Account-Based *Content* Marketing
Account-Based *Content* Marketing – Talking to the right crowd at the right time
ABM is a buzzword in marketing these days. However, marketing teams might be surprised to find that this is not a new concept to the Sales Teams they work with. Sales have always had their eyes on target accounts, unlike marketers who have typically aimed to talk to anyone who is willing to listen. That’s changing now that marketers have more data available to them and the technology to bring a much tighter focus and a more rigorous approach to engaging target accounts. Using ABM, marketers can provide “air cover” to heat up target accounts for sales and generate a steady flow of Account Qualified Leads (“AQLs”).
Content and ABM
Most content marketing is used to drive top-of-the-funnel traffic, support organic traffic, collect emails, or create general brand awareness.
Account-Based Content Marketing leverages content to target a specific customer, or with some extra effort, a very small group of customers. It is tailored to the unique pain points of highly-targeted potential customers and their present situation and needs.
When using Account-Based Content Marketing (ABCM) you need to research and understand the client that you are targeting. Ask yourself: Who are your customers? What do you deliver that they need? What are the pains of your customers? What does your customer journey look like? How many touch points typically take place between the first point of contact and making a sale? And what questions do those that convert tend to ask along the way?
From Theory to Action
Find out which downloadable content or specific blog posts resonate with key accounts.
By mapping journeys of people in key accounts, you can compile a picture of which topics (and even specific pages and items) are engaging your target accounts. This helps guide your content strategy and focus content creation and promotion efforts towards those items.
Create targeted messages and show specific content to people in key accounts.
These insights can also be used to optimize journeys on site, by showing top performing content to people from those accounts. For example, you could show people from a certain financial organization relevant case studies from their industry or competitors, increasing the relevance and effectiveness of your message.
Deanonymize visitors from target accounts.
Another benefit of ABM is the ability to attribute certain visits to specific companies, even before they sign up for anything on your site. This ability to know whether people from a certain key account are engaging with your assets can help you focus further sales & marketing efforts towards that account.
Empower your sales development team with content engagement insights.
By providing your sales development team with information about which pieces of content were consumed by which accounts, the engagement of the SD can be more relevant and productive. Give them the ability to know if certain accounts are more interested in certain aspects of your product or technology.
Personalize the content journey for target accounts
Provide performance-driven content recommendations and call to actions to specific targets and automatically boost website conversion rates.
Understand how content affects your realized and potential revenue and pipeline.
To be able to effectively attribute the impact of your content marketing assets on sales, you must use the ABM lens. Five people from the same company signing up for a demo does not mean five new business opportunities; if follows that the impact of content on the buyer journeys should be clustered per account, not per individual person. This is a more accurate way of measuring content marketing ROI.
Going beyond the acquisition – marketing for LTV
As marketing (especially in B2B) is moving to target the entire customer lifecycle and not just the acquisition stage, the importance of understanding and engaging people from key accounts along all stages is growing. Engagement of people from existing accounts with your content and offers can serve as an early indicator of whether certain accounts can be expanded. On the flip side, lack of engagement can serve as an early warning that an account may churn.
Also, as we look to measure content’s ROI, we need to measure its impact across the entire journey. If certain posts or items have contributed to an upsell, that should also be taken into the ROI equation.
TrenDemon and ABM – Account-Based Content Marketing
Helping companies align marketing with revenue has been our north star since inception. In practice, our customers have been using our technology to leverage the ABM methodology and target key accounts with specific messages with great success.
Connecting your content to business goals doesn’t need to be so hard. If you want to find out how you can do it simply and easily, schedule a demo today.