A powerful ABM content strategy can help your marketing approach in a way that allows you to generate leads for your business better. How so? Well, read on to find out more.
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What is ABM?
Before anything else, let’s first answer what ABM is.
ABM is short for Account-Based Marketing, and it has this name because this marketing approach focuses a lot on your target accounts.
The ABM strategy stands out from traditional marketing approaches by focusing on individual accounts or high-value prospects rather than casting a wide net and hoping for the best.
Unlike other marketing strategies that rely on mass outreach and lead generation, ABM takes a more personalized and targeted approach. By identifying key accounts that align with their ideal customer profile, companies can tailor their messaging and efforts to meet these accounts’ specific needs and challenges.
This approach allows for a more strategic and efficient allocation of resources, resulting in higher conversion rates and stronger customer relationships.
ABM involves close collaboration between sales and marketing teams to ensure targeting, messaging, and overall strategy alignment. Companies can create highly customized experiences for their target accounts by working together towards common goals.
This level of personalization increases the chances of capturing crucial decision-makers attention and enhances brand perception and trust.
Since it’s such a personal approach, the marketing approach often requires a lot of effort to get to know who you’re marketing to. That means that you have to work on creating meaningful connections. That’s one reason this works exceptionally well for B2B companies over B2C ones.
Now that you know what ABM is, it’s time to see what ABM content strategy tips you can apply to your business
1. Conduct a content audit
If you’re implementing any new changes to your content strategy approaches, then having or conducting a content audit will be crucial.
A content audit involves evaluating and analyzing all existing content assets within your ABM campaign. It provides valuable insights into what content is working and what isn’t and identifies gaps in your strategy.
By conducting a comprehensive review of your content, you can make informed decisions on optimizing and aligning your messaging with your target accounts’ needs and preferences.
A well-planned content audit enables you to identify which pieces resonate most with your audience, allowing you to refine your messaging for maximum impact.
Furthermore, a thorough understanding of the existing content landscape helps you identify opportunities for repurposing or updating outdated materials. By effectively leveraging existing assets, you can save time and resources while delivering relevant and compelling messages tailored to each stage of the buyer’s journey.
If you haven’t done a content audit yet, you might not have a solid and reliable list of your content inventory. This is the perfect chance to do that.
You can then rely on your content inventory to determine which pieces of content you’ve already published need updating. You can even use that as an inspiration to figure out new content ideas based on the content gaps you manage to unearth.
2. Develop a content plan
Once you have finished conducting your content audit, you can start creating a more informed content plan.
It’s always best to do some content auditing before this step, so do not skip the audit.
Now, a content plan serves as a roadmap that outlines the specific content pieces and tactics your business needs to engage and nurture target accounts effectively.
Creating a content plan for an ABM content strategy involves careful consideration of the unique needs, preferences, and pain points of the target accounts. Marketers can establish credibility, build relationships, and ultimately drive conversions by tailoring content specifically to these accounts.
The primary goal of an ABM content strategy is to provide valuable information that resonates with the target accounts at each stage of their buyer’s journey. This goal requires thoughtful planning and alignment with sales teams to ensure the right messages arrive at the right time.
A well-crafted content plan not only helps in generating leads but also ensures consistency across all touchpoints. It allows marketers to create a cohesive narrative that reinforces key messaging and positions their brand as a trusted advisor.
Furthermore, developing a comprehensive content plan enables marketers to track performance metrics, measure success, and make data-driven optimizations.
Marketers can maximize the impact of their ABM efforts by continuously analyzing results and refining their approach.
3. Create unique, personalized content
The real game-changer for many ABM marketing campaigns would be its ability to be more personalized than the usual way of marketing or anything. That’s why after you craft your content plan, it’s time to create customized content your customers would appreciate getting from you.
Blogs are a great form of content for the long-term and SEO, but you can’t rely on them solely as they can be challenging to personalize.
One way to do that is through your email marketing campaigns.
Gone are the days of generic mass messaging that fails to capture the attention and interest of potential customers. Businesses must go above and beyond to stand out from the crowd. This hurdle is where unique and personalized content comes into play.
You demonstrate a deep understanding of their challenges and aspirations by tailoring your email contents specifically to your target accounts’ needs, pain points, and preferences. This level of personalization grabs their attention and establishes a sense of trust and credibility.
Moreover, unique content sets you apart from your competitors by offering fresh perspectives or insights that other competitors still need to explore. It positions you as a thought leader in your industry who brings valuable knowledge and expertise.
4. Find out lead magnets for your audience
One type of content you need to create that would be useful for you in many ways is a lead magnet.
If you don’t know what they are, lead magnets are compelling pieces of content that come with offers to potential customers so you can get their contact information, most commonly their email addresses. These can be ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, or exclusive access to industry insights.
By finding suitable lead magnets for your audience, you can create a compelling ABM content strategy that captures their attention and generates high-quality leads.
The key to success with lead magnets lies in understanding your target audience’s pain points, interests, and motivations. By conducting thorough research and leveraging data analytics, you can identify the types of content that will attract and engage your ideal customers.
This knowledge allows you to develop highly targeted lead magnets that address their needs and challenges.
For example, if you’re targeting anyone in the real estate industry, perhaps a report or whitepaper on rising real estate trends can be compelling enough for them to sign up and even give you their email.
You can then build an email list of all of your leads you can contact and email with relevant news and information to keep them warm. Eventually, they may even convert.
5. Repurpose your content into different formats
Once you’ve made critical pieces of content as part of your content strategy, you have to make sure that you find ways to make the most out of them. The best way to do that is by repurposing existing pieces of content in different formats.
Repurposing content involves transforming existing assets such as blog posts, whitepapers, or case studies into different formats such as videos, infographics, podcasts, or social media posts. This process allows you to adapt your message to suit other platforms and audience preferences while maintaining consistency in your brand messaging.
The importance of repurposing your content lies in its ability to amplify your ABM efforts.
By presenting your message in multiple formats, you increase the chances of capturing the attention of prospects who may prefer consuming information through different channels. This multi-channel approach enhances brand visibility and enables you to engage with potential leads at various touch points throughout their buyer’s journey.
For example, you can start with a whitepaper. Condense it a bit and turn it into a blog post. Use that as a podcast topic. Condense it even further and use it to create several social media posts that engage with your audience.
6. Optimize your content process
Now that you’ve finished creating and publishing your content, it’s time to reflect on your entire content process.
It’s a good idea to take this step to acknowledge which parts didn’t work for you during the content process. It would be best to note the common bottlenecks that have caused delays, for example.
Also, now is the time to look at your KPIs or key performance indicators. These can help you celebrate successes where you got them.
7. Keep it SEO-Friendly
Although SEO isn’t that much of a personal approach, it’s still crucial with any marketing campaign in this digital age. However, it would help to aim for keywords that might not get as much traffic as others.
The more niche your audience, the less competitive the terms you may need to use. That may make it harder to weed out relevant keywords from irrelevant ones, but your knowledge of your target audience certainly helps with it.
8. Use push notifications to alert target accounts
It would be best to pay attention to the messaging mediums you can use when you run your website. For example, push notifications are a small but powerful prompt that you can use to alert your target accounts.
If they’re on your site for a specified amount of time, you can prompt them with some push notifications that can “push” them to do something relevant to them. It’s simple but powerful.
In Conclusion
These tips are all helpful in straightening out your ABM content strategy in a more efficient way. Apply these to your content approach today to start generating leads as soon as possible for your business, no matter who your customers may be.