The Complete Guide to Content Creation and Marketing for ABM
You’ve started down the ABM path. That’s great!
You’ve joined over two-thirds of companies that have also adopted ABM and can now use customer lifecycle marketing to make more personal connections, generate leads that last, and get even more sales growth.
Now you’ve come to the part of your content strategy where you put all your plans into practice: content creation.
“Content” isn’t just words. It’s anything that can be expressed with the end user in mind. Blogs, videos, podcasts, social media posts, Clubhouse discussions, infographics, emails … you’re familiar with the endless list. Yet, according to TOPO, content creation for ABM is the top challenge for 37% of organizations.
How do you master content creation for ABM? Where do you begin?
A strategy and good content.
A Strategy for Your ABM Content Creation
All content needs a strategy – especially for ABM. Before you start writing, here’s how you can inform your content marketing strategy.
Research the Who, What, and When
The cornerstone of ABM is account targeting. When you understand your audience, your content will resonate with and reach your ideal customers.
Companies with a strong Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) get 68% more win rates because they know their people. When researching your ICPs, detail the ones that create the most value for your organization. What are their buying habits, motivations, and pain points? What kind of content do they consume? Where do they consume it?
Finally, choose a channel for posting – social media, podcasts, YouTube, blogs, or email – and find out when those channels are most effective to avoid posting when everyone is at work.
Do a Content Audit
Before creating anything, find out what’s already done. Update or keep cornerstone content, which highlights your products or services. Identify short, poorly written, or low-performing content. Look for opportunities to add high-quality information or optimize for SEO. If you cannot improve it, delete it. Revise outdated or irrelevant content. Check and update blogs with statistics, trends, or current events. Above all, fix broken content. It looks bad and performs poorly with end users.
You should do a content audit at least once a year. Once that’s done, you can begin content creation.
What Does Good ABM Content Look Like?
Good content isn’t born from inspiration alone. It’s carefully planned. After all, ABM is a targeted marketing approach. Your content must also target your audience.
Personalized at Scale
While integral to retaining high-value customers, personalized content can seem tedious. Fortunately, through an audit, you can save energy and time for more targeted efforts by repurposing existing content.
To personalize content, tailor it to your audience’s industry, needs, and style. Refer to your ICP. What your audience cares about is reflected in their work and life challenges and which publications they read. You can also match the styles of their preferred publications to appeal to them stylistically. Most of all, personalization means providing value to your audience. Practical, actionable content is the most useful.
Mapped to the Buyer’s Journey
Your audience is unique not only in needs but also their stage in the buyer’s journey. While your ICPs may be the same people across the stages, they behave differently in each stage.
Awareness-stage buyers know they have a problem, but don’t know what exactly it is or how to fix it.
Consideration-stage buyers know what their problem is and why they have it. But they don’t have a solution.
Decision-stage buyers are ready to buy or act.
Your content should meet buyers where they are. For people in the awareness stage, create content that educates, informs, and illuminates their problem. The call to action (CTA) should move them to the consideration stage.
Once there, prospects want to know how to solve their problem. Tell them how – and assert your brand as the best solution. Infographics, white papers, case studies, and customer testimonials reinforce your case. The CTA here should lead to an easy place to purchase – the decision stage. Once there, they become a lead simply because you mapped your content to their position in the funnel.
Optimized for SEO and UX
Content marketing is built on SEO. Without rankings, your brand will never be visible to new prospects searching for your services. Here are some tips for content optimization:
- Do thorough keyword and topic research.
- Integrate keywords into metadata, headlines, and subheadings.
- Don’t keyword-stuff.
- Include internal links to relevant services.
- Get backlinks from authority sites.
- Provide a seamless user experience.
- Clean up your URLs.
Ever seen a URL like this?
www.badurl.com/hub/2556123/78fksdn2019jss/%how %to%optimize%%urls^info/28778d8sldsdkj9890askkd/djfi9w9a99dascjmkdjo8%6jfoslkd&jfskdl
Or this:
www.badurl.com/urls
The first URL is a mess. The second isn’t specific.
This one is better and descriptive of the page’s purpose:
www.goodurl.com/how-to-optimize-urls
Tidying your URLs means you get found and counted among the rising stars in the SERPs.
Aside from links, make your site easy for users to access and navigate. Here are characteristics of a site optimized for UX:
- Fast load time
- Simple navigation menus
- Use of white space
- Mobile-friendly
- Scannable content
- Personalized CTAs
Consistency, Quality, Quantity
Above all, your content should be consistent. People get used to and prefer content with the same format, style, voice, and tone from your brand.
Only quality work can truly connect with your audience. Avoid errors, broken links, hasty work, or sparse content. Make your content worth consuming and put out as much of it as reasonably possible. Combined with consistency, a high volume of top-quality content is a powerful demand generation tool.
Bolster Your Content Creation for ABM
A targeted approach to content creation for ABM is difficult to master. However, with a content strategy and personalized, optimized, consistent content, you can build relationships much easier.
Televerde is a global sales and marketing services company that uses digital event marketing services to create leads and boost the pipeline for your brand. Stay updated with Televerde’s whitepapers, infographics, webinars, and events on current topics.
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