5 Account-Based Content Creation Hacks

Rachel Lefkowitz

October 25, 2016

Marketers, I’m guessing your organizations are talking about going account based. Whether it’s Account Based Marketing, Account Based Sales Development, or Account Based Everything—the idea of a coordinated approached that orchestrates personalized messaging and experiences for named accounts is gaining some serious traction. These strategies are being recognized as the viable solutions to the problem of long, complex sales cycles with multiple decision makers.

… and if your org is not talking about going account based, you should! Consider doing some reading and bring it into your team. Your execs will thank you later.

If you need a place to start, I suggest The Clear & Complete Guide to Account Based Sales Development—a piece of partnered content by EverString and Engagio. It’s a bold strategy for companies that don’t want to wait around for revenue to show up.

Account Based Sales Development? You said this post was for marketers! It is, I promise.

This post is about a major piece of the marketing department’s contribution to ABSD—content. If your team is going to prospect into named accounts, you are going to want some account-based content to send them. An email or a tweet can only go so far without some solid personalized content for a prospect to chew on.
Want some quick hacks to help you get a jump start on your account-based content creation? I give you the 5 essential account-based content hacks.

Hack #1 Tier Your Accounts
First step to account-based content hacking is to think of your accounts in tiers. A tiered approach to any account-based strategy makes it easier for you to scale since each tier is associated with the relative importance and effort you will put into each target account plan.

We recommend that you have three account tiers—Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 target accounts. Make sure that the number of accounts you have in each tier is commensurate with the amount of time and effort you can devote! This becomes incredibly critical especially when it comes to content.

Tier 1 accounts are household names. These companies are trendsetters in their respective industries. The big dogs. These are the accounts that could single-handedly make your revenue goals for the quarter. You want to create one-to-one content for these accounts. These accounts should only receive highly personalized content from your brand like custom ebooks, infographics, webinars, etc.

Tier 2 accounts are not the biggest fish in the sea, but they are accounts that you would be honored to have as customers. Tier 2 content is personalized and targeted, but you will likely create content for targeted groups of accounts, rather than tailoring each piece of content to a single account. For Tier 2 content you can create custom content hubs, personalized videos, or engaging interactive content by industry or account.

Tier 3 accounts are still great accounts. These are the ones you feel good about turning into customers with less personalized content. For these accounts you can produce industry specific content or content based on company size or other firmographic info.
Don’t worry! You don’t have to create a zillion ebooks. Stay with me, I’ll show you how to quickly hack together personalized content without taking up a ton of your teams’ time.

Hack #2 Make A Quick Update to an Existing Piece of Content
Look at your current content inventory and see what you can update. Do you have an ebook that has performed really well? Choose your top 20 accounts, and add their logos to a new cover page like the example below. Do some minor copy changes throughout to reflect a target account or industry with an introduction page that speaks to each target account.

Hack #3 Create Custom Content Hubs
Using a platform like Uberflip, you can create custom content hubs. This is a lot less work than asset-level personalization. Take a group of assets that are relevant to a particular account or group of target accounts. Customize the hub with the account name or for a group of accounts.