How to Set Up Account-Based Marketing in HubSpot

Account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns are an important tool to help B2B marketers communicate in a more targeted and effective way with contacts who are an ideal fit for their product or service. As a result, more companies are incorporating an ABM approach into their larger marketing framework. 

Account-based marketing is a strategic approach that focuses on a select set of target accounts and the individuals in buying roles within those accounts. An ABM campaign uses highly targeted, personalized content or offers to reach each of these buying roles, from decision makers and budget holders to influencers and blockers. Usually, this means creating high-value, custom pieces that are designed to create a deeper connection with your target audience that prompts them to move further through the sales cycle — for example, a common call to action with ABM campaigns is booking a meeting with your sales team.  

When done right, ABM campaigns can be extremely effective, so much so that a recent report found that 67% of brands regularly use ABM campaigns. What’s more, 62% of brands say they can measure a positive impact as a result of taking an ABM approach. 

However, executing successful ABM campaigns that result in closing new — or even bigger — deals does require significant planning. For example, not only do you need to know the specific companies you’re targeting, but you also have to ensure you have accurate contact information and customer data. 

The good news is that HubSpot’s ABM tools are designed to help you conduct highly-targeted ABM campaigns with efficiency. Here, we’ll take a high-level look at how to do account-based marketing in HubSpot to help you start planning your own ABM campaign.

Make sure your CRM data is clean

This is a good rule of thumb regardless, but conducting a contact audit to ensure the data in your HubSpot CRM is clean, accurate, and up-to-date is critical for a successful ABM campaign. CRM data that is inaccurate or unclear can not only hamper the overall effectiveness of your outreach, but it can also compromise the personalization of your content. 

For example, an outdated job title contact property can undercut your ability to connect and build a sense of trust with your target audience. 

Turn on your target account tools

Now that your CRM data is clean, you can activate HubSpot’s ABM tools, which will automatically create your ABM properties and your ABM dashboard. This action will also generate a set of target account reports for your ABM dashboard. 

Create a targeted account list

The core of ABM campaigns is targeted outreach to a very specific list of companies that meet your ideal customer profile. You can then assign buying roles to contacts based on job title, job role, seniority, and more. You can also integrate with a variety of third-party tools like LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator to build and enhance the data in your target account list.   

HubSpot’s contact and company insights help you harness the power of detailed company or contact information, including firmographic data, engagement history, and website activity to help you better understand the ideal accounts for your list. Plus, this data will help you create more targeted content and offers.

Segment your target account contacts

Segmenting your target account contacts will help you better deliver targeted messaging that is applicable to specific job titles, roles, or areas of expertise. For example, you may want to send one piece of content that is more applicable to a decision maker and one that is more targeted toward a budget holder. 

You can assign buying roles to each contact associated with a target account from the contact record, via automated workflows, or directly from your target accounts index page. Your index page also offers an easy way to identify target accounts that have no buying roles assigned. 

Create personalized content

Content in ABM campaigns can mean a variety of things — and HubSpot’s ABM tools can help you fill in every gap. If your ABM campaign is centered on a content offer like a white paper or downloadable guide, you can use your data to create personalized emails to deliver that content more effectively. 

What’s more, HubSpot’s smart content can help you create personalized landing pages or even website pages to create an individualized, end-to-end user experience. Plus, email marketing automation tools and sales sequences can help you create workflows that provide additional content based on how accounts engage with your initial offer. 

Monitor and analyze performance and engagement

With HubSpot’s ABM dashboard, you monitor and analyze the performance of your ABM campaigns using a variety of metrics. For example, you can track specific engagement data points like email open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, along with sales metrics like pipeline growth, closed deals, and revenue generated from specific accounts. 

Continually monitoring and reviewing the performance of your ABM campaigns also helps create a data-driven conversation between your marketing and sales teams about how accounts have engaged with your campaigns, and which marketing content leads to more sales qualified leads. 

In addition, HubSpot’s reporting features make it easy to generate detailed performance reporting to share with your team or internal stakeholders to help communicate the value of ABM campaigns and demonstrate the ROI on this type of marketing strategy.  

With these steps, you have some understanding of how ABM campaigns can be structured in HubSpot. But there’s much more to executing HubSpot ABM campaigns than we can fit in a single blog post.

 Contact us to learn more about how we can help you leverage all HubSpot has to offer using the ABM tools feature. Or, you can try our HubSpot ROI calculator to learn whether HubSpot is right for your needs.