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.