5 Tips for Creating Content Strategy for Account-Based Marketing

In the B2B marketing space, buyers make careful purchase decisions based on in-depth information, tips, updates, videos, product reviews and with the help of many other resources they seek online. This leads directly to the necessity of content marketing, which helps marketers to attract, grow awareness, interact and engage, convince and convert, and retain new customers.

Especially with larger enterprises, larger numbers of employees are involved who play significant role on final purchase decisions. That’s why the process of closing a deal becomes more time consuming and complex in larger companies with more people to follow up with and engage.

Why ABM needs content strategies?

Content Marketing and account-based marketing create the most relevant and data-driven content to educate, inform, motivate, and follow up all the people playing major roles in making the purchase decision through diverse channels where they engage, mention and search for similar product information, through different phases of buying journey. That’s why content plays a major role in account-based marketing campaigns in order to target the right audience and market by addressing their needs, preferences and challenges.

The main decision-makers and budget maker will be interested to buy only when their bosses and other employees involved in the buying journey and show interests in the products as they are followed up with educational content, daily updates, industry facts, market research findings, demo videos, images and other informative content which convince them how their problems will solve with the right set of products.

This requires a strategic, personalized approach in content marketing and ABM to build long-standing relationships with decision makers, industry influencers and with the target company. Here are five content marketing tips to hatch personalized ABM campaigns to attract more conversions.

Content marketing tips #1: Check with your present content inventory

The first step to lay the perfect content marketing plan for account-based marketing is to scan through your current repository of content and which assets need to be updated to match the needs of current companies you are dealing with. Then, you need to determine how you can personalize the content in order to make it more effective for the campaign, while establishing meaningful customer relations with the target accounts.

Creating a large amount of fresh content could be time consuming. For that reason, it’s better to repurpose existing content with a strategic modification plan to create personalized, relevant and targeted messages for your ABM campaigns. Here is how you can repurpose and reuse your old content:

1. Make a list of the top target accounts and incorporate their logos to the cover pages of all content you are sending them.

2. Make some minor copy changes in ways that should reflect the company, market and the industry you are targeting with the content.

3. Make a new introduction to the existing content that will address the needs, challenges, and preferences of your target company and its decision makers.

Content marketing tips #2: focus on interactive content for easy modification

Interactive content is the most engaging form of content that interests buyers and influencers, so it is best to emphasize this type of content, which you can then modify and change in ways to recreate targeted and relevant ABM content. You can simply clone these items by slight modification and by adding relevant images, videos or copy to all the content you are recreating for the ABM campaign, for all versions.

That ways, you can create different versions of the content for different companies and industries and make it optimized, personalized and relevant as per the target company. Thus, you can create content relevant to key decision makers as well as the company itself.

Content marketing tips #3: Create optimized content hubs

Creating a lot of personalized content for diverse accounts, markets, and influencers could be daunting and prolonged activities. However, having an optimized content hub would be a more feasible alternative. Such content hubs are web pages where you place a selected range of content for a target account. Make every hub optimized to the target account and also incorporate photos of the sales people who will follow up the account.

Choose the content carefully to reflect the needs and expectations of each account. Thus, you can make use of these content hubs for email engagement programs and sales activities as well. With these content hubs, you do not need a new customized content creation plan as these can be used for other similar industries.

The webpage of these content hubs should not be included in the main navigation and also you need to ensure that the webpage has ‘noindex’ and ‘nofollow’ tag in the html version of the page to inhibit search engine indexing spiders from indexing those pages. Once the page is ready and you got the URL – you can send the link to your target prospects and accounts.

Content marketing tips #4: Opt for no-fuss site personalization

Website personalization plays a major role in targeting accounts in account-based marketing campaigns. After all, your site is the first thing your account will notice and interact with when you are dealing with them, hence, your company website must be optimized to the target account with the content and copy that reflect the market and industry you represent.

You can make use of website personalization tools that enable creating account and industry specific copies for customized website experience. However, personalized landing pages are also good alternatives to customized microsites or websites – that you can use by using a marketing automation platform. And you can simply direct your target prospects to focused landing pages instead of the broader website, which is normally far too generic for the target audience. Those landing pages must be customized to the specific language, data, stats and information, photos, relevant messages.

Content marketing tips #5: Create joint content with partners

Another great way of creating content for account-based marketing campaigns is to join with your partners when you can’t spend a lot of time in creating content. You can leverage the partnership to create content with joint efforts. Here’s how: to begin with, you need to scan through all the strategic partners to identify which partners are expert in creating content that reflects the market, industry, language and information relevant to the target prospects.

If you don’t have content for the specific types of industry you are dealing with or you do not have bandwidth or in-house team to create the content, then you can search through the partner list and find those who have that industry-specific content you can serve that particular account. You can also ask those partners if they are willing to engage in joint content creation project and share the individual tasks of research, writing, designing, formatting etc., in ways that the asset will be useful for both you and your partners.

Do you find these content strategies for account-based marketing feasible for your campaign or do you want more tips and help? Call us at (408) 502 6765 or via Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to contact our ABM and content marketing experts. Also check out all latest news and updates on account-based marketing on our social pages and drop your comments – we’d love to listen to you.