Buyer Intent Data
Article | October 7, 2022
High-value content plays a key role in account-based marketing. Account-based marketing uses content to nurture leads and address their pain points throughout the sales process.
A perfect ABM strategy is one that provides relevant content to the right prospects at the right time. ABM content needs to be personal and highly relevant to create an impact on the stakeholders of your target account.
In an interview with Media 7, Stuart Sumner, Editorial Director at Incisive Media, talked about the importance of content in marketing strategy.
“The best way to win the content war is to have better, more valuable, and more timely content than your competitors. You need to offer audiences a regular supply of high-quality, in-depth content, which they can’t get elsewhere.”
The need for effective content is all-encompassing across industries, demographics, and niche domains. It helps businesses seek solutions to their critical business challenges. Reading through the opinions of other thought leaders from the industry influences their purchase decisions. So, good quality, reliable content can convince a business that you are the ideal choice for a B2B association.
How Should ABM Content Be Organized?
Creating effective content is the need of the hour, but it can be challenging if done without a direction or goal in mind.
Your ABM content should build brand awareness, and engage the readers while also presenting value to them. It should also be personalized enough to convey your involvement and dedication to your target account. To organize ABM content effectively, follow these steps:
Conduct Stringent Research
Stringently researching your target audience can help to create a content framework that can capture the solutions to their problems, their needs, and their interests. When you investigate the target accounts in-depth, you will know what aspects you can leverage to capture their attention and interest. Then you can organize the content to engage them.
Another interesting approach is to directly ask your audience about the kind of content they enjoy and their preferred formats. These insights can help you personalize the content better because 80% of consumers prefer shopping with brands that provide a personalized experience. You might also be able to leverage content for more than one account.
Maintain a Content Inventory
The research-based content that was created before you developed your ABM strategy can be repurposed to target the accounts in your focus. Creating a content library and mapping the intent of your content can help you with repurposing the correct content. The more detailed your content library, the easier it gets to reuse it. Consider organizing your content library with dates, extra information, highlights, and formats so you can start using the content without much ado.
The content you develop should complement your ABM strategy. As a part of your ABM strategy, it should add value to your marketing effort.
Create a Content Matrix
Create a content matrix that lists out the target accounts in your focus. It is a tool to organize your data to meet your marketing objectives. Based on your objectives, you can carry out content mapping to influence purchase decisions for these accounts. This can help you decide on the purpose of your content strategy. Do you want to create awareness or incite action from your readers? By figuring out what you want, you can use your content matrix to understand the scope to personalize the content in line with your ABM goals.
Analyze Your Performance
Experiment with different formats, visuals, and messages while creating your content. Measure the success of your content strategy like you measure the success of your ABM strategy using KPIs. Gauge how your audience reacts to different formats and visuals to know what to focus more on. Revise, retest, repurpose the content till you get the best output. It all boils down to how well you organize your ABM content.
ABM Content Best Practices
Best practices should be followed when creating content to achieve sales and marketing alignment, drive ROI, and target key accounts. Periodically engaging in website content mapping and content research to see how your content is doing is vital. Here are the ABM content best practices you should follow to organize ABM content:
1. Personalize the content to suit your target account’s needs.
2. Conduct regular SEO and content audits to find any flaws or unresponsive content.
3. Optimize your content to meet search engine optimization needs.
4. Repurpose your content regularly to make the most of it.
5. Support your content with good design.
6. Focus on creating interactive ABM content.
7. Your content should build trust in the minds of your target accounts.
How Coca-Cola’s Fanbase on Facebook Increased by 39% Because of Organized Content
Coca-Cola’s famous ‘Share a Coke’ campaign targeted Australian millennials to improve their sales numbers in the summer of 2011. Under this campaign, Coca-Cola offered name-branded coke bottles to the customers. Through stringent research, understanding their audiences’ preferred formats (TV commercials, newspapers, bus ads, and social media), and implementing strong CTAs in their ads, Coca-Cola gained a 39% increase in its Facebook fanbase.
Key Takeaway
The way you formulate and organize ABM content plays a key role in driving results from your ABM strategy. It is crucial that you dedicate time and resources to creating, personalizing, organizing, presenting, and analyzing the content you offer to your target accounts. You can drive a higher ROI from your ABM and content strategy only when your approach to content is as focused as your ABM strategy.
FAQ
What is a content matrix?
A content matrix is a tool that a marketer can use to plan and offer the right content in the right format and on the right platform to the target audience.
How can you use old content in your ABM strategy?
You can use your old content by repurposing it to better target your key accounts.
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Core ABM
Article | June 20, 2023
Since the introduction of account-based marketing, B2B marketing has evolved. According to Forrester, as of 2025, "account-based marketing" will be overtaken by "account-centric marketing," which will be the way most B2B companies find, plan, manage, and measure purchase and post-sale actions.
A Brief
The marketing departments of multibillion-dollar corporations were early users of ABM. Over the years, they have made significant investments in their ABMprocesses and technologies. The exercise worked flawlessly for them. Their business circumstances made them ideal candidates for ABM, for instance lengthy sales cycles, high transaction sizes, and several decision-makers in purchasing committees. They have now realized that shooting in the dark and probably what sticks around is not the ideal method to develop a sustainable GTM process for their organizations. Moreover, they're debating whether to maintain their investment in inbound marketing methods and alternatively abandon it entirely!
On the other hand, smaller businesses are lagging behind in ABM implementation. They are aware that their existing spray and pray procedures are inefficient and require immediate improvement. They are powerless to ignore the continual buzz about the benefits of ABM and the larger good it may unlock for their firm. And yet, they are confused about how to begin. Additionally, they will learn how to integrate ABM into their current marketing processes. They exist in a perpetual state of contradiction, torn between the fear of missing out and the danger of prematurely disturbing the apple cart (the switch to ABM). Their meager marketing budgets and resources do little to aid them in decision-making.
As a result, marketing teams (large and small) are faced with a fundamental question: "Should I abandon inbound marketing methods in favor of ABM?"
The answer is a strict no! Both are essential.
Why Are Marketers Skeptical of the Efficacy of Inbound Marketing Strategies?
Current inbound B2B marketing practices are fragmented and generic, attracting the wrong types of leads. With a heterogeneous set of digital touchpoints, each with its own data silo, insights are dispersed throughout the organization, owing to multiple native dashboard management and data collectors.
What's behind the inbound demand funnel?
Inbound marketing is majorly concerned with attracting users or customers to your business's offerings. Three stages comprise the inbound funnel: attract, engage, and close. It enables marketers to communicate with each of these categories on a value-based basis. Things get muddled when there are a lot of digital touch points for inbound marketing strategies, like search engine optimization, social media marketing, digital and offline branding, and so on. This results in the decentralisation of insights. Marketers increase interaction through the use of social media and landing sites.
The sales team generates leads through email campaigns.
Client Relationship Managers respond to inquiries via automated content management systems.
Due to the dispersed nature of the touchpoints, the issue is ensuring that communications are consistent and personalized across the various account segments.
What's behind the ABM funnel?
Identify: Identify the accounts that most closely match your company's ideal customer profile criteria.
Engage: Use personalized and specialized content to reach out to and nurture those accounts, and urge them into conversion.
Establish and Expand: Attract new customers and uncover possibilities to expand existing accounts through a variety of customer marketing methods such as cross-sell, upsell, and retention.
ABM & Inbound Marketing - the Convergence of the Funnels
A common misunderstanding is that an ABM funnel and an inbound funnel are opposed. ABM and inbound marketing are not mutually exclusive strategies. Indeed, they complement one another. Both are facets of the same coin.
B2B marketers use ABM and inbound demand generation to have maximum impact. These two tactics combine to create a new funnel known as the "dual funnel." The dual funnel strategy entails maintaining a high-volume demand generation funnel in addition to a highly targeted account-based funnel. Both funnels function in tandem to engage a target demographic with a high level of intent and an inclination to buy.
This dual funnel strategy enables the identification of target accounts and the provision of tailored experiences through account-based approaches.
In a mature ABM program, marketers keep an eye on target accounts, retire underperforming ones, and replace them with new high-intent clients found and qualified through the inbound demand generation funnel, which is how they find and qualify new clients.
Conclusion:
When these two procedures are integrated, inbound marketing successfully generates leads. Additionally, account-based marketing focuses on customizing and delivering one-on-one messages and engagements to target accounts. Optimize your inbound marketing approach to generate the highest quality leads across all channels. When you set up your ABM funnel, only use it to get the most qualified leads. Then, use it for highly personalised and targeted marketing.
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Account Based Data
Article | June 29, 2023
Account-based marketing, also known as ABM, is an effective yet efficient way to seek out high-value leads and close sales. A B2B marketer can align his sales and marketing strategies to break into the industry. However, there’s one thing that needs all the attention from the marketing team- the content.
The B2B marketers from around the world are shuffling their budgets to focus more on account-based marketing. As of now, 28% of the budgets were allocated to support account-based marketing.
When considering ABM, marketers often jump to the execution part instead of planning, identifying, and targeting the target accounts. Therefore, they fail to understand the critical needs of the clientele. The whole process of connecting with the customers with their accounts goes into vain.
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ABM Accounts
Article | May 24, 2021
The pandemic has catalyzed an en-masse move to hybrid workforce models across industries and functions, including marketing teams. Add to this the broad changes in consumer behavior and market expectations resulting from the disruption of the last 15 months. How has all of this change impacted marketing priorities?
While DX has been a priority for a while now, what’s changed is the race to connect customer experience (CX) to the DX initiative. Over the last year digital engagement has been at times the only way to find, get and keep customers. Starting with overhauling virtual shopfronts — aka brand websites — to investing in more advanced data-driven marketing decisioning engines, making CX central to the digital strategy has become primary.
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