Account-based marketing (ABM), by its very nature, limits the number of accounts a B2B focuses on. Your team will be creating personalized content for only a few accounts. Thus, you might assume ABM is a zero-sum game. There is a finite amount of time your team has to nurture leads. And, every additional lead takes up a slice of that.
So trying to create a stockpile of content while scaling up for account-based marketing may sound like an oxymoron. It’s very, very possible – but it does require advanced planning. Here are a few tips to help you scale up while focusing on personalization:
5 Tips for Personalizing Content at Scale for Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy
Step 1: Align your sales and marketing teams.
Aligning your sales and marketing teams is critical to any upscaling process. We’re big believers in this theory, especially for small and mid-sized businesses. With smaller teams, roles so often overlap. Just because a lead becomes a customer doesn’t mean they don’t still need nurturing.
Scaling ABM content requires such a personalized approach. So, having an all-in-one CRM is the only way both teams can see what’s going on with a single lead. Without customer and prospect data in one place, you run the risk of letting outreach slip through the cracks.
Step 2: Divvy up your accounts by importance.
You can’t spell “account-based marketing” without “account-based,” so we’re assuming you’ve got a list of accounts you’re hoping to land.
At scale, of course, not every account merits equal attention or expenditure. That means you’ll be dividing your dream list into a multi-tiered system. Here the most important accounts get top priority (and the most personalized content). And, each subsequent tier receives a little less. Three tiers may be enough. You don’t want to over-complicate things, but depending on your company you may want more precision. The lowest tier will be for the broadest inbound marketing efforts you have.
This multi-tier system creates a new kind of sales funnel, whereby while you’re working your way down from the top, other potential leads may find you from the bottom.
Step 3: Audit every piece of content you’ve got so far.
When the folks at content marketing platform Uberflip decided to scale up their ABM efforts, they began by auditing their content. They found thousands of content assets (ebooks, white papers, case studies) and tagged each of them based on industry, persona, role, account, stage and individual. (They also employed the tier system we mentioned above, divvying up their tiers by each tag – Tier 1 was individuals and accounts, Tier 2 was industry and persona, etc.) Having that arsenal of content fully organized gave them a huge leg-up in scaling it, and allowed them to find and pull out certain items that could be useful to future leads within seconds.
Bonus tip:
In completing this process, you may also find handy ways to reuse old content you’ve forgotten about. Whether you compile old blog posts into a new ebook, condense an ebook into a listicle or offer it up as a guest post elsewhere, there are a myriad ways to repurpose old content, so this audit can double as cost-effective outbound marketing.
Step 4: Create new account-based content for each lead.
With your content fully organized and your list of leads set, it’s time to actually create your content. This may seem like standard account-based marketing: you want to promote your company’s strengths and target the right decision makers at your account.
The difference, since we’re scaling it here, will be that you’re not just targeting certain accounts. Since your content is organized by relevant industry, persona, etc., you can start with a combination of highly-specified outbound and inbound marketing by targeting different people within different accounts.
In other words, by capitalizing on your past efforts, you’re not just creating a new display banner for one lead – you’re finding an old display banner that you could repurpose to target a few leads that overlap in a few categories. You’ll still have to customize the old content, of course, but you’re not starting from scratch.
Step 5: Individualize your front-facing content.
Here’s where more traditional ABM sales techniques come into play. With your database of content organized and aligned to your targeted accounts, you’ll now be relying on cold emails, digital display ads, social media shout-outs and unique landing pages.
All the old rules apply here. Display ads can be targeted by location and individual, personalized to the lead depending on how important that account is to you – you’ll be using that multi-tier system as a guide here. Research your leads’ social handles to try to capture their attention, and promote unique pieces of valuable content to impress them and show them what your brand is capable of.
The beauty is that this technique saves you major time. Because so much of the content creation is already done – it will likely just need a few tweaks. You can even lean into the transparent approach in your outreach: “Hey Jim, we sent this whitepaper to the VP of marketing at Grow Sales Company, and she loved it. I thought I’d pass it along in case you also find it helpful. Enjoy!”
The power of ABM is the ability to target key accounts in order to drive growth. That means trading in a one-size fits all approach to a more personalized one. But the ultimate success with account-based marketing lies in your team’s ability to put these five tips in to practice so you’ll not only scale your ABM process but your revenue too.
AUTHOR BIO
Jonathan Herrick is co-founder, chief sales officer, chief marketing officer, and chief high-fiver of Hatchbuck, an all-in-one sales and marketing platform based in St. Louis. His extensive experience in digital marketing and sales strategies has been a driving factor in growing Hatchbuck’s sales by over 2,000 percent. A purpose-driven leader in all aspects, Jonathan has a passion for cultivating his team’s culture, spending time with his family and working to make a difference in the St. Louis community.
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