As performance imperatives become clearer and data takes center stage as the priority for marketing and sales teams, hyper-targeted, personalized outreach strategies are becoming more important.
Case in point? Account-based marketing is rapidly rising in prominence, with 60% of companies saying that they plan to invest in ABM technology and strategy in 2019.
Not only are marketers and sales professionals reporting higher ROI and deepening client relationships with ABM, but resources and tools to ensure ABM success are becoming more commonplace. Among those resources are a suite of cloud-based tools to help you understand and manage the various demands of your accounts. These automate or otherwise simplify various parts of the process so you can focus on what matters most: converting accounts to customers.
Here are a few of our favorite account-based marketing tools.
ABM tools to help you build your target account list
Successful account-based marketing isn’t built on ignorance and it isn’t executed willy-nilly. Rather, it’s built on robust, granular knowledge and reasoned execution that ties every asset and action to a smart, measurable outcome related to a marketer’s or salesperson’s desired clientele.
For that reason, it’s imperative that account-based marketing teams understand their ideal customer profile and build their outreach strategies accordingly.
In general, your ideal customer profile should consist of entities that are likely to buy into a lot of your product or service without needing much customization or hand-holding. These aren’t needle-in-the-haystack, dream customers – they’re the solid, reliable clients you want to get in the door and keep because they stabilize and grow your bottom line.
Envisioning Your Ideal Customer
When it comes to figuring out who your ideal customer is, there’s more to it than simply looking into their firmographic data. This is especially true for businesses that are selling SaaS, PaaS or IaaS solutions.
In these complex scenarios – where you’re probably trying to secure enterprise deals – it’s important for you to dig deeper. You need to look for trends across your clientele’s technology stacks, identify problems and evaluate your prospects’ ability to consume large quantities of your product. The following tools help you to do just that.
DataFox: DataFox is a business intelligence platform that helps sales and marketing teams find and prioritize target companies to source more opportunities. Paired with a team of over 100+ human analysts, DataFox verifies AI-sourced insights about millions of businesses to provide robust company data, growth signals and account scoring.
Pricing: Based on number of employees; contact.
G2Crowd Rating: 4.4/5; “A powerful prospecting tool.”
Trustradius Score: 8.6/10; “Simple and intuitive.”
Intricately: Intricately is a contextual data platform that gives marketing and sales teams an inside look at the spend, usage and adoption of cloud technologies to predict revenue opportunities. We specialize in working with high-tech marketing and sales teams to provide a critical advantage in finding and acquiring new customers through spend intelligence data.
Pricing: Contact for pricing information. Free sales tool available.
G2Crowd Rating: 4.3/5; “If you want a product that can show you technologies in an easy to digest view and you want to understand to what extent each technology is being used, then Intricately is the only product that will help provide the level of context that you'll learn to love, and after you've begun to use Intricately, you'll wonder how you survived without it.”
Trustradius Score: 8.4/10; “Intricately is being used to find out what our prospects are using in terms of their video, CDN and security services. We also use it to see which competitor vendors are being used and reach out to prospects on behalf of those services used.”
ZoomInfo: ZoomInfo is a growth acceleration platform delivering accurate and actionable contact and business information to empower your sales, marketing and recruiting teams. Backed by a massive B2B contact database, ZoomInfo helps users align their business intelligence with personnel data to make outreach quick and easy.
Pricing: Varies by product; must contact.
G2Crowd Rating: 4.4/5; “Great data mining for prospecting potential clients!”
Trustradius Score: 8.4/10; “ZoomInfo – best thing available, but doesn’t have everything.”
Each of these prospecting platforms offers a different advantage – and each can help supercharge your list-building and contact efforts, both of which are cornerstones of account-based marketing strategy.
Account-based marketing tools to help you execute
Once you’ve really gotten to know your ICP and designed a strategy to guide them through their customer journey, it’s time to translate strategy into tactics. That means executing across your marketing channels and making sales happen through action.
While you don’t necessarily need to buy special tools to help you execute ABM, especially if you already have a pretty robust marketing technology stack, these tools will help you execute efficiently. That’s because they often come loaded with artificial intelligence functions, smart data storage and other features that help you automate much of the process so you can focus on the most important parts of sales and marketing: building relationships.
ABM Tools for Direct Mail Marketing
Though physical mail has taken a backseat in the minds of many consumers and marketers alike, direct mail remains a highly viable outreach strategy – particularly for marketing and sales teams using account-based marketing.
Direct mail can bolster other marketing efforts and is said to have a much higher response rate than email, which many B2B prospects say they ignore more often than not.
These tools will help you execute a direct mail strategy that remains aligned with the rest of your ABM workflow, helping you to send out materials, keep track of them, measure their performance and integrate this part of your marketing and sales outreach approach into your larger marketing ecology.
Sendoso: A fully-integrated direct mail solution, Sendoso allows you to manage a team of users, assign gifts and items to specific groups, manage budgets, track inventory and design a variety of custom pieces for recipients. Even better, the service provides users with a customer success manager to help you devise campaigns that work – and tees you up for even more success by integrating with leading CRMs and other automations.
Pricing: Available upon contact.
G2Crowd Rating: 4.6/5; “Beautifully efficient and easy to implement.”
Trustradius Score: Not listed.
Thnks: Described as a “smart business gifting” solution, Thnks helps marketers and sales personnel to build stronger business relationships on a foundation of gratitude. The simple solution allows you to “thnk” customers, prospects and peers alike with tokens of appreciation that you can select from their gift registry – currently stocked with thousands of customizable items. Like other technologies in this category, Thnks can be integrated with a variety of CRM and expense systems, can automate gift fulfillment and can provide analytics for account managers to help you keep track of ROI.
Pricing: Free tier, with enterprise and premium pricing available upon request.
G2Crowd Rating: Not listed.
Trustradius Score: Not listed.
PFL: When marketers want to use Tactile Marketing Automation®, PFL can be of great help. This service – which is integrated with a variety of cloud marketing solutions including Marketo, Engagio and Salesforce – helps users understand engagement trends across their clientele, consolidate direct mail and digital engagement workflows and, over time, optimize physical marketing investments via measurement.
Pricing: Available upon contact
G2Crowd Rating: 4.0/5; “Excellent direct mail fulfillment – world class customer support.”
Trustradius Score: 7/10; “Great platform overall.”
While direct mail marketing may not be the best investment for every ABM strategy, there’s a powerful argument for its use in the form of its ROI. Hyper-personalized tactile mail can inspire trust in prospects and a sense of deeper connection in clients, enriching your relationships and ultimately broadening your profits.
ABM Tools for Video Marketing
Hailed as the “next big thing” in marketing, video’s moment has arrived and doesn’t look to be passing anytime soon. Increasing connection speeds across mobile devices, along with the democratization of video technology and shifting consumer expectations, all add up to a powerful use-case for video in general. That makes it a smart investment as part of any marketing strategy.
For B2B ABM in particular, video can be a powerful asset in capturing the attention of prospects and educating them about your solution. It can also be highly useful for bringing clients up to speed about new products or other up-selling opportunities you might be interested in pursuing with them. Further, video content can be another touch point from which you can gather engagement data, which can eventually be used to inform your marketing strategy. Here are some popular tools to help you achieve those ends.
Vidyard: Promising to transform your videos into “lead generation machines” and to create more “sales-ready opportunities,” Vidyard is a demand generation video utility that allows users to publish video, implement split testing, optimize content and track performance metrics – including SEO – via a dashboard that monitors interactions with videos published through the Vidyard player. Vidyard also allows users to store and share video content all in one place.
Pricing: Multifactorial pricing model; must contact.
G2Crowd Rating: 4.6/5; “Best platform for creating and sharing personalized videos.”
Trustradius Score: 8.9/10; “Video is the future of engagement; start here.”
TwentyThree: A simple-to-use and rich video solution, TwentyThree allows users to create video hubs, landing pages and easy-embeds on their website that play branded content in beautiful 4K resolution. Whether it’s an advertisement, an explainer video or a webinar, you can use this platform to trot out exciting insights or to pitch your products, then collect key information about the people you’re trying to reach with TwentyThree’s seamlessly embedded “collector” form solution.
Pricing: Starting at $675 per month.
G2Crowd Rating: 4.5/5; “An adaptable software that delivers!”
Trustradius Score: Not listed.
Brightcove: Brightcove’s fully-featured video marketing solution allows users to quickly publish to all major social networks; live-stream using its video cloud live feature; capture leads and other critical information via CRM-integrated, automated lead capture forms; and launch dynamic video experiences beautifully across the web.
Pricing: Starting at $199 per month.
G2Crowd Rating: 3.8/5; “Robust and diverse platform for delivering and measuring video to any audience.”
Trustradius Score: 7.6/10; “A bright idea for serving up hot and fresh videos!”
As video appears set to retain its growing dominance in the marketing space, account-based marketers should take advantage of emergent technology to make incisive decisions about how to engage their prospects and push persuasive content that works.
ABM Tools for Content Marketing
Content marketing is a behemoth, and in many ways, the phrase could be described as an umbrella term. From email marketing copy to blogs to white papers to topical advisories and so much more, it seems the sun never sets on the content marketing empire.
From creating content experiences to curating marketing assets across the web to building smart customer journeys that engage your prospects at all the right moments with all the right messaging, the following tools help you take your content marketing for ABM to the next level.
Uberflip: Hailed as the number one “content experience platform,” Uberflip provides users with tools to aggregate marketing content and empower their B2B marketing/sales teams to create personalized content experiences for the many accounts they touch. In the context of ABM, Uberflip can help marketers and sales professionals tailor content marketing assets at scale and deliver them to the digital destinations at which they’re most likely to engage their prospects and clients, persuading them strategically along the buyer’s journey.
Pricing: Pricing available by request.
G2Crowd Rating: 4.4/5; “Uberflip is the perfect partner for your content journey.”
Trustradius Score: 8.3/10; “Customer service is by far the best I’ve seen.”
Percolate: Integrated with a variety of softwares and designed with enterprise marketing in mind, Percolate is a content marketing governance platform designed to help CMOs minimize administrative work, diminish bottlenecks, analyze and minimize obstacles to content production and improve both the execution and delivery of branded experiences. Part project management and part administrative powerhouse, Percolate is an excellent tool for any content operation looking to pare the fat and promote performance.
Pricing: Starting at $20 per month, depending on features.
G2Crowd Rating: 3.5/5; “Percolate can do everything we need it to, but requires a lot of customization.”
Trustradius Score: 7.8/10; “Percolate: your BFF for social media management.”
Showpad: Showpad is a sales enablement and content management system that helps businesses bring all of their marketing and sales content to a single location. From there, those marketing assets can be managed in an intuitive interface that lets users quickly create attractive, personalized content which can then be deployed to prospects and clients in order to educate, persuade and ultimately convince decision-makers to close deals with your business.
Pricing: Pricing available by request.
G2Crowd Rating: 4.5/5; “Keeps information flowing in a simple and measurable way.”
Trustradius Score: 8.7/10; “One of the best sales tools out there.”
Curata: Powered by machine learning and built originally with content curation in mind, Curata enables marketers to scale content marketing, grow leads and increase revenue. A powerful dashboard helps marketers track all published content, understand lead interactions and revenue impact, and pair the right content with the right state of the buyer’s journey. Even cooler? If your organization works with freelancers, Curata can help you pair the right subject matter expert with the right opportunity. This is content curation and management at its best.
Pricing: Tiered pricing available upon request.
G2Crowd Rating: 4.5/5; “Excellent product; outstanding customer support.”
Trustradius Score: 7.4/10; “A great all-encompassing content curation solution.”
Pathfactory: This “content insight and activation” platform helps marketers make smart decisions about what is and isn’t working to stimulate pipeline activity and revenue. An easy-to-read dashboard helps B2B marketing teams understand how prospects are engaging with content, telling a more in-depth story than you might discover from clicks, form-fills and downloads alone. The result? Marketers can lean into the best parts of their strategy and cut out the time-sucking parts that contribute little value.
Pricing: Available upon request.
G2Crowd Rating: 4.4/5; “Great tool for continued engagement and robust content analytics.”
Trustradius Score: 8.4/10; “The content ‘easy button.’”
Content is absolutely critical to ABM – and personalized, properly deployed content is necessary to generate leads, create demand and convince increasingly savvy but often skeptical B2B prospects to work with you. The tools above help you work through one of the most labor-intensive parts of marketing – planning, creating, deploying and measuring content – in a way that minimizes drag and maximizes results.
ABM Tools for Paid Advertising
While organic marketing strategies tend to be preferable among marketers, they aren’t the only strategy in the playbook, and using them alone may actually cost you more time and resources than your return warrants. In these cases, it’s a great idea to use paid ads, which provide air cover for your account-based marketing through hyper-targeted pushes. In fact, some teams – like Rollworks – use highly customized ads to achieve significant ABM success.
There are a variety of advertising tools out there, but which ones are the best for executing paid and programmatic tactics in the ABM context? Here are some of our favorites:
Madison Logic: As mentioned elsewhere in this piece, B2B customers are an increasingly savvy group that’s likely to do intensive research before choosing to work with any vendor. Knowing this, Madison Logic has developed a platform to deliver hyper-relevant messages across all devices used by those actively researching your products. Using a variety of formats including video, native advertising and content syndication, this tool anticipates your prospects’ intent and gets the right messaging in front of them, wherever they might be.
Pricing: Available upon request.
G2Crowd Rating: 3.9/5; “Very effective for B2B marketing.”
Trustradius Score: Not listed.
Terminus: Terminus’s ABM platform does a whole lot of things. Among them is the international deployment of multichannel advertising (LinkedIn is their present specialty), display targeting and stage-based advertising based on dynamically populated/managed lists. Even better? Because Terminus knows the account-based marketing ecosystem well, its dashboard understands the relationship between advertising metrics and other ABM KPIs, bringing all of these factors together under one roof when it comes to reporting.
Pricing: Pricing available upon contact.
G2Crowd Rating: 4.4/5; “A fantastic tool for tracking intent and interest of clients and prospects.”
Trustradius Score: 8.2/10; “An ABM tool for everyone, not just marketing gurus.”
Listenloop: Normally, if someone told us they could launch any part of an ABM campaign within minutes, we might laugh. With Listenloop, this wouldn’t be the case. Listenloop’s solution allows users to upload a list of key accounts, then choose select job titles to market to. From there, Listenloops can help you stay top of mind by quickly delivering programmatic campaign assets to your prospects – which help warm said prospects up for contact by your sales team.
Pricing: Tiered service plans starting at $99 per month.
G2Crowd Rating: 3.5/5; “Great product, but you must be experienced in ABM.”
Trustradius Score: Not listed.
Jabmo: This omni-channel ABM platform helps drive web traffic and account engagement within other marketing channels by creating “passive brand awareness” through targeted, personal and relevant ads. Jabmo displays to these prospects whether they’ve entered their information into a form or not by piggybacking on search intent and other factors, ultimately contributing to sales enablement and helping marketers understand their performance so they can retarget where appropriate.
Pricing: Pricing available upon request.
G2Crowd Rating: 4.1/5; “A great way to reach your known and unknown decision-makers.”
Trustradius Score: 8/10; “A useful retargeting tool.”
Use advertising to push your marketing efforts just a little bit further, create brand recognition and penetrate prospective client bases that might not be familiar with you yet. Tied to a broader marketing strategy that engages clientele across a variety of thoughtful touchpoints, using these tools can give you advantages that kick your ABM efforts up to the next level.
Other ABM Tools to Go One Step Deeper
Sometimes your account-based marketing methods need to be a little deeper or more esoteric than the methods indicated above. When that time comes – or if you’re simply feeling a bit more creative than usual – these tools can help you try something different.
Sigstr: Take advantage of your email signature by using it as a marketing opportunity with Sigstr. This software allows marketers to turn “every email into a marketing campaign” by using a pixel that measures email engagement and calendar and conversational insights via AI to “check the temperature” of your business relationships and provide insights that help you choose the right content or topics to market to your prospects.
Pricing: Starting at $200 per month for up to 50 employees.
G2Crowd Rating: 4.4/5; “Subtle and unique way to further engage prospects and customers.”
Trustradius Score: 8.0/10; “Solid solution for email signatures and campaigns.”
Leadfeeder: Simple but significant in its usefulness, Leadfeeder is a B2B tool that gives provides you with real sales leads by alerting you to the companies that are visiting your website – while filtering visitors who may be of low value or of little interest to your business goals out. These filters and alerts can be tailored in such a way that you’re able to see country of origin, industry or other factors pertinent to you.
Pricing: Tiered pricing with free “Lite” option and premium option starting at $53 per month.
G2Crowd Rating: 4.7/5; “Really good product, but not for everyone.”
Trustradius Score: 7.9/10; “A game-changer to gain intelligence and fuel your outbound efforts.”
These may not be the most “robust” solutions in the world, but they add something more to your marketing mix and can provide a surprising share of value if used wisely.
Complete suite ABM tools
Account-based marketing and enterprise sales can be very complicated and can require several utilities for success. For that reason, it might be a good idea to consider investing in an end-to-end account-based marketing tool that consolidates what could otherwise be a sprawling marketing technology stack into one place.
When it comes to simplifying things so you can operate from a single nexus point – a central marketing command – these tools are peerless aids in your quest to persuade prospects and close with new clients.
Engagio: An ABM system that is designed to help you market from conception to reiteration, Engagio works to help marketers in three steps. Its research and account insights feature tells you how your clientele is engaging with your product or marketing assets, while its marketing automations allow you to deploy content based on those interactions. From there, Engagio’s measurement feature steps in, providing you with insights about how your ABM program is working and what you can to to optimize.
Pricing: Starting at $25,000 per year.
G2Crowd Rating: 4.4./5; “Achieve thoughtful, tailored and human outreach at scale.”
Trustradius Score: 8.2/10; “Turn to Engagio for optimal account-based marketing.”
Marketo: Is Marketo really the “best in class marketing automation software”? That might be hard to say, but this product does offer a vast array of marketing features, including an email marketing platform, a consumer marketing platform, mobile and customer base engagements, revenue attribution insights and, most recently, a suite of features dedicated specifically to account-based marketing. Certainly, it’s worth checking out.
Pricing: Tiered pricing based on products included, starting at $895 per month.
G2Crowd Rating: 4.1/5; “A high impact tool for digital marketing.”
Trustradius Score: 8.0/10; “Marketo is the industry leader for a reason.”
Pardot: This customer relationship management software solution by Salesforce lets you do it all. A research component allows you to find leads, qualify them and build the lists you’ll need to begin your account-based marketing venture, while its email marketing platform and lead generation solutions allow you to publish smartly personalized content. From there, you can enjoy insightful ROI reporting and artificially intelligent advisement to help you make smart marketing decisions.
Pricing: Tiered pricing starting at $1,250 per month.
G2Crowd Rating: 4.0/5; “The possibilities with Pardot and Salesforce are pretty hard to beat.”
Trustradius Score: 7.5/10; “Pardot is a powerful marketing automation tool for beginners to pros.”
6Sense: Powered by artificial intelligence, 6Sense describes itself as an ABM orchestration platform. Like Engagio, but unlike some of the other solutions indicated here, 6Sense is designed very specifically with account-based marketing in mind. The platform therefore focuses on marketing and sales alignment, funnel visibility, pipeline-and-content alignment and sales insights as they pertain primarily to ABM as a discipline.
Pricing: Multifactorial pricing depending on client needs; contact for more information.
G2Crowd Rating: 3.9/5; “A necessary addition to any ABM strategy.”
Trustradius Score: 8.4/10; “A very effective sales tool for account executives.”
Remember: Successful ABM is built on more than tools
While account-based marketing tools can help you execute ABM, you can’t lean on them for everything. You need to ensure that your sales and marketing teams are aligned, that you’ve come up with relevant and creative content to engage your prospect accounts, and that you have a plan to measure the results of your efforts.
