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How to Create a Full-Funnel Content Strategy for Account-Based Marketing
Content is the foundation of any ABM strategy.
Many of you will already have a content strategy
in place already. Don’t worry, most of your existing
content will still be useful you as you embark on
your ABM journey. The difference is that now you
can make your existing content, and the content
you create going forward, relevant to the readers
that you value most—your target accounts.
Why is creating content important? In the words
of Jon Miller, CEO of Engagio, and Co-founder of
Marketo, “Content marketing has transformed
B2B by letting marketers initiate conversations
and develop relationships earlier in the buying
process”. Not only that, but content also gives
salespeople the ability to reach out with the right
piece of information for each prospect, adding real
value at the first touch point.
Content marketing is truly full-funnel—it comes in
at the tippy top of the funnel and plays a roll all of
the way through to customer renewals.
Support Your Buyer Journey with Content
Content marketing is the best way to provide the
approachable, detailed content that buyers need
to what your product has to offer.
With content, you can create:
• Thought leadership on important areas of your
space to establish your brand as trustworthy
and knowledgeable
• Content about the impact your product has
beyond the technical implementation
• Content to address questions or concerns
about your product specifically
CHEATSHEET
Different types of content are more or less
relevant depending on the buying stage of the
account and prospect. You can use the predictive
score to determine how far along they are in the
buyer journey. Let’s take a look at how this can be
applied for each funnel stage.
The Beginning of the Journey: Top-of-funnel (TOFU) TOFU content is introductory and educational.
This content is for accounts that have had little
to no meaningful interactions with your brand. If
you used a predictive marketing platform in your
account selection process, then you should look
for accounts that have low engagement score, but
a high fit score. These are the accounts you want to target with TOFU content. This is the content
you most often use in your traditional demand
generation programs. This is also the type of
content you will most likely use initially with the
net-new accounts and leads you received from
your predictive demand generation platform.
Pro-Tip: If you don’t have time to create multiple
different specialized versions of content assets,
consider taking an asset that you already have
and changing the title, cover, and some interior
copy to be more relevant to the attributes you are
looking to target.
By keeping your initial content touches
educational, entertaining, and useful, you can start
to warm up your predictive leads to move them
towards the middle-of-the-funnel.
The Middle of the Journey: Middle-of-funnel (MOFU) Once you have won your prospect over with your
amazing TOFU content, they are now ready to
move through your funnel. They now should know
about your brand and if they have successfully
moved to this stage, they likely have a high
engagement score.
CHEATSHEET: How To Create A Full-Funnel Content Strategy for Account-Based Marketing
Conduct a content audit
• Discover all the potentially relevant
content you have right now.
• Tag it by account, persona, purchase
stage, and issue.
• Identify content gaps that need filling.
Adapt existing content
• Pick content that’s relevant and usable
as is.
• Identify content that needs simple
revisions to make it account-relevant.
Create new content
• Prioritize themes and issues for the
account based on your insight.
• Identify sources: subject matter experts,
existing content, etc.
• Create editorial calendar for content
creation.
• Create content briefs and assign to
internal team or agency.
THE ACCOUNT BASED
MARKETING CONTENT
CREATION CHECKLIST
MOFU content discusses topics that are more
closely related to your product or service. You’re
targeting the buyer who has shown quantifiable signs that he is interested in your brand.
Depending on what you know about his company
and industry from your predictive model, offer him
a piece of content that shows how your product
impacts his day-to-day job or overall business.
The End of the Journey: Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) BOFU content gets to the heart of your product
or service. This is where you get more aggressive
with your offering. This account and prospect has
high fit, high engagement, and high intent scores—culminating in a very high overall predictive
score. If you’re not using predictive look to your
fit qualifications in your CRM and engagement metrics in your marketing automation platform to
find this information.
BOFU content is very specific to your product or service, like for example, a pricing guide or
customer testimonial. The only prospects that
should be getting BOFU content are the ones that
you think are ready to pull the trigger and buy
your product. If you give it to them any sooner,
it will come off as pushy, and can damage the
relationship. This is a critical point to note when
it comes to the accounts from your predictive
marketing platform—don’t shove your sales-
focused content in their face immediately, take
time to build the relationship.
Use the data from your predictive
marketing and marketing automation
platforms to inform what type content
you should create more of and what
type of content just isn’t cutting it. For
example, maybe there is a piece of
content that continuously gets high
conversions with the right accounts,
while another piece of content gets
a similarly high conversion rate, but
the majority of those that convert are
bad-fit accounts. You probably want to phase out that piece of content
and replace it with a piece of content
that looks similar to the one that is
performing well with your top accounts.
USE PREDICTIVE DATA
TO DETERMINE CONTENT
PERFORMANCE
CHEATSHEET: How To Create A Full-Funnel Content Strategy for Account-Based Marketing
Your content won’t create itself! Hopefully this
quick cheatsheet can help you on your way. You
are ready. Show those target accounts of yours
some love and educational resources!
Creative Ways to Spark Your Next Groundbreaking Direct Mail Initiative
Direct mail fell out of fashion as email became the primary communication vehicles for marketers. However, direct mail continues to prove its value, especially when it comes to target account marketing and moving those accounts through your funnel.
Canada Post did a study on direct mail as a marketing tactic and found that, “by combining the intimacy of ritual, the impact of physicality, and the power of data-driven relevance, direct mail can mean the difference between contributing to the noise and breaking through it”. Their results showed:
Direct mail inspires. The concept of mail is so engrained in our lives that prospects feel emotionally attached to it, making them more susceptible to inspiration from brands.
Direct mail increases open rates. Buyers are more likely to notice, open, read, and enjoy a direct mail offering than they are a digital form of marketing.
Direct mail is lasting. Prospects keep mail and display it in their homes and businesses. In some cases, they even share it with others (shout out for cookie bouquets!) This creates more opportunities for brand awareness and visibility.
Direct mail is persuasive. Studies show that direct mail delivers a call-to-action that resonates, making prospects more likely to engage.
Make sure your mailer is personalized and also make sure it is fun! No one is going to read a printed version of an email you’d send. Get creative here! There’s a bit of Don Draper in each of us. Your direct mail initiatives should be unique—make it interesting. We’ll give you some ideas.
CHEATSHEET
1. Holiday Cards
This is easy and inexpensive. The creativity here is going to come in the design of your card and message. And we are not just talking Thanksgiving and Christmas. Maybe you’ve noticed that images of French Bulldog puppies do really well with your audience (we know they work with ours!), there’s a day for that. That’s right, National Dog Day is August 26th. Use that as an opportunity to put a smile on someone’s face.
2. Creatively Display Your Offerings
Think about fun ways to display your product offerings or company culture. As an example, Skype sent a Rubik’s Cube direct mailer that had a different message depending on which way you put the cube together. Something like this is much more fun to play with and touch vs. that same old content on a computer screen.
3. Object Recognition, Brand Recognition
What’s an object that resonates with your audience and your brand? For instance, at EverString we have considered sending out Magic 8 Ball direct mail or fortune cookies. Think about it, predictive marketing…Magic 8 Balls…fortune cookies...Get it?! Can you think of any household favorite that represents your brand?
4. Executive Mailers
For your top tier accounts, you want to focus on the decision maker—which is most likely an executive. Sure, everyone loves a fun direct mail piece like a Magic 8 Ball, but you also want to make sure that you are sending out something a bit classier. For an executive at a key account consider sending a printed piece of thought leadership, a purchased book on her industry, a high quality piece of company swag, and so on. Make sure that for each executive mailer you send out you include a personalized note from a member of the sales team or even from one of your key executives! Also, pay special attention to your packaging. Nothing sloppy!
CHEATSHEET: Creative Ways to Spark Your Next Groundbreaking Direct Mail Initiative
Tips and Tricks to Personalizing Your Emails at Scale
Email is one of your main distribution channels, and arguably the most crucial. With the insights you have from your predictive marketing platform, email shouldn’t just be a way to broadcast messages to your prospects. Instead, now that you have thousands of data points on your customers, you should be sending targeted, personal messages through your nurture streams using the personalized content you have created.
Check out these tips and tricks to personalize your emails without spending too much of your teams’ time on each one.
Segment Your DatabaseWhen you segment your email database, you can group accounts and leads by various different attributes, such as industry, behavior, and more, in order to create more personalized communications. Using a one-size-fits-all approach (like email batch-and-blast) to your targeted, predictive accounts simply won’t have the impact you are looking for.
Look at the insights gleaned from your predictive marketing platform to find:
• New opportunities for segmentation
• Places you can optimize your exisiting nurture streams
• New nurture streams to create that get to the heart of what your best customers are looking for
For example, maybe you learn that some of your best customers use marketing automation in their technology stack. From there, you may decide to segment your database by tech stack, and create a marketing automation-specific nurture stream. Or maybe your predictive marketing platform tells you that accounts that look like your best customers are located in Australia. Using that information, you can create nurture streams that cater to what’s going on locally in the country—even talking about the weather in a locality can make a difference in conversions!
PERSONALIZING YOUR “BIG FISH” TARGET ACCOUNT OUTREACH
CHEATSHEET
It’s important to note that your “big fish” target accounts are a different ball game. According to ABM thought leader, Jon Miller, in his new ebook, The Clear & Complete Guide to ABM, you should actually take targeted accounts out of your lead generation programs and generic nurture mailing programs, so they can be treated in a more personalized way.
You should setup systems, like predictive marketing, to gather insights on these accounts in order to send timely and relevant messages.
Once you’ve added your new contacts to your
existing nurture streams and created a few new
streams in response to the data that you found
out from your predictive marketing platform, it’s
time to get started.
Craft Personalized EmailsIn the age of the noisy internet personalization
is key. While we do recommend sending
individualized emails to your target accounts as
much as possible, it is simply impossible to expect
that every email to every account is personalized
to that degree. Although, you can certainly make it
look like it!
Don’t underestimate the power of the
customization features available to you through
your marketing automation system to help show
your new predictive accounts that you know who
they are and what they are interested in.
Email TokensEmail tokens in you marketing automation
platform allow you to create personalized and
replicable emails and assets. They’re an absolute
must for any successful email campaign. A token
is essentially a shortcut to using whatever value
you want to use. For instance, you can create
tokens that populate an individual buyer’s name,
company, industry, and so on.
Tokens add a personalized touch to your email.
Adding tokens gives your email recipients the
impression that your large email send has gone
out to each individual directly—making them
much more likely to engage.
You may even find new email tokens to create based on the information you found in your
predictive tool. Maybe you create a new token
related to a piece of software that all of the
contacts in your segment use, or a location where
all of the accounts in that email stream reside.
Personalized BannersFor those high target accounts, consider creating
personalized banners in your emails. You can ask
your designer to create a banner with your target
account name and logo. While most people in the
industry have capitalized on the benefits of tokens, not many marketing teams will go the extra mile
to personalize email banners. Consider doing this
for your high engagement, best fit accounts that your predictive marketing platform helped you
procure.
Remember, even if you’re personalizing with email tokens, you should be inserting content individually personal to that contact or company whenever possible.
CHEATSHEET: Tips and Tricks to Personalizing Your Emails at Scale
How Predictive Changes the Game for Your ABM Event Strategy
Predictive marketing enables you to be extremely
effective in identifying and planning your most
worth-while events, and it can minimize costs by
ruling out events that aren’t right for you. From
big road shows, to webinars, and dinners, the
data gleaned from predictive marketing is critical
helping you determine which events you should be
attending or hosting.
The key to events moving the needle for your
target accounts is to be where your accounts are
and make sure that the events you are planning
are relevant and personalized.
Choose the Right Big Reach EventsIt’s important to chose the right events. With all of
the cost in travel, sponsorships, exhibitions, and
tickets—events add up quickly. And it’s tough to
know what events are worth your time. Did you
know that your predictive marketing platform can
help with these critical decisions?
Check out the list of past attendees for each large
show you are considering. How many of your
target accounts are on that list? Cross check your
target list with the past event attendee list. You
want to be where your targeted accounts are. That
alone can do wonders for your time and budget.
Additionally, you can even take that attendee list
and score that list using your predictive model.
How many accounts on that list are highly
qualified to purchase your product and how many of the attendees are not a great fit? Use these methods to help determine what you should
attend.
Before a chosen event, make sure that you take
time to set up meetings with your key predictive
accounts. This helps you get valuable that one-
to-one face time, which is critical for building that
lasting relationship and making an impression.
Plan Field Marketing Events for Face-time with Target Accounts In contrast to the large events you attend, field marketing events are intimate gatherings where
your prospects can learn about you and your
product offerings. You should think about hosting
these for the accounts that your sales team is
starting to build relationships with.
With your predictive marketing platform, you can
now be much more targeted in where you hold
events and who you choose to invite to these
intimate events—ensuring that you spend your
time, resources, and budget on the accounts that
are most likely to close.
CHEATSHEET
Breakfasts and DinnersWho doesn’t like pancakes or a night on the town? These events are outside of work hours, which shows you are really trying to create a relationship with a 1:1, in person conversation. Here you can learn much more about a buyer’s pain points, so you can better address them in your continued marketing and sales efforts.
Invite a small number of your high scoring accounts to one of these intimate gatherings, facilitating the opportunity for your reps to create valuable relationships that drive the deal forward.
Lunch and LearnsA lunch and learn is an event you’d host in your office with catered food, or you can rent out a room at a restaurant with a projector. Talk about a problem in your industry, best practices, or another hot topic. If you can educate your key accounts on best practices for their roles and industries, you can further foster the trust you need for your prospect to become a customer. Additionally, it’s a great way to have like-minded people share their thoughts and network.
Your predictive marketing platform can help you hone in and get very specialized with these types of events so that you can address the right people and problems.
PanelsPanels are events that feature members of your executive team, along with hand-picked industry experts to discuss the current state and future of your industry. It’s a great way to position your brand as a thought leader and gain credibility. As with lunch and learns, your predictive marketing platform is really going to be there for you as you plan these events.
Out-of-the-Box Invite-Only EventsWhat else can you think of that will break through the noise? Find budget to buy tickets to cool events. Whether that’s a movie premier, wine tasting, or a sports game, inviting your prospects do something unique is a great way to get stand out. Prospects are more likely to have their guard down and speak candidly if they’re mingling with you at a fun event.
As an example, for the premiere of the new Star Wars, EverString rented out an entire theater on opening day to give our prospects and customers an opportunity to see a private showing of a very popular movie.
Use your predictive marketing platform to determine what your high target accounts are into. Identify those target accounts and see if they’ve posted on their social channels about their hobbies or interests. Maybe you find that a target account is really into the Chicago Blackhawks. Find out when they’re coming to town and invite them to a game!
CHEATSHEET: How Predictive Changes the Game for Your ABM Event Strategy
TIP: BE WHERE YOUR ACCOUNTS ARE
Be sure you have a good geographic spread when you think through your field marketing event strategy, not all of your prospects are going be conveniently located in your state. Go to where your targeted accounts are, show them you’ll go the extra mile.
Use Web Events to Be Where You Can’t BeWeb events can put you anywhere you need to be to reach your prospects. They are often very budget sensitive and can be really impactful. Not to mention you have huge reach across geographical and physical lines—from New York to San Francisco, you can get a few hundred people in a virtual room and not have to front the bill for the exhibit space. This is content that you can record and use again, post about on the blog, and send out to customers.
WebinarsWebinars are web-based events that are centered around a presentation or discussion. These events can help with brand awareness, generating leads, and providing education to your potential customer base. Your predictive marketing platform can help you decide what you should be talking about and who your target audience should be.
Consider hosting targeted webinars for your large accounts. For instance, if you have determined that your top priority account is, let’s say, “Acme Corp” and you are trying to penetrate into various divisions, you may want to host a “Acme Corp” exclusive webinar and only invite contacts from that company.
CHEATSHEET: How Predictive Changes the Game for Your ABM Event Strategy
HOW TO THROW THE IDEAL ABM EVENT
According to Jon Miller, CEO of Engagio and Co-Founder of Marketo, there are best practices around planning a great target account event.
The best ABM events tend to share these characteristics:
• A timely, relevant topic - on a specific pain point or trend.
• A balanced content mix - not just product talk–think panels, cases, chalk-talks...and fun content that’s not commercial.
• Third-party participation - customers, experts, analysts, partners, etc.
• A curated audience - people who will learn from eachother.
• A softer sell - not pushing sales decks to a captive audience.
Creating Personalized and
Hyper-Personalized Content
ITSMA research shows that 75% of executives
will read marketing materials that are relevant to
their businesses. How do you achieve relevance?
Through personalization. There are many ways
to achieve account-based personalization with
your content without writing an entire content
piece just for one company and their needs—that
just doesn’t scale. Think about it in two tiers:
personalized content and hyper-personalized
content.
Personalized Content
Creating personalized content can be largely a
repurposing effort of existing content.
There are a few ways to repurpose your content to
make it feel more relevant:
• Change the title of the piece to reflect the
name of the account or the industry
• Have your designer provide a few different
cover pages for ebooks and cheatsheets that
reflect the different industries you’re targeting
• Create multiple targeted landing pages for a
piece of content to personalize for different
accounts or industries
• Create content hubs for your top target
accounts individually and by industry. Put
relevant content pieces in each hub so that
sales reps can direct their accounts to their
unique hub.
Hyper-personalized Content
While creating hyper-personalized content usually
requires more effort, it creates larger returns.
Think about receiving content created just for you
and your company as you build a relationship with
a potential vendor—pretty compelling right?
Creating hyper-personalized content can be labor-
intensive. Make sure that if you are spending a ton
of time and resources on a target account, that
they have had some meaningful engagement with
your brand. We only recommend this sort of effort
with your top-tier target accounts.
CHEATSHEET
CONTENT HUBS IN PRACTICE
Here at EverString, we use Uberflip to create
unique content hubs for specific accounts, and in some cases, different reps. This way,
reps can choose which content they think
will be most relevant for the prospects in
their territory. With names like ‘Jessica’s
Hub for Predictive Marketing’, the reps that
want to go above and beyond, have the
chance to hand pick content for their target
accounts.
A few ways to create hyper-personalized content:
• Change the title of the piece to reflect the
name of the account or the industry
• Pull together an account-based webinar for
a large target account. Invite members from
different headquarters and departments to
a webinar based around a problem they are
trying to solve
• Create a one-of-a-kind report for a target
account addressing a pain point they’ve
expressed in their communication with your
sales team
• Create an infographic featuring something
meaningful to their company—maybe that’s
incorporating their headquarters into the
infographic or using their public data to make
the infographic unique and hyper-relevant for
that account
CHEATSHEET: Creating Personalized and Hyper-Personalized Content
CREATING PERSONALIZED CONTENT WITH LIMITED TIME OR RESOURCES
• Pull the creatives in from across your
organization to brainstorm some kind
of automated report. For example,
Hubspot’s ‘Website Grader’ was a
top-performing content asset that
generated a unique report from a
website’s URL
• Companies like Vidyard can help you
create videos with a prospect’s name
and company to create a just-for-you
video that you can use for multiple
accounts
Three Types of Paid Ads You Should Be Using in Your ABM Strategy
In order to engage in a true multi-channel nurturing ABM approach, paid ads are critical. Paid ads can reach out to targeted prospects when they aren’t directly engaging with you. By placing ads passively on a multitude of websites in a multitude of different ways, you can capture the attention of your target accounts by being where they are. There are three types of ads that we suggest you use with your target accounts—search ads, display ads, and retargeting.
Search AdsTrackmaven defines brand awareness as, “the level of consumer consciousness of a company”. It measures a potential customer’s ability to not only recognize a brand image, but to also associate it with a certain company’s product or service”. Search ads help you make contact with accounts early in the funnel, maybe even before they have engaged with your brand.
When people think of predictive marketing, we want them to think of EverString. There is a plethora of other keywords we want to be associated with—we all have our list. Google did a study that showed on average, search ads increased brand awareness by 80%. The prospects that are using the keywords you have identified are showing intent to purchase. You want to make sure that your name and your offering is showing up for them at the top of the page.
In Google Adwords, you should be bidding on your brand name so that when someone searches for your brand, you are taking up the most real estate on the page. Note that your competitors can bid on your brand name as well in order to take some of that organic attention. If your target accounts are looking you up on Google, the last thing you want is a competitor site showing up before yours.
Also make sure that you bid on keywords that represent the demographics and behavior of your account list. If you brought in a predictive platform for account selection, you can use predictive insights to determine what keywords to prioritize.
Display AdsDisplay ads are the text, video, and audio ads that display on webpages that contain content relevant to your business and target audience. Today, these ads show up as a traditional banner ad or, more recently, they show up natively in social feeds like Facebook and LinkedIn. With display advertising, you can ideally catch individuals within your target accounts while they are viewing a piece of content that is relevant to your business, and serve up an image, video, or audio about your offering or value. Display ads are a great way to target your target accounts—and they’re only getting more seamless and more relevant.
CHEATSHEET
Native display ads are the big splash in the space
right now, and for good reason—Dedicated Media
reported that native ads are viewed 53% more
than banner ads. Native display ads compliment
our experience in an app or website, unlike the
unrelated banner ad that is easy to actively ignore.
If you are aiming to have a sophisticated ABM
approach, you can use the insights gleaned
from a predictive platform to find out where your audience is most active, and spend on display ads
there. Maybe your target accounts are constantly
sharing and engaging with posts on LinkedIn.
In that case, make sure you dedicate spend to
sponsored updates on LinkedIn.
Retargeting With retargeting, you’re targeting users who have
previously visited your website with display ads.
You are going after (even anonymous) prospects who have already had an experience with your
brand and you’re inviting them back to pickup
where they left off. Retargeting ensures that if an
individual from a target account has made contact
with your brand, that he is reminded to come
back, and hopefully continue moving through
your sales funnel.
According to Adobe, the average website
conversion rate is a little under 2%. So, nearly all
of your first time site visitors leave without taking action. Don’t let your target accounts slip through
your fingers! Retargeting them with ads as they go about their day can mean the difference between
them forgetting about you and coming back to
learn more.
The Future: Predictive AdsIn the near future, you will be able to serve ads
using your predictive marketing platform. With
predictive, you can be intelligent about the use of
online advertising and retargeting. The current ad
purchasing process is based on guess-work. You buy ads and don’t really know who is going to see
or engage with these ads. As a result, you waste
time and money. You think these ads are targeted, but are they really?
Some companies target accounts by using a
company’s IP address. You can do this based on your high scoring account list, but this is only
effective with about 10-20% of the market (the Googles and the Microsofts). But even then, you will still be hitting peoples’ browser that have
nothing to do with the buying team. At EverString,
we do this kind of targeting, but we also take it a
step further.
CHEATSHEET: Three Types of Ads You Should Be Using in Your ABM Strategy
With predictive advertising, you will be able to target individuals within accounts that look like your best customers—whether or not they have ever been to your website.