ABM tools allow you to create lists of target accounts based on company size, industry, location, and more.

By identifying your ICP and creating a list of target accounts, you can focus your ABM efforts on the accounts that are most likely to become your customers, and improve your chances of success.

Develop Your ABM Strategy

ABM can be approached in different ways, depending on the number of target accounts and the level of personalization needed. Here are the three main approaches to ABM:

1. One-to-One ABM: This approach involves creating highly personalized campaigns for a small number of high-value accounts. This requires a significant investment of time and resources but can result in high conversion rates and long-term customer relationships.
2. One-to-Few ABM: This approach involves grouping a small number of accounts with similar characteristics and creating targeted campaigns for each group. This allows for some level of personalization while still being scalable.
3. One-to-Many ABM: This approach involves creating campaigns that target a larger number of accounts with similar characteristics. This approach is more scalable but may require less personalization.

To develop your ABM strategy, you should start by aligning your strategy with your ICP and target accounts. This involves understanding the specific needs and pain points of your target accounts and developing campaigns that speak directly to those needs. You should also consider the channel mix and the types of content that will resonate with your target accounts. Finally, you should set clear goals and KPIs for your ABM campaigns to ensure that you are tracking success and making data-driven decisions.

Build Your ABM Campaigns

In this section, we'll discuss the key components of ABM campaigns and how to leverage HubSpot's ABM tools to build and execute effective campaigns.

1. Define Your Messaging: The messaging of your ABM campaign should be personalized and tailored to your target accounts. It's essential to highlight how your product or service can help solve their specific pain points or challenges. Additionally, your messaging should be consistent across all channels and touchpoints.
2. Choose Your Channels: Your ABM campaign should leverage a mix of channels to reach your target accounts effectively. Some of the channels you may consider include marketing email, direct mail, social media, and personalized landing pages.
3. Create Your Content: Content plays a vital role in ABM campaigns. You should create content that is specifically designed to appeal to your target accounts. Some of the content formats that work well for ABM campaigns include whitepapers, case studies, videos, and webinars. You could also reuse those contents as Lead Magnets to generate new leads.
4. Personalize Your Campaigns: Personalization is critical for ABM campaigns. You should use HubSpot's personalization tokens to ensure that each piece of content and touchpoint is customized for each target account.
5. Leverage HubSpot's ABM Tools:HubSpot provides several ABM tools that can help you build and execute effective ABM campaigns. These tools include lists, ads, and workflows. HubSpot's ABM tools allow you to create lists of target accounts, run targeted ads, and trigger workflows based on specific actions taken by your target accounts. You can also sort your different accounts on tiers, using workflows, to better organize your database and your campaigns.

Measure and Optimize Your ABM Efforts

Once you've executed your ABM campaigns, it's important to measure their success and optimize your strategy accordingly. Here are some steps to help you do that:

1. Define your ABM metrics: Before launching your campaigns, it's important to define what success looks like. This will depend on your goals and objectives, but common ABM metrics include engagement (e.g. clicks, opens, downloads), pipeline generated, and revenue generated.
2. Track your ABM metrics: HubSpot's ABM tools allow you to track and analyze key metrics for each of your target accounts. You can use these insights to identify what's working well and what needs improvement.
3. Analyze your results: Take a deep dive into your ABM data to identify trends and patterns. Look at which channels and tactics are driving the most engagement and revenue, and which accounts are most receptive to your messaging.
4. Optimize your strategy: Based on your analysis, make adjustments to your ABM strategy and campaigns. This might mean tweaking your messaging, adjusting your targeting criteria, or experimenting with new channels and tactics.
5. Continuously refine: ABM is an iterative process, so it's important to continuously refine your strategy and campaigns over time. Regularly analyze your data and adjust your approach based on what's working and what's not.

By measuring and optimizing your ABM efforts, you can maximize the impact of your campaigns and drive more revenue for your business.

Endnotes

Implementing an effective ABM strategy can help businesses achieve significant growth by focusing on high-value target accounts. By identifying your ideal customer profile, developing a tailored ABM strategy, and leveraging HubSpot's ABM tools to build and execute campaigns, you can increase engagement, pipeline, and revenue. Additionally, measuring and optimizing your ABM efforts over time can lead to continued success and growth for your business.

HubSpot provides a wide range of tools and resources to help you build and execute your ABM strategy, making it a powerful platform for ABM. So, if you haven't started building your ABM strategy on HubSpot yet, now is the time to get started and take advantage of the benefits that ABM can offer.

If you want to deepen your HubSpot skills and find all the workflows created and presented by HS Simple, do not hesitate to request your free access to the workflow box. A private web page listing all the workflows requested by the community with an explanatory video and a simple action plan in the form of a “to-do list”.