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Gone are the days when social media publishing and engagement could be tacked onto the daily responsibilities of an intern — as were many of the first roles in social media.

Today’s growth-minded organizations need a team of people ideating, creating, publishing, and promoting content on social media to drive meaningful returns on investment — and this requires time, effort, and creativity.

Marketers are realizing this and dedicating more time, resources, and staff headcount to social media. In the 2017 State of Inbound report, more marketers said they planned to add social channels like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to their marketing efforts than in the previous year’s survey.

Here at HubSpot, we’re constantly evaluating and changing the way we create content on social media to adapt to the way people want to stay connected. As our audience’s preferences for social media content evolve each year, so does our strategy.

In our survey, nearly half of respondents said they wanted to see more social media content — and more videos, especially. So we’ve run a few experiments digging into what our audience wants to see, how they want to engage, and where they want to interact on social media. We’ve also started experimenting with collaborating more closely with influencers and media professionals to generate buzz on social media — akin to offsite SEO strategies we know and love already.

We have our strategies, process, and results to share that might inform your strategy, but our greatest piece of advice for any social media team — no matter the size — is to always experiment. The social media space changes so much every month — it’s important to figure out what works, but it’s also important to remain agile so you can try new things whenever you can.

How We Increased Video Views 20X by Creating Native Social Media Content

Social media has changed.

That might read like the biggest understatement in the world, but hear me out.

As part of our previous social media strategy, our posts were connected to lead generation goals — and most had a strong tie to our brand and promoting our content. Now, our content is all about our audience — and not all about us. We needed to refocus and remember that our audience members are people, just like us. If we wouldn’t want to see a piece of content in our Facebook News Feeds, why would our audience? We wanted to test the effect of focusing our content on our audience — what they want to learn about, what their goals are, and even what struggles they face.

In short, we wanted to be more social, and less promotional.

This doesn’t mean we recommend doing away with sharing blog content or ebooks on social media entirely. After all, it’s hard to come up with new ideas for creating social media videos to share every day of the week. We’re just saying you shouldn’t post a link to a blog post or ebook on Facebook and call it a day. Instead, get inspired by the ideas and salient points, and repurpose your content into Facebook videos, Instagram albums, or Snapchat Stories. You can still use the good ideas — but use them to create native social media content that performs better for the medium.

If your current social media strategy sounds like our previous, all-about-us approach, don’t worry — read on to learn how we’ve changed things up.

1) Different Video Topics

The Goal:

We examined our audience and learned what they did engage with in our previous social media strategy. Then, we researched the broader social media and digital landscapes. We wanted to learn what marketers and salespeople were already engaging with and finding relevant, and how we could create content more specifically for them, instead of distributing our content on social media channels for our goals.

The Experiment:

We created a list of topics and headlines we believed our audience would respond well to — that were more lifestyle and culturally-oriented — and immediately started creating content. Then, we started brainstorming culturally relevant and popular topics and saw how we could creatively present them to this audience in a way that makes sense for our audience and their world.

Our audience is made up of marketers and salespeople who want to learn how to grow and get better at their jobs — so instead of using our social media channels to simply push out content we were producing on our blogs, offers, and external channels, we’ve started creating content specifically for our Facebook audience based on what we know about what they like (like this video about making coffee to improve productivity — two things busy people love):

The Results:

We went from an average of 50,000 video views per month to 1 million views in our first month performing these experiments. Our engagement rate also shot up as the content resonated with our audience and they started liking, commenting, and sharing our posts.

Take a look at our engagement rates from our previous social strategy (orange indicates reach, and pink indicates clicks):

And here’s what our views and engagement rate looked like under our new strategy:

Pretty big jump, huh?

Key Takeaway for Marketers:

When you start evaluating how to generate more Likes, comments, and shares from your Facebook audience, think about how you yourself use the platform. You might not be as interested in sharing a post that’s highly specific to one brand or organization, but you might engage with a post that’s highly relevant to you, right?

Conduct some detailed persona research, analyze your Facebook audience insights, and learn more about how they’re spending time on the platform instead of simply using Facebook as a means to only promote what you’re doing. Create social media content specifically for your audience, and you’ll get better results.

2) Different Video Design Devices

The Goal:

We wanted to test our videos to see if different designs and formats would lead to different engagement rates.

The Experiment:

We tested the effects of some new design devices. These included starting videos with a human face, putting title bars throughout the duration of our videos, ensuring there were captions throughout, adding a “Best with Sound on” animation, and providing a CTA with the goal of audience engagement.

• Human face: We felt that people would respond best to a human face as they would feel connected. Here’s an example.
• Title bars: People are scrolling so fast we wanted to grab their attention and make sure they knew what our video was about in that quick motion. It also helps if someone gets distracted during the video, they will always know the topic. Here’s an example.
• Subtitles: Our historical data showed that about 95% of people watched our videos without the sound on. We wanted to meet them where they were at and make sure that our videos could still be watched in that format. Here’s an example.
• “Best with Sound On” animations: Knowing our audience primarily watches with the sound off, we wanted to make sure our videos that benefitted from sound were noted as such. Here’s an example.
• Call-to-action: To help facilitate how people could engage with our video, we ask them questions, or ask them to respond in some way to our video. Here’s an example.

The Results:

In January 2017, the average Facebook view earned 4,500 views. By May 2017, our average number of Facebook video views had increased to 56,000 per new video. Additionally, our average number of video engagements (Likes, comments, clicks, and shares) during this time period increased from 100 to 496. Finally, our percentage of Facebook viewers who watched videos with the sound off decreased from 95% to between 60-70% per video.

Overall, we averaged 50,000 total Facebook video views per month last year, and this year so far, we’re averaging about 1 million total video views per month.

Key Takeaway for Marketers:

The design devices we added are designed to make for an easier viewing experience for the audience and crafted based off how people are using social these days. We are serving up videos to our audience how our audience wants to see them, and the results show that it’s working. Use different devices and tools, such as the ones we tried, to make your videos easier to consume for your audience — no matter where or how they’re watching.

3) Different Video Sizes

The Goal:

We want to create videos that are eye-catching and attract our audience’s attention in the Facebook News Feed to increase our video views and engagement on the platform.

The Experiment:

We’ve started experimenting with different video sizes and formats to improve engagement and increase video views. The default Facebook video size has an aspect ratio of 16:9 (a rectangle), like the video below. When viewers click the video to watch on mobile devices (where roughly 90% of Facebook users access the platform), it only takes up part of the center of their screen in the News Feed:

And when viewers click in to watch the video, it takes up so little space that Facebook queues up another video for them to watch next — or potentially navigate away to if they get bored with the original video:

Conversely, when we post Facebook videos with a 1:1 aspect ratio, the video takes up 78% more space on the mobile News Feed — and it takes up more space when the viewer clicks to watch it, too.

The Results:

We haven’t experimented with mobile Facebook video sizes enough to report on it — yet. Luckily, our friends at Buffer have us covered — they partnered with Animoto to experiment with optimal Facebook video sizing for mobile earlier this year.

Buffer and Animoto found that square videos (1:1) outperformed landscape videos (16:9) in both views and engagement. Over the course of the experiment, square videos achieved 30-35% more views and 80-100% more engagement than the landscape format. You can dig into all of the results in Buffer’s blog post for all of the findings — including the interesting note that landscape videos outperformed square videos for desktop users.

Since the odds are that most of your Facebook fans will access your content on mobile devices, filming videos in a square aspect ratio will most likely drive more engagement and more video views for your content on the platform. But, if you’re specifically targeting desktop users for a campaign or ad, landscape videos might be a better choice.

Key Takeaway for Marketers:

Film videos in 1:1 aspect ratios to take up as much space as possible on your audience’s mobile phones — because that’s where they’re interacting with you the most. Next, we’ll be trying to film in 9:16 aspect ratio to take up the entire screen — like an Instagram or Snapchat Story — and we’ll keep you posted how those perform in future posts.

Tl;dr: Native Social Media Content

Think about creating content for social media the way you think about optimizing blog posts with on-page SEO elements.

You know all about on-page SEO — how to create titles, headers, meta descriptions, and URL structures that help your blog posts and webpages rank in search engines. Think about these video devices and strategies like on-page SEO — but for social media.

Subtitles, title bars, animations, and video sizes all work together to make it easier for your audience to view your videos and interact with them the way they want to — primarily on mobile devices, and without turning up the volume. And of course, engaging topics get viewers interested in clicking and watching something on their News Feeds in the first place.

Next Steps

We’re going to keep iterating on what works, scrap what doesn’t, and brainstorm more ways to keep our audiences engaged and entertained by our content. The ultimate goal of social media is to be just that — social — and we want to hear from our audience, learn what they like and dislike, and keep creating cool stuff for them to enjoy.

What experiments is your social media team running? Share with us in the comments below.

Movie producers and inbound marketers aren’t that different when it comes to creating and editing video content.

We’re both telling a story, and whether that story is about a protagonist or a product, we’re both trying to captive our audiences and make them believe in the story we tell.

What happens at the end of the story is a little different, though.

Download our free guide here to learn how to create high-quality videos for social media.

While movie directors might want viewers to come away from their work feeling or thinking something, inbound marketers want viewers to come away from it planning to do something — whether that’s subscribing to a blog, filling out a lead form, or signing up for a product trial.

Most marketers wear a lot of hats and let’s just say, out of all the hats worn, the videographer one isn’t always their favorite. That’s because creating videos can be intimidating, especially if you’re new to it. 

And if you’re more of a copywriter than a videographer, as I am, you might overlook how important the planning stage of video production is — the part where you really solidify your video concept, goals, and script. Contrary to what I previously thought, you can’t just rewrite a blog post and call it a day — there’s a specific way to write a script so that it shapes an effective video.

So that’s what we’re going to tackle in this blog post: how to write an effective video script to ensure the best possible product emerges from your editing software, and lives wherever you’re publishing.

How To Write a Video Script

1) Start with a brief.

Although it might seem like this is an easy step to skip, it’s not worth it.

Starting with a brief allows you and your team to document the answers to the most important project questions so everyone involved in creating the video can get on the same page. When you’re three-quarters of the way through the editing process, and your boss or colleague wants to completely redo that whole shot where you demonstrate how your product solves a problem, that’s a huge problem — for you.

When pesky predicaments like this one stand in the way of progress, you can just refer back to the brief that documents the goals and project plan your team mapped out together, and say, “Actually, that’s not what we agreed to.” 

Then, you can move forward.

Focus on your goals, topic, and takeaways when developing your brief.

A brief doesn’t have to be fancy, nor does it have to follow a specific formula, but there are several key questions it should include to craft an effective video script. 

• What’s the goal of this video? Why are we making the video in the first place?

• Who is the audience of this video?

• What’s our video topic? (The more specific, the better. For example, if you’re in the house painting business, you might choose a topic like, “buying the right paint brush”).

• What are the key takeaways of the video? What should viewers learn from watching it?

• What’s our call-to-action? What do we want viewers to do after they’ve finished watching the video?

You can easily create a brief in Google Docs to serve as a living, breathing template that you revise over time — and that your team can collaborate on.

2) Write your script.

Once you’ve picked a topic, it’s time to write the script.

Just like the brief, the video script doesn’t have to be fancy. You’re not trying to submit this script for any awards — its purpose is strictly functional. A good script makes it easy for the people on camera to get their messages across while sounding and acting naturally.

Write conversationally.

Writing a script is not the same as writing a college paper or marketing research report. You want to write the script how you want the video subject to speak. Saying, “I’m gonna create a video after reading this blog post” on camera will read much better than, “I am going to create a video after reading this blog post.” Keep sentences short and crisp — I recommend avoiding compound sentences, if possible.

Make it thorough.

A script doesn’t just include dialogue. If your video will require multiple shots, characters, or scenes, include these details. Be sure to include any necessary information about the set or stage actions, such as a wardrobe change.

Basically, you want the script to be thorough enough that you could hand it off to someone else to shoot, and they’d understand it.

Write for the audience and the platform.

Is your audience made up of young teens, middle-aged professionals, or older retirees? Will your video live on Instagram, YouTube, or your website? Make sure you’re keeping it conversational for the people you’re trying to connect with — and infuse humor, tone, and inflection accordingly. Furthermore, if you’re writing a short-form video for Facebook, you might want to consider keeping your script choppier with sentence fragments — but if you’re producing a long-form explainer video for your website, make sure you’re as thorough as possible.

Differentiate the main narrative from B-Roll, text overlays, and voiceovers by using different formatting or callouts.

If your video will transition from the subject speaking the primary narrative to a close-up shot of your product with a text overlay, you’ll want to call these things out in your script so anyone who reads it knows what’s supposed to be read on-screen — versus incorporated into the editing process.

Take a look at how the folks over at Wistia did that in the video script for Wistia’s scripting tips below. Text overlay is called out with a big, bold “TEXT,” audio is called out in all caps (REWIND SOUND), and B-roll or additional details are called out in italics (with glasses on). (Note: It might help to watch the video first for the excerpt of this script to make sense).

Source: Wistia

Script every single word.

It’s understandable to think you can just jot down the main bullet points for a script, and then just wing it on camera, especially if you know your subject matter. This approach makes it tough to communicate a message as clearly and concisely as possible (which you should aim to do in every video you create), and it usually results in a lot of re-dos.

So, we suggest scripting every last word. Trust me — doing this will keep you organized during filming and save you loads of time later.

Make it brief.

When it comes to marketing, shorter videos are more compelling than longer videos, and to make short videos, you need a short script. Don’t write a script any longer than two pages. If you can keep it to one page, even better. It’s also worth doing two to three rounds of edits solely focused on cutting all unnecessary fat in your writing. Reading it out loud to listen for opportunities to make the language more conversational, or sentences shorter, can also help.

The result is a video that’s succinct, engaging, and allows for a simple editing process.

Use this script template.

Writing a script from scratch is way harder than starting with an example. To give you a head start, download this Word Doc video script template we used to create this video with Wistia:

Have your script ready? Neat. Now it’s time to …

3) Do a run-through.

Now that you know how to write a script, it’s time for a table read — the part where you practice bringing that script to life on camera.

Why practice? Because some words look great on paper, but once you read them aloud, they just don’t sound right. The table read is where you really get to fine-tune the tone and nix anything that sounds too proper, improper, robotic, or otherwise inappropriate for the message you aim to convey.

Check out the video below on how to do a table read:

Oh, and one last tip …

When it’s time to shoot, use a laptop and a chair as a teleprompter.

Since you don’t need a fancy script, you don’t need a fancy teleprompter to remember your lines. But you do need help remembering your lines. You can actually just use two things you already have — a chair and a laptop — to keep your lines handy as you’re shooting.

For more tips for using the tools at your disposal to make a killer marketing video, check out our video guide to shooting videos with an iPhone.

Are there other tips you have for video marketers when it comes to putting together a great script? Share your advice with us below!

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in November 2013 and has been updated and for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

 

Mayo on a sandwich. Hot sauce on a taco. Hot fudge on a sundae. All things that — when used correctly — make the thing they complement way better.

But If you use too much of any of them, or use them in the wrong context (hot sauce on a sundae? No thanks.), or simply use them wrong (gobs of mayo, instead of a thin layer), you’ve ruined a perfectly tasty snack.

As a marketer, the same concept applies to everything you do. If used correctly, every technology and tactic has the power to create better connections with your potential customers. If done without care, it can drive a wedge between you and your buyers.

Take social media. At HubSpot, people ask us all the time: “Will social media work for my business?” The answer? Yes, absolutely! But only if you do it in a way that fits in with the way your buyer wants to interact with you.

On social, people feel interrupted if you’re just sending spammy mass messages. If you’re not providing them with quality content that their mom, friend, or coworker could have sent them, you’re just another brand in the crowd. Or worse, a brand annoying them in their personal space, where they don’t expect to see brands interrupting. When you’re cold, interruptive, and irrelevant, nobody wins.

It’s not just social. It’s virtually every tactic in today’s marketing playbook. Email, ads, popup forms, video, and all the rest. Do it in a human-friendly way, and everybody wins. Do it in a permissionless, cold, disruptive way, and you’re in trouble.

Account Based Marketing fits squarely into this thread. Done right — in a customer-centric and human-friendly way — it can play an impactful role in an effective marketing strategy. Put simply, a company-centric B2B approach doesn’t have to be spammy.

What is ABM, Anyway?

Account-based marketing looks slightly different depending on who you ask. But at its core is one central theme: the idea of company-centricity.

If you’re B2B, you’re selling to businesses. Generating five thousand leads doesn’t matter much if those leads aren’t within the businesses you want to sell to. This idea of company-centricity applies to everything in ABM. You generate accounts (rather than leads). You engage with all the key stakeholders within those accounts. You close accounts. And you measure account engagement and growth.

What is ABM Not?

More often than not, the concept of ABM is associated with targeted outbound. It looks like this: choose a set of companies you’d like to market and sell to. Use online databases to build an org chart for those companies. Use tactics like cold email and calls, direct mail, and live events to engage the key stakeholders at those accounts that you found in your research. Close deals with those accounts. Then “land and expand” into other parts of the business using similar tactics.

This outbound-heavy interpretation of account-based marketing is misguided and miserable. 

We see examples of soul-less ABM emails all the time. I’m sure you do too. Rather than call any one company out — here’s a compiled fictional example of the types of targeted outbound emails we get.  

Now, technically this is an account-based email.  It reflects a unique data-point on my company: The Business Insider article.  It demonstrates the land and expand practice of branching off of a colleague of mine’s interest. But it still feels cold, right?  There are a few things wrong with this type of ABM email from a recipient experience standpoint.

First, even though my colleague had an interest — there’s no consideration as to whether I even know that colleague or a demonstrated understanding of how or if we work together.

Second, while I appreciate the mention of the recent article on us, it has nothing to do with the purpose of the email. It almost feels as though it’s in there just to prove that the sender took the time to Google us. Crummy experience for the recipient. Poor results for the sender. Nobody wins.

So, even though the email is personalized to my context — It still feels like cold outbound and odds are, I’m not going to bite. 

My email inbox is littered with emails like these. So is my voicemail. What about yours?

The good news: ABM doesn’t have to look like this. There’s a better way. One that’s warmer, more human, and a whole lot more buyer-friendly.

How to do ABM the Right Way

What does ABM done right look like? In this section, we’ll walk you through it, step by step.

Get specific about your target.

Who do you want to market and sell to? Imagine your ideal customer were to walk through the door. What would they look like? What would they sound like? What would they talk about? We call these ideal customer profiles buyer personas.

A few important best practices to remember when creating your buyer personas, as it relates to an account-based strategy:

If you’re B2B, your personas should include insights about the person’s company. What size is it? What role do they play? Who do they report to? Are they a decision-maker or an influencer? What’s their budget and what other things are they spending it on? What industry are they in? Where are they located? What other tools do they use? While, in the end, it’s the people that make the buying decisions, their company dynamics play a big role in the purchasing process.

It’s perfectly okay — and, often, necessary — to have more than one persona in the same company. At HubSpot, we sell both marketing and sales software, so it’s vital that we understand the core characteristics and motivations of both marketing and sales leaders. Sometimes, the same person plays both roles. More often than not, we’re marketing to the two separately. To do so effectively, we need to understand not only the nuances of marketers and salespeople individually, but also the way they interact in the workplace.

Marketing and sales should be tightly aligned in the creation of personas. Personas aren’t an arts-and-crafts project undertaken by the marketing team on a rainy day. They’re the glue that holds every function at your company together. If you’re a marketer, take into consideration your sales team’s feedback on the types of accounts they’re interacting with most. 

What generalizations can they make about the different types of customers you serve best? If you’re a salesperson, what lessons can you pass along to your marketing counterparts from the front lines? What’s driving conversations forward? Sales and marketing should be in lockstep throughout the inbound process; that’s especially important in the creation of personas.

A common question that often comes up around personas and ABM: if you’re B2B, should you select one specific set of a few companies to target? The simple answer: in general, no. Even if your target “universe” of potential customers is small — big banks, universities, etc. — think about what your target persona has in common.

Let’s say your primary decision-making persona is the VP of risk management at a big bank. Do the VPs of risk management at Wells Fargo and CitiBank have vastly differents sets of motivations and priorities? Do they hang out on different social networks? Are they concerned about different changes in the market? Probably not.

The personas you create should be very specific to your best customer fit, but broad enough to be applicable beyond a single person at a single company.

Create valuable content for those personas.

Next up: creating content. ABM and Inbound are in lockstep here. Once you’ve gotten clear on your target, it’s all about creating content that’s personalized, relevant, helpful, and valuable for your potential buyers.

The bitter truth: today’s buyer doesn’t care about your company. They don’t care about how you’ve just launched the coolest widget since sliced bread. They don’t want to book a 15 minute meeting with you, if they’ve never heard of your company. They want things that’ll make them better at what they do, or teach them something they don’t know, or fill in a blind spot in their day. Even better if it makes them look good to their colleagues and managers.

How do you ensure that you’re creating content your target personas will actually want to engage with? By combining two key concepts: personas, which we covered above, and the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is the process buyers go through to become aware of, evaluate, and purchase a new product or service. The journey is a three-step process:

• Awareness Stage: At this point, a buyer is trying to solve problems, get an answer, or meet a need. They’re looking for top-level educational content to help direct them to a solution.
• Consideration Stage: The buyer defines their problem and researches options to solve it. In HubSpot’s case, our customers might realize they have a problem organizing and managing their sales processes, and in the consideration stage, they’re considering the different strategies for addressing that: Excel, adopting a CRM, outsourcing sales, etc.
• Decision Stage: The buyer chooses a solution. In HubSpot’s case, our buyers have determined that they’ll adopt a CRM in the consideration stage, and now it’s time to compare HubSpot to the other CRMs, and to make a final decision.

Once you’ve defined your personas and mapped out the buyer’s journey for each one, the next step is to ensure that you have at least one piece of content for each of your personas, at each stage of their journey. Here’s how to visualize that process:

Whether you’re B2B, B2C, or anything else, this process is pivotal. The best part: its simplicity. You’re answering two questions: who’s your product or service for, and what does their path to you look like? Answer those questions, and you’re well on your way to an effective content strategy.

Get that content in front of the right people at the right companies.

Once you’ve mapped out and created your content, you’re ready to ship it out into the world. The key concept: engage with your personas where they’re at. But how do you do that? In the world of traditional ABM, you’d use targeted outbound: a combination of cold emails and calls, direct mail, and other strategies.

But how can you get your content in front of your most important accounts without using ineffective interruptive tactics? HubSpot Partner Kuno Creative puts it well (in this case, IBM is a target account):

It’s not as hard as it sounds. First, I create blogs, some visual content like an infographic and maybe a video or podcast about a very specific topic that I know will interest the IBM account team. I publish my content on our website and promote it using search engine marketing and paid media ads with messaging and keyword phrases that highlight the benefits to the account team.

I even mention IBM, possibly even the people on the team, in my content and social media posts. Companies like IBM are always looking for company mentions on social media and are likely to pass them along to their team members. Once I get their attention and attract them to my website, I can use retargeting strategies to remind them of our content and bring them back for more.

Remember: how you promote your content depends entirely on your target persona. Are the members of the account teams at your ideal customer companies on LinkedIn? Quora? Do they go to industry meetups? Do they follow other industry blogs? When they search on Google, what do they search for? Align your content promotion with your persona’s defining patterns.

As you create relevant content, the stakeholders at your target accounts will naturally come to you. In traditional ABM, a fishing analogy is often used: ABM is spear-fishing, whereas inbound is casting a wide net.

Think about it this way: what good is spearfishing if there aren’t any fish within a mile of your boat? If there aren’t any fish to catch, it doesn’t matter whether you use a net or a spear; you’re out of luck. Your content is your bait. It’s what brings the people that matter into your company’s sphere of trust and influence.

Turn interest in your content into truly engaged leads using your conversion method of choice: landing pages, pop-up forms, or live chat.

Identify your Accounts

Let’s say you’ve done all the right things so far. Defined your personas, including company characteristics. Created content and put it in front of the right people at the right companies. And actually generated interest and engagement from companies that fit your target persona. What happens next?

If you didn’t choose a specific set of accounts on which to focus your efforts during your persona development, now’s the time. What’s the best way to home in on the right accounts? Here are a few ideas:

• Dig into what you know about the company. Explore both demographics, the job titles and other traits of the people in your database, and firmographics, the characteristics of their companies (size, industry, location, etc.). Match up the data you’ve collected on your leads and accounts with the personas you put together at the beginning of the process.
• Work closely with your sales team. They’ve worked accounts before. Chances are that their gut on what makes a good-fit account is spot-on.
• Think in terms of revenue. Which of the accounts has the potential to bring the most business at the end of the day?
• Use account scoring to determine which accounts are actually engaged with your company, and how many contacts at each one have interacted with you. Here’s what that looks like in HubSpot:

  

Once you’ve decided on your target accounts, use your automation tools to mark the target accounts in your database:

Pro tip: Use tools that make tracking companies easy. A filterable database of companies and an integrated company profile — where you can see all associated contacts, create custom properties, communicate with your contacts at the company, and view all past and future engagements — are two absolute musts.

Expand your Reach

If you’re B2B, the natural next question is: how can we make sure to engage more than just one member of the buying team at an account? Here are two ideas to get your mind rolling:

• Create content that helps one persona influence another. As an example, at HubSpot, we created an offer called “100 Stats, Charts, and Graphs to get Inbound Marketing Buy-in.” It’s designed to help a marketing manager make the case for inbound to his or her management team, and has helped our marketing and sales teams to bring the decision-makers into the conversation.
• Make your content easily sharable. Include sharing links on your thank-you pages and in your follow-up emails, to help get more of the buying team exposed to your content.

Nurture your accounts using company-level insights.

Once you have an engaged audience within a target account, use company-level data to continue the conversation with those accounts, and pull them through your marketing funnel. The best ways we’ve found to do that:

• Create drip email campaigns. Below is an simple example. The workflow enrolls contacts within target accounts whose title includes “marketing,” sends them a specific nurture email, then alerts their account rep if they’ve opened the email.

  
  

• Website personalization. Adapt the content on your website to specific audiences based on both lead and company intelligence. For example, show a VP at one of your target accounts a specific call-to-action when they land on your pricing page next time around.
• Online ads. Ad platforms today are a whole lot more sophisticated than they were even five years ago. Show ads to your target buyers that align with their specific context — in just the right places online. Use an ad platform that syncs with your CRM to show personalized, targeted ads to the members of your target accounts. Many of these platforms even automatically update your ads as new data is added to your CRM. 

Report on Company Engagement, not Just Leads

If you’re B2B, contact-level metrics like leads generated and website conversion rates only tell a part of the story. ABM requires a deep understanding of the company-level dynamics too. Here are three reports that our best customers use to report on their ABM success:

• Growth of companies over time. How many companies are in your database? Break down your chart by lifecycle stage — to determine how many marketing-qualified accounts you’ve generated — or by original marketing source.

  

• Reach within target accounts. How many contacts from each of your target accounts do you have in your database? How engaged are they, from a high level?

  

• Breakdown of contacts within a specific target account. What job titles do your known contacts hold? Are you generating enough interest from decision-makers? Where are your gaps? Use this report to find out.

  

• Engagement of contacts within a specific target account. How engaged are the contacts within a specific account? Who are the most engaged? 

  

• Most popular content within target accounts. Of those most-engaged contacts, what type of content are they actually engaging with? Use this report to determine the most relevent topics with which to nurture those accounts. 

  

The elephant in the room: Isn’t Inbound wasteful?

ABM experts sometimes bring up the idea that inbound and other popular demand gen strategies are wasteful, because they focus energy across a broad target, and end up producing leads that’ll never end up closing.

There are two vital questions to ask yourself as you think about spending your time on the right marketing strategies.

First, where’s the leverage, and which strategies scale? Leverage is the concept of using a small initial investment to gain a disproportionately high return. Put in a small initial effort, and see that effort yield exponentially greater results over time. The concept of leverage is especially important on teams with limited bandwidth. 

At HubSpot, the leverage has come from Inbound. How do we know? Check out this stat: over 90% of our blogs leads come from old posts (i.e. posts published prior to the current month). That means the work we did last month, last year, five years ago, continues to pay exponentially greater dividents.

Put another way, if HubSpot’s blogging team took next month off, we’d still hit 92% of our lead goal. Will all those leads end up closing? No. Does every single one fit into our ideal persona? No. But because we’ve carefully mapped out our personas and created content that’s truly aligned with their motivations and goals, the blog continues to be the primary source of qualified accounts for our sales team.

As you think about ABM, apply this same concept. Where can you find leverage? If you’re working with four different internal teams to create a unique piece of content for each stakeholder within a specific target account, how does that scale? How does the output of your effort relate to the input? What happens when, inevitably, a big chunk of your target accounts don’t close? Where do you go for your next customer?

Second, which strategies give you the most flexibility to pivot over time? Here’s another example, from our own past. When we started HubSpot over a decade ago, we sold marketing software. We wrote content about marketing, and that content generated us a ton of leads. But that content did more than just win us customers in that moment. It positioned us as a trusted source of thought leadership, and gained us an avid following of brand evangelists: people who would support HubSpot, even if our product wasn’t a fit for them at that very moment. 

But what about when HubSpot’s product improved? What about when we launched a new sales productivity tool in 2014, then a CRM in 2015? Because of that content we’d built years earlier, we already had a base of loyal followers ready to jump on the new tools.

If you focus your efforts closely on one specific set of target accounts, what happens when the market shifts, or your priorities change, or new technologies come about, or you launch a new product line? How do you find your early adopters and brand advocates?

Use these two concepts — leverage and flexibility — to inform how you combine ABM and Inbound.