Account-based marketing (ABM) helps you to hone in on key accounts that promise to deliver loads of value. But even though this narrows your focus, there are still likely multiple decision-makers to target and a high level of personalization to implement.
So, if you want your business to grow, you need to be thinking about scaling your ABM efforts. That’s where account-based marketing automation comes into play.
What is Account-Based Marketing Automation?
Account-based marketing automation takes the manual effort out of targeting and engaging key accounts by introducing powerful software into your ABM workflow. This can help you to identify, segment and tier targets, and personalize their journeys so that you deliver the right content at the right time for the most effective relationship-building.
Benefits of Automating Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy
There are loads of benefits that come with automating your ABM strategy that make it easier to focus on high-value accounts while cutting down on manual tasks. Below, we’ll walk you through the benefits of marketing automation and explore how it can help refine your approach to ABM.
- Higher Sales Velocity
- Faster Speed to Execution
- More Time and Resources to Use Elsewhere
- Better Account Prioritization
- Better Sales and Marketing Alignment
High Sales Velocity
Automation helps deals move quickly through the sales pipeline by making engagement signals actionable in real time and enabling your team to act when the prospect is warmest.
Let’s say a potential client opens a pricing email or visits a competitor's comparison page. Instead of someone having to go and look for that information, premium automation tools—like Userled—instantly notify your sales team.
Automation tools can also provide guidance on the next best steps, like sending tailored resources or setting up a consultation. This optimizes your sales process by keeping your team’s focus exactly where it needs to be.
Faster Speed to Execution
Automation tools can instantly segment accounts, personalize content at scale, and coordinate outreach across email, ads, and other channels.
This means your campaigns aren’t stuck in the planning phase forever—they’re up and running in no time. Automation lets you focus on strategy while ensuring every touchpoint is ready to go, so you can accelerate the time it takes to move from planning to execution and maximize your impact in the market.
More Time and Resources to Use Elsewhere
Your team doesn’t need to be bogged down by repetitive tasks like scheduling, tracking, and reporting when you use ABM automation, particularly if you’re facing a reduced headcount or otherwise looking to remain ultra-lean as an organisation.
It frees up time and creative capacity that can be put towards what really matters: coming up with innovative ideas to engage your most valuable accounts, through a 1:1 program, for example.
This software can also drastically reduce campaign turnaround times, helping your team to deliver better results, faster. It makes the entire go-to-market process more efficient, which gives your team the chance to let their creativity and expertise shine through.
Better Account Prioritization
Assessing how leads are interacting with your content—like which pages they’re checking out or what LinkedIn Ads are getting the best engagement—helps you to identify the prospects that are showing real interest. Unfortunately, analyzing this data is a huge task.
With ABM automation, you can let your software do the heavy lifting. This allows your team to zero in on the high-value prospects that are more likely to convert without having to manually dig into the data and potentially waste time on accounts that aren’t as engaged.
Better Sales and Marketing Alignment
Alignment between sales and marketing is essential for the success of any ABM strategy. And ABM automation, with its ability to reduce wasted effort by ensuring that both teams are working toward the same goal, is the ideal enabler.
Marketing can generate ABM assets that speak directly to key prospects, giving sales the tools they need to engage with qualified leads and build meaningful, long-term relationships.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Automating Account-Based Marketing
So, how do you actually automate your ABM strategy? Here are 9 simple steps to automate your account-based marketing and streamline the process from start to finish.
- Define high-value accounts
- Map out the buyer journey
- Set clear objectives and metrics
- Implement an ABM platform
- Segment and personalize content
- Set up account scoring
- Automate campaign triggers
- Optimize campaigns with real-time data
- Iterate and scale
1. Define High-Value Accounts
Defining targeted accounts involves looking for companies that fit your ideal customer profile (ICP). You might have identified existing customers of a partner organization, prospects that use specific tooling, or businesses that exceed a defined sales threshold.
Once you understand who you’re targeting, you can identify your high-value accounts. Then you’ll need to segment and score each one. Two important questions to ask yourself here are, “Who’s the most engaged?” and “Who’s most likely to convert?”
You’ll look at market insights, intent, and signals, such as: if the company is hiring your specific persona job title, or engaged in another round of funding, or anything else that’s related to your business.
With automation tools, you can track all this easily and make sure you’re putting your energy into accounts that are ready to make a move.
2. Map Out the Buyer Journey
Each stage of the buyer journey—awareness, consideration, and decision—requires different types of content.
When you map this buyer journey for each of your target accounts, you can better understand where they are in the process and how you can guide them to conversion. That puts you in the position to provide the perfect content at the exact right moment.
3. Set Clear Objectives and Metrics
Every ABM campaign should start with the same thing: setting clear goals. This could be something like raising engagement by 25% or booking 10 meetings per month.
With those broad goals in mind, you can define KPIs for each funnel stage and start tracking your account-based marketing metrics regularly to assess whether you’re on the right path, like tracking engagement, conversions, and account progression. This will give you a much clearer idea of what’s working and what needs a little more attention.
4. Implement an ABM Platform
Start small and focus on getting your people and processes right before investing in ABM tools. Then, once you’ve laid the foundations and understand what you need to scale, begin searching for the right ABM solution; the right technology is a massive help for any team tasked with executing these intensive marketing strategies.
You want one that’s packed with automation features, like Demandbase, HubSpot or Marketo, and that syncs seamlessly with your CRM. This way, you can manage everything from email campaigns and social media outreach to ads and website content—all in one place.
It’s particularly important to invest in a solid ABM platform that can help you identify and create quality content for current and future prospects. Userled makes it easy to target accounts, build custom buyer journeys, and personalize content, so you can scale up multichannel ABM campaigns and supercharge your business.
5. Segment and Personalize Content
When it comes to ABM, one-size-fits-all content doesn’t cut it. You need to tailor your content to each account segment based on factors like account type, role, and challenges.
Automating content delivery based on account activity helps streamline this process. For instance, if a prospect visits an alternative landing page (think: a “Your brand vs your competitor” page), automatically send them to a personalized landing page to keep them engaged. This level of personalization not only speaks directly to their needs but also keeps your brand front of mind at the right time.
6. Set Up Account Scoring
Account scoring will help you prioritize accounts based on engagement, fit, and behavior. For example, track how they interact with your content—what pages they visit, the number of contacts that have viewed key pages, and how long they are spending viewing this content. Use that data to guide your next steps.
Other essential data includes outbound activity (like how many contacts interact with a personalized landing page sent via outbound) and targeted campaign activity (like clicks on a targeted LinkedIn Ad).
Using this data to inform your lead nurturing strategy will ensure no one is left behind and that you’re always focusing on the most promising accounts.
7. Automate Campaign Triggers
Campaign triggers create a domino effect for success. When a key individual from an account performs a certain action, a campaign trigger will set off a series of follow-up actions designed to move them through the sales funnel.
For instance, if they visit your site three times, your system might send an email inviting them to demo your product. Or you might deploy retargeting ads via search engines or social media platforms. This helps you to stay top of mind without manual work.
Plus, powerful ABM software will notify sales owners about impactful account activity and enable them to be accurate and impactful in their outreach.
8. Optimize Campaigns with Real-Time Data
The beauty of real-time data is that it gives you the chance to adapt quickly. It tells you which prospects are engaging, what content they’re loving, and which channels are bringing them in.
Found a blog post that’s getting tons of clicks? Promote it. Noticed a drop in email open rates? Tweak your subject lines. Real-time insights give you the power to refine your approach and put your resources where they’ll drive the most value.
9. Iterate and Scale
It’s impossible to scale your ABM efforts if you have to strategize from scratch each and every time you plan to target a new account or set up a campaign.
Data is your friend here. Digging into your data analytics and account insights can help you skip a bunch of the trial-and-error that usually goes into making a campaign a success. Building on previous wins can help you to save time and money—and free up space for your team to create content that really speaks to your targets.
As you scale, automation ensures nothing gets lost in the shuffle, from tailored messaging to timely follow-ups. The goal is to grow without sacrificing the personal touch that makes ABM so effective.
Features of Account-Based Marketing Automation Tools
Account-based marketing automation tools can help you scale with ease, but there are some key features to look out for.
Account Targeting and Prioritization
Effective account targeting ensures you identify high-value accounts that match your ideal customer profile. This means that the ABM automation tool you choose must give you the ability to assess details like revenue, industry, or even engagement behavior.
[H3] Personalization and Dynamic Content Creation
Personalization needs to go beyond adding a name to a generic email. You need to make each of your target accounts feel like you’re in conversation with only them.
Here, it’s important that your chosen ABM platform lets you craft messaging that’s as unique as each account, offering the option to automatically tailor content to their specific profile—across all platforms.
[H3] Multi-Channel Campaign Management
A multi-channel campaign lets you meet decision-makers from your target accounts wherever they are, whether that’s in their email inbox, on a personalized landing page, or via LinkedIn Ads.
Automating your ABM marketing lets you create, coordinate, and track everything with ease so your target accounts have a consistent experience no matter where they engage with you.
[H3] Account-Based Advertising
Account-based advertising gives you a direct line to your target audience. With integration into ad networks, you can serve tailored ads to specific accounts, reinforcing your message and boosting engagement.
Whether you’re retargeting or reaching out to new prospects, you need to be able to identify exactly who you want to engage. That means having ABM automation software with powerful account targeting and analytics capabilities.
[H3] Engagement Monitoring, Tracking and Analytics
Engagement tracking and analytics help keep you on track and understand what's working and what’s not. The right software will let you see exactly how your accounts are interacting with your content—from how much time they’re spending on it, what they’re engaging with, and what gets them to convert.
[H3] CRM and Marketing Automation Integration
Integrating your ABM automation software with your CRM helps to break down the barriers between your marketing and sales teams. The platform you choose should work with a range of other marketing software.
For example, Userled integrations include Hubspot, Salesforce, 6sense, and Slack. This alignment leads to better communication and faster, better times, and more personalized follow-ups.
[H3] Sales Adoption
Your sales team needs to anticipate, rather than react. So, if you want your sales team to win, your ABM automation tool needs to give them instant insights and timely alerts. This will help them to strike while the lead is hot and close deals.
ABM Reporting
It’s essential to understand which campaigns are your most successful and why. The best ABM automation tools give you granular details on account interactions, pipeline movement, and ROI to ensure you can maximize your impact and drive better results
Account Based Marketing Examples
Here are some real-world examples of account-based marketing in action to inspire your own strategy.
Entrust
Entrust used Userled to tailor landing pages and assets to enterprise accounts, increasing its demo booking rate by 120%. This shortened the customer journey, enabled the sales team to close deals faster, and increased lead conversion and pipeline.
Gupshup
Gupshup used Userled to scale up personalized outreach and align the efforts of their sales and marketing teams. With efficient asset creation, tailored landing pages and outreach personalization, , Gupshup saw a 99% increase in engagement rate, pipeline growth and double SQL generation, and increased efficiency.
Qobra
Qobra generated personalized experiences, at scale, with Userled, driving an 3–5% increase in outbound reply rates. With a combination of automatic website traffic notifcations, tailored landing pages and easy campaign integration, Qobra overhauled its processes and scaled ABM. This led to better pipeline generation and campaign performance, including $100,000 in monthly pipeline growth.
Scaling Your ABM with Userled
Ready to scale your ABM? Userled is the automation powerhouse that enables personalization at scale. It’s the all-in-one platform for automating campaign triggers, optimizing outreach, and gaining real-time insights. Driving impactful account-based marketing campaigns has never been easier or more effective than it is with Userled.
Author
Generated £1.3M pipeline by focusing on UTM parameters personalisation.
Generated £1.3M pipeline by focusing on UTM parameters personalisation.
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