How B2B Marketers Can Use HubSpot for ABM

HubSpot is not often advertised as a platform to support account-based marketing. Therefore, many businesses don’t consider it when transitioning into ABM strategies — 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

Benefits of ABM with HubSpot CRM

1. ABM reporting and testing

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:

• New Business by Channel (Leads, MQLs, SQLs, Opps)
• Deals by Channel
• Top Personas
• Top Emails
• Top Landing Pages
• Contacts reports
• Customizable dashboards

Your team can make unanimous decisions by keeping a dashboard of your handiest reports. For example, you can answer questions like, where do our hot leads fall in the pipeline? Which campaign is generating the most marketing 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.

2. HubSpot sales tools for ABM

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 strategy.

Sales reps can also get desktop, email, and/or HubSpot-native notifications when their target lead engages. With ABM, momentum is critical when your target leads visit your website. And since HubSpot is a CRM and an all-in-one marketing platform, you’ll instantly get notifications for all your online actions.

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.

3. Marketing and sales alignment

Marketing and sales alignment is one major feature many businesses seek 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.

Each contact in HubSpot has a dedicated contact record that captures every interaction with that lead. This comprehensive record tracks how the lead became a contact, which content they have engaged with, the number of emails they have opened, videos they have watched, and the 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.

HubSpot also pulls together leads automatically into a Company record. It uses its extensive database to populate known company information such as revenue, location, number of employees, and time zone. You can watch companies progress down the deal pipeline and create customized deal stages so both marketing and sales can monitor the progress of target leads.

4. ABM Targeting with HubSpot

Hyper-targeting is the backbone of successful ABM. Generic messages are unsuccessful in winning target accounts. So, ABM marketers always look for ways to tailor their content marketing and messaging to get the most impact.

HubSpot ABM targeting tools:

1. Target accounts: If you have a targeted account-based marketing strategy, the target accounts index page in HubSpot becomes your command center to track and filter your focused accounts. You can also directly integrate this targeted list with paid advertising platforms like LinkedIn and Google Ads to continuously nurture your ideal buyers.

2. Automated marketing email drip campaigns: This allows you to build customized marketing email tracks for specific leads, ensuring you are always in touch in a relevant way.

3. Sales sequences: Sales teams can use personalized email templates to strategically nurture sales leads throughout their journey. Automatic tasks set reminders to follow up, and when contacts respond or schedule a meeting, they are removed from the sequence.

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. Rich analytics tell you what’s working and why.

5. Targeted ABM content marketing

Being educational and building relationships with prospects is another foundation of ABM.

HubSpot ABM content marketing tools

1. Sales sequences: In HubSpot, you can easily queue up your ABM content marketing assets — like case studies, sales one-pagers, and helpful eBooks — in your sales sequences to educate prospects.

2. HubSpot Documents: Track engagement with particular content pieces to better understand the marketing ROI. Understanding how many pages were read and the time spent on each slide can help further tailor sales outreach to buyer needs.

3. Smart Content: This feature allows ABM marketers to customize website or email content for a specific lead or lead type. You can show a different value proposition and conversion button for new leads vs. highly engaged leads. Or differentiate email copy based on someone’s job role.

When used together, all these tactics are highly effective at educating and converting your target accounts.

6. Integrate with popular ABM platforms

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 can target leads across multiple channels from different angles. 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.

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

1. ITSMA, ABM Beyond Revenue, July 2017