If you’re in any type of sales or marketing role, chances are you’ve heard of account based marketing or ABM for short. It’s almost impossible not to have. It seems to be everywhere! You may even be using an ABM strategy currently, which means you likely already know the what and why behind ABM. So instead of going through why it’s so great (you likely already know), I’m going to talk about the tools that can help you execute an even more effective ABM strategy.
What is Account Based Marketing?
Quick recap. ABM (account based marketing) is a focused growth strategy. Sales and marketing work together to create a personalized buying experience for a set of high-value accounts that the two teams have both agreed on.
Once those accounts are agreed upon, there’s an ABM framework that should be followed to successfully execute the focused growth strategy. Within that strategy, there are tools that you can and should use to help ensure your efforts are as successful as possible. Many of these tools integrate within your CRM, like HubSpot for example, and make using them for ABM pretty painless. Here are five account based marketing tools worth taking a look at:
Account Based Marketing Tools
Vidyard
Here at Lake One, we love using Vidyard as a video platform. Vidyard not only can be used to further ABM efforts, but it integrates directly with HubSpot. It allows you to easily create, track and include personalized videos into your landing pages or emails. In addition, you can see user engagement and use it for segmenting, scoring, and nurturing leads. We also like it because it allows you to easily:
- Create video playlists
- Embed your videos just about anywhere
- Create in-video CTAs with links to your website and specific pages
- Provide customer testimonials, product demos marketing videos, and more.
- Generate video transcriptions for SEO and improved accessibility, automatically!
With the growing importance of incorporating video into your sales and marketing strategies, it’s no wonder this type of tool aids in a successful ABM strategy.
Related Reading: HubSpot Account Based Marketing: Orchestrating Your ABM Marketing Program
LinkedIn is a social networking platform dedicated to business professionals and used only for business purposes. It’s a great account based marketing tool to have at your disposal. There are several ways to use LinkedIn to help with ABM:
- Build a LinkedIn ABM account list
Since ABM protocol says to find a specific person/account at a company, versus just a company at large, you’re able to search people using LinkedIn’s advanced search features to find the types of accounts suited to your business and build a targeted account list.
- Create LinkedIn sponsored content
Sponsored content is LinkedIn’s version of “ads”, only it’s content that’s being displayed. These “ads” will only show up in the newsfeed of your targeted accounts. So you’re getting the right type of content in front of the right sets of eyeballs.
- Take advantage of LinkedIn InMail
With the LinkedIn Premium subscription you’re able to direct message people you aren’t yet connected to. This allows you to reach out to those targeted accounts you’ve identified directly before you’re connected.
Pro Tip: Ensure your message is personalized and not spammy. The goal is to get people to actually open the message and read it. The subject line should be to the point and attention-grabbing.
- Utilize LinkedIn Sales Navigator to manage your ABM
Sales Navigator allows you to take all of your LinkedIn account based marketing efforts to the next level. This account based marketing tool allows you to do an even more advanced search, receive account recommendations and score them, and you can set up alerts on those accounts, create notes, and see which of them views your profile.
One of the reasons we love LinkedIn for ABM is because users self identify on the platform. They readily provide their job titles, company they work for, and what their job entails. Not to mention, companies themselves are offering up loads of information, like their size, industry, service offerings, and location. Thanks to this, it’s a lot easier to identify specific people for your ABM efforts.
Uberflip
Another account based marketing tool that integrates well with HubSpot is Uberflip. Uberflip is a content experience platform (CEP) that allows you to reorganize existing content based on different audience profiles so that they can experience your website in ways that are most relevant to them.
As a result, you’re able to attract audiences to stay on your site longer and help you increase your revenue. This can be applied in different use cases, such as sales enablement and demand generation, but most importantly for this discussion, it can be applied to ABM. According to Uberflip, you’ll be able to accelerate the pipeline with binge-worthy experiences. What does that mean exactly? You can decrease the sales cycle by guiding your buyer down a path-to-purchase that encourage self- nurturing
OrgchartHub
When targeting specific companies or people at those companies, it’s important to know who plays what role. Who are the decision-makers? Who works for who? It can be tough to keep all of that straight. With these Org Charts for HubSpot you can easily build and store customer organization charts one each of your accounts. Not only that, but you can also do:
- Relationship mapping: a visual display that shows the relationship between contacts
- Customized sales personas: help your team to visualize key stakeholders
- Placeholder contacts: you can identify key contacts, avoid sales blockers, and close deals faster
- Account mapping: visualize and manage relationships between parent and child companies
Postalytics
Despite the digital age that we live in, direct mail is still alive and well. Postalytics takes the more traditional route of direct mail and marries it with the modernness of automation. What’s the result? A match made in heaven.
Marketers are using Postalytics automated direct mail to help grow their pipelines and increase engagement throughout the inbound marketing journey. It allows you to:
- Quickly design and send your personalized letters and cards
- Access affordable and high-quality print and mailing services
- Track, trace and measure impact of your campaign real-time
- Target new leads and drive great responses from customers
- Cut direct mail production from weeks to minutes
- Tracks every piece of mail through delivery and response
- Integrates with HubSpot workflows, lists and contacts
As account based marketing continues to grow in both popularity and performance, it’s important that you’re using the proper tools to help aid in your efforts. You might have a good ABM strategy in place, but with the help of these account based marketing tools, you can take your efforts from good to great. Keep in mind, not every tool will be the best fit for your ABM toolbox, but you won’t know unless you try.
New to account based marketing and wondering how to get started? Or maybe you just need help incorporating these tools into your strategy. Let’s talk. Our ABM strategists know a thing or two about both.
