Get Started with ABM Using These HubSpot Workflow Recipes
In August 2017, we announced the Terminus integration with HubSpot to bring together, for the first time, inbound and account-based marketing strategies. HubSpot’s VP of Product, Christopher O’Donnell, unveiled the integration during the product keynote at INBOUND, calling it “legitimately extremely cool.”
The integration allows HubSpot Marketing users to launch account-based advertising tactics to amplify their message beyond the lead’s email inbox and reach the entire buying center at an account. No longer is it account based marketing vs inbound marketing, but rather how both strategies can work together to make each other better.
From within HubSpot’s Workflow tool, marketers can automate Terminus campaigns that nurture all the stakeholders at an account with digital advertising as they simultaneously nurture leads with a coordinated email nurture program. Unlike CRM or website retargeting, Terminus doesn’t require that you have contact information to reach the key stakeholders at an account, nor do those individuals need to visit your website to see your ads.
Learn more about the integration and how it can help B2B marketers drive more pipeline and revenue for their organizations.
Savvy B2B marketers understand that account-based marketing is a critical strategy to complement their inbound efforts because, as HubSpot’s Bradford Coffey said, “B2B purchase decisions aren’t always made by single individuals empowered to act alone.” You must influence the other stakeholders at the account to close more deals faster.
To support the implementation of ABM strategies, we’ve developed five core HubSpot Marketing Workflow Recipes that illustrate how to blend inbound and account-based marketing. The result is more engaged accounts and more revenue for B2B companies.
Measuring Success with Terminus and HubSpot
Before we dive into these five Workflow Recipes, we need to address how to measure success with account-based marketing and how this differs from the metrics and KPIs used in inbound marketing.
Both approaches should be held accountable for the same outcomes: marketing-influenced pipeline and revenue.
However, the leading measures of success are starkly different. While lead acquisition and engagement metrics are the norm for inbound marketers, measuring the success of account-based marketing is different — as it should be. Each approach has its own purpose, so each a has a distinct measure of success.
With account-based marketing, you measure account engagement.
The easiest and most effective way to measure account engagement is by looking at behavior on your website. If an account is actively evaluating your solution, then key decision-makers will spend time researching it online. If multiple people from an account are spending time on high-value webpages — for example, your product, pricing, or solutions pages — you can use that data to quantify the account’s engagement.
Terminus allows you to see which accounts are visiting your website, how many individuals from each account are visiting, how much content they’re consuming, and precisely which pages they’re visiting.
This allows you to create account engagement criteria to complement lead acquisition and lead scoring measures. For example, an account could be considered “engaged” when five unique people from a particular account have been to your product page.
Account web engagement is a perfect complement to lead scoring and allows marketers to be certain that the accounts or leads being passed to sales are likely to purchase.
5 HubSpot Workflow Automation Recipes for Account-Based Marketing
These recipes fall into three broad use cases:
- Generate More Pipeline and Revenue from Inbound Leads – Expand your reach to the entire buying committee by nurturing them with digital ads while simultaneously nurturing a qualified lead via email.
- Improve the ROI of Events – Reach all the key stakeholders at an account before or after an event to ensure your brand stands out with the right people and increase the return on your investment.
- Align Marketing and Sales on Multichannel Campaigns – Use HubSpot automation to scale your ABM efforts to more best-fit accounts and easily coordinate efforts with sales.
Let’s look at how to create HubSpot Recipes for each one of these use cases.
Generate More Pipeline and Revenue from Inbound Leads
We call this strategy “lead-to-account nurture.” This means you’re identifying inbound leads that match your ideal customer profile and expanding your reach beyond the individual to nurture the entire buying committee at their company.
In both of these lead-to-account nurture recipes, it is critical to ensure that you are only enrolling qualified leads in the Workflow — not every single lead that enters your database. Targeting a company that is not a good fit for your business is a waste of your marketing budget.
Workflow Recipe #1: Accelerate “Hot” Leads
When a high-quality lead begins showing interest in your product — perhaps they request a demo, consume key content, or open all your emails — you should begin immediately targeting their buying committee with account-based advertising.
This will ensure that all the other key stakeholders involved in the purchase decision are aware of and engaged with your brand. Then, when you get a demo or a meeting with that lead, their colleagues will already be familiar with your solution. This helps your sales rep to secure their buy-in and close the deal more quickly.
In the Accelerate Hot Leads Recipe, it is critical to set the right enrollment criteria. You will want to use multiple HubSpot fields to ensure that the leads you enroll are a good fit and are showing the right behavior.
In the example below, the enrollment criteria is based on three key factors: requesting a demo, meeting the MQL criteria, and having a high lead score.
Depending on your business and how you use HubSpot Marketing, you may have different criteria. Remember, the key is to only enroll hot and good-fit leads.
In this example, the Terminus advertising tactic runs for 21 days. With account-based advertising campaigns, it is important to allow them to run for long enough to ensure that all of the key stakeholders have been targeted by the ads for enough time to influence them.
Also, since your goal with account-based advertising is NOT to drive form fills but instead to generate account web engagement, there is no need to gate the content on the landing page. Instead, provide content that educates and drives deeper engagement with your content.
You will know the Terminus ads are working when there is an increase in the number of unique visitors to your website from these accounts, which you can see using Terminus’ Account-Based Visitor ID tool.
Workflow Recipe #2: Not Ready to Buy Nurture
Sometimes a lead from a good-fit account comes in, but after working that lead (and ideally the rest of the account), it’s clear that they are not ready to buy. Usually, marketers drop these leads into an email drip campaign to keep them warm. With the Terminus integration, you can also nurture the entire buying committee with account-based advertisements.
Nurturing the entire buying committee with Terminus has two benefits:
- It helps accelerate the account’s progression toward becoming a sales opportunity. Reaching the entire buying committee ensures that you’re engaging the right decision-makers. Often, the person who completes a form on your website does not have buying power, but they can be a champion for your brand among the buying committee.
- Nurturing on a channel other than email is a great way to keep prospects aware of your product and benefits without annoying them by blowing up their inbox.
Improve the ROI of Events
Marketers who rely on B2B events to drive demand know how difficult it can be to cut through the noise from a conference. And beyond that, delivering your message to the right people at your target accounts is even harder.
Instead of simply hoping your booth traffic is high-quality and your reps have productive meetings, take an account-based approach to events. With ABM, you can drive the right people from the right accounts to your booth and ensure that your follow-up communication resonates.
Workflow Recipe #3: Pre-Event Engagement
It’s easy to flood contacts’ inboxes with emails prior to a big event when it’s unclear who from your target accounts will be at the event. But unfortunately, the results from these email blasts are usually pretty poor.
With the Terminus HubSpot integration, you can send a few high-value emails complemented by account-based advertising instead. This mix will ensure you build awareness with the people attending from the best-fit accounts.
In fact, Terminus’ first-ever customer, Avere Systems, utilizes this recipe with great success. Digital Marketing Manager Gretchen Weaver shares her strategy in this post.
To measure success, look to see what percent of your target account list was in attendance and what percent visited your booth. When you use targeted account-based ads to pretarget the accounts, you should see an improvement in how many visit your booth and speak with your team.
Workflow Recipe #4: Post-Event Engagement
After an event, marketers typically take the list of people that visited their booth and begin blasting them with emails. However, every other marketer from the conference is doing the same thing. This makes it nearly impossible to cut through the noise in the prospect’s inbox. Furthermore, the lead who visited the booth is often not a decision-maker who can purchase your product.
By triggering a Terminus account-based advertising campaign based on the leads you engaged with at the event, you can reach the key decision-makers at those accounts without needing their contact information. Plus, by engaging outside of the target audience’s inbox, you’ll stand out among the noise of every other marketer’s email follow-up.
As always, it is important to ensure that you are only targeting accounts that are a good fit for your business. You can manually review your list from the conference or use HubSpot Workflow criteria to identify the best accounts to target. In the example below, we’ve used behavioral criteria that filter out the poor-fit accounts.
With these event strategies, our customers see increased engagement on their website from best-fit accounts and resulting increases in opportunity creation rates, sales efficiency, and win rates.
Align Marketing and Sales on Multichannel Campaigns
You can use Terminus with HubSpot to automate your ABM plays, orchestrating both marketing and sales outreach across multiple channels. If you use Salesforce as your CRM, you can automate these plays using Terminus’ Salesforce integration. If you don’t use Salesforce, you can automate these campaigns through HubSpot.
There are seven key account-based marketing plays that can help you generate demand, accelerate your pipeline, and market to your customers. Below is one example, but many of the core ABM plays can be automated through HubSpot.
Workflow Recipe #5: Pre-Targeting
Pre-targeting is an ABM strategy for driving opportunities from net-new accounts. To begin, you need to identify a shortlist list of target accounts (less than 500 companies). These accounts should all share common attributes — such as industry, size, product interest, or any other factors that matter to your business — so you can tailor your outreach to them.
After choosing the target accounts, you need to enroll them in your Workflow. You can do this with Smartlists or by creating custom fields in your HubSpot account. Each account must have at least one contact in it to be enrolled in the Workflow.
Then, it’s as simple as running Terminus ads and alerting your sales reps when an account has been warmed up and is ready for one-to-one outreach, all of which is automated through the Workflow.
The example above is based on a use case developed by our customer WP Engine. They saw a nearly 30% increase in opportunities created from companies that were served Terminus account-based advertising versus those that were not.
How to Add Terminus to a HubSpot Workflow
Now you have some ideas for how to incorporate Terminus account-based advertising into your HubSpot Workflows. Adding a Terminus advertising tactic is very easy. Simply set up a HubSpot tactic in Terminus and then add the provided URL to the Webhook action in your HubSpot Workflow.
Ready to begin marketing to the entire buying committee at your target accounts? Your Terminus Customer Success Manager or Account Executive can help you determine the right ABM strategies for your business and how to implement it with HubSpot and Terminus.
Customers can reach their CSM at [email protected].
If you’re new to Terminus and would like to see it in action, request a demo here.
