So your VP of Marketing just announced that your entire organization is going to shift to Account Based Marketing (ABM) and you’re thinking “Shoot me now! It’s hard enough to create content to feed our marketing engine now, how am I supposed to create personalized content for a dozen personas?!”
Back away from the cliff!
I have good news! You can be the hero of your company’s ABM initiative!
Content Superhero Weapons
In order to help your company win at ABM, you’ll need to bring to the table the following content weapons:
- The Super Scope – An ability to determine the unique messages that will get the attention of target buyers. Sales and marketing will work together to determine which accounts to target. That’s mostly data analysis, but the hard part comes after they are identified. What are the pains of each persona in the buying unit of each account type? You’ll play a key role here, but don’t freak out about quantity. Your job also needs to be to prioritize the personas that are easiest to attract. See this article for detailed steps on how to do this.
- The Magic Matrix – An ability to create a matrix of the personas and their pains across industries to identify efficiencies. The best way to create personalized content while minimizing effort is to understand both the similarities and differences across personas. The goal of this exercise is to identify 80% or more of the content that will be understood across multiple personas and just create multiple versions of the remaining 20%. For example, if you were targeting a VP of Sales in four different industries, you could get four white papers in the effort it would normally take to write about 1.4 white papers (80%+20%+20%+20%).
- The Magnificent Macro – An ability to create macros that can replace a small amount of content to make it feel 100% personalized. A big part of digital personalized content can be handled with macros. This is the foundational element of website personalization. If a web visitor has property X, serve them content Y. The key here is similar to the white paper example above, write the digital content so that 80-90% never changes and you only need to change out a few words or graphics. There are some great ABM or web personalization tools that can enable this, but it is up to the content marketer to brilliantly see the path of least macros, but biggest impact macros.
The VP of Marketing needs your help!
Don’t be intimidated by the call for ABM. It truly is an effective go-to-market strategy and you can make it work for your company without putting in extra hours. Do the research to make sure you understand the personas and keep them focused. Then be the content genius you are and whip out your superhero weapons to create efficient personalized content that feels like it was written just for your target persona.
If you need a little help, Focused B2B can get help you tackle your ABM initiative. Reach out to us today to get strategy help and content that will get the attention of your ideal target buyers.
