In recent years, B2B marketers are leaning away from the concept of generating volumes of leads in favour of targeting specific accounts. The adoption of account-based marketing yields higher returns. Since you are marketing to a group of decision-makers within the company, you need to deliver highly specialised content. That is a lot of content! But don't panic; we can assist in content creation for your ABM strategy. So, why is content vital in account-based marketing?

Statistics indicate that 80% of decision-makers would rather learn about a company from online content instead of sales adverts. Content offers value and establishes a relationship with your prospects. Let us dive deeper into the types of content you need for ABM. Read on to find out how to build a persona and generate personalised content that will wow your potential clients.

What Types of Content Does Your ABM Need?

Traditionally, the content was used alongside other marketing tools to provide useful information to the general audience. Apart from driving traffic, the content promoted brand awareness and collected emails. However, you would get a few conversions. ABM uses a direct approach by leveraging content to target a particular account and its group of decision-makers. Therefore, the content has to be custom and address the pain points of the targeted customer.

Personalisation requires adequate research and planning. Therefore, before you focus on a specific account, you need to find out if it is the perfect fit. It can be disappointing to waste time on a prospect that will not yield great results. When researching your target markets, focus on your past customers and the reason they buy from you. What questions do they ask during the buying process? What are their pain points? After that, pick the highly qualified leads.

When creating content for the accounts, do not focus on writing articles and case studies only. Utilise other types of content like videos, emails, and infographics. They also have an impact on the B2B decision-makers. The search for infographics is skyrocketing with Google recording an 800% increase in about two years. Personalising each type of content increases your chances of winning the account.

Persona Creation

Every account is unique and requires a specific approach. Therefore, to create personalised messages, you need to know everything about that account. Without a buyer persona, your potential customers may tune out your content, or worse, toss it out.
Here are critical insights you need to learn before crafting content for an account:

The Market

Which market is your target account serving? What are the growth drivers? You also need to study the market dynamics and know the industry influencers. With this information, you can understand their pain points, market inhibitors, and design content that addresses those issues.

Target account

What is your target account’s company structure? What marketing strategies do they have in place? Identify their strengths, weaknesses, competitors, and opportunities. Learning their culture and sales triggers will come in handy when addressing the decision-makers.

Decision-makers

The target personas are vital in your marketing strategy. They determine whether you will win the account or lose it. Therefore, you need to identify the key decision influencers in the company and build a detailed profile for each of them. Understand the agenda of the COO, CMO, CFO, and CEO. What role do they play in the purchasing process? You also need to know the priorities of each decision-maker. Their preferences, styles, prejudices, and tactics will help you customise the message.

Relationships within an account

How do the decision-makers interact? What is the chain of command? Find out the key influencers of a decision and the blockers. You also need to identify the mobiliser in the group that can promote your brand.

Relationship to the account

Do you have any connections with the account? It could be past sales, links to the influencers, or your deals with their competition.

Content Creation

Your research is only useful if you put it into practice. Therefore, armed with a detailed profile of the target account, it is time to write high-quality content. You should redefine the relevance and quality of your content if you want to increase your resonance and interactions.

You do not have to create new content every time. That could increase your budget to unmanageable levels. Therefore, you can update and repurpose the existing content to suit a target account. Small changes can make a huge difference. For instance, if you include a targeted title, change the introduction and conclusion, you will have a tailored article without incurring an additional cost. Scaling up your content with high-quality images and illustrations is also quite useful.

Educational Content

The account-based marketing funnel begins with identifying prospects before targeting specific accounts. During the identification process, educational content will come in handy. However, you have to use this method tactfully to get substantial results. A good example is mentioning the target company in your informative guide and recognising them as experts in the subject.

A brief mention builds a rapport and opens a channel of communication. Even if the prospects do not interact with you on social media, they will be receptive to your marketing materials.

Email Personalisation

If well executed, email personalisation can be very useful in account-based marketing. However, if you use it poorly, your emails end up in the junk folder. Once you have identified key contacts, you can send emails to each contact. Make the email relevant, concise, and relatable. If your email is creative and helpful, the reception will be good. The fastest way to destroy your campaign is to stuff all the information on a single email or send several emails a day. You will give your prospects headaches, and they will opt out of your ABM list faster than you can blink.

Using Social Media

Most of the key contacts are on social media. Therefore, you can gather a lot of information from their posts. With knowledge of their challenges, you can create tailored content. You can also engage them on social media by tweeting and replying to their tweets, liking and commenting their Facebook posts and acknowledging their updates on LinkedIn. These interactions will set a stage for future business engagements.

Creating content for account-based marketing strategy requires in-depth study and familiarity with the accounts. You should also diversify the content to keep your audience engaged.