Maximising Content's Impact for Account Based Marketing

When you’re taking an account based marketing approach, content creation for your key targets need to take two things into consideration:

• Mapping content to the customer journey, so you can meet your customer’s needs and intent at every stage of their relationship with your company. 

• Creating buy-in from multiple levels of the organisation by addressing the aspirations, requirements and concerns of different people in the organisation who have a role to play in making a purchase decision.

In other words, as part of your B2B digital marketing strategy you have to produce different content, at different stages and for people with wildly different focuses according to their role in the company.

Whether their focus is on customer experience, business case, project management, technology stack and implementation, or issues related to corporate culture, your content will need to address everyone’s needs. One way to do this is to address each of these people directly and persuade them individually that your company is the partner they’ve been looking for.

However, there is another approach, one we’ve come to think of in terms of Dorothy’s journey in the Wizard of Oz. Dorothy starts the journey along the yellow brick road on her own, but we see her gradually pick up characters along the way with specific skills that she needs to complete the journey.

For us, it’s the perfect metaphor for what your content needs to do in an ABM context. While you will start out by talking about a distant and exciting ultimate objective in terms your main contact (your Dorothy) will appreciate and understand, you need to appreciate that she will be picking up colleagues along the way. And your content can be designed to help her address their needs and to persuade them on your behalf.

Creating The Customer Journey

There are several steps to creating a customer journey with your content.

• Mapping out the customer journey will allow you to create strategic content that speaks to your targeted audience at different stages of the buyer journey.

• Once you’ve identified your key target within the high value account, start your inbound marketing strategy with activities to raise their awareness of and educate them on the problem your product or service solves . At every stage of the customer journey your marketing efforts should contain an invitation to implement this new knowledge.

• As they deepen their relationship with you, create content that acknowledges the impact of this product or service on their colleagues. Mention the things they will need to know to bring this idea to life in their organisation.

This last step means you're addressing all the informational requirements and concerns of the entire buying team and not just the core target client. As the client continues their journey, your content shifts to address how they can bring along and enthuse their entire organisation. They may need to put together a proposal or a budget, and demonstrate the value of the product or service to their executive team. Your job is to use content marketing to help them do that.

Let’s assume your principal target is a CMO. Initially, you create targeted ads, social media marketing campaigns and blog posts that help her discover your approach to her marketing problems and educates her on the benefits it would have for her department. 

With her interest piqued, she dives deeper into your content on the topic to understand the methodologies and find out how to implement them. In going through the case studies, white papers and webinars you’ve prepared to answer her questions, she familiarises herself with your company’s culture and values. 

Because she has received relevant and useful content that meets her at every stage of her quest, she is convinced. Not only does her company need to try your approach, but she wants your company’s help to do so. She’s now your champion and you’re in consideration should the company decide to make a purchase. 

Understanding Your Evolving Audience

While you design your initial content to grab the attention and convince one decision maker, as she goes through the customer journey the number of people she will need to involve broadens. She will have to ask questions about your product or service as it relates to the rest of the organisation. She’ll need to be able to bring her colleagues up to speed with the idea, get their interest and convince them it’s worthwhile. And she needs to do so on their terms, not hers.

So, how do you produce content that recognises it is going to take a team of people in the target account to decide on and deliver?

Every content marketing strategy requires audience research. With account based marketing, understanding your audience means understanding the interactions between roles within your client's organisation. 

If you recognise the complexity of getting anything done, you need to think about all the people your target will need to talk to and convince. Your strategy, and the content you create, will need to address people on multiple levels of the organisation. 

While your client is gathering data to convince colleagues that your product is what they need, they are also looking for information that directly addresses those colleagues’ concerns. Consider the people on your contact’s purchase team and who they will need to approach along the way. 

• Does your product or service impact HR or IT? Does it need to align sales and marketing teams? 

• Will they need the approval of the CEO, CFO or other heads of department? If so, what concerns will they have? What questions will they ask?

• What evidence will people in different roles need to persuade them to purchase your product or service?

It’s helpful to think about the steps each department will need to take to implement your solution. Address those concerns in your content to help your contact to persuade them on the positive impact it could have. That might look producing content that:

• explains the business and strategic case to help your contact make the case in her discussions with the CEO.

• works through employee engagement and how to manage change inside the organisation to get the HR team on board. 

• provides insight into the implications from a technical perspective so she can take her case to the IT department. 

Sometimes this will be a complex and subtle affair with carefully crafted content that meets these objectives without being too overt about them. At other times ‘How to Convince Your Boss to Invest in a New CRM System’ will be exactly what is needed.

Don’t forget that the content creation doesn’t end there. As the customer journey moves past the sales process, content that supports customer service is just as valuable. The goal of your content marketing strategy is long term retention, not just short-term wins.

Account Based Content Marketing 

Focussing on your evolving audience throughout the different stages of the customer journey map is the key to unlocking the impact of your content within the ABM strategy. Early content will be about discovery and education targeted at one team member from your high value account. Later content will need to have appeal across the organisation, from the target client to the chief executives.

Within this framework, you can produce an unbeatable customer experience that provides unbeatable ROI by targetting specific accounts.

1827 Marketing provides integrated marketing automation solutions and marketing services to help you establish strong B2B marketing strategies.

Engage your most valuable leads and maximise your account based marketing potential with content and solutions that convert.