The future of how companies will communicate with their most important targets – Account-Based Content Marketing (ABCM). By leveraging account-based marketing (ABM) and content creation, this strategy makes it easy for companies to reach their high-value accounts with laser-focused content that is personal, relevant, and ultra-specific to the needs and challenges of the account.
Regardless of whether you are a marketing lead or run a small business, it is critical that an understanding of ABCM can and should be leveraged to develop stronger client relationships and ROI.
Here, we’ll discuss what account-based content marketing is, why it’s important, and how to establish a powerful campaign from the ground up.
The Relevance of Account-Based Content Marketing
ABCM is based on personalization and precision. ABCM is the opposite of traditional content strategies that try to have mass appeal; it focuses on content that is going to be most relevant to a narrower audience , that matters the most to your business.
The move from quantity to quality yields several advantages:
- Increases Engagement: Very personalized content gets noticed, calling out pain points or objectives of the target account.
- Higher ROI: Investing on your high-value accounts and across your funnel means more bang for your buck.
- Unites Marketing and Sales: The version of ABCM promotes teamwork between your marketing and sales departments, facilitating communication during the buying process.
A report from ITSMA has found that 87% of B2B marketers believe that ABM (arguably ABCM) delivers a higher ROI than other marketing initiatives. This is a testament to the increasing value it plays in today’s marketing world.
Identifying Key Accounts
The first step in implementing an ABCM approach is to determine which accounts you wish to pursue. The course you take here will determine the very basis of your campaign.
How to Select the Right Accounts
- Data for Insights: Utilize your CRM and third-party analytics and customer data to pinpoint accounts that have a high likelihood of generating revenue, or becoming long term partners.
- Sales Team Collaboration: Partner with your sales team and decide which accounts have shown intent or match your ideal customer profile (ICP) measurement.
- Scoring & Prioritization: Score and prioritize your key accounts based on their fit, the size of opportunity, relevance within their industry, and how well aligned they are with your product or service.
Key Tip: Spend your time with accounts where the prospects have challenges or initiatives that your company’s offerings are directly aligned with.
Designing Content That’s Targeted to the Account Level
After you’ve gotten a sense of what accounts are worth targeting, the next step is creating content designed specifically to speak to their needs. This personalized content is the “account-based” in account-based content marketing, and it’s how you grow your visibility in an overcrowded digital world.
How to Use These Techniques – Creating You-Are-There Content
- Know Their Pains: Weave all of your target account’s pain points using findings from an industry report, the company’s website, recent events they attended or public statements they made.
- Adapt Your Content to Differing Formats: You have different decision-makers within the same organization to speak to, and not everyone prefers a video or blog post; some people like case studies, white papers or target those explainer videos for a very exact audience!
- Add A Personal Touch: Add personal touches to the content, like Caitlin does here by adding their account’s name, discussing their business goals or mentioning current challenges.
Examples of Custom Content
- Case Studies: Showcase the solutions and outcomes relevant to issues specific to your ideal customer’s industry.
- Persona-Based Videos: Brief videos demonstrating pain points and how your services can solve them can be an impactful and straightforward approach.
- Co-Branded Materials: Build branded slide decks or professional documents that reflect synergy.
Effectively Share Your Work
Just publishing great content is not enough. How you deploy it is just as serious to ensure it reaches the right people within your target accounts.
ABM Channels for Content Marketing to Accounts
- Email Marketing: Get your custom-made content into your customers’ inboxes with an integrated email marketing service. Create catchy subject lines and add a clear CTA.
- Social Platforms: Sites like LinkedIn are great places to distribute targeted content, get into meaningful conversations, or run niche sponsored campaigns.
- Direct Mail: Old-fashioned direct mail campaigns delivering customized, physical content can break through digital clutter and leave a lasting impression.
- Sales Enablement Tools: Equip your sales team with materials they can present at initial meetings or later on followings to keep your messaging in tune.
Key Tip: Concentrate on channels that your target market actually logs into and don’t be afraid to test a few combinations for maximum reach.
Assess Your Campaigns’ Success
A campaign would not be a campaign without an evaluation. Monitoring these Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) not only demonstrates the worth of your ABCM exercise but also provides a focus for further breakthroughs.
Key Metrics to Monitor
- Engagement Metrics: Monitor open rates, click throughs and time spent on your content.
- Account-Specific Traffic: Monitor the amount of traffic your target accounts are directing to your website and landing pages.
- Accounts per Conversion: How many accounts have progressed down the funnel as a result of total campaign activity.
- Revenue Impact: Finally, you need to tie the revenues or LTV figures with your ABCM campaigns.
Instruments for Efficient Measurements
- CRM Systems: You can track account interactions and sales progress with platforms like Salesforce.
- Marketing Analytics Tools: Analyze how accounts are engaging with your content across digital platforms by leveraging tools such as Google Analytics or HubSpot.
Top Tip: Review and update your strategies often. If an aspect of your process just isn’t working, don’t hesitate to put it aside and try something else!
The Future of Account-Based Content Marketing
Account-Based Content Marketing is a complete inversion of the B2B marketing approach from businesses’ perspective. Its individualized and targeted methodology results in unparalleled audience experience and long-term client partnership.
Going forward, advances in AI, particularly machine learning, are likely to continue to improve the accessibility and effectiveness of ABCM for businesses of all sizes.
By automating this content personalization and distribution process, marketers can scale their activity without having to lose the precision.
Conclusion
But don’t let the future start running away from you! Begin using ABCM now to gain a competitive advantage and to generate impactful marketing results.
Whether you’re new to ABCM or still refining your approach, think of the time to act as now. Take these principles and apply them to really open up meaningful engagements with your target accounts, impact measurable business outcomes, and chart a long term sustainable path to success.
