Researching Whether and How to Implement an ABM Strategy

The sales and marketing teams coordinated our goals to justify the effort and resources required to build an account based vertical approach. We had to determine if a unique, referenceable, and identifiable audience existed for our product. And we had to feel confident we could create a repeatable sales approach that would yield sales wins at or above our inbound conversion rates.

The aforementioned elements are important because:

• Unique: If the story is the same for everyone, mass marketing tactics may work more economically.
• Referenceable: Are the customers happy and wanting to share their win? This validates the product/market fit and is a good indicator we’ll be successful.
• Identifiable: To build an outbound/ABM strategy, we need identifiable attributes that allow us to find the right accounts and contacts online. If the profile is too general, again, we’d be better off using other marketing strategies.

We broke the research phase into two main parts:

Should We Do It?

1. Do the acquisition economics make sense?
2. Is the use case/story unique or does it apply broadly?
3. Do we have advocates? Which success stories can we tell?
4. Is the industry a driver of success and/or are there other success attributes at play?

How Do We Do It?

1. Do we deeply understand the customer—their needs/pains/successes?
2. What support does sales need?
3. How will we measure success?

The Economics of an Audience

Curata’s first year average sale price (ASP) for our curation software is half that of our content marketing platform. So we questioned the additional investment in human and dollar resources required to run an ABM campaign. However, we had an ace up our sleeve—nearly a decade’s worth of customer lifetime data. We set out to understand our high lifetime value customer segments, where a higher initial acquisition cost could be offset. We cleansed our industry data using out of the box reporting in Salesforce.com, then compared days of lifetime/contract length by industry.

From here, we determined the minimum number of customers per vertical required to confidently consider them in our outbound plans. For example, we had one vertical with CRAZY long renewal rates, but only a few customers. We ruled this vertical out. We wanted to narrow in on our best bets to start, knowing we could always expand later. This process helped us filter 28 industries down to seven, where customers renewed for multiple years. These high lifetime value (LTV) customers offset the higher cost of our ABM strategy.

Is There a Unique Story?

Next we analyzed whether the use case was unique across these industries. We assumed that the act of renewing multiple years meant a customer was having success curating. But we wanted to understand if a particular industry was an attribute of success, and/or if there were other factors making these customers stick around longer. For example, if the attributes were the same across high lifetime value segments, then we may not need to tell an industry specific story. Rather, we could target a broader group with the same value based messaging.

To figure this out, we went back to our customer list in Salesforce and identified two to three customers for each of the seven high LTV industries. We then interviewed the Customer Success Manager for each account. In 30 minutes with each manager we captured:

• Business overview
• Their curation use case
• Main users and job titles/role focus
• Referencability. Were they happy and willing to share their story?
• Whether we already had a documented case study for this vertical

Interviewing our in-house team closest to these customers was incredibly helpful. It allowed us to better understand the various segments and the variety of users and needs. It helped us identify gaps in our collective knowledge that we needed to fill in to deeply understand how to craft an experience that would resonate.

At the end of this process—which took roughly a week—we were able to eliminate two more industries where we felt the use cases weren’t different enough from our broader marketing messages. Now it was time for deeper profiling and to validate the critical success factors at play.

Hot Takes: Four Practitioners on ABM

‘Don’t hesitate to collaborate’ should be the ABM mantra. The biggest mistake ABM teams make is not setting specific, quantifiable goals by account that are aligned with sales goals. This makes everything else so much harder. A close second mistake is not tapping into all the internal resources that can help Account Based Marketers get their work done faster from content teams to customer advocacy to influencer/analyst relations, data and analytics and more.

Megan Heuer, SiriusDecisions VP of Research

The biggest mistake they make is to forget to include sales in the planning process. Sales doesn’t want marketing to swoop in at the end with a to-do list. If sales truly is your partner, treat them that way from the start.

Joe Chernov, VP of Marketing at InsightSquared

The biggest mistake [in ABM] is in assuming that all audiences within the account need the same content at the same part of their buyer’s journey.  Some personas need to be inspired at the same stage as others need to be informed and educated.  Truly knowing the nuances of the different audiences can make all the difference.

Robert Rose, Advising Content’s Chief Strategy Officer

The biggest mistake marketers can make when developing an ABM strategy is to not allow enough time to ensure the strategy is working. As marketers in today’s digital world, we’ve come to expect almost instant results. In traditional demand generation, we can quickly A/B test, optimize, and change. While it is imperative to apply these same tactics in an ABM strategy, you need to give the campaigns extra time to win over large accounts—it’s very tempting to change tactics when you’re not seeing immediate action from your audience. In these large accounts, there are most likely multiple people involved in making business decisions. If you don’t allow yourself enough time to reach all of these people, you’re not giving your campaign a fair chance.

Rebecah Wiegardt, Account-Based Marketing Manager at GoAnimate

The Profile of Success: Which Factors Are at Play?

At this point, I rallied the marketing troops to help with the research. We divided the five verticals amongst the team and created a list of questions we wanted answered about the customers in each vertical. We went after information that was accessible online from their website or other public profile listings.

The relevant factors in our profile set included:

We set three research deadlines one week apart, followed by a group review of the profiles. At each review, a team member presented the profiles they had completed using Google Slides, and we discussed and documented trends and inconsistencies within our customer/vertical set.

We challenged ourselves to extrapolate the use cases and attributes we were uncovering, and to decide whether they applied consistently within the vertical. Or whether there was an even narrower sub-vertical or segmentation opportunity.

One instance of this was in Financial Services, where we felt the use cases and attributes we observed may not hold true in the majority of the industry. However, we found narrowing down to local branch banks, for example, could produce a more repeatable success model based on the other factors we observed. “Gut instinct and reasoning” may not be so popular in research these days, but in this case, blending brains, guts, and data—made sense.

At the end of the three week research process we had identified four industries with unique use cases and success attributes. We felt they represented solid candidates for our outbound/ABM strategy. Now we needed to determine:

• The appropriate scale of the initial pilot
• Which marketing and sales content already existed and/or was required
• Which tools and sales training was needed

How Will We Do It? Launching the Pilot

Taking a note from Curata advisor Mark Roberge, we knew to approach this test on a small enough scale that it wouldn’t interrupt other business functions. However, it also needed to be large and varied enough that we could collect the required data and rule out single-participant bias. I.e., if we only had one salesperson test it, whether they nailed it or failed it our results would be off.

The Initial (limited) Scope of the Pilot:

• One industry, reduced from four. We chose Trade Associations
• One marketing owner
• Three business development reps (BDRs)

We designated the marketing owner as the single source of feedback. And we created a rapid learn and optimize partnership with our BDR team. Then we had to coordinate sales training, identify target accounts, support contact discovery, provid email templates, listen to pitch calls, monitor performance data, and tweak and identify new content/messaging requirements for future phases of the pilot. Phew! Yes, even in limited scope, it was a lot of work!

Key Performance Indicators

To monitor progress, we planned to measure three KPIs:

1. Discovery calls: an in-depth conversation for both sides to learn more
2. Discovery call to opportunity creation
3. Opportunity win rate

The next step? Assess these KPIs against the historical performance of the same metrics within our inbound lead cohort and outbound/ABM cohort. We would deem this pilot a success if we could achieve higher conversion rates than our inbound channel, and similar results to our other ABM program (or better!). We calculated the funnel conversion rates using data from Salesforce, isolating for a set timeframe or cohort of leads.

Content, Tools, and Sales Enablement

Balancing a “pilot” approach with setting ourselves up for success was possibly the hardest part of the process. You don’t want to sink a disproportionate amount of resources into an ABM strategy without some indication it will be worthwhile. But if you under-resource—you could doom it from the start.

We did our best to balance this in real-time as we worked with the BDR team. We decided along the way what felt necessary versus nice-to-have, or to be developed later. From a content marketing perspective, we wanted to have at least one industry-specific item, and the ability to communicate with prospects in their “native tongue.” We did this with targeted emails and a targeted case study.

If things went well, we would create top of funnel blog posts aimed at trade associations and consider modifying top performing eBooks to include an excerpt for associations. (Here are some more account based content ideas.)

Here’s what we delivered as part of the pilot launch:

We leveraged our in-house tools for this exercise. These included Salesforce for account and contact management, SalesLoft to manage email and call activities, Engagio to observe target account activity, and ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator for prospecting.

Given their focus on B2B and tech, ZoomInfo and LinkedIn didn’t have enough contacts within our trade association target accounts. So we supplemented contact discovery with a specialized tool (free trial baby!) called Associationexecs.com. Using Google to identify our first set of accounts, we generated 300 targets and aimed to locate a minimum of two contacts each.

What We’ve Learned So Far

We’re a month into outreach and have already learned plenty about this industry:

• They actually answer the phone! We’re experiencing a higher than average call connect rate.
• Timing is key. Budgeting and purchase approval cycles happen annually and are quite rigid.
• Education is required. Content marketing and content curation tactics are relatively new concepts, so educational materials are helpful.
• Purchasing marketing software is new. Unlike B2B buyers, trade industry buyers don’t make many software purchases, especially for marketing. Making these buyers comfortable with the process is important.
• Locating contacts is difficult. Even with three different tools, it was hard to find appropriate contacts. The effort required was definitely higher than normal.

It’s still too early to call the final score, but if businessman, author and motivational speaker Nibo Qubein is right, we should be on the right track with our ABM strategy. As he eloquently puts it, “Nothing can add more power to your life than concentrating all your energies on a limited set of targets.” To measure how well you’re hitting those targets, download the Content marketing Metrics: Account Based Marketing Edition eBook.

But over the first few years of working with most of the big marketing automation tools, we started to realize that they didn’t really map to the way B2B buying was done. They were all about the individual lead, whereas B2B sales were almost always done by teams.

Then we heard about Account Based Marketing.

More specifically, we heard that Jon Miller, founder of Marketo, had moved on to start a new ABM company called Engagio.

We did some digging and started getting more and more excited about ABM—just as we had in the early days of marketing automation.

As Jon put it, if marketing automation is fishing with nets, account based marketing is fishing with spears. It’s about actively targeting the big accounts that make the biggest impact on your revenue, instead of waiting for them to turn up in your demand-gen trawls.

(For more from Jon, read How to Generate Relevant Messages and Content for Account Based Marketing.)

For many of our B2B tech clients, the greatest challenge and opportunity is around landing the biggest deals. This means deals 10-20 times larger than the average deal size. Clearly, Velocity had to learn all about this ABM thing.

We knew Jon from Marketo days (Velocity had helped with some of their Definitive Guides), so I could have just picked up the phone and called him. But I didn’t know him that well and so it felt kind of random and maybe presumptuous.

Instead, we used a core ABM tactic—writing a blog post called Account Based Marketing: What Jon Miller Did After Marketo. It was legitimately a post for our blog readers about the big news in B2B ABM and its implications. But there was our own not-so-hidden account based marketing agenda there too: to get on Jon’s radar.

Before we could even start the sinister Phase Two of our ABM pilot (stalking the poor guy), I got an email from Jon asking us if we wanted to help him write Engagio’s first big piece of content. This became The Clear & Complete Guide to Account Based Marketing. It was a 125-page monster that covers the whole topic, start to finish.

“Wow,” we thought, “This ABM stuff works!”

Writing that guide and its sister, The Clear & Complete Guide to Account Based Sales Development, gave us an intensive ABM education condensed into a few months.

As we learned all about this new discipline, we were always looking for ways to integrate ABM into Velocity’s offer. To understand how content marketing works in an ABM context.

At first, the synergy between the disciplines didn’t seem obvious.

B2B content tended to target a persona.
ABM targeted individuals inside specific accounts.

Our kind of content was one-to-many.
ABM was often one-to-one, or one-to-few.

Our content programs targeted the buying team one job role at a time.
ABM looked at them as a tightly integrated team, coordinating communications across departments.

Our B2B work was driven by our clients’ marketing departments, more or less alone.
ABM is always a tight partnership between marketing and sales.

So how could we use everything we knew about B2B content marketing and apply it to ABM programs for our clients?

Here are some of the ways:

Create content to encourage buying team convergence
Instead of simply creating content for each persona in a buying group, create content that helps the buying group align their agendas around the solution. In one of our favorite books, The Challenger Customer, this is called creating ‘convergence’ and it’s an alternative to over-personalization.

ABM content is more about facilitating the ‘collective learning’ of the buying team than appealing to each individual’s parochial needs.

Work with Sales to find the key issues
In most of our content programs, we get input from the sales team. For ABM, it’s a much closer partnership. They need content with a tight focus on the conversations they need to have with prospects.

ABM content is all about creating new relationships and deepening existing ones. This means focusing on the issues salespeople most need to talk about.

Audit your existing content and find gaps
If you’ve been doing content marketing for a while, you have a library of content resources. Many of these will be relevant for ABM programs.

Once you know your target audiences intimately (the first step in any ABM program), you can look at your existing content library through this lens.

An ABM-driven content audit is an important start. Which pieces can play a role in each stage of the buying journey for each persona? How and when might the Sales and Sales Development teams use each piece?

Make all content available to Sales
Just because content exists doesn’t mean Sales knows it exists. If they don’t, the content can’t make an impact on these key accounts.

Develop a process for updating all sales teams on what content is available, who it targets, which issues it addresses, and how it can be used. Some of the Sales Enablement software out there can help, such as ShowPad and Callidus Cloud.

Get granular
Some of the best ABM content is content that drills right down into very specific issues. The high-altitude, general stuff has an important role to play too. But super-specific pieces helps drive sales conversations that hinge on discrete issues.

For ABM, cover the broad ground but be ready to do more pieces on tighter issues too.

Personalize—or sector-ize
Turning generic content into sector-specific or even personalized content isn’t necessarily as hard as it sounds. Change the intro, imagery, sidebars, and case study references. It can turn a horizontal piece into a vertical or personalized one.

Create content with subsequent personal or sector spins in mind. But don’t bother with the superficial, “Hi Doug” kind. That’s just a gimmick. The personalization that works is the stuff that turns understanding into relevance.

Track impact from an account perspective
The way you track and report on content marketing efforts also has to change for ABM programs. It’s not good enough to see the impact a given piece made on an individual prospect. You need to see the impact it made on the whole buying team.

Set up your analytics to give you an account-based view of the world so you can measure content impact by account.

Don’t forget events
I’ve always felt that live events (and online webinars) are content marketing. Done right, they may even be content marketing at its purest and most effective.

Don’t let events become a silo in your organization. Connect the dots so that all events—your own and third party conferences—play their role in the whole ABM journey.

Account Based Marketing is Complimentary to Content Marketing

As these examples show, applying content marketing to account based marketing is really about taking simple, practical steps that use your resources appropriately for your highly-targeted, account-based programs.

A general inbound marketing program can easily run in parallel with a more focused ABM initiative, using core content resources for both. The key is to bring the sales and marketing teams together early and often to make sure all your content resources are being deployed for maximum impact. For more, download the eBook Content Marketing Metrics: Account Based Marketing Edition.

ABM is a strategic approach to marketing that focuses on select customer accounts and treats them as markets of one. When done well, account based marketing has the potential to be one of the most lucrative methods of marketing today.

However, tracking the impact of content is a major struggle for content marketers today. Even more so in a world where ABM is at the forefront of many people’s content marketing strategy. This article discusses the most relevant account based marketing metrics as they apply to content marketing.

Account Based Marketing and Content Marketing: Definitions

According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing:

…is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience—and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Account Based Marketing is, according to Engagio CEO Jon Miller, “…a strategic approach that coordinates personalized marketing and sales efforts to open doors and deepen engagement at specific accounts.”

Content marketing is about attracting an audience. Account based marketing is about personalized marketing and specific accounts. Both are effective and widely implemented.

• 80 percent of marketers measuring ROI say ABM outperforms other marketing investments.
• More than 90 percent of marketers believe ABM is essential to B2B marketing.
• Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing, and generates three times as many leads.

While both strategies can be effective, the methodology behind them is arguably at odds.

Account Based Marketing and Content Marketing: Friend or Foe?

JOE CHERNOV
VP Marketing at InsightSquared, keynote speaker @jchernov
“Inbound marketing and account-based marketing are like a taco and a burrito. They have the same ingredients, they’re just shaped differently.”

Regardless of methodology, account based marketing can’t work without the personalized blog posts, mailers, and sales enablement content generated by content marketing.

According to the Harvard Business Review, stakeholders who perceive supplier content to be tailored to their specific needs are 40 percent more willing to buy from that supplier than stakeholders who don’t personalize.

Similarly, MarketingSherpa research indicates that 82 percent of prospective customers value content targeted to their specific industry.

In the same way that content created for an account based marketing strategy should be tailored to that strategy, the way in which you measure that strategy should also be different.

Think Differently for Account Based Marketing Metrics

There are eight categories you should consider when developing a system for measuring your content marketing.

While these are important for determining content marketing success, account based marketing changes the way these metrics are interpreted.

Consider these three points when analyzing content metrics from an ABM perspective.

• Instead of measuring people, measure accounts. (But still write to people.)
• Quality is much more important than quantity. While most content marketers are interested in increasing their website’s reach or overall visits, these metrics are unimportant with an ABM model. It’s less about how many people are coming to your site, and more about who is coming to your site.
• Leads are less important than opportunities or revenue. Many leads can make up one account. When employing an ABM model, content should focus on the impact on the account or revenue generated.

What Your new Metrics Outline Should Look Like:

1. Consumption Metrics:
   What percentage of target accounts are consuming your content?
   Which channels are they using?
   How frequently and how in-depth is their consumption?
2. Sharing Metrics:
   Which of your content pieces are being shared?
   Who is sharing them?
   How/where are they sharing?
   How often are they being shared?
3. Lead Metrics:
   How is content supporting demand generation in terms of lead generation and lead nurturing (middle-of-the-funnel) at target accounts?
4. Sales Metrics:
   How is your content influencing bottom-of-the-funnel results?
   Is your content enabling targeted account pipeline?
   How is your content driving revenue?
5. Retention (Subscription) Metrics:
   How effective are you at holding your audience’s attention beyond the initial point of contact?
6. Engagement Metrics:
   Does your content inspire target users to take action?
   What kind of action are they taking?
   How frequently and consistently are they taking action? How does this correlate with the success of your account-based goals?
7. Production Metrics: (to assess team and/or individual performance)
   Is your team performing against editorial calendar deadlines and goals?
   How long does it take your team to turn a content idea into a published piece of content?
   How many pieces of content do you regularly publish in a period of time?
8. Cost Metrics: (to determine return on investment (ROI))
   What are your overall content marketing costs?
   What are your costs per piece? Per creative resource?

Four Big Changes to Account Based Marketing

Account based marketing metrics require more direct, tangible numbers like accelerated pipeline velocity, increased lead generation, and more conversions… there’s no spray and pray in ABM, it’s about making every piece of content count.
—Leadspace

After tweaking your preexisting account based marketing metrics to focus on the success of your content from an account level, ensure your content marketing metrics are optimized for ABM. There are four main areas of measurement to focus on:

1. Coverage
   Build contacts at target accounts rather than building overall reach. This total is much more important than overall increases. You can measure this using unique traffic from account IP addresses.
2. Awareness
   Look at web traffic from target accounts rather than overall traffic. Again, the increase in numbers and percentages from target accounts is more important than overall increases.
3. Engagement
   Create a heat map for engagement by title. Engagement is no longer a question of “how much?” but instead “who”—and how influential that person is. Measure this using the total traffic from account IP address, total number of touchpoints by account, total time spent with an account, or total time spent with a decision maker at an account.
4. Influence
   Track your content directly to pipeline revenue using software or a defined strategy. This is hugely beneficial not only to your account based marketing strategy but your content strategy too. However, the problem with only using Influence to measure success is the lag in results from campaign execution.

Influence is intimately related to Time to Close. Influence is a KPI popularized by Jon Miller at Engagio. It can help you determine which of your marketing activities contributes the most to revenue. Rather than attributing sales credit to every marketing activity (there can be MANY), Influence attribution requires looking at groups of accounts that have a similar profile. By comparing these successfully closed accounts, you can determine which of your account based marketing activities are truly adding value.
—Metadata

After making general changes to your measurement methodology and taking a deeper dive into these four categories, consider how your ABM strategy changes the content created. This changes the content and account based marketing metrics.

Consider Strategy Changes to Inform Measurement Changes

An ABM content strategy naturally looks different to a traditional content strategy. Consider these ABM strategies that are less common or important in a traditional content strategy:

• You send printed content and direct mail to decision makers at target account.
• Target accounts receive sales enablement content tailored to their needs/questions.
• A lead at a target account shares content with other contacts at an account.

(Share PDFs as a link rather than attachment; it can capture some of the sharing in your

analytics.) Here are some suggestions for tracking these and why it matters:

Traditionally the types of questions you can now answer include:

• How many new leads were generated from a given piece of content?
• How many existing leads in my database were touched by a particular piece of content?
• Which pieces of content helped convert leads lower into the funnel?
• In which areas of the funnel do we not have sufficient content?

Developing an ABM Attribution Model

Once you have a clear idea of what to track in your ABM content strategy, start looking at those account based marketing metrics and create a related attribution model. ABM attribution models differ from traditional content marketing attribution models in two ways:

• They consider attribution from an account based perspective rather than a lead-based perspective.
• They enable marketing attribution past the opportunity stage through to the closing of a sale.

An ABM attribution model uses one funnel for sales and marketing instead of two. This allows you to look at an account journey as one holistic piece. It enables you to give appropriate credit to all content—including sales enablement content—and gives you a more comprehensive picture of how content is pushing potential buyers through your sales cycle.

You don’t have to do all this measuring manually. The following software will help drive your ABM analytics endeavors.

ABM/Content Analytics Software

For assistance measuring your content from an ABM perspective, the following tools are useful:

Engagio: Provides analytics and automaton for an ABM strategy. It connects to your website and existing Salesforce and Marketo accounts to keep track of leads, marketing programs, and site visitors. Engagio’s utilization of account based marketing metrics such as “engagement minutes” offers a straightforward way to track lead interest.

LeanData: Lean Data’s Demand Management product focuses on account-based reporting and nurturing to alter your strategy based on account based marketing metrics and attribution models.

Bizible: Assists with attribution of all kinds. According to Bizible’s website, their account-based measurement feature enables the measurement of everything from accounts to mailers and ties to revenue.

DemandBase: Offers a full suite of ABM solutions including account-based measurements that separate high-value account visitors from traditional metrics.

Curata CMP: Ties both gated and ungated content directly to revenue, leads generated, social shares, and more, so you can measure from both an ABM and content perspective. Also shows you content engagement at the account level.

ABM and content marketing can work together to help you close more business and increase revenue. To ensure your content marketing works with your ABM programs, develop a measurement methodology that uses accounts rather than leads, a single marketing/sales funnel, and attributes content beyond opportunity created through to revenue generated.

The Importance of Tracking Revenue in Account Based Marketing 

Revenue has to be the mother of all metrics. It’s what we’re here for, right?
-Doug Kessler, Creative Director/Co-Founder, Velocity

Measuring revenue from an ABM standpoint requires measuring pipeline opportunities influenced. This tells you how much of the sales pipeline has been influenced by consuming one or more of pieces of your content. You can report on this metric for a single piece of content, over several pieces of content in a content marketing pyramid, or for all content across the board.

Cost Metrics

Cost metrics, like production metrics, track production efficiency, but exclusively examine the financial costs of content marketing, or the “I” (investment) part of ROI. Here are some places to start:

Production Costs per Post. If you are using freelancers to write content, it should be easy to track the cost per post based on their invoices. This gets harder when tracking full time internal writers.

Distribution Costs per Post. Many people assume content distribution is free. But with more and more content online, distributing it is getting more expensive—sometimes even more expensive than producing the content in the first place. Consider these distribution costs:

• Social Media Promotion. Time and equivalent pay spent on promoting your content.
• Influencer Marketing. After you have created your content, you may be reaching out to influencers to promote your post.
• Native Advertising. If you are using native advertising networks like Outbrain or Taboola, factor these costs in as well.

ROI Metrics

Last up is the holy grail—ROI metrics. These combine different classes of the aforementioned content and account based marketing metrics with a broad range of variations. Here are some to consider.

Return on Investment. For each piece of content x in Campaign C, take the $ amount of Revenue generated (a sales metric) by Content x and divide it by the ($ Production Cost for x + $ Distribution Cost for x) (a production metric). If the ratio is greater than 1, your content was profitable from a sales perspective.

You can similarly compute this for a single piece of content, or all your content marketing. Alternatively, C can represent all content produced by a particular writer, and the calculation will give you the ROI for that individual. If their ratio is less than 1, they may need to up their quality and/or quantity of content produced. Take this with a grain of salt however, since there are a lot of variables that influence revenue.

How to Implement Account Based Marketing Metrics for Content Marketing

• Incentivize your team. Your content marketing team, right down to individual writers, are accountable for achieving not only a certain level of content output, but also a certain level of content performance.
• Diagnose and troubleshoot. Content marketing metrics let you effectively diagnose when things don’t go as planned. For example, if your data tells you content is effective at the top of the funnel, but isn’t producing high quality opportunities at the bottom of the funnel, this may indicate you need better calls-to-action.
• Create alignment between divisions. If there is a singular focus on one ROI-based content marketing metric—particularly if you pay team members for it—walls between different functions will suddenly come down and teams will find new and more effective ways to collaborate.

For a thorough examination of how to measure the results of your content marketing, download The Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics & Metrics eBook.

1. Select accounts
2. Discover contacts and map to your accounts
3. Develop account insights
4. Generate account-relevant messages and content
5. Deliver account-specific interactions
6. Orchestrate account-focused plays

I’ve written an entire eBook around this process: The Clear and Complete Guide to Account Based Marketing, but in this post I want to focus on generating account-relevant messages and content. We start off with how to use insight to fuel your ABM efforts, follow that up with how to nail personalization, and end with examples you can use immediately. You can find some good posts about the other steps, but I think generating account-relevant messages and content is one of the more exciting pieces of the ABM puzzle.

Before we dive into messaging and content, we first have to develop account insights. The power of ABM comes from personalization—without it, you’re contributing to the generic marketing spam that plagues everyone’s inboxes.

The 5 Types of Account Insights for Effective ABM

In order to generate personalized messages relevant to your target, you need to know as much as you can about them, otherwise they’re going to tune out, opt out, or toss out.

Here are five types of insight to look for at each target account.

1. The target account’s market—The market dynamics, news, trends, growth drivers and inhibitors, M&A activity, and so on.
2. The target company—Their stated strategy, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats; competitors (and which similar companies use your solution already); their organization chart and unique buying centers; which buying centers own your products, which own competitors’ and which are open (whitespace analysis); any recent sales triggers (new funding, new hires, etc.); their culture and values.
3. The target personas—The agenda of each member of the buying team; their priorities, prejudices, preferences, styles, tactics; where they’ve worked in the past (and what systems that company used).
4. The relationships inside the account—How each key contact relates to the other members of the team; who reports to whom; who holds budgets; who are the influencers, blockers, mobilizers, enablers etc.
5. Your connections to the account—Your existing connections to the key contacts; previous deals; customer service experiences; your experience with their close competitors; LinkedIn connections to people you know; university or past company ties.

If you’re able to uncover insight at each level, this translates directly into relevance and personalized content, which drives engagement, and ultimately, closed deals.

Creating the Right Content From Your Insights

The insights you generate are only an asset if you use them—in every sales interaction and in all of the messages, offers, and content you send to the buying team in each account.

The idea is simple: every sales process is the sum of its engagements. Dial up the relevance and resonance of your interactions and content and you increase the quantity and quality of your engagements.

Every kind of content you’d use in a normal sales and marketing process is effective in an account based marketing program—as long as it’s targeted and relevant—including emails, eBooks, webinars, white papers, web pages, blog posts, SlideShares, videos, infographics, podcasts, social media posts, interactive content, surveys, quizzes and graders.

The key is to focus on tactics and formats your audience engages with. Some personas read eBooks widely, others don’t. Some will happily watch half-hour videos; others won’t even watch a one-minute video.

Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) research shows 75 percent of executives will read unsolicited marketing materials containing ideas that might be relevant to their business. Would you read unsolicited marketing materials containing ideas that might be relevant to your business such as success stories, research reports, or webinar invitations? Would you pay attention to these marketing materials even if they were from solution providers you had not previously done business with?

Every piece of content does not have to be specifically created for a target account—that approach doesn’t scale. Instead, think about a balanced mix of content, with each piece falling somewhere on the content personalization spectrum:

Simple Personalization Versus Super-Personalization

Simple Personalization

You can turn a relevant but broad piece of content into a super-relevant piece with some simple tweaks, including:

• A targeted title or subtitle
• Imagery that reflects the target industry
• Case studies from the target market
• Tweaking the introduction and conclusion
• A targeted landing page and email

This allows you to scale up your content personalization efforts without breaking the bank.

“Persona plus Industry is where the magic happens. That’s powerful targeting.”

• Johan Sundstrand, Freya News

Super-personalization

Content prepared ‘just for you’ can be the most compelling of all. Consider using your company’s unique expertise, resources, or assets to produce a special report specifically on the target account and its key challenges. Email and direct mail done right can be a great channel for highly personalized plays.

For example, OpenDNS created a custom visualization of the network for each target account and used it in their campaign. And a network security company would get meetings by scanning a client’s network, finding vulnerabilities, highlighting some of them, and asking for a meeting to go over the rest. Other vendors make highly personalized ‘Annual Reports’ for each major account (especially powerful for existing customers).

While these may be labor-intensive exercises, there are automated approaches. For years HubSpot’s ‘Website Grader’ was a top-performing content asset that auto-generated a report from the target’s website URL.

Start Using Content in Your Account Based Marketing Program Today

At TrackMaven’s Spark Roadshow stop in San Francisco, Dayna Rothman, VP of Marketing at EverString, gave some great examples of how to use content in account based marketing. Once you’ve gained insights into the account, try something like this:

• For highly customized content, use a platform like Vidyard for delivering a video experience to target accounts. Vidyard allows you to sync with your marketing automation platform and CRM system, allowing you to keep tabs of who is watching.
• Create a customized cover to an existing eBook or whitepaper with your account’s logo on it. You can even tweak the content, such as the introduction, to show something unique to the target account. We all get excited when we receive something personal, which makes us read it. Sometimes, we even end up keeping it.
• For top Tier 1 accounts, you can go even further by producing a webinar for just one account. Make this unique content around a challenge specific to the target account while positioning your company as the experts.

One of the keys to creating content that drives your ABM program is the need for content for each buyer persona and at every stage of the funnel. Remember, taking an account based approach means quality over quantity. It has to deliver value for the prospect and keep them moving down the buying process.

But wait, there’s more! Not only do you have to create content for each stage of the funnel and for each buyer persona, you also have to diversify your channels. Channel diversification is a critical factor for account based marketing success. What does this mean? Don’t use just one channel—a single piece of relevant content isn’t enough. One eBook and a Vidyard video isn’t enough either.

Here are some ideas to help you diversify your channels. They don’t all have to be highly personalized and customized, but they all have to be relevant and valuable:

• Social media: Follow your target accounts on Twitter, comment on their blog posts, sign up for their newsletter, join the LinkedIn communities their influencers are a part of, and so on.
• Micro-ad targeting: Using a platform like AdRoll allows you to pull in segments from your CRM or marketing automation and launch campaigns against those specific segments. You can also use ad targeting on social media to accomplish the same thing.
• Earned media: Hire a research firm or pull together a research report on an important matter to your target account. Better yet, include them in your research. These reports are a great way to get press, and now you’ve gained free press for your target accounts (as long as you show them in a positive light).
• Owned media: If you have a podcast, webinar, or interview series, invite a key influencer to be an expert guest. This is a great tactic for initially breaking into an account and building rapport quickly. Another approach to owned media is to create specific landing pages that talk their language.

As you can see, there are countless ideas for how you can leverage content to fuel your account based marketing program. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more that goes into successfully deploying a successful ABM program. We cover that and a whole lot more in our upcoming webinar: How Content Marketing Fuels Account Based Everything.