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While it might seem like people use delayed media (like streaming services or podcasts) more often, real-time media hasn’t come to a halt.

Real-time marketing is still a great way to get in front of and convert your audience.

In fact, a new report from Monetate and Econsultancy concludes that UK marketers report a 26% increase in conversion rates from real-time marketing.

Additionally, a study found real-time marketing not only positively impacts standard marketing goals — word-of-mouth, attention, preference, likelihood to try or buy — but it also turbocharges other marketing initiatives, including paid and owned media effectiveness.

As marketers, those stats are impossible to ignore.

Below, let’s learn more about real-time marketing, and then we’ll see what it looks like in action.

This type of marketing occurs when your company reacts, instead of planning or strategizing a marketing plan for months. That’s not to say that you won’t have a real-time marketing plan, but it’ll be a quicker turnaround.

The objective? To connect with your audience and communicate your brand position.

You might be able to plan real-time marketing if there’s an event or ongoing trend. For example, if you strategize an ad around a current fad, your company might become more appealing to your audience because you understand them.

Real-time marketing helps you provide relevant messaging that is tailored to your audience’s wants, interests, and needs.

One way for marketers to implement a real-time marketing strategy is to have an active social media presence.

Your social media team will often be the first people to know about a current fad or trend if they’re implementing social listening (which they should be).

Additionally, you can learn more about your audience and their current interests by looking at your own data.

For instance, you can look at your website or social media analytics to discover the most popular topics of conversation. You can also learn what questions your audience is asking through social listening tools.

Having a team actively look at this information every day can be helpful in planning and strategizing a real-time marketing plan.

When you want to implement a paid real-time marketing ad, you can use social media and search engine targeting tools to ensure you reach the right audience. That type of personalization in marketing has elevated real-time marketing efforts.

Ultimately, to effectively implement a real-time marketing plan, you should always listen to your audience, monitor industry trends, and know where the conversation is taking place.

Then, you need to react. Respond to your audience on social media and create assets to discuss what’s going on.

Before you implement a real-time marketing campaign, think about your audience and what you want to achieve with your reaction. Once you know the goal, you can create your message, whether it’s a social media comment, an email, or an ad.

Now that we know more about real-time marketing, let’s review some examples.

Real-Time Marketing Examples

1. ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

One of the greatest lessons in real-time marketing is the ice bucket challenge from 2014. This phenomenon went around the globe and every company or celebrity who took part in the challenge was participating in real-time marketing.

Taking part in the challenge was a way to raise awareness and money for ALS. But since it was a current event and trend, companies were able to increase brand sentiment and awareness by participating.

2. INBOUND

Every year, INBOUND attracts thousands of business professionals from almost every industry to learn more about marketing, sales, and customer service.

During this three-day event, businesses and professionals are active on social media and commenting on the live events, such as HubSpot product updates and the keynote speech.

All of these social media posts and comments about the live breakout sessions or speeches are real-time marketing in action.

3. Taco Bell

Taco Bell has built a reputation as a great company to follow on social media through their crafted brand messaging.

The reason? On social media, Taco Bell’s strategy is to take part in enthusiastic real-time marketing. They respond to messages on Twitter almost twice an hour every day.

The company has made it a priority to listen to their customers online and to interact and connect with them, no matter what is happening that day.

Real-time marketing is a great strategy to connect with your customers right now. However, to implement this type of marketing, it’s important to measure conversations and sentiment to determine how real-time programs will develop. To get started, you can use free monitoring tools, or invest in one of the many paid social media monitoring technologies.

There’s no doubt that technology has simplified the way we carry out our day-to-day routines. Computers help us do things faster, emails and text messages let us always be in touch, and the internet makes it easy to find the answer to any question with just a quick Google search.

While being constantly plugged in can make us feel safe, connected, and in-the-know — both at work and at home — it also means we never really clock out.

It’s one thing to pull a long day every once in a while to finish a project or deal with a crisis, but it’s another to routinely stay late at the office or work into the night. That’s chronic overwork — and it can have extremely negative impacts on your health, happiness, and overall quality of life.

But working overtime has become the norm for most people. And, now that multiple offices have embraced remote work, the lines between the end of the work day and the start of personal time can get even blurrier.

It’s one of those things everyone knows is bad for us, but no one really listens. Trouble is, failure to prioritize a healthy balance isn’t just bad for the employees — it’s actually bad for employers, too.

There are numerous research studies out there showing how overwork — and its resulting stress — can lead to many health problems. But, it also impacts your brand’s bigger business too. Read on to learn exactly why it’s bad for health and our performance at work.

Why Overworking is Bad For Your Health

1. It prevents sleep.

Study after study shows that working too much or too late in the day can negatively impact your sleep — whether it’s the resulting stress, the staring at the computer screen, or just not having enough time to unwind before hitting the hay.

Avoiding sleep can cause us to build up “sleep debt.” Essentially, it feels like your energy is overdrawn for days at a time until you get a proper eight hours of sleep.

Chronic sleep debt raises the risk of obesity, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. In the short-term, lack of sleep can have significant effects on the hippocampus, an area of the brain involved in memory creation and consolidation.

Think you’re one of those “lucky people” who can get by fine with only five or six hours of sleep? You probably aren’t. While researchers have found genes in people that enable them to be well rested after less than eight hours of sleep, they also say incidence of either is incredibly rare.

2. Overworking gets in the way of good habits.

Working too much can take a toll on the body and brain in two ways — by boosting stress and by getting in the way of exercise, healthy eating, and other good habits.

For example, when you’re overtired, you rely more on caffeine to get you through the day, you tend to make unhealthy food choices and working out becomes a thing of the past.

Cleveland Clinic reports that stress due to overworking or lack of sleep can cause you to overreat or make poor diet choices. But how does this happen?

First, overworking and lack of sleep slows activity in the areas of our brains responsible for ranking different foods based on what we want and need.

Second, little sleep also causes an increase in the brain’s amygdala, which is responsible for controlling the salience of food. Over time, poor food choices can lead to weight gain and even obesity.

3. Overworking is bad for your heart.

A long-running study of more than 10,000 civil servants in London found that white-collar workers who worked three or more hours longer than a normal, seven-hour day had a 60% higher risk of heart-related problems than white-collar workers who didn’t work overtime. Examples of heart-related problems included death due to heart disease, non-fatal heart attacks, and angina, a condition caused by low blood supply to the heart.

A follow-up study of over 22,000 participants found that people who worked long hours were 40% more likely to suffer from coronary heart disease than those who worked standard hours.

And even after that, reports from health sites like WebMD still tell stories of people who developed heart conditions through overworking.

What about overworking might be causing heart disease, specifically?

The link between overworking and heart disease might have something to do with your personality. In fact, the “Type A vs. Type B” personality test was originally aimed to determine how likely it was that a person would develop coronary heart disease. Considering Type A folks tend to be more competitive, tense, time-oriented, and stressed out — which is often intensified by overworking — their personality type is often associated with a higher risk.

4. It leads to bad habits.

Aside from health risks, research done in the last decade has shown how overworking links to bad habits that are also unhealthy.

Even back in 2015, the Finish Institute of Occupational Health published the largest ever study of the correlation between working patterns and alcohol consumption. In the study, a group of researchers put together a dataset of over 330,000 workers across 14 different countries.

They found that 48 hours of work per week was the magic number: When people worked more than 48 hours per week, they were more likely to engage in “increased risky alcohol use.” Risky alcohol use was defined as more than 14 drinks per week for women and more than 21 drinks per week for men.

Aside from alcohol consumption, researchers have also found that long hours link to bad smoking habits.

And a 2018 paper from Welltory added to the list of bad habits by showing that overworking can also lead to more social media consumption, which can danger your level of stress recover when you’re not working. 

5. It causes higher risks for low-income workers.

Way back in 2015, a group of researchers investigated the role of long working hours as a risk factor for type 2 diabetes. They found that the link between longer working hours and type 2 diabetes is apparent in individuals in the low socioeconomic status groups. This was true regardless of age, sex, obesity, and physical activity, and remained even when they excluded shift workers from the analysis. Shortly after, another study showed an association between long hours and type 2 diabetes in low-income workers.

Overall, these findings show how strong of a relationship a person’s mental state can have on physical health.

Why Overworking is Bad for Business

If better health and happiness isn’t enough of an incentive to do something about chronic overwork, it turns out overworking can have a legitimately negative impact on a business’ bottom line. Sarah Green Carmichael of Harvard Business Review calls the story of overwork “the story of diminishing returns”: keep overworking, and you’ll keep making avoidable mistakes and getting lost in the weeds — all while not actually producing more.

6. More input doesn’t necessarily mean more output.

Do longer work hours equate to more work getting done? From time to time, yes — but not when “overtime” becomes “all the time.”

Research by the Business Roundtable found employees saw short-term gains when they pushed their workweek to 60 or 70 hours for a few weeks at a time if, for example, they needed to meet a critical production deadline. But increasing the number of hours worked in the office from 40 to 60 hours doesn’t result in more output: “In fact, the numbers may typically be something closer to 25–30% more work in 50% more time,” writes Sara Robinson for Salon.

Why? Robinson explains that most people do their best work between hours two and six of working in a given day. By the end of an eight-hour day, their best work tends to be behind them — and by hour nine, fatigue begins to set in and productivity levels drop. They won’t be able to deliver to their full potential — especially if they aren’t invigorated by something like a rare, critical deadline — and they’ll end the day completely exhausted.

Interestingly, one study out of Boston University’s Questrom School of Business found that managers actually couldn’t tell the difference between employees who actually worked 80 hours per week and those who just pretended to. What’s more, managers tended to punish employees who were transparent about working less — but there was no evidence that those employees actually accomplished less, nor were there any signs that the overworking employees accomplished more.

7. You’re more likely to make mistakes.

Speaking of exhaustion, researchers have found that overwork — and the resulting stress and exhaustion — can make it far more difficult to do everything that a modern office requires, including interpersonal communication, making judgment calls, reading people, or managing one’s own emotional reactions. Aside from small office slip ups, research from NCBI even shows that overworking can lead to physical injuries in the workplace.

8. You lose sight of the bigger picture.

Have you ever worked on a project so long that you began to obsess over it and forget about everything else related to your role or personal life? Many marketers have been there.

The breaks we take to recharge, eat meals, or spend time with the people we love help us step back from our work and stay mindful of how our work contributes to our goals.

9. Overworking hinders creativity.

As marketers, we’re sought after for our creative and colorful ideas, messaging, and content. But, this type of work takes a lot of time, energy, and open-mindedness.

Unfortunately, lack of sleep, stress, and other issues caused by overworking can drain your energy, motivation, and, ultimately, your level of creativity.

If you want to stay fresh and creative, it’s important to limit your work hours, get a good night’s sleep, and take time off when you feel like your mind is being drained of creative thoughts.

When you do take time off, be sure to keep a notepad or a phone recording app nearby. Sometimes, creative ideas can strike when you’re most relaxed — and you’ll want to take them down somewhere.

10. It makes multitasking harder.

As we mentioned above, overworking raises the risk of making silly mistakes. This risk gets even higher when you’re working on multiple projects all at once. 

Multitasking is one of the commodities of a modern marketing role. Each day, we might send out an email, update social media, write a long-form blog post, attend multiple video meetings, and monitor the analytics of what we’re doing.

When you’re tired, low on energy, and not primed to pay attention to detail, it will be harder to complete all of your tasks correctly — let alone one of them. 

Who’s to Blame?

Chronically overworking isn’t fun. It doesn’t feelgood;to realize you have to work through yet another family dinner or relaxing weekend.

So why do people do it? Is it because our bosses told us to? Or because we want to make more money? Or do we have some deep-seated psychological need? In her article for Harvard Business Review, Carmichael asks, “who’s to blame?”

Over-ambitious managers?

In many cultures, bosses want and expect employees to put in long days, make themselves available on email 24/7, and work nights, weekends, and during vacation without protest. In this version, writes Carmichael, we overwork because we’re told to.

This is especially evident in the three countries in which employees work the longest hours of all advanced countries in the world: America, South Korea, and Japan.

… Or ourselves?

Some of us overwork even when our managers don’t want us too, And, truthfully, most of us can’t put all the blame on others.

More often than not, working long hours is a way for us to prove something to ourselves. Maybe working late makes us feel ambitious or important. Maybe it’s because we think it’s the only way to get a promotion, make more money, or avoid falling behind. Maybe we straight up feel guilty when we get up and leave at 5 P.M. Several studies have even shown some of us consider work a safe haven — a place in which we feel confident and in control as compared with stresses outside the office.

And who could blame us? More and more, working beyond normal business hours has become something people brag about. In some cases, it becomes an addiction.

“We live in a competitive society,” writes Laura Vanderkam for The Wall Street Journal, “and so by lamenting our overwork and sleep deprivation — even if that requires workweek inflation and claiming our worst nights are typical — we show that we are dedicated to our jobs and our families.”

Know When It’s Time to Log Off

Sometimes, working long hours can feel rewarding — even invigorating. Other times, especially when we make a habit out of it, it can make us feel stressed, mad, lonely, and generally unhealthy.

The key is paying attention to how it makes you feel. If it’s interfering with your mental, physical, or emotional help, it may be time to reprioritize.

Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally published in June 2016, but was updated for comprehensiveness and freshness in October 2020.

Think about how much easier marketing is when you know exactly what companies to target and what marketing messages would best resonate with them. That’s the dream, right?

While we don’t live in a perfect world, we do live in a world where inbound marketing and account-based marketing (ABM) exist. And, when these two strategies work together, this dream can become a reality.

You may be pretty familiar with inbound marketing — creating content that attracts, converts, and delights customers.

You may also know a thing or two about account-based marketing: aligning marketing and sales to deliver a consistent, personalized buying experience for prospects. But, because of their definitions, perhaps you think you have to choose between the two.

Fortunately, you don’t have to choose. In fact, instead of thinking “ABM versus inbound,” you should be thinking “ABM and inbound.”

To clarify, let’s define the two and offer some tactics around how to work these strategies into your existing marketing campaign.

What is account-based marketing?

Account-based marketing is a highly-targeted, focused growth strategy. It works by aligning marketing and sales functions to create a personalized experience for accounts, rather than an individual buyer.

Instead of treating each of those buyers as an individual entity, ABM is a strategy that says, “Let’s make sure we plan how to market and sell to all of those buyers as one account.”

This starts with aligning Sales and Marketing to mutually choose a select set of accounts. Then, together they create marketing and sales strategies that target each account. This saves time for marketing and sales and delivers a far more consistent buying experience for the customers within each account.

Businesses that are typically a good fit for using an ABM strategy are those that sell high-value products or services to other businesses, like B2Bs.

The alignment of Sales and Marketing when using an ABM strategy helps you make more streamlined business decisions. It eliminates the time you would spend trying to sort out the best accounts to target, and instead, speeds up the process of delighting those prospects.

ABM treats accounts as if they’re individual buyers, and because of this, you’ll be able to delight the key decision-makers with a personalized content strategy.

So, ABM is a go-to strategy for shortening sales cycles, increasing ROI, and effectively selling to your highest value accounts in the way they each prefer to buy — but how is it comparable to inbound marketing? Let’s talk about that next.

Account-Based Marketing and Inbound Marketing

ABM allows you to delight high-value accounts with a focused approach. Inbound marketing lets you attract customers through the creation of valuable, SEO-optimized content — it provides audiences with the information that’s important to them in an organic manner.

But what do they have in common?

Both strategies require a deep understanding of your target buyer to inform what type of content you’re creating & how you choose to deliver it. This increases discoverability by that target.

According to HubSpot’s ABM Product Marketer, Ryan Batter, “Every growth story begins with the same foundational elements of inbound marketing — building great content, crafting a publishing strategy, optimizing search presence to enable discovery of your brand and generate leads.”

You can repurpose content and use the same channels for ABM as you’ve already put into place with inbound. ABM is often just taking that foundational content and personalizing it even more.

Both inbound and ABM are focused on delivering a great buying experience across the entire flywheel. ABM helps accelerate the flywheel once inbound foundation is in place.

Additionally, the two strategies focus on targeted, personalized content. ABM hones in on delighting the right customers through content that is specifically created to cater to their challenges, an essential function of inbound marketing.

Finally, the two help with the happiness and retention of your customers. Because an ABM strategy focuses on a set of specific accounts, you’ll have more opportunity to focus on the happiness and retention of those clients, which is another essential part of the inbound marketing flywheel.

That’s not all, though — you can also use the two in a partnership to elevate your entire strategy.

“For some stories, companies benefit immensely by complementing their inbound foundation with account-based strategies that provide more personalized, tailored buying experiences for a subset of high-value leads,” Batter says.

Put another way: inbound marketing helps you attract the right customers. Then, account-based marketing uses marketing and sales to speed up the process of the flywheel and provide a valuable customer experience. In the end, both strategies enable you to win those target accounts.

It’s critical you approach your account-based marketing, the inbound way: provide valuable content and customer experiences to those high-value accounts.

Using the two together helps you offer a more robust strategy. Plus, software, like the HubSpot CMS, allows you to experiment with the creation of campaigns that align with your businesses’ goals.

How to Do Account-Based Marketing

To ensure you keep customers at the center of your account-based marketing strategy, stick to the principles. Make your account-based marketing strategy center around tailoring the way you communicate with your target company.

There are five primary stages to account-based marketing that work hand-in-hand with inbound marketing. Let’s walk through each and detail how you can conduct ABM in a human-friendly way.

1. Identify

Account-based marketing begins with sales and marketing identifying and selecting relevant accounts. When beginning this selection process, data, such as company size, number of employees, location, and annual revenue, can give you an understanding of accounts you may want to target.

Similar to inbound marketing, you can also use buyer personas to understand the day-to-day lives and challenges of your target buyers, then determine content and channels to approach them.

2. Expand

In sales where ABM is typically used, buying decisions are generally made by numerous individuals within a company. ABM helps establish a relationship with each potential buyer and engages them in the purchase decision.

At the expand stage, creating unique, company-specific content that interests each potential buyer within the organization is important. Whether your product is for marketers, operations leaders, or anyone else, ensuring that you identify and engage with everyone in the buying decision is crucial to winning a customer.

Consider the challenges each of your stakeholders faces in order to create compelling content. For example, Finance may be concerned with pricing, while Operations might be focused on user access, ease of use, and security. With this context, you can create targeted content and interactions that match each individual’s concerns and challenges.

3. Engage

Here’s where sales and marketing come together and join the party to engage with stakeholders across various channels. For example, if one of your stakeholders prefers email, then equipping salespeople to reach out to that person with a helpful and relevant message can get a conversation started. This stage is largely about developing relationships with and getting to know all the buyers who will make the final decision.

4. Advocate

Next, you want to nurture bonds with a few stakeholders who can serve as advocates within the organization. The modern buyer can tune out information they don’t want to hear. So it’s up to both marketing and sales here to provide value — and talk about the product when and where necessary.

5. Measure

Finally, reporting at the account level can give you data on what’s working, what’s not, and how to improve over time. With HubSpot ABM software, you can report on company growth, revenue, job titles, engagement levels, and much more — all at the account level.

For more information about how to align ABM with inbound, as well as some tactics for stellar account-based marketing tactics, be sure to check out this ultimate guide.

If you’re a company that sells into a smaller addressable market and has its sights on a handful of highly critical accounts, you can learn more about building an ABM strategy without abandoning your inbound philosophy in this webinar.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in May 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Imagine a world where you could start the sales process by selling directly to your best-fit, highest-value accounts. No wasted time working to market and sell to unqualified leads who aren’t the right fit for your business. Meaning, you could move straight into the phases of engaging and delighting your target accounts.

Talk about efficiency, right?

With account-based marketing, all of this is made possible. The process allows you to align your marketing and sales teams from the get-go to promote long-term business growth, delight customers, and boost revenue.

This guide is here to help you make it happen. Let’s dive in.

Account-based marketing allows you to weed out less-valuable companies early on and ensure Marketing and Sales are in complete alignment — in return, your team can leap into the critical processes of engaging and delighting those accounts much faster.

ABM helps your business work and communicate with high-value accounts as if they’re individual markets. By doing this — along with personalizing the buyer’s journey and tailoring all communications, content, and campaigns to those specific accounts — you’ll see greater ROI and a boost in customer loyalty.

Before we take a look at additional benefits of account-based marketing and specific tactics you can implement at your company, let’s review its relationship with another important strategy: inbound marketing.

Often, these strategies are thought of as entirely different entities. However, they can be quite complementary.

Account-Based Marketing And Inbound Marketing

Batman and Robin. LeBron and D-Wade. Peanut butter and jelly. Arguably some of the strongest partnerships ever to exist 💪. These dynamic duos are forces to be reckoned with when they work together.

Similarly, when paired, account-based marketing and inbound marketing have the power to make waves (the good ones) for your business.

You might be wondering, “How exactly does this partnership work?”

Well, we just reviewed the definition of account-based marketing — as you learned, ABM is a highly-targeted strategy.

Meanwhile, inbound marketing is more foundational — the methodology and growth strategy allows you to attract customers through the creation of valuable content, SEO, and a delightful customer experience.

Rather than interrupting your target audience and customers (as you would with outbound marketing), inbound marketing allows you to more organically provide your audience with the information they want when they want it. Inbound lays the foundation for a strong ABM strategy by allowing for highly-targeted and efficient resource allocation of high-value accounts.

Here are a few more reasons to implement both ABM and inbound marketing:

• Inbound marketing helps you attract target accounts and ABM then accelerates the flywheel so you can win and delight those target accounts with a remarkable customer experience (and as a result, you’ll grow better).
• Inbound marketing lays the foundation for a strong ABM strategy — ABM builds off of inbound by allowing for targeted and efficient resource allocation of high-value accounts.
• With this combined approach, you attract a broader group of prospects than you would while using just one method and catch any opportunities the other strategy may have missed.
• Your content has a two-for-one value — you can create and use content that serves both an ABM and inbound strategy (e.g. create a personalized case study for a target account that you also share on your website).
• Software options, like HubSpot’s account-based marketing software, are available and make it easy to implement ABM and inbound strategies in a complementary way.

🧡TLDR: Combine ABM and inbound marketing to grow better.

Next, we’ll take a look at some of the definable benefits of account-based marketing.

There are a number of benefits associated with account-based marketing. We’ve compiled the following list of commonly-noted results that positively impact (all types of) businesses.

1. Keep Marketing and Sales aligned.

Cross-team collaboration and improved communication across any organization are beneficial to growth. In terms of account-based marketing, this transparency and alignment will ensure your marketing and sales teams are focused on the same goals, stick to the mutually-agreed-upon budget, and understand the specific roles of each internal stakeholder.

This alignment helps ensure all communications, interactions, and content (and more) are consistent for the accounts you work with. Meaning, no matter how long an account works with your company, your team members can pick up where others left off at any point in time without question — this creates a seamless and delightful customer experience.

🧡The easiest way to maintain internal account-based marketing alignment is with the help of software, like HubSpot, which makes connecting your marketing and sales teams exceptionally easy.

2. Maximize your business’s relevance among high-value accounts.

Account-based marketing requires you to personalize everything (e.g. content, product information, communications, and campaigns) for each account you invest your resources in. Through this personalization and customization, your relevance among these accounts is maximized.

That’s because your content and interactions are tailored in a way that shows them how your specific products, services, offerings, and team are what they need to solve their challenges and to grow better. Meaning, ABM allows you to angle your business in a way that makes it the most-relevant and ideal option for your target accounts.

3. Deliver consistent customer experiences.

As mentioned, account-based marketing requires you to deliver consistent experiences for your accounts — this plays a major role in your success. A large part of the reason for this is because ABM is a long process that often lasts several months or years.

So, for your ABM efforts to be remarkable, you must maintain a long-term sense of delight among your accounts. This is how you’ll make each account feel as though they’re your business’s market of one — and why would they ever want to stop doing business with you if that’s their experience?

Delivering these long-term, consistent experiences may seem a bit daunting. Although this is understandable, the good news is that ABM is a process that naturally encourages you to do so.

Think about it this way: We already discussed the way ABM requires Marketing and Sales to be aligned on all things related to each account (e.g. their goals, budget, unique needs, members of their team and buying committee).

When there’s a universal understanding of these factors within your organization, Marketing and Sales (and anyone else involved) will be able to effectively and naturally deliver that feeling of consistency through everything they communicate and share with each account (e.g. personalized content, targeted campaigns, pricing and product information, and more).

4. Measure your return on investment.

With account-based marketing, you can easily measure return on investment (ROI) for each account you invest your resources and time into. This is beneficial because you can confirm whether certain accounts you invested in were ideal for your business.

Then, you can nurture and delight those accounts long term as well as identify and target similar accounts in the future. If your ROI proves your ABM tactics worked, use those results as a motivator to drive your strategy forward as well as one you can count on to continually improve your bottom line.

5. Streamline the sales cycle.

Depending on your business, industry, and resources, the sales cycle typically looks something like this:

1) Prospect → 2) Connect → 3) Research → 4) Present → 5) Close → 6) Delight

With account-based marketing, this cycle is streamlined — by focusing your efforts on specific high-value target accounts, you save time and resources, and spend more time on the stages of the cycle that positively impact your bottom line:

1) Identify Target Accounts → 2) Present to Target Accounts → 3) Close Target Accounts → 4) Delight Accounts

ABM streamlines your sales cycle by helping you stay efficient. Rather than experimenting with different tactics to prospect and qualify a large pool of leads, ABM ensures your target accounts are ideal for your business so you can quickly dive into building relationships.

The sales cycle stage of closing is also streamlined through ABM. That’s because your chances of converting accounts and retaining them long term increase thanks to marketing and sales alignment, consistent customer experiences, and personalization.

6. Expand business through account relationships.

The saying “quality over quantity” applies to account-based marketing. The process requires you to invest significant time and resources in engaging and delighting a group of carefully-chosen, high-value accounts, versus trying to quickly close deals with less-qualified leads who may not be the best fit for your company in the long run.

By taking the time to build these trusting relationships with accounts, you’ll expand business by retaining those valuable customers longer. And considering it costs more to obtain customers than retain them, this will positively impact your bottom line.

Additionally, as a result of personalized, thoughtful, and consistent customer experiences, accounts will become loyal to your business over time — and loyal customers become your best marketers, promoters, and brand advocates.

In other words, your accounts will help you expand your business among their networks (e.g. partners, customers) through referrals, word-of-mouth marketing, testimonials, and more.

Now let’s cover some account-based marketing tactics you can apply to your strategy to improve the likelihood of success.

ABM tactics are the building blocks of your strategy — so, work through the following list to ensure your ABM efforts and investment are successful.

1. Secure organizational ABM alignment.

One of the most important account-based marketing tactics is arguably one of the most straightforward: Secure organizational ABM alignment.

This means getting all internal stakeholders on board with the various factors related to your account-based marketing strategy. In doing so, it’ll be easier for your business to create consistent experiences for accounts and make sure your strategy is as efficient and streamlined as possible.

For example, your VP of Marketing and VP of Sales should secure organizational alignment and spread awareness regarding:

• Marketing and sales team members who are directly involved in the strategy
• Account buying committee members and any other account stakeholders
• Your business’s point-of-difference for each target account
• ABM budget and resources
• ABM goals and KPIs

2. Build your ABM team.

Similar to the first tactic we reviewed above, VPs of Marketing and Sales will also likely be leaders in the discussion regarding how you’ll build your ABM team.

They, along with managers on their respective teams, will need to identify a minimum of one marketer and one sales rep who will be completely dedicated to the accounts you work with.

These people will create and publish content for accounts as well as work to manage and close business deals with each account’s buying committee. (As a rule of thumb, try to limit your team size to no more than ten sales reps and one marketer.)

In addition to the marketer(s) and sales rep(s), don’t forget to identify any other internal key players — such as customer success reps — who should be aware of and aligned on your ABM strategy.

3. Identify and pick your ideal set of target accounts.

Identify and pick your ideal set of high-value target accounts to invest your time and resources in.

Here are some recommendations on how you can do this:

• Set search alerts for your ideal customer profile on LinkedIn.
• Create a workflow that filters incoming qualified leads based on specific criteria (e.g. company size, industry, etc.) and tags them as an ideal customer type in your CRM.
• Ask, “If we could replicate one deal from last year, what would it be?” Then, use the characteristics of that deal (e.g. industry, company size, value) to help you identify other good-fit customers.
• Pick target accounts based on a particular industry or geographical location.
• Review major companies and leads who are using and engaging with your inbound content but don’t have a deal attached (yet!).
• Identify the lighthouse accounts you could use for reference.
• Stick to no more than 10 accounts per sales rep.

4. Encourage Marketing and Sales to create account plans together.

Throughout this guide, you’ve probably picked up on the fact account-based marketing is a team effort. That’s why ensuring appropriate marketing and sales team members are involved in account planning is so important.

Make sure Marketing and Sales ask the following questions while they work on account plans:

• Who will we need to know at each account (e.g. buying committee members and account stakeholders)?
• What content will we need to attract and engage account buying committee members (and any other stakeholders)?
• Which channels will we use to share content with the right people at each account?
• How will we (marketers and sales reps) provide the right type of support throughout each stage of the strategy and sales process — in other words, how will sales help at the outset and how will marketing support in the later stages?

🧡Store your account plans as pinned notes in your HubSpot CRM, Google Docs, Asana Boards, pinned messages in Slack, and more to allow for easy access and collaboration.

Here are a few other tips Marketing and Sales can use to make your account plans successful:

• Ensure Marketing and Sales align on your product or service’s value proposition and point-of-difference for every account.
• Create personalized content — or update existing content — so it’s tailored to each unique account.
• Customize your allocated resources and budget for each account.

5. Attract contacts from high-quality accounts.

Next, you’ll want to attract the buying committee members and stakeholders of your target accounts. Depending on how long you’ve been in business and any previous ABM work you’ve done, you may or may not already have contacts for specific accounts.

The key to successfully attracting high-quality accounts is to personalize content to those accounts — this will help you elevate brand awareness and maximize relevance among audience members.

Here are some GDPR-compliant recommendations for attracting high-quality accounts:

• Engage accounts on social media (e.g. determine which platforms they’re on, join the groups they’re in, contribute to conversations they’re a part of, and share helpful and relevant content you’ve created).
• Produce a podcast or video series and invite a leader from the account to be a special guest.
• Sponsor a booth at a target account’s conference or event.
• Send direct messages via social media and direct mail via email or post.
• Communicate through LinkedIn InMail outreach (do this simply and without ever leaving HubSpot with the LinkedIn integration).
• Build custom landing pages tailored to the needs, questions, and concerns of accounts.
• Offer gifts for engagement and interaction (e.g. prizes, swag, and discount codes).
• Distribute content such as blog articles across channels that are relevant to each account (e.g. website, social media, and magazines).
• Create ad campaigns and social ads to target different factors such as location, skill, and job title.
• Ask current contacts, accounts, and customers for referrals.
• Invite contacts to (physical or digital) events and ask attendees to invite their colleagues.

6. Forge strong relationships with the account’s buying committee.

Once you’ve attracted high-value accounts, it’s time to forge strong relationships with their buying committees. This is something your team will likely work on over an extended period of time — in fact, it often takes months and even years to develop these bonds. Think of this tactic as one tied to delighting your accounts — you never stop the process of delight.

Here are some thoughts on how you can forge strong, long-lasting relationships with an account’s buying committee.

• Provide education around the value your business — and your product/ service — brings accounts through tailored interactions and engagement.
• Create and share personalized content, such as case studies, to prove the ways you’ll exceed expectations and resolve the challenges of each account.
• Communicate one-on-one when possible to make buying committee members feel like they’re your only priority.
• Host events with and for account members (e.g. dinner) so they get to know your brand and team on a personal level.
• Stick to organized, well-timed meetings.
• Use email sequencing to enhance all communication, be professional, and maintain consistency.

Learn how to showcase your company’s success using compelling case studies with a free case study creation kit.

7. Measure and analyze your ABM results (and make necessary iterations).

While working through and upon completion of the tactics above, it’s crucial you monitor your success. By reviewing and analyzing your ABM results, you’ll identify any gaps or parts of your strategy that need to be changed. This will allow you to make your strategy more effective for your business, marketing and sales teams, and accounts.

Here are some examples of common account-based marketing KPIs that provide insight into how you’re doing:

• Deal creation
• Account penetration (net new contacts added to an account)
• Account engagement
• Deal-to-close time
• Net-new revenue
• Percent of deals closed

🧡For support with your analysis, enlist the help of HubSpot’s library of 12+ ABM reports and pre-built ABM reporting dashboard to gain valuable insight into how to modify your ABM strategy for greater success.

Grow Better With Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing doesn’t have to be overwhelming. By working through the tactics we’ve listed above and implementing software — such as HubSpot’s ABM software — for your marketing and sales team to use together, you’ll identify valuable accounts more efficiently, reduce any friction impacting your flywheel, and grow better.

In today’s day and age, marketing is all about personalization.

It’s about reaching the right people in the right place at the right time. Account-based marketing (ABM) is no different and has been growing in popularity in recent years.

In fact, 87% of account-based marketers say ABM initiatives outperform other marketing investments.

Plus, one in five accounts targeted through ABM becomes considered a qualified sales opportunity.

That’s why ABM is an important tactic to implement if you sell high value B2B products or services to a finite number of companies who have a multi-person buying committee and require personalized content and engagement.

As a marketer, that might seem like a daunting task, because you’ve probably felt the pain of tools that were hard to use, didn’t integrate with your systems, or made collaboration among teams hard.

That’s why using marketing automation and ABM software to make the process seamless is a good idea.

Below, let’s review how to automate your account-based marketing strategy.

1. Create your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

Before you can get started with ABM, you’ll need to define your ideal customer profile. This is similar to a buyer persona, except it’s built around targeting entire organizations rather than individuals.

You’ll want to know what types of companies you want to target. For example, your ICP should include information on company size, revenue, industry, and location.

With software, like HubSpot’s ABM software, you can use ICP workflow templates to help you spot common traits that can be used to classify companies in your database by how well they match your ICP.

Ultimately, automation should help you identify and organize your target accounts. Once you’ve created your ICP, you should be able to use this information in your ABM software to manage your audience.

2. Set up your target accounts.

Once you’ve created your ICP, you should be able to set up your target accounts in your ABM software.

Tagging “Target accounts” in your software will enable you to manage your audience from a Target Accounts dashboard. For example, with HubSpot’s ABM software, you can tag accounts as target accounts and then rank them with the ICP Tier property. Your priority accounts will be marked Tier 1, while lower priority accounts will be marked Tier 3.

Additionally, a great ABM software will use AI-powered target account recommendations to automate the process of researching companies that are a good fit.

These types of tools will help you manage and then segment your lists so you can deliver personalized content to your target accounts.

3. Integrate your ABM, marketing automation software, and CRM.

Before you can build your ABM campaigns, you’ll want to integrate your ABM software with your marketing automation software and your CRM.

For example, with HubSpot, you can use many of the ABM software features if you have Marketing or Sales Pro.

Integrating your marketing tools is important in the automation process. If your ABM software doesn’t interact with your email marketing software or your ads tools, then you won’t be able to automate the process.

Additionally, if it doesn’t interact with your CRM, it’ll be impossible to know if leads become accounts and track the ROI of an account-based campaign.

By integrating these tools, you’ll have your ICP research, target accounts, content, and CRM all in one place.

4. Build your campaigns.

When you have your ABM software and marketing tools set up, it’s time to create your campaigns.

To start, you’ll want to decide what channels you want to use and what actions will trigger an automated workflow.

First, look at your target accounts and find out where they spend their time online. For example, you can build an ad campaign based on people’s job title or company on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Then, you’ll want to think about your customer journey and set up automated workflows. For instance, you can have a task created for a sales rep when someone who works at one of your target accounts interacts with an email, your website, or blog content.

5. Personalize your content.

You probably got started with ABM so you could personalize your marketing campaigns. To do this, you’ll want to create your content, and use your automation tools to segment your audience.

For example, with HubSpot’s ABM software, you can use company lists to create an ad audience or use company ad targeting for your LinkedIn ads.

With your ICP set up, it should be easy to create your content based on your target audience. The content in your ABM campaigns will be similar to other marketing content, except that you’re now targeting specific accounts and companies.

Ultimately, your messaging should address specific pain points, and appeal to solving your target account’s problems.

6. Tailor your engagement.

Another aspect of your ABM strategy will be collaborating with your sales team so they can tailor their engagement with target accounts.

A great way to do this is through automation tools. That’s why it’s important for your CRM and ABM software to work together.

For example, with HubSpot’s ABM software and Sales Hub, you can automate your follow up emails and tasks based on prospect behavior.

However, remember that even though you’re focusing on automation right now, your sales outreach and content should still be personalized.

7. Set up a dashboard to assess ongoing efforts.

The last step to automating your ABM strategy is to track and measure your efforts. With your ABM software, you’ll want to see information at-a-glance.

For instance, on your dashboard, you might include information on your target accounts such as company score, open deals, total pipeline, and the number of decision makers identified.

If your ABM software has company scoring available, you should use it. This is similar to lead scoring, where you assign a score based on the properties in your software.

Additionally, you should consider running A/B tests when you get started with ABM automation so you can see what messaging appeals to your ICP.

While ABM does require thoughtful planning and coordination, using ABM software tools — ideally ones that integrate with your CRM and marketing automation tools — can help you automate and scale your strategy.

For more information on HubSpot’s offerings, read about our ABM software.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in May 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Are you in the market for your new account-based marketing (ABM) software?

If so, then you’ve come to the right place.

Account-based marketing means catering your message to the top decision-makers for target accounts with a blend of marketing of sales tactics — it’s a strategy that targets companies, rather than individual customers.

As HubSpot’s Senior Manager (Accelerated Leadership Program), Ryan Batter states, “The beauty of using an ABM strategy is that it’s customizable to a team’s readiness and budget. Look for a CRM that enables strong integrations to ABM-specific tools to customize your strategy.”

With that in mind, let’s look at account-based marketing software.

1. HubSpot ABM Software

HubSpot’s ABM software lets you carry out a fully-fledged campaign right in your CRM. When using it, you can make an ideal customer profile, or ICP. This ICP will help HubSpot automatically tier prospects based on how good of a match they are to your profile.

Additionally, you can import a spreadsheet of your target accounts. This can also be done manually.

HubSpot’s software helps you identify challenges of prospects so you can personalize specific marketing messages to attract them. You can also use Marketing Hub tools, such as ads, web pages, and social media posts, to market to your customers and make your campaign successful.

2. Terminus

Terminus is a platform that offers full-service ABM software. It helps you build account lists equipped with the data you need to personalize your strategies.

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With Terminus, you can find accounts where they are and run campaigns that target them directly. For instance, you can manage retargeting, automation, and email campaigns within the software and access performance metrics of those campaigns. Analyzing these metrics will give you a better understanding of how to better target accounts.

3. Demandbase

Users of Demandbase’s software experience ABM programs throughout the entire customer journey. The platform allows users to scale their efforts with accounts, rather than using a bunch of confusing point solutions.

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Demandbase was built with B2B marketing in mind and offers a user-friendly interface. Within the platform, you will find solutions for engagement and conversion. These help you identify potential accounts, personalize your strategy, and experiment with new ways to close deals.

4. Triblio

Triblio is an ABM platform that specializes in the growth of account pipelines. Users can leverage ads, analytics, web, and sales tools to help them execute a carefully constructed strategy to attract accounts.

Additionally, users can find out when the best time to reach an account is based on the platform’s ability to analyze the web behavior of industries — all from their dashboard.

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With the software’s one-to-one account marketing setup, you’ll be able to target larger accounts and cater to their challenges directly, right from your dashboard. Triblio also offers a guide for ABM — think of it as a crash course — that teaches you how to use the software for your business.

5. 6Sense

This platform focuses on providing its users with the intent of accounts. It provides users with the capabilities needed to engage with customers. With their service, you can collect insights about an account’s challenges and market to them in a way that provides immediate impact.

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With the engagement platform, you can align your sales and marketing strategies together using data. You’ll be able to use the data provided about accounts to prioritize your strategy and engage customers based on their unique interests. With this setup, you can deliver consistent experiences that scale with your customer’s journey.

6. Engagio

With Engagio, B2B marketers can provide a personalized approach to engagement for accounts. This is done by using the platform’s tools for sales insights, multi-channel creation, and analytics that cover the entire buyer’s journey.

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Engagio’s users are able to unify data from their accounts onto one platform, making easier and more accurate analysis possible. With that data, you can accurately align your sales and marketing strategies, highlight areas to focus on, and execute those strategies.

7. LeanData

LeanData’s software is focused on providing its users with the data they need to connect with accounts accurately. You can use the software to align marketing and sales goals, as well as align revenue operations.

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If you want to unify the data and processes you use across your go-to-market (GTM) teams, LeanData is a great software option. You’ll be able to build a GTM plan, execute it, and access performance analytics with the software.

8. Bound

This platform is intuitive and is built to provide marketers with the tools needed to personalize account-based strategy. With Bound, you can build audiences, create dynamic content, and measure the success of campaigns.

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Bound lets users analyze the web behavior of accounts and build audience segments based on that data. They can also choose how to target those segments using software offerings like email and copy templates. Finally, users can see how their segments are performing and adjust their personalization strategy as needed to best reach accounts.

9. Zymplify

If you want to find prospective accounts and nurture those leads, Zymplify lets you do that on one platform. It offers automated lead qualification tools, so you can turn prospects into customers.

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Their scale-based services let you cater to customers throughout their entire buyer’s journey. Automated services, such as demand generation, prospect identification, sales, and reporting, saves marketers time when creating strategy.

10. MadisonLogic

MadisonLogic is a platform that offers tools for ABM advertising and content syndication. With the software, you can also accelerate your accounts’ customer journey, access insights about campaign performance, and offer a formatted content marketing package.

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This software lets you engage with relevant advertising content, and syndicate that content across multiple channels. That way, you can easily find new and relevant contacts. With their content marketing formats, you can engage with your contacts in a highly stylized and compelling fashion.

11. ActiveDemand

If you work for an agency, ActiveDemand is a great option to look into. It offers services specifically for agencies or marketers to execute their ABM campaigns.

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ActiveDemand’s software lets you engage accounts by delivering campaigns that are relevant and valuable to the challenges of prospects. It allows agencies and small businesses to execute campaigns by offering a full-service suite of tools. For instance, this software provides email marketing, content creation, reporting, and form building.

12. Vainu

Vainu is a platform that focuses on personalizing the interactions you make with accounts. Users are able to spot who is interacting with your content and why, so you can accurately enrich those leads. So, if conversion is one of your big goals for ABM, this might be a good choice.

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The platform aims to help its users find ideal potential accounts, know when to reach out to them, and how to send the message that will catch their attention. It offers synchronization features, such as company contacts, build customer lists, and provides ROI analytics based on sales functions.

13. Leadiro

Leadiro is a B2B customer data platform that helps businesses connect directly to the key decision makers at companies. The software uses demographic profiles to help its users identify their ideal customers, and it offers segmentation tools to organize those prospects into lists, like what’s shown below:

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This platform is extremely helpful for targeting because you can choose specific geographic regions in which to find prospects. If you want to generate more leads globally, this software is a good option. Leadiro also integrates with HubSpot, so customers of both can sync their data.

14. AdDaptive Intelligence

With this service, users can target, engage, analyze, and optimize their account-based marketing campaigns. Its main focus is to provide its users with the tools to connect with high-value decision makers for B2B accounts.

AdDaptive’s software lets you boost your advertising messages to the right business audiences to help you maximize ROI. It also has the capabilities to target customers, analyze advertising analytics, and optimize your future campaigns.

15. RollWorks

RollWorks is a software that helps you drive demand, run digital ad campaigns, and automate sales functions, such as customer outreach. Its software is based around turning target accounts into customers by using machine learning and data. This helps users identify ideal customers and engage them across multiple channels.

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The software lets you create an ideal customer profile so you can begin to find key contacts. You can also run cross-channel campaigns with the platform, and run digital ads through it. From those campaigns, RollWorks will analyze their performance and provide you with key metrics about their impact.

Batter states, “As teams increase commitment and budget to ABM, it likely makes sense to complement a CRM with more focused tools that can provide deeper sophistication in a certain category – ads targeting, company enrichment, intent data, events management.”

As your business grows, so will the tools you will need for account-based marketing. So, when you’re picking software, make sure it’s scalable, and can grow with you.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in May 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

As marketers, we’ve become experts in our target audiences. We know their typical demographic, what they like, the platforms they spend time on, and what they value in a product.

But unlike sales reps — who talk to and learn from our biggest prospects each day — we don’t always know tiny, but crucial, details about the brands or people we most want to sell too. This might be why only 28% of salespeople say marketing is their best source of leads.

So, how do we bridge the gap to better help our sales teams sell to high-priority clients? The answer to this question could be account-based marketing (or ABM).

Rather than just marketing to a broad target audience and hoping someone calls your sales reps, ABM is a strategy where sales and marketing teams align from the start to create campaigns that cater to their most qualified leads and current customers.

For example, as part of an ABM strategy, sales reps might offer marketing teams data from customers, prospects, and those that didn’t buy a product so that the marketers can create a targeted campaign that amplifies why their product is valuable and how it can help targets navigate daily pain points.

While inbound marketing is vital for pulling general audiences and demographics to your site, service, or store, account-based marketing can help you to reel in prospects or qualified leads that are most likely to buy your product.

To show you just how beneficial account-based marketing can be, while also informing you of the challenges it comes with, here are 36 stats you should know in 2020.

36 Account-Based Marketing Stats to Know in 2020

General ABM Stats

• 67% of brands leverage account-based marketing. (HubSpot)
• “Researching Accounts” and “Identifying Target Contacts” are the top two tactics used by marketers within an ABM model. (HubSpot)
• Just one year ago, the top five account-based tactics were sales development rep outreach, digital advertising, direct mail, marketing email, and events. (TOPO)
• Additionally, marketers strongly agree that personalized content (56%) and advanced data management (43%) are keys to ABM’s success. (Forrester)
• Most organizations intentionally only pursue 38% of their target accounts at one time. (TOPO)
• By 2019, 55% of marketers rated their ABM strategy as “established” compared to just 43% in 2018. (Forrester)
• Companies dedicated 29% of their marketing budgets to ABM in 2019. (Engagio)
• It’s estimated that ABM budgets saw an average increase of 41% in 2019. (TOPO)
• 57% of professionals say their companies target 1,000 accounts or under with ABM. (TOPO)

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• At the beginning of 2018, only 18% of adopters had two years of experience in account-based marketing. (TOPO)
• In 2018, 18% of account-based programs were run against current customers (larger organizations with more than $1 billion in revenue ran about 50% of these programs. (TOPO)
• The most common metric marketers use to track ABM is revenue won. (HubSpot)
• Two other metrics marketers most commonly track to measure ABM efforts are the number of pipelines created and account engagement. (Engagio)
• In 2019, 7% of marketers reported a decrease in dedicated headcount for ABM teams, showing that this strategy is going mainstream and being implemented within regular processes. (Forrester)
• In 2019, 40% of the average marketing team was dedicated to ABM. (Engagio)
• 57% of marketers say their organizations have implemented ABM for more than one year. (TOPO)

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Benefits and Challenges of ABM

• Marketing and sales teams that take an ABM approach together can be up to six percent more likely to exceed their revenue goals than teams less ABM-advanced. (Forrester)
• 62% of marketers say they can measure a positive impact since adopting ABM. (Forrester)
• 80% of marketers say ABM improves customer lifetime values, while 86% say it improves win rates. (TOPO)
• 87% of account-based marketers say that ABM initiatives outperform other marketing investments. (ITSMA)
• One in five accounts targeted through ABM becomes considered a qualified sales opportunity. (TOPO)
• Organizations with a strong Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) — which is similar to a buyer persona — achieve 68% higher account win rates. (TOPO)
• More than two-thirds (69%) of top-performing account-based organizations now have a dedicated account based leader. (TOPO)
• 70% of companies that started account-based initiatives in the first six months of 2019 have dedicated ABM leaders. (TOPO)
• 42% of companies that missed their account-based objectives don’t have dedicated leadership. (TOPO)
• The most common challenge with ABM is delivering a personalized experience. (HubSpot)
• The top three challenges of implementing ABM are creating a scalable strategy for multiple accounts, producing customized content, and coordinating programs across marketing, sales development, and sales teams. (TOPO)

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ABM Technology

• By 2021, over half of all sales phone calls will be analyzed by software. (TOPO)
• The conversational intelligence market was estimated to grow by 3x in 2019. (TOPO)
• Voice assistants will account for at least half of automated data entry by mid-2020. (TOPO)
• An estimated 55% of sales data entry was eliminated by automation by 2020. (TOPO)

Smarketing Benefits and Challenges

• Organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing teams experience 36% higher customer retention rates. (MarketingProfs)
• The most common measurement of success for content marketing programs is Total Sales. (HubSpot)
• 85% of marketers with an SLA think their marketing strategy is effective. (HubSpot)
• Only 7% of salespeople said leads they received from marketing were very high quality. (HubSpot)
• Only 28% of salespeople said marketing was their best source of leads (HubSpot)

Create an Effective ABM Strategy

As a marketer, it’s important to know what makes ABM techniques successful and how they differ from other target audience marketing tactics.

Additionally, you’ll want to learn about the companies you’re interested in marketing to, similar to how you learn about a target audience. For example, before creating an ABM campaign, you’ll want to learn about the pain points of companies in your industry, company missions, and what their top decision-makers value in a product or service.

Once you discover valuable data about the accounts you’d like to market to and feel ready to create a campaign, check out our Ultimate Guide to Account-Based Marketing.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in May 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

To understand what the term “trading up” means, let’s start with a scenario.

You wake up early and jog to the Starbucks on the corner of your street. There, you wait in line to order a pumpkin-spiced latte, as you skim emails on your iPhone.

Afterwards, you return home, put on your new Lululemon workout apparel, and hop on your Peloton for an at-home workout.

In this scenario, you’ve “traded up” in a variety of consumer categories: including coffee, technology, clothing, and even workout gear.

Why, for instance, did you feel the need to head to Starbucks and pay $6 for a drink, as opposed to making a quick pot of coffee in your Keurig? Alternatively, why not purchase workout apparel from Marshalls or Target?

(No judgment on any of these decisions: I’ve made them, too.)

Ultimately, trading up refers to a consumer’s tendency to pay more for a higher-quality, more expensive product or service from a brand to which they’ve formed an emotional attachment, and feel a sense of loyalty.

But trading up doesn’t just refer to a consumer’s behavior in the marketplace at-large: it also refers to a consumer’s decision to upgrade their product for a newer model with additional features.

As a marketer, it’s critical you understand the concept “trading up” to discern how you might evoke brand loyalty in a crowded marketplace — or, how you might market a new version of your product to existing consumers.

Here, let’s explore what trading up means, as well as what it means specifically for marketers.

What does trading up mean?

Trading up in the industry at-large.

There are two contexts in which you’ll find the term “trading up” used: within a marketplace at-large, and within your company’s own product suite.

To start, let’s explore what trading up means within an entire marketplace.

In this context, trading up refers to a consumer’s decision to purchase a more expensive product because of the brand value they feel it delivers. This is why consumers will purchase a car for 10X the normal price if it’s marked with BMW, but why they might not make the same decision for a car from a lesser-known brand.

There are a few reasons why a consumer will trade up in the marketplace. For one, a consumer might trade up because the brand meets their aspirational vision of who they want to be. There is undoubtedly a different vision that comes to mind when a consumer thinks of Starbucks versus Dunkin’ — in exchange for this vision, a consumer might be willing to pay more for a coffee.

These top-of-the-line brands often feel “premium” and luxurious, incentivizing consumers to pay more than they would for another version of that product in the marketplace from a lesser-known or lower-quality brand.

However, that isn’t to say that consumers purchase products from certain companies entirely based on brand name alone. No matter how impressive Starbucks’ brand image is, it doesn’t do much good if the coffee is disgusting.

Ultimately, you can’t have one without the other. A brand like Starbucks, BMW, or Apple rises to the top of their industries because they provide high-quality, well-engineered products — not just because they have a good brand image to match.

Additionally, these brands have built a good deal of trust with existing consumers, which leads to positive word-of-mouth marketing. Considering over 90% of consumers trust family and friends’ suggestions more than advertising, this is important.

For instance, nowadays, Apple doesn’t need to appeal to consumers with constant commercials and billboards — instead, they can trust their loyal brand advocates to do the heavy-lifting (just consider the jokes you find on Twitter when you search “green bubbles”, which signifies a non-Apple user).

Suggestions from friends and family is the second powerful reason a consumer will trade up. Perhaps you’ve never considered purchasing a Peloton, until you heard your friends raving about the product.

Friends will only suggest a product if it’s truly high-quality and meets their needs above all other competitors in the marketplace.

Which is why, ultimately, you need both a strong brand and a powerful product or service for consumers to feel they’re trading up from the “status quo product” that exists in your industry.

Next, let’s explore what it means for a consumer to trade up at your company in particular.

Trading up within a company’s product suite.

The second context for trading up is within a company, and is also known as upgrading.

For instance, let’s say you sell a starter version of your software, but you’ve just released a new professional version, with higher-quality features. If your consumers choose to upgrade to the new version of your product, they’re “trading up”.

In many ways, this mirrors the first definition. You might think of your starter version as a used car, and your professional version as this year’s latest model.

To encourage consumers to trade up, you’ll want to demonstrate how the new features of your product are powerful and necessary — not just “nice to haves” but “need to haves”.

Take a look at Cross-Selling and Upselling: The Ultimate Guide for more information on this.

Trading Up in Marketing

Now that we’ve explored what trading up means for a consumer, let’s explore what it means as a marketer.

Understanding the reasons a consumer might trade up can help you leverage your brand and products to incentivize consumers to feel they’re trading up when they purchase your products or services.

How? Through good brand recognition (and a high-quality product, of course).

While I used some major brands in my examples, you don’t need to be a large corporation for consumers to feel they’re trading up. For instance, consider my new favorite coffee shop, the Bittersweet Shoppe, on Newbury Street. The cozy cafe is filled with sunflowers and offers fantastic customer service — now, when I go there, I feel like I’m trading up from Starbucks. Ultimately, I like the experience of entering their coffee shop, which is what a good brand image is all about.

If you work for a small business, there are plenty of strategies you might implement to create a strong brand, including building a brand strategy, prioritizing consistency, and using a strong mission or vision statement to guide all your decisions.

Additionally, encouraging consumers to trade up, or upgrade, from within your product suite involves strong messaging, sales and marketing alignment, and a true understanding of what your consumers need and how your newer version can meet those challenges, particularly as consumers out-grow your first product.

Ultimately, people don’t trade up from brands and products they love. Ensure you’re meeting your consumers needs, both through your brand and your products, and they’ll tell their friends and family. Soon enough, you’ll be the brand people trade up for.

Just consider this: I’m going on six years of owning an iPhone, with no interest in pivoting. Now that’s the power of a good brand, and a strong product.

As marketers, we all want to climb the career ladder as quickly as possible. But if you’re going to become a marketing manager one day, you first need to learn what the role demands.

Moving up in ranks means becoming more involved in the marketing process, and eventually becoming the principal implementor.

As a marketing manager, you’d be in charge of a team. Employees will look up to you as you once looked up to your manager.

However, accepting this position comes with increased responsibility. It can feel rewarding to watch your strategies come to life, but it’s important to understand what the role entails.

Below, we’ll go over what a marketing manager is, what a marketing manager does, the management process, and the skills and education you’ll need to become one.

What does a marketing manager do?

Marketing managers have a variety of responsibilities. While there are industry-specific standards, there are common tasks that all marketing managers will do:

• Conduct market research to understand the public interest and determine the marketability of products and services.
• Design creative and unique marketing strategies across multiple channels like social media, tv, billboards, and newspaper articles.
• Create marketing plans detailing outcomes and goals.
• Create comprehensive budgets and cost estimates.
• Negotiate with potential clients and partners to prepare sales and advertisement contracts.
• Handle public relations and troubleshoot internal and external issues as they arise.

Marketing managers are also responsible for training their team members on campaign-specific marketing plans. They’ll hire new employees to join their team, selecting those they believe will meet intended goals for executing brand strategy. They collaborate with all team members, motivating them to meet goals while providing guidance and delegating tasks.

Marketing Management Process

To succeed in their responsibilities, marketing managers follow a similar process. Each step in that process requires a unique approach depending on the product, service, or business.

Idea Generation

Marketing managers approach the idea generation stage with an intended product in mind or an idea for a product or service that a business hopes to create.

They’ll conduct market research to understand current trends and customer interest. If a new product is launching, are there competitors? How successful are they? What are consumers saying about available products, and how can they be improved?

Understanding consumer interests and behaviors is key to beginning this process.

Marketing Plan

After identifying markets and understanding trends, marketing managers will develop a marketing plan that they’ll use to implement their strategy. This plan identifies the target audiences, campaign-specific tactics, budget, and goals.

They’ll work with different teams, like UX product design, financial departments, and sales engineers, to develop a strategy that  will allow the product to meet its intended goals. While a marketing manager is the chief decision maker, there may be financial aspects that they are not aware of. Collaboration between all teams ensures that the marketing plan is as comprehensive as possible.

The marketing manager will likely conduct tests with intended audiences to ensure that the final marketing plan will drive the most revenue before implementation. This may take the form of focus groups, personal modeling, or consumer interviews.

Implementation and Results

At this point, the marketing manager will work with their team to implement the finalized marketing plan. Timelines will be set for tracking campaign metrics, using data to adapt the strategy if necessary.

Regardless of campaign outcomes, all research and data will inform future marketing processes.

Skills to Become a Marketing Manager

Most companies require their marketing professionals to have a bachelor’s degree. Still, since the marketing industry adapts quickly, companies don’t necessarily need their marketers or marketing managers to have specialized degrees in specific fields. Some companies may require professional degrees or memberships in professional associations.

However, there is one universal requirement to become a marketing manager — a three- to five-year track record of consistently performing to your potential and achieving your goals. If you want to become a marketing manager one day, your performance as an individual contributor matters more than anything.

For instance, if the main goal is to manage a company’s blog team, one would need to prove that they’ve consistently written quality content that has met their manager’s expectations.

There are basic soft skills that a marketing manager should possess, like creativity, critical thinking, and leadership. However, a combination of these skills along with well-developed hard skills are crucial for job success. There are six essential skills an aspiring marketing manager should work to develop.

1. Communication

A marketing manager’s job revolves around communicating with different audiences by developing creative content for advertisements, videos, and articles. This content must also be consistent with the tone, branding, and voice outlined in the marketing plan.

The marketing manager will also be in conversation with their own managers, team members, and external stakeholders.

Understanding how to confidently communicate with different audiences is critical for this role.

2. Budgeting 

Marketing Managers handle all kinds of resources, from campaign budgets to pay-per-click ads to influencer marketing. All of these actions require budgeting skills.

A marketing manager also handles  internal budgets for their team, ensuring that everyone has the resources they need.

3. Negotiation

After creating the marketing plan, the marketing manager will need to convince internal stakeholders of its value. They’ll need to identify the right teams, and convince them of the benefits to the business and intended customers. Without internal buy-in, the campaign may cause internal confusion if all teams aren’t on the same page.

The marketing manager may need to negotiate with other teams if they believe changes need to be made. They may agree with some suggested changes, but they’ll also need to know when to negotiate and advocate for certain elements of their plan if they are called into question.

Externally, the marketing manager may be involved in financial negotiations with outside stakeholders to ensure that budgets aren’t over-spent.

4. Planning and Execution

Long term planning and goal setting are two important skills to be a marketing manager. They need to understand intended outcomes, plan for intended results, and execute the strategy to meet those outcomes. For example, is the ultimate goal to gain 1,000 Instagram followers? How will that happen? What steps need to be taken along the way to reach the goal?

When managing multiple marketing channels and entire teams of people, understanding how much time to dedicate to all aspects of a campaign is essential.

Can you create comprehensive plans to manage your tasks? Can you meet deadlines? Can you deliver high-quality work under said deadlines? These are questions that might be asked when interviewing for a marketing management position.  

5. Collaboration and Delegation

Marketing managers lead an entire marketing team. Size may vary, but there are several people who will work under their direction.

They need to work well with others and enjoy building relationships with internal teams and external stakeholders. However, it’s still important to be a leader that can step in and assign tasks when necessary. For example, the marketing manager would ensure that their team members are assigned the right tasks for their skillset, and that individual performance aligns with task expectations.

6. Adaptability

Customer behavior and markets can be volatile, so adapting to changing industry standards is a must. For example, a strategy may need to be adapted after falling short on expected outcomes. Instead of giving up, the marketing manager should devise a plan with their team to come up with alternative options.

7. Empathy 

Understanding markets means understanding consumer needs and predicting what they want and how they’ll react to your service. This requires a significant amount of emotional intelligence.

On their teams, marketing managers are responsible for balancing role expectations with team member’s capabilities. For example, if someone on their team is stressed because they aren’t meeting deadlines, it’s the marketing managers job to address the issue with empathy. An effective marketing manager would be able to recognize their stress and work with them to come up with effective ways to meet their goals.

Ultimately, marketing managers develop unique, ambitious marketing strategies for products, 

businesses, and services. They create comprehensive marketing plans, and work with their teams to execute them successfully.

A marketing manager ensures that products, services, and businesses have the best chance to thrive in their intended markets, satisfying both companies and consumers.

Anyone who works to develop the skills outlined in this piece will be successful in their role as marketing manager.

Everyone wants to be #1 … especially when it comes to marketing.

Reaching the top of search engine results and creating content that becomes viral is a marketer’s dream — but it’s often not that simple.

Creating good, high-quality marketing campaigns mean creating content that aligns with your marketing goals, target audience’s interests, brand voice, and so much more.

Plus, it needs to be effective without breaking the bank or surpassing the resourcing constraints your team might be up against.

Additionally, building a strong online presence takes time and patience. Marketing campaigns can only be effective once you’ve invested in properly defining your value proposition, messaging, and brand authority.

Fortunately, there are three high-impact marketing strategies you can implement to see maximum results. Here, we’ll dive into three highly effective campaigns you might use for both quick wins, and impressive long-term results.

1. It’s More Than Just LinkedIn: Account-Based Marketing

LinkedIn Ads are the leading tool for generating new leads in B2B and a great start to any ABM campaign.

On LinkedIn you can target by company, location, job title, and more, which can help you reach the right people at the right time. You can even set it up right from your Hubspot Account!

But you don’t have to stop there. You need to build the journey beyond the ads. For instance, how will you nurture leads, who will nurture them, and when?

To maximize engagement with your ABM campaign, combine it with an inbound campaign. Build an infrastructure of additional content and emails to nurture your new leads and keep them engaged. Be sure to constantly refresh your content to maintain relevance and new interest.

Here’s a five-step plan to build an effective ABM campaign with inbound tactics:

1. Designate an owner of the campaign and ensure buy-in from all team members company-wide.
2. Create a LinkedIn Lead Generation campaign focused on your ideal companies’ industry with captivating ads.
3. Create or update existing landing pages and content that speak directly to the targeted audience. Customize the messaging and design to really grab their attention and create a connection.
4. Set up a workflow that will take the new leads and nurture them with the above content, as well as specialized landing pages (for advanced campaigns, set a nurture for each company or industry with customized content and messaging for each).
5. Monitor the leads and their engagement so you can reach out with the right content at the right time.

2. Two is Better than One: Partnerships

An often untapped source for high-impact marketing is partner collaboration. Finding a partner with whom to create a piece of content is highly effective both in terms of engagement and costs.

Partners will have a different perspective and can provide insights that you might not have considered. Plus, the backlinks is valuable from an SEO perspective. The assets you create with your partner can be shared with both of your brand’s networks, expanding your exposure and enabling you to reach new audiences.

Simple ways to create these partnerships include offering a guest blog post, inviting a speaker to join you on a webinar, or creating an infographic that showcases both companies’ expertise.

Make sure to choose your partners wisely. Your partner should have shared values, a strong following, and provide value to your target audience.

For instance, in early 2020 our company planned on hosting a Hubspot User Group (HUG) at the Google Campus in Tel Aviv. Following the pandemic and subsequent social distancing, all plans were canceled and companies were forced to adapt at lightning speed. All of a sudden, physical meet-ups were out of the question.

To solve for this, we decided to host a virtual event in less than three weeks. Thanks to a dedicated staff and strong partnerships, some of the industry’s top marketing leaders reached out to us about how they could take part in the event.

These leaders’ involvement brought on a snowball effect of leads from their networks interested in joining the event. Plus, although our HUGs are normally restricted to 300 registrants due to space limitations, we were able to accept over 1,200 registrants to the virtual event.

3. Actions Speak Louder than Words: Customer Evangelism

Customer evangelism may be one of the most impactful tools for generating high-potential leads. You can create amazing campaigns, but nothing compares to a freely given recommendation by a satisfied client.

The inbound flywheel is made up of three sections; Attract, Engage, and Delight. If you don’t delight your customers, then your flywheel can’t reach maximum speed.

A customer evangelism program is not a linear campaign. You must delight your customers at all touchpoints, so when an opportunity arises they will gladly recommend you to their network.

Moving beyond impeccable service and outstanding results, think of other creative ways to connect with clients and build your relationships. This can be anything from shout-outs on social media for wins, to sending new year wishes to show you are thinking of them. Ultimately, a little generosity can go a long way.

Recently, one of our customers was on LinkedIn when he came across a post from a connection who hadn’t heard of us. Because he was delighted with our services, our customer commented that the connection should check us out — one day later, he was speaking with a sales rep in the first step to becoming a new customer.

You are already constantly in touch with your customers, and they have endless potential to bring in new business — don’t let that go to waste.

These strategies are only the first step in building a high-impact marketing strategy. They must be combined with a full strategic plan aligned across your entire company, from marketing to sales to customer success and beyond.

Each campaign is only one block inside a larger marketing plan that needs to cover all stages of the flywheel. No campaign can live on its own.

Additionally, it’s important to remember the importance of monitoring old campaigns to gather insights and ensure you’re optimizing each future campaign for better results.

Do you know how you have siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles? Well, brands kind of do too — only their fellow brands probably don’t get way too aggressive about the conspiracy theories they believe in while everyone’s just trying to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner like somebody’s Uncle Gary does every year.

While brands don’t go through that kind of situation that totally doesn’t apply to me, they’re still generally related — falling under umbrellas set by larger, overarching firms. And if we’re running with the whole family analogy, the family trees those umbrellas set are known as brand portfolios.

Here, we’ll get a more thorough understanding of brand portfolios, see the different kinds of brands that can compose one, and explore some prominent brand portfolio examples.

Firms generally create, expand, and maintain brand portfolios to gain footholds in multiple markets and appeal to a wider variety of prospects. This trend has a presence in virtually every industry. For the sake of example, let’s imagine a firm that runs a single fast-food chain.

That flagship brand serves typical fast-food fare at bargain prices. That chain is doing well, but executives at the firm are noticing a significant shift in consumer preferences. Now, a solid segment of the chain’s market is starting to err towards healthier options.

The flagship brand’s identity has been firmly established as a value-oriented albeit not-so-healthy franchise — so much so that making its menu healthier might alienate the majority of its customers who aren’t interested in health-food.

In this case, the firm could explore the possibility of creating a new restaurant — one with an emphasis on healthy options. If it decides to take that route, it would add another brand to its brand portfolio.

The brands contained within your average brand portfolio tend to fall into four main roles: flanker brands, cash cow brands, low-end entry-level brands, and high-end prestige brands. Each category serves a purpose, and in many cases, a firm will create and maintain brands that fulfill different roles to complement one another.

1. Flanker Brand

A flanker brand is a brand a company releases in a product category in which it already has an existing brand. The hope is that the new brand helps increase the company’s market share within that product category and serves the needs of prospects the original brand might not cover.

For instance, alcoholic beverage company Molson Coors leverages a flanker brand strategy in its approach to the low-calorie beer market. The company has released multiple brands — including Miller Lite, Coors Light, and Keystone Light — that all occupy a similar niche.

Still, the brands are distinct enough to appeal to different consumers and suit different situations. Even though they’re technically competing, flanker brands complement more than they cannibalize. They’re designed to help a company flesh out its market presence and crowd out competitors.

2. Cash Cow Brand

A cash cow brand is one that has reached a certain level of maturity with respect to its market presence and ability to make money. These brands can generate enough profit to essentially sustain themselves — keeping themselves afloat after businesses recoup their initial investments from them.

It’s much less expensive to sit back and let these brands continue to bring in cash than to launch any sort of new product to replace them. As a result, they’re rarely removed from the market.

3. Low-End Entry-Level Brand

A low-end entry-level brand is one that’s added to a brand portfolio to be offered at a lower price than the other products or services that portfolio covers. The principle behind low-end entry-level brands has to do with hooking customers.

The idea is that consumers will buy the low-end entry-level brand initially — effectively introducing them to that brand’s broader portfolio. Once a customer has engaged with and been impressed by the company behind the low-end entry-level brand, they’ll be inclined to explore the broader suite of products in its portfolio.

4. High-End Prestige Brand

High-end prestige brands are ones designed to create the impression of premium quality and luxury. The hope is that some of the esteem the brand creates will trickle down onto the other brands within the company’s broader portfolio.

These kinds of brands are tailored to lead consumers to think, “If this company can create a product of its caliber, maybe its other ones are high quality in their own right.”

1. Coca Cola

Image Source: Coca Cola

Coca Cola’s brand portfolio is about as eclectic, far-reaching as they come — certainly when it comes to the food and beverage industry. Its suite of brands includes drinks and edible products that cover a massive range of purposes, prices, qualities, and regional markets.

2. Nestle

Image Source: Nestle

Nestle is the largest food and beverage company in the world, and the graphic above barely scrapes the surface of its scale. Its brand portfolio is eclectic and contains brands that suit a massive variety of categories and needs.

3. General Electric

Image Source: GE

GE’s brand portfolio is monolithic, meaning all the brands that fall under its broader portfolio are similarly branded. They all feature fundamentally similar names and sport the same logo.

4. Johnson and Johnson

Image Source: Johnson and Johnson

Johnson and Johnson’s brand portfolio covers a variety of markets that fit under the broader healthcare industry umbrella.

Major brands generally don’t exist in a vacuum. Almost all of them are a part of a broader brand portfolio, so virtually every brand has a firm, company, or conglomerate at the top of its lineage.

That’s important to bear in mind when taking actions like trying to be ethical with your dollar. Any brand you use starts somewhere. If you can navigate that product’s portfolio back to a company whose values and actions don’t sit well with you, you’ll know to avoid it.

When I go to bed every night, I have to set about five alarms for the morning.

I’m just the type of person that needs a lot of reminders to wake up on time.

In a similar vein, marketers use reminder advertising to stay top-of-mind with potential customers.

And it makes sense.

In the world of sales, 80% of sales require 5 follow-up calls after a meeting. For marketers, it’s no different.

Essentially, you have to nurture and continuously remind your audience who you are to convert leads.

In fact, companies excelling at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost.

Below, let’s learn more about reminder advertising and see what it looks like in action.

Reminder advertising is a paid method of marketing that targets people in your audience who are in the consideration stage of the buying process.

During this stage, users are reviewing their options. They’re aware of their problem and the companies that might be able to help them. Now, they’re trying to figure out which solution is the right way to go.

In this stage, it’s important to stay at the forefront of your audience’s mind. That’s where reminder advertising comes in.

Another way to use reminder advertising is if you own a retail or ecommerce store. With a reminder ad, you can inspire customers to buy more products from you.

In this case, reminder advertising can help customers remember that they like your store and products.

Additionally, you can use reminder advertising when you’re at the end of the product life cycle. For example, if a product has launched and you’re done with the growth phase, then you can use reminder advertising to keep people interested.

At this point, you might’ve noticed that this type of advertising doesn’t introduce a new product. Instead, these ads are targeted at customers who are already aware of your brand and the products you offer.

Also, these types of ads won’t contain a lot of information. Rather, they’ll just reinforce key messages and brand awareness. For instance, while you might include brief testimonials, usually just the name of the brand and product with a visual is enough.

The objective is to hopefully serve as a reminder for potential customers and increase demand for your product or service.

So, what tactics can you use for reminder advertising? Let’s take a look at a quick list below.

• Retargeting: Retargeting is when users who were on your website or social media page start seeing ads for your company on other pages they visit online. The whole point of retargeting ads is to remind customers of a product or service they were looking at and didn’t buy. Retargeting is essentially a targeted reminder ad.
• Abandoned cart emails: If a potential customer is on your website, adds a product to their cart, but doesn’t complete the purchase, you don’t want to lose that sale. To get them to complete their purchase, you can send them an abandoned cart email and remind them that they have items in their cart they may want to buy.
• Email newsletters: An email newsletter is a great way to stay top-of-mind with your customers. If you’re regularly sending them valuable information and perhaps including special offers, they’ll be more likely to purchase from you.
• Display ads: Display ads on Google or Facebook are another excellent option for reminder advertising. You can create a reminder ad that can help reinforce brand awareness.
• Content: One of the best ways to keep your brand in your audience’s mind is to produce content on your website and social media. If someone sees your posts on social media or on your blog, they’ll have you in their mind when it’s time to purchase.

Now that we know more about reminder advertising, let’s look at some examples.

Reminder Advertising Examples

1. Coca-Cola

Since Coca-Cola is an established brand, any ad that isn’t aimed at a new product launch serves as a reminder ad.

Take the ad below, for instance.

In this ad, Coca-Cola isn’t introducing any new product. All they’re doing is trying to remind you that their brand exists and you might be thirsty.

This is a great reminder ad because you’re probably not thinking about Coke all day. By seeing these types of messages, you’re more likely to purchase a Coke the next time you can.

2. Zillow

Zillow is another brand that benefits from reminder advertising. With Zillow, you can look to buy or rent a new apartment, condo, or house. However, people don’t make these big purchases all the time. Instead, Zillow needs to rely on reminder ads so their audience chooses Zillow when it’s time to buy a new house.

In the ad below, even the tagline reads, “When you’re ready for a change, we’re ready to help.”

This is a great example of a reminder ad. This shows that Zillow isn’t trying to show you anything new, but rather remind you that they’ll be there when you’re ready to buy a house.

3. McDonald’s

Again, McDonald’s is a globally recognized brand. If they aren’t launching a new product, almost any ad you see from them is a reminder ad.

In this McDonald’s ad, the company isn’t trying to launch any new menu items or tell you about something new.

Instead, they’re just reminding you that the company exists. And hopefully, they made you hungry enough to go buy some French fries.

Ultimately, reminder ads are a great way to stay top-of-mind with your audience. Since most people need to come in contact with your brand several times before they purchase, reminder ads are an excellent way to convert leads.

What makes a blog post bad?

There are lots of reasons a blog post could be less-than-perfect. Poor formatting. Poor grammar. Poor word choice. Poor shareability. 

The most pervasive problem? Poor flow. The post jumps from one idea to the next to the next and then circles around again for a split second to the first idea, then back to the fourth, and so on. Or the post reads like a stream of consciousness — but it wasn’t a stylistic choice. 

Luckily, you have a simple solution. Before diving headfirst into writing your post, you can create an outline. 

I’m not talking about jotting down a few quick bullet points — even experienced writers can go astray with just a few talking points. I’m talking a fully fleshed-out outline with enough details that make it virtually impossible for your writing to go off the deep end. And it’s pretty easy to do.

Below is my method for outlining posts and organizing my thoughts. You may prefer to switch up some of the steps depending on your writing style, but your end goal should always be to get an outline detailed enough that its result is a cohesive, logical piece. Here’s one way you can do that. 

1. Nail your working title.

This is the most important step of this entire process. You want to have a clear understanding of what you’re going to write before you start outlining. 

My colleague Corey wrote an awesome post about how to pick a great working title. Go read it, now. I won’t go too much into the weeds here (that’s why you should read her post), but a great working title is specific. It’s “How to Use Images to Generate Leads on Twitter,” not ” Twitter lead generation.”

Spend time getting your working title to something specific and easy to tackle in a blog post format — but don’t waste time getting nitpicky. You can refine your title later. The goal here is to have a title that gives you a very clear idea of what the whole piece is about. You can make it sound catchy later.  

2. Write down as many distinct takeaways from the article as you can.

Next, you get to brain dump. Write down all the things you want your readers to get out of the article. These won’t always be the main sections of your article — it’s just all the things you want your readers to know by the end of reading your post.

This is the only time in the whole process you’re not worried about organization — just let your ideas flow naturally. You need to get out all of your wild and crazy ideas now so they won’t muck up your post later in the process.

Let’s use the previous example to show you what I mean. If my working title was “How to Use Images to Generate Leads on Twitter,” I’d probably want readers to know:

• What sets a good image apart from a bad one on Twitter
• Where they can find images to use legally 
• How they can create images on their own
• What sizes they need to make images
• How often they should tweet images
• How to actually upload an image to Twitter
• How they can generate a lead on Twitter
• How long their tweet should be with the image in it
• What results they should expect to get 

Notice how these are really unfiltered and all over the place. That’s okay. We’ll wrangle it all in in the next step.

3. Break up those takeaways into larger sections.

Now, we’ll take that jumble of ideas and place them into overarching sections. Think of it like sorting laundry — each thought belongs to a different pile. From your brainstorm, you should come up with a few big themes. Sometimes, one of your brainstorming bullets will be a theme in itself, but usually several bullets will fall under one overarching theme. You may also realize that there’s a theme that you may not have any bullets for, but the post definitely calls for it. 

Lots of people recommend sticking to 3-4 larger sections, but it really depends on what type of post you’re writing. If you’re writing something that’s long and comprehensive, you might need more. If it’s a quick post, fewer sections would be ideal. But if you need a benchmark, 3-4 sections are fine. 

So if we’re writing that post about generating leads on Twitter using images, we’d bucket my ideas into the following buckets:

1. Intro
2. Crafting a Twitter Image Lead Gen Strategy
   • How they can generate a lead on Twitter
   • How often they should tweet images
3. How to Create the Perfect Lead Gen Tweet
   • How long their tweet should be with the image in it
   • How to actually upload an image to Twitter
   • What sizes they need to make images
   • How they can create images on their own
   • Where they can find images to use legally 
   • What sets a good image apart from a bad one on Twitter
4. Measuring Your Strategy’s Success
   • What results they should expect to get

4. Add more takeaways to some sections. 

At this point, you should have a pretty weird looking outline. Mine is. Some sections have lots of little bullet points, others have only a few, and others have nothing. 

Now’s the time to fill in the holes. What did you miss in your initial brainstorm? Thinking about what’s missing is always hard, but it will help improve your final post significantly. 

Don’t forget to beef up your intro here, too. Have a great point you think would set the stage for the article? Add a little reminder below that section so you don’t forget it. 

Below shows how my outline’s evolved. I italicized all the things I added, and the outline is becoming closer and closer to being a post:

1. Intro
   • Images work really well on Twitter (find study)
2. Crafting a Twitter Image Lead Gen Strategy
   • How they can generate a lead on Twitter
   • How often they should tweet images
3. How to Create the Perfect Lead Gen Tweet
   • How long their tweet should be with the image in it
   • How to actually upload an image to Twitter
   • What sizes they need to make images
   • How they can create images on their own
   • Where they can find images to use legally 
   • What sets a good image apart from a bad one on Twitter
   • Should you tag people in images
   • Should you use photo collages
   • What colors you should use to stand out
4. Measuring Your Strategy’s Success
   • What results they should expect to get
   • Which metrics to look at
   • How to find them in your analytics
   • How to adjust the above to get better results

Essentially, you’re re-doing the second step, but in a more controlled, organized manner.

5. Revise, remove, and reorganize details in each section.

Now comes the fun part: editing your outline. You’ve already done the hard part of actually thinking of your ideas. Now, you’re tightening up your outline to include only the most relevant information, revising the sub-bullets to actually make sense, and reorganizing the sub-bullets to tell the most logical story.

First, let me show you what I’d cut — shown in bold. 

1. Intro
   • Images work really well on Twitter (find study)
2. Crafting a Twitter Image Lead Gen Strategy
   • How to generate a lead on Twitter
   • How often they should tweet images
3. How to Create the Perfect Lead Gen Tweet
   • How long their tweet should be with the image in it
   • How to actually upload an image to Twitter (This is a pretty basic step that someone would already know if they’re reading this post.)
   • What sizes they need to make images
   • How they can create images on their own
   • Where they can find images to use legally 
   • What sets a good image apart from a bad one on Twitter
   • Should you tag people in images
   • Should you use photo collages
   • What colors you should use to stand out (Don’t believe there’s hard data on this, just speculation. Let’s cut it.)
4. Measuring Your Strategy’s Success
   • What results they should expect to get (The study in the first part should cover this bullet point.)
   • Which metrics to look at
   • How to find them in your analytics
   • How to adjust the above to get better results

I cut things usually because the sub-bullet didn’t add value to the post or the reader would already know it. That’s a pretty good benchmark to remember if you’re not sure whether to cut something. 

Next, we’ll reorganize the remainder of the sub-bullets and rework them to sound like actual takeaways. We’ll also turn some of the sub-bullets into sub-sub-bullets. Here’s what this outline looks like now:

1. Intro
   • Images tend to work really well on Twitter (find study)
2. Crafting a Twitter Image Lead Gen Strategy
   • How to generate a lead on Twitter
   • How lead generation fits in with the rest of your Twitter strategy
3. How to Create the Perfect Lead Gen Tweet
   • How to choose the right image
     • Creating it on your own 
     • Finding images to use legally
   • Optimizing the image for Twitter
     • Sizing images for Twitter
     • Tagging people in images
     • Using Photo Collages
   • Optimizing the rest of your tweet
     • How long the tweet should be with the image in
4. Measuring Your Strategy’s Success
   
   • Which metrics to look at
   • How to find them in your analytics
   • How to adjust your strategy to get better results

Ta-da! A much more comprehensive outline that makes your post easy to write.

6. Include links to your examples and/or data.

This is purely a time-saving trick. After you’ve fully fleshed out and then trimmed your outline, you should look for examples and data to support these claims. Once you find a source to support your arguments, just add them as a note underneath the section — that way, when you go to write it, it’s all organized for you.  

7. If any details come to you that you don’t want to forget, add them in. 

Last, but certainly not least, spruce up the outline with anything you don’t want to forget while writing. Maybe you’re writing the post right away — or maybe you won’t have time to actually start for a few more days. Regardless, having these details in your outline will make sure you’re not missing a thing. I do this often if I think of a terrible pun or pop culture reference while outlining … and trust me, that’s something I definitely wouldn’t want to forget. 😉

Here’s my final outline: 

And that’s it! Feel free to take that methodology and apply it to other types of posts. Once you have a solid outline, writing the actual post should be a breeze. It’s even easier if you work from a template. 

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in May 2014 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.