Account-Based Marketing (ABM) in HubSpot: A Complete Guide

This guide will walk you through implementing Account-Based Marketing (ABM) in HubSpot.

This is the same approach helping top B2B companies close deals by focusing on high-value accounts and delivering personalized, data-driven campaigns.

With HubSpot’s ABM tools, you can streamline everything—from identifying target accounts to tracking engagement—in one platform.

And the best part?

You’ll align your marketing and sales teams so they can focus on what matters most: closing deals with the right clients.

Let’s dive in and see how you can leverage ABM in HubSpot to boost your results.

1. Overview of Account-Based Marketing
2. Understanding the Fundamentals of ABM
3. The Benefits of Account-Based Marketing
4. How HubSpot Supports ABM
5. Executing ABM Campaigns in HubSpot

Overview of Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a highly targeted approach that focuses on proactively targeting and engaging high-value accounts rather than targeting a broad audience. 

Instead of relying on generalized campaigns, ABM personalizes marketing efforts toward a select group of accounts, working with the sales team to ensure alignment.

ABM acts more like a targeting lens than a separate strategy.

It’s a way to focus resources where they’ll be most impactful instead of replacing paid advertising and content marketing strategies.

The aim is to tailor your messaging and campaigns to address the unique needs and pain points of specific companies or decision-makers within those companies.

ABM also emphasizes alignment between your sales and marketing teams. By working collaboratively, both teams can target duplicate accounts, building a more cohesive and consistent strategy. 

This leads to improved results, better communication, and a more streamlined buyer experience.

HubSpot defines ABM as a growth strategy where marketing and sales collaborate to deliver personalized buyer journeys for a focused set of high-value accounts. 

As we continue this guide, you'll see how ABM enhances existing marketing strategies rather than replacing them by focusing on the most promising leads.

Understanding the Fundamentals of ABM

Understanding its core elements and how they work together to drive results is essential to grasp the total value of account-based marketing (ABM). 

At its heart, ABM is about building solid relationships with high-value accounts through tailored and highly personalized marketing efforts. Here’s a closer look at the fundamentals:

What is ABM?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy that identifies and engages a select group of target accounts with personalized marketing campaigns. 

Instead of marketing to a broad audience, you narrow your focus to key accounts most likely to convert into valuable customers. 

The primary goals of ABM are to acquire high-value customers and nurture long-term relationships with them, using precise and tailored messaging.

Critical Components of ABM:

1. Targeting High-Value Accounts: 

Rather than casting a wide net, ABM hones in on the specific accounts that align with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

These are the companies that have the potential to deliver the most value to your business.

2. Sales and Marketing Alignment: 

Successful ABM requires close collaboration between your sales and marketing teams.

Both teams must work together from the beginning to identify target accounts, develop strategies, and measure success. This ensures a unified effort and seamless customer experience.

3. Personalization of Marketing Efforts: 

ABM relies heavily on delivering personalized experiences to your target accounts. This could mean tailoring your messaging, content, and offers to the specific needs and challenges of individual companies or decision-makers within those companies.

Primary Types of ABM

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) can be tailored to different scales depending on the type and value of your target accounts.

By segmenting your efforts into three distinct approaches—1-to-1, 1-to-Few, and 1-to-Many—you can allocate resources more efficiently while maintaining a personalized experience.

Each approach varies in its degree of personalization, scale, and resource investment, ensuring your marketing strategy is aligned with your goals and the potential value of each account.

1-to-1 ABM: 

This type of ABM focuses on creating highly personalized marketing strategies for individual accounts.

It’s resource-intensive but delivers maximum engagement and results for the most significant and valuable clients.

Usually, an ABM campaign targeted at tier 1 accounts will consist of 5-10 companies that can be considered markets because of their large size and revenue potential.

1-to-Few ABM: 

Here, you target a small group of accounts with similar characteristics or challenges. The marketing is still personalized but scalable across this small group of high-value accounts.

Using a 1-to-few approach usually results in 10-20 accounts that belong to a cluster of companies within the same vertical or experience very similar challenges.

Still, the revenue potential is lower than for a tier 1 account.

1-to-Many ABM: 

In this approach, you target a larger account group using broader but highly tailored marketing efforts. It allows for a grander scale while maintaining relevance for each account.

When doing 1-to-many, there are usually 50 to hundreds of accounts.

This approach makes sense if you target specific verticals with lower ACV and can’t invest the resources to personalize your effort to every account.

The Benefits of Account-Based Marketing

1. Improved Return on Investment (ROI)

One of the most compelling advantages of ABM is its ability to deliver a higher ROI compared to more traditional, broad-reaching marketing strategies. 

By focusing on fewer but higher-value accounts, your marketing and sales teams can allocate resources more effectively, leading to better results.

2. Shortened Sales Cycles

ABM aligns sales and marketing, helping streamline the sales process.

When both teams focus on specific accounts, they can better coordinate their efforts, reducing friction and ensuring prospects move through the funnel more quickly.

3. Higher Conversions

Personalization is critical to ABM’s success. By tailoring your messages and offers to the specific pain points and challenges of your target accounts, you can deliver higher relevancy, which increases engagement and the likelihood of conversion.

4. Breaking Down Silos

ABM naturally fosters closer collaboration between marketing and sales teams.

Both departments work toward the same goals, targeting duplicate high-value accounts.

HubSpot’s tools make this even easier by allowing both teams access to the same data.

5. Measuring Success

One of the critical strengths of ABM is its ability to offer more precise and actionable metrics.

Since you’re targeting a smaller pool of accounts, metrics such as engagement, pipeline velocity, and account expansion are more accessible to measure and track.

6. Proactively Sourcing Leads

A significant shift from traditional inbound marketing is the ability to pre-qualify the companies you want to attract using external databases like Clay and Ocean. Instead of passively waiting for leads, ABM allows you to identify and target high-value accounts in advance. 

This proactive approach ensures that you engage the right companies from the start.

However, ABM is not synonymous with cold outbound; it simply means that you choose your target market instead of passively waiting to see which companies contact you. 

How HubSpot Supports ABM

1. Single Source of Truth

HubSpot centralizes all ABM data, ensuring that sales and marketing teams work from a unified source of truth. This improves coordination and reduces miscommunication.

HubSpot brings all departments into the same system. This means that any data, whether from marketing, sales activity, or customer success, is logged on shared records inside of HubSpot.

This gives you a holistic view of the customer journey and allows all departments to work towards a common goal: closing your target accounts.

2. Target Accounts Feature

HubSpot’s Target Accounts feature helps you easily track and manage your high-value accounts, ensuring teams can prioritize efforts on the accounts that matter most.

Your ABM strategy starts with selecting the correct accounts. 

HubSpot’s tools make it easy to define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and create your Target Account List. This ensures that your teams focus on the highest-value opportunities.

Classify accounts into tiers based on their potential value (e.g., Tier 1 for the highest-value accounts). HubSpot allows you to assign and manage these tiers, ensuring your team focuses on the most valuable accounts. You can also segment your accounts by industry.

From the Target Accounts view, you can see all the interactions between your team and the target account. It will identify previous actions and the next step in the sales process and show how many accounts you have engaged.

3. Account Overview Page

While the Target Accounts view shows you all your target accounts, the Account Overview provides detailed insight into each account’s activity, including contacts, deals, and engagement:

This view breaks down the engagement of each account’s buying committee member, the number of sales activities your team has completed, and whether additional steps are needed to move the account forward.

This feature helps you attract high-value accounts and forge deeper relationships with more personalized engagement.

Over time, this personalized approach helps build more authentic connections with stakeholders at each account, ensuring you stay relevant and engaged with key decision-makers.

4. LinkedIn Ads Integration

HubSpot’s integration with LinkedIn Ads allows you to create custom audiences based on your target accounts in HubSpot, enabling precise ad targeting to decision-makers.

HubSpot lets you target companies as target accounts and tier them (1-3) using properties created when activating the ABM features within HubSpot.

Then, you can segment your accounts into active (dynamic) lists that can be synchronized with LinkedIn. This means you can use your data in HubSpot to target specific companies and contacts with very targeted advertising on LinkedIn.

You should have the URL of the LinkedIn Company Page of the company you want to target.

That is why you should enrich your list of accounts using Clay before launching LinkedIn Ads campaigns.

5. Smart Content and Personalization

HubSpot’s smart content feature enables marketers to deliver personalized experiences by tailoring content based on a visitor’s country, device type, referral source, and other attributes. 

This is crucial for account-based marketing (ABM) because personalization ensures each target account sees content relevant to their needs, increasing engagement and nurturing stronger relationships. 

Using personalization tokens tied to CRM data, you can display customized content on websites, landing pages, and emails, ensuring your messaging is highly relevant to each stage of the buyer’s journey.

This increases the impact of ABM efforts, making your outreach more precise and effective.

Executing ABM Campaigns in the HubSpot Platform

1. Warm-up Campaigns

Start with a warm-up campaign to build awareness and engagement.

HubSpot enables you to create highly personalized campaigns with smart content that adjusts based on the accounts' engagement with your website or emails.

There are multiple types of campaigns you can create in HubSpot. Leverage content formats like webinars, blogs, SEO, and podcasts to engage target accounts, tailoring content to their needs.

Let’s take an example:

You want to create a campaign about reducing ship emissions and the IMO 2030 regulation. This campaign could consist of multiple different assets with a common theme:

1. One pillar page that gives a broad introduction to “What is IMO 2030?”
2. A series of blog posts going into more detail around IMO 2030
3. A 30-minute webinar with an internal subject-matter expert
4. An outbound sequence promoting the webinar to decision-makers
5. A series of organic LinkedIn posts published through private profiles
6. A set of LinkedIn Ads promoting the blog posts and webinar
7. A Google Ads campaign to target keywords such as “IMO 2030”
8. A case study about how one client reduced their emissions by 55%

2. Activation Campaigns

Activation campaigns aim to reach the most engaged prospects within your target accounts and start a sales conversation. 

These campaigns leverage the engagement signals that indicate buying intent, whether from multiple buying committee members or other key stakeholders. 

At this stage, your offers should encourage direct interaction, such as product demos, free inspections, or even pilot programs. 

By tailoring your outreach to the prospect's level of interest and readiness, you maximize the chances of initiating a productive sales conversation.

In some cases, running a webinar or physical event—featuring a keynote and a panel discussion—can be a more engaging way to activate prospects. 

During these events, you can present industry research, showcase best practices, and share case studies on how your clients have overcome similar challenges without making it a pitch for your product.

This educational approach builds trust and positions your brand as a thought leader.

Because not all prospects will be ready to engage in a sales conversation immediately, follow up by sharing a content hub that includes the event recording, detailed case studies, and relevant product information. 

HubSpot’s tracking and analytics tools allow you to monitor which prospects visited the content hub, what materials they interacted with, and how long they spent on each resource.

 This level of detail gives you valuable insights into their interests and readiness, enabling personalized and timely follow-up. 

With HubSpot’s CRM and behavioral tracking, you’ll know exactly which content resonated with each prospect, allowing your sales team to tailor their outreach and engage with the most relevant message at the right time. 

This approach ensures that your team can initiate a meaningful sales conversation when the prospect is ready.

Conclusion

Account-based marketing (ABM) focuses your efforts on the accounts that matter most.

You can drive more effective, targeted results by aligning your sales and marketing teams and creating personalized strategies for high-value accounts. 

HubSpot’s ABM tools empower you to implement this strategy seamlessly, providing the necessary features to manage everything from account selection to campaign execution.

With HubSpot’s Target Accounts tool, Account Overview feature, and integrations with platforms like LinkedIn Ads, you have everything you need to create a streamlined, data-driven approach to ABM. 

The ability to personalize content, automate workflows, and track performance in one place ensures that your sales and marketing teams stay aligned throughout the process.

Leveraging these tools can help your business improve ROI, shorten sales cycles, and engage the correct accounts with the right messaging. 

Incorporating ABM into your HubSpot strategy ensures that your efforts are more focused, data-driven, and scalable—leading to better business outcomes.