Account-Based Marketing: How to Apply it to Your B2B Content Strategy

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the book Account-Based Marketing for Dummies.

With account-based marketing (ABM), you’re tailoring your message to contacts in an account. These contacts should match your personas, or the type of people who are the best-fit for your product or service. Keeping the accounts and contacts in mind when developing your content will help to make sure it resonates. To think about your content from an account-based marketing perspective:

• Know your audience: remembering your audience is extremely important as you’re taking a targeted account approach.

• Deliver content meaningfully: don’t just blast an email to thousands of people every time you publish a new infographic or whitepaper.

• Your content was designed with your audience in mind. Spraying and praying is the opposite of account-based marketing.

I’m a huge fan of Joe Chernov. He’s one of the content marketing gurus in the B2B world, having run marketing teams at HubSpot, Kinvey, and Eloqua, and now InsightSquared. He was kind enough to share these tips for developing content:

1. Think about all the content your company has published and could publish as a “Total Addressable Content Market”. Everything you published includes internal content such as presentations and reports, and external content such as blog posts, resources on your website, and advertising. Then think about everything you could publish such as stories and anecdotes, plugging your readers into the thoughts and minds of your company’s leadership

2. The value of having a content library starts by identifying what you have and what you need. Catalog all of your existing content, everything you have published internally and externally, and then identify areas needing collateral.

3. Marketing needs to interview sales leaders for questions they’re frequently asked. Salespeople are on the frontline between your business and future customers. What topics or subjects regularly come up on sales calls? Then match these questions to existing content, or brainstorm what content needs to be developed to answer these questions.

4. After talking to sales, marketing needs to talk to the customer success team. These are the folks who are on the frontline of customer service for implementation, adoption, and usage. They have the pulse on customer needs. Use them to source ideas for content.

5. Resist the temptation to create content that speaks to you and your boss. Reduce your own role and replace it with the customer. This sounds obvious but not everyone loves the product like you do…at least not yet.

Remember, the story you’re telling with all of your content must align to a narrative. Ask yourself, your marketing, and your sales team: “What is the problem, and how is our product the solution?”

This will help you develop content and parts of the story to tailor to individual personas. Your personas for your contacts in your target accounts will range across all levels of the organization.

The way a C-level executive wants to consume content will be different from a marketing manager, simply because they are different people who are focused on various business needs. Your content should provide answers for all the personas in your ICP. Each person wants to hear why your solution will work for him or her, plus the company as a whole.

Looking for more on account-based marketing? Download Chapter 1 of Account-Based Marketing For Dummies here.