It’s a brand new day; the sun is shining.

For awhile now, you’ve felt like your marketing strategy has been missing something, and today you’ve decided what to do about it. You know it’s long overdue to try out an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy.

You’re eager to dive in and start creating highly-personalized experiences for a few carefully selected accounts. As HubSpot says, you’re ready to try “fishing with spears” instead of casting a wide net.

But, wait a minute, this make-to-order approach isn’t as easy as you once thought.

The path to a streamlined ABM strategy is not without challenges. Great big thunderclouds are threatening your sunny new day.

You might be asking yourself:

• How do I go about choosing the right companies to target?

• And, once I choose, how do I deliver that highly personalized piece of content at exactly the right time and exactly the right place?

• Personalizing content means I’ll need to generate more pieces of content. Where will I find the time?

• How can I deliver the same personalized experience on my website?

Sound familiar?

Enter marketing automation.

If you haven’t heard, marketing automation software is designed to help you prioritize and execute your marketing tasks in a more streamlined and efficient way. Marketing automation tools do some of the work for you, allowing you to focus your time on other big-picture tasks.

Marketing automation can help you:

• Save money

• Increase revenue

• Save time

• Identify high-quality leads and nurture them more effectively

• Deliver better qualified leads to your sales team

Thinking it’s too good to be true? Brian Downard and Ehsan Jahandarpour compiled some pretty mind-blowing statistics on the benefits of automation, showcased in this infographic.

The right tool for the job

Automation can be a wonderful part of your ABM strategy, but where to begin?

You need to find the right tool to get the job done. At Mindgrub, we love using HubSpot’s workflows tool.

Workflows are made up of an enrollment trigger, actions, and a goal.

You could create a simple workflow to automatically send a welcome email to your new newsletter subscribers. In that workflow, the enrollment trigger would be filling out the form to subscribe. The subsequent action would be that the subscribers are sent an email thanking them for subscribing. And the goal is that the contact property “Newsletter Subscription” is “yes.”

That workflow might look like this:

Hubspot’s tool goes beyond email automation. Here are a few other examples of how you can use workflows:

Social Media

Workflows can be triggered by a user’s interaction with your brand on social media. For example, we could set up a lead nurturing workflow that begins when a Twitter user mentions @Mindgrub, or when someone clicks on one of our LinkedIn ads.

Lead Nurturing

Nurturing your leads is all about sending out the right content at the right time. Try out one of these Tried and True Marketing Automation Recipes for moving your leads down the funnel.

Lead Scoring

Use workflows to quantitatively qualify leads and assign funnel stages to your contacts. Check out this sample workflow we’ve set up to assign all our newsletter subscribers to the Subscriber lifecycle stage.

Management Activities

Workflows can be used to automate management activities as well. Consider setting up a workflow to send out internal mass updates, or one that notifies sales reps when their contacts reach a certain lead score.

You can also set up workflows that will automatically create a task instructing a sales rep to follow up with a lead who views your pricing page, clicks a certain CTA, or views a webinar.

Bulk CRM Updates

Keeping your CRM healthy is no small task, but automation can help here too. We created a workflow that automatically populates a contact’s industry field if the company’s industry field is filled in.

This revealed a more accurate representation of contacts per industry, and helped us build out a strategy to target key industries with highly-specified content.

Bringing it all back together

With HubSpot, the marketing automation possibilities are nearly endless. But remember, automation is not a cure-all, and it certainly isn’t going to do all of your work for you. Best put by Matt Burke, “marketing automation is just one piece of a greater puzzle.”

Be sure to take the time to discover best practices before getting started, and consider starting small. Done well, automation could lead to a 451% increase in qualified leads and 14.5% increase in sales productivity. That ought to be enough to scare those thunderclouds away.

Wondering where to begin when it comes to marketing automation? As a HubSpot Certified Agency Partner, we’ve gotten pretty good at executing automated campaigns that get results. Send us a message; our digital marketing team is ready to help.