Traditional marketing casts a wide net, hoping to catch as many leads as possible. Account based marketing (ABM) takes the opposite approach—it’s like fishing with a spear, targeting specific high-value accounts with laser precision.
If you’re a B2B marketer struggling to engage enterprise clients or close bigger deals, ABM might be the game-changer you need. This strategic approach aligns your marketing and sales teams around a shared goal: winning specific accounts that matter most to your business.
But here’s the challenge: ABM requires a completely different content approach than traditional demand generation. You can’t rely on generic blog posts or one-size-fits-all email campaigns. Instead, you need content that speaks directly to each target account’s unique pain points, industry challenges, and business objectives.
This guide will walk you through building an account based marketing content strategy that turns prospects into customers and customers into advocates.
What Makes ABM Content Different
Account based marketing content isn’t just regular content with a company name swapped in. It requires a fundamental shift in how you think about content creation and distribution.
Traditional content marketing focuses on attracting anonymous visitors to your website through SEO and social media. ABM content, however, is designed for known accounts. You’re creating content for specific companies, often specific decision-makers within those companies.
This personalized approach means your content can address industry-specific regulations, company-specific challenges, and even reference recent news about the target account. The result? Higher engagement rates, shorter sales cycles, and stronger relationships with prospects.
Building Your ABM Content Foundation
Start with Account Research
Before creating any content, you need to understand your target accounts inside and out. This goes beyond basic firmographic data like company size and revenue.
Research each account’s recent press releases, quarterly earnings calls, leadership changes, and industry challenges. Look at their social media activity, recent blog posts, and any content they’ve shared. Understanding their strategic priorities will inform every piece of content you create.
Use tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, company websites, and industry publications to gather insights. The more you know about each account, the more relevant and compelling your content will be.
Map Content to the Buying Journey
ABM prospects move through distinct stages before making a purchase decision. Your content strategy should address each phase:
Awareness Stage: Target accounts may not yet recognize that they have a problem your solution can solve. Create educational content that highlights industry trends, emerging challenges, or regulatory changes affecting their business.
Consideration Stage: Prospects are evaluating different approaches to solving their problem. Develop comparison guides, case studies from similar companies, and thought leadership content that positions your solution favorably.
Decision Stage: The buying committee is ready to choose a vendor. Provide detailed implementation guides, ROI calculators, and testimonials from customers in similar situations.
Identify Key Stakeholders
Enterprise purchases typically involve multiple decision-makers, each with different concerns and priorities. Your content strategy must address the needs of various stakeholders:
- C-Suite executives care about strategic impact and ROI
- IT leaders focus on security, integration, and technical requirements
- End users want to know how the solution will affect their daily work
- Procurement teams evaluate cost, contract terms, and vendor reliability
Create persona-specific content that speaks to each stakeholder’s unique perspective while maintaining a consistent message about your solution’s value.
Content Types That Drive ABM Success
Account-Specific Case Studies
Generic case studies have their place, but ABM requires more targeted social proof. Develop case studies featuring companies that closely match your target accounts in terms of industry, size, and challenges.
For example, if you’re targeting a regional bank, showcase how you helped another regional bank navigate similar regulatory requirements or technology modernization efforts. The more similarities your prospects can identify, the more credible your solution becomes.
Interactive Content Experiences
Static PDFs and blog posts don’t stand out in executive inboxes. Interactive content like assessment tools, ROI calculators, and interactive infographics provides value while capturing engagement data.
Create industry-specific assessments that help prospects benchmark their current performance against peers. This positions you as a trusted advisor while generating insights about their specific challenges and priorities.
Thought Leadership for Target Industries
Position your executives as industry experts by creating thought leadership content that addresses the unique challenges facing your target accounts’ sectors.
If you’re targeting healthcare organizations, publish research on healthcare IT trends or regulatory compliance. For financial services accounts, focus on fintech innovation or risk management. This approach builds credibility and keeps your brand top-of-mind as prospects evaluate solutions.
Personalized Video Messages
Video adds a human element to ABM outreach that text-based content can’t match. Create short, personalized videos addressing specific challenges or opportunities for each target account.
Reference recent company news, congratulate them on recent achievements, or offer insights about industry trends affecting their business. These videos work particularly well for re-engaging stalled prospects or breaking into new accounts.
Distribution Strategies That Get Results
Creating great content is only half the battle. You need distribution strategies that ensure your content reaches the right people at the right time.
Direct Outreach
Email remains one of the most effective channels for ABM content distribution. But forget about mass email campaigns—ABM requires highly personalized outreach.
Reference specific content pieces in your sales emails, explaining why they’re relevant to the recipient’s current situation. Include clear next steps, whether that’s scheduling a call, requesting feedback, or sharing the content with other stakeholders.
LinkedIn Targeting
LinkedIn’s advertising platform allows you to target specific companies, job titles, and even individual prospects. Use this precision targeting to promote your ABM content directly to decision-makers at target accounts.
Create LinkedIn campaigns for each piece of content, adjusting the messaging based on the recipient’s role and position in the buying journey. Track engagement metrics to identify which accounts are showing increased interest.
Account-Based Advertising
Use programmatic advertising platforms to serve targeted ads to employees at your target accounts. This creates multiple touchpoints across different digital channels, reinforcing your message and keeping your brand visible.
Coordinate your advertising campaigns with your direct outreach efforts to create a cohesive experience. When prospects see your ads after receiving a personalized email, it reinforces your credibility and demonstrates a serious investment in winning their business.
Leveraging Data and Technology in ABM
Data and technology play a critical role in executing a successful account-based marketing strategy. CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, and intent data tools help identify high-value accounts and track engagement across multiple touchpoints. By analyzing behavioral data, marketers can understand which accounts are actively researching solutions and what content resonates most with them. This insight allows teams to deliver timely, relevant messaging that aligns with buyer intent. When data is centralized and accessible to both sales and marketing, it improves decision-making, prioritization, and overall campaign effectiveness.
Building Long-Term Relationships with ABM
ABM is not just about closing deals—it’s about building lasting relationships with strategic accounts. Even after a deal is closed, personalized content and engagement should continue to support onboarding, adoption, and expansion. Sharing exclusive insights, product updates, and tailored success stories helps strengthen trust and position your brand as a long-term partner rather than a one-time vendor. Over time, this approach turns customers into advocates who are more likely to renew, expand their contracts, and recommend your solution to others within their network.
Measuring ABM Content Performance
Traditional content marketing metrics like page views and social shares don’t tell the whole story for ABM campaigns. You need account-level metrics that tie content engagement to business outcomes.
Track metrics like account engagement score (how many people from each target account have consumed your content), content progression (whether prospects are moving from awareness to consideration content), and pipeline velocity (how ABM content affects deal progression speed).
Use marketing automation platforms to score account engagement across multiple touchpoints. This helps sales teams prioritize their outreach and identify accounts showing buying signals.
Monitor which content types and topics generate the most engagement from each account. This intelligence informs future content creation and helps you double down on what’s working.
Scaling Your ABM Content Strategy
Many organizations start with one-to-one ABM, creating unique content for each target account. While this approach delivers impressive results, it’s not scalable.
As your program matures, segment your target accounts based on shared characteristics like industry, company size, or use case. Create content clusters that can be used across multiple accounts within each segment.
This “one-to-few” approach maintains personalization while allowing you to serve more accounts effectively. You can still customize messaging and examples for specific accounts while leveraging core content across the segment.
Invest in content creation tools and templates that make personalization more efficient. Marketing automation platforms can dynamically insert account-specific information into content, reducing manual customization work.
Making ABM Content Strategy Work for Your Business
Account based marketing content strategy isn’t just about creating more personalized content—it’s about fundamentally changing how you approach B2B marketing. Success requires close alignment between marketing and sales, deep account research, and a commitment to quality over quantity.
Start small with a handful of high-priority accounts. Perfect your research process, content creation workflow, and measurement approach before expanding to additional accounts. The lessons you learn from your initial ABM program will inform your broader strategy and help you scale more effectively.
Remember that ABM is a long-term strategy. Building relationships with enterprise accounts takes time, and your content strategy should reflect that reality. Focus on providing value consistently over time rather than pushing for immediate conversions.
Ready to transform your B2B marketing approach? Begin by selecting 5-10 high-value target accounts and conducting thorough research on each one. Use these insights to create your first account-specific content pieces, then measure engagement to refine your approach. The investment in personalized content will pay dividends in stronger relationships, shorter sales cycles, and higher deal values.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is Account-Based Marketing (ABM)?
Account based marketing is a B2B strategy where marketing and sales teams focus on a defined set of high-value accounts and create personalized campaigns to engage specific companies and decision-makers rather than a broad audience.
2. How is ABM different from traditional demand generation?
Traditional demand generation targets a wide audience to generate leads, while ABM starts with selected accounts and delivers tailored messaging and content designed to win those specific businesses.
3. Which businesses benefit most from ABM?
ABM works best for B2B companies with long sales cycles, high-value deals, and multiple stakeholders involved in purchasing decisions, such as SaaS, enterprise technology, healthcare, and financial services firms.
4. How personalized does ABM content need to be?
ABM content can be fully personalized for top-tier accounts or semi-personalized for groups of similar accounts. The focus is on relevance and value rather than creating entirely unique content for every account.
5. What content formats work best for ABM?
Effective ABM content includes account-specific or industry-specific case studies, ROI calculators, executive briefs, thought leadership content, and personalized videos that address real business challenges.
6. How do you measure ABM content performance?
ABM performance is measured using account-level metrics such as engagement across stakeholders, content progression through funnel stages, pipeline velocity, and revenue influenced by target accounts.
7. How long does it take to see results from ABM?
ABM is a long-term approach. Early engagement may be visible within weeks, but significant pipeline and revenue growth typically takes several months, especially for enterprise-level accounts.
8. Can small marketing teams run ABM successfully?
Small teams can implement ABM by starting with a small group of high-value accounts, aligning closely with sales, and using scalable content strategies to maximize impact with limited resources.
9. How many accounts should you start with in an ABM program?
Most companies start with 5–10 high-priority accounts to test their ABM strategy. This allows teams to refine research, content, and measurement processes before scaling to more accounts.
10. What are common mistakes to avoid in ABM content strategy?
Common mistakes include using generic content, failing to align marketing and sales, ignoring multiple stakeholders within an account, and measuring success using traditional lead-based metrics instead of account-level outcomes.
