What’s the key to creating compelling marketing campaigns that drive sales in today’s competitive B2B landscape? It’s knowing how to reach the right people with the right message at the right time.
Enter account-based marketing (ABM), which leverages both sales and marketing expertise to identify high-value accounts and convert them into customers. The results speak for themselves: 80% of ABM sales strategies close more deals than traditional marketing and sales approaches, and 73% even see a higher deal size than conversions from standard campaigns.
Fueling your ABM efforts with a content strategy can improve this win-rate even more, and fully marry your sales and marketing departments. An ad hoc ABM content strategy won’t get you the results you want, so your content efforts need to be systematic in approach. Let’s look at how an ABM content strategy can drive higher sales.
Leverage Your Research
If you already have an ABM strategy underway, then your sales team has done extensive research on target accounts. Leverage the data they’ve compiled to develop topic ideas and audience personas. If you’ve already won some of these accounts, you have even more information to draw inspiration from.
See how you can apply the insight you’ve gained about industry and company pain points from interviewing stakeholders during the onboarding process. This information can form the basis of your entire ABM content strategy.
Identify Topics
Here are a few questions to ask as you come up with content ideas:
- What are the biggest challenges facing your target accounts?
- How is your company uniquely able to help them?
- How do decision makers measure success?
- What information and content do they find most useful?
- What channels are they most active on?
Depending on which persona you’re targeting, content may need to span different objectives (ie thought leadership versus instructional content) and through different stages of the sales funnel. Understanding your audience’s needs will help you determine what topics to cover and the format your content should take.
Audit Your Existing Content
Once you have a better idea of which content will be most useful, take a look at what you already have. Look for assets that align with your new strategy, as well as what you can update or repurpose. Older content can be incredibly useful and productive when given a refresh — just remember to update stats and reference links, refresh the design and layout, and re-optimize content for search.
Another pro tip? See how you can repurpose existing content into new formats for new channels. For example, turn an old ebook into a blog series and an infographic. Turn high-performing blog posts into videos and webinars. Repurposing old content can be a gold mine and more cost-effective than creating new pieces.
Create Personalized Content — With Scale in Mind
The beauty of ABM content strategy is that when it’s done correctly, you can create content that is both optimized to specific target accounts and broad enough to provide value for other leads in their industry. Depending on your resources, there are a number of ways you can tackle this.
The more complex strategy is to create content templates that you populate with data and talking points specific to the needs of a target account. The sales teams would use this highly tailored content to engage with individual target accounts. This approach can provide strong results, but it takes more time and resources to execute, given the targeted content approach. This can work well in niche industries where you have a small target account list with high dollar value deals.
A more attainable approach is to create content about solving the challenges of specific target accounts, but framing it in a way that establishes your brand as a thought leader in the industry. If one account is facing a certain challenge, chances are, other target accounts are as well.
Develop an Editorial Calendar
Coordinate with your sales team to get a better idea of their current funnel and customer journey. When you know which accounts they’re pursuing and when, you can schedule content creation that aligns with their goals.
Keep in mind the importance of being able to scale each piece of content, and you will be able to develop a fully fledged editorial calendar that serves the needs of your sales team, as well as your entire organization.
An ABM content strategy hyper-focuses your team on providing more value to target accounts. But in the process, you will develop even more insight into the industries you serve and further develop expertise in a niche. Get in touch for support in creating and executing an ABM content strategy.