Today more than ever before, marketing departments are emerging as key revenue drivers whose work has a measurable impact on companies’ bottom lines.
As such, marketers have scrambled to prove their contribution, attaching their reputations to goals centered around increasing efficiency and generating leads.
But these early measurements of success—individual leads, specifically—have created their fair share of problems. Creating tons of content that doesn’t get used and flooding the funnel with leads and opportunities who aren’t ready to buy aren’t the best ways to enable sales teams.
So, what is?
Two philosophies have emerged to tackle this question:
Content Operations: A model that aligns the people, processes, and tools that plan, produce, distribute, and analyze content. It’s how marketers, communicators, sales, and customer success break down silos, ensuring a more effective investment in content.
Account Based Marketing (ABM): A strategic go-to-market approach that coordinates personalized marketing and sales efforts to open doors and deepen engagement at specific accounts.
Each one seeks to make marketers smarter about how they influence the bottom line, and they’re not mutually exclusive. Quite the contrary. As we attempt to implement strategies that bolster marketing’s impact, it’s clear that both strategies are essential to success—and neither can truly thrive without the other.
Great ABM Strategy Hinges on Great Content
“Content is the queen in the realm of ABM”
–Forrester
Here’s the good news: you don’t need to reimagine your content strategy to launch an effective ABM strategy. Content is the lifeblood of everything we do as marketers, and Account Based Marketing is no exception. Content forms the foundation of the trust you build with customers, whether it’s meant for one person or one thousand.
In fact, content-focused B2B marketers are some of the best positioned to thrive in the Account Based Marketing era.
Why?
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Collectively, we as marketers have all come to understand—and preach—that mass appeal isn’t a winning strategy. For years, we’ve been steadfast in the belief that we must make less matter more by ensuring we create only the right content, that it’s delivered only to the right customer, and that it’s presented only at the right time.
And once our content is published, we know better than to get distracted by vanity metrics, such as views, likes, and shares. Instead, we focus on how our content performs in key accounts, and whether it aligns with and contributes to key company priorities.
In many ways, Account Based Marketing is simply the logical evolution of our strategy. ABM applies theories at a granular level, challenging us to target not simply certain personas but certain people at the right accounts.
How? With outstanding, personalized content.
The Three Building Blocks for Great ABM Content
Before you dive into content creation, there are certain things you must do first to set your foundation. Don’t dive head-first into creating your personalized content. You must understand three things first that will set your ABM content efforts up for success.
Content Operations: A content operation is the set of processes, people, and technologies for strategically planning, producing, distributing, and analyzing content. When well-designed and implemented, it unifies the customer experience across all departments and channels and allows marketers to focus on authentic, resonant messaging that drives revenue and growth.
A Tiered Approach to ABM Content: Just as not all accounts are created equal, not all target accounts are created equal either. Thus, your approach to prospecting, working and closing accounts is going to be different for different companies, which also means your approach for content is going to be different. You must define that upfront.
A Content Framework: Designing great ABM content follows the same fundamental rules that govern effective content strategy. Every piece of content (down to the last social media post) should be able to answer three key questions: Who is it for? What is the context? Where will it be distributed?
Once you have those three things in place, you can begin to execute your ABM content quickly and effectively.
Since this is such an important topic that deserves more than just a blog post, we teamed up with the content pros at Kapost to bring you The B2B Marketer’s Guide to ABM Content. In this ebook, we’ll dive deep into each of these three topics for setting your foundations. We’ll also reveal strategies for creating killer content at different stages of the buyer’s journey, how to determine the effectiveness of your content, and how to get started with ABM content immediately.
