If you want to nail your ABM strategy, building effective campaigns around content pieces is essential. When your content is strong, you’ll be able to build a strong brand identity while nurturing engagement within your target audience.
But what content should you create, and does it matter what you're sharing, so long as your language is clever enough to get you clicks?
The truth is the content you direct users to is just as critical as the language you use in ads and social posts. So today, we're diving into the art content creation. We'll discuss what to create, how to market it, and a few tips and tricks that can set your ABM campaign on the right track at the outset so that you can get more engagement, which translates to higher win rates.
What "Valuable Content" Looks Like
The highest level of engagement, whether it's an ad or an email, physical mail, or direct outreach, comes from content that "adds value.” The most valuable content, for example, could help your target audience understand their market more, give them insight into consumer behavior, and, most importantly, see the value in your unique offering. Therefore, when creating a content piece for an ABM campaign, your first job is to create something educational and insightful.
The most valuable content:
- Uses data to back up claims
- Tells a story that resonates
- Contains relevant, timely, and sharable statistics and insights
- Is heavily researched
- Appeals to a company's values
Statistics are beneficial when crafting content your audience will resonate with. They provide a memorable, often surprising snapshot that can help contextualize patterns or events. However, ensure you wrap statistics around a topic that resonates with readers. The content should offer a fresh perspective on something your audience may already be thinking about or researching.
Whatever you decide to create, as you build a piece of content for your ABM campaign, make sure it's timely, well-researched, and tells a story that will resonate.
Stay Away From Sales-focused Language
Even without designing an ad that says "Get 10% Off Now!" you could be using subtle sales language that lowers the likelihood of engagement.
Note the difference between these two ad titles:
Avoid Data Loss With Company X
vs
The Ultimate IT Guide to Protecting Data
While the first title implies that a lead would only benefit if they did something with Company X, the second empowers the audience to learn how to protect themselves against data security issues effectively. Using less transactional and more value-driven language will help build more significant engagement.
When building your content or designing your ads, lean into words/phrases such as:
- Guide to
- Best practices
- How to
But avoid these more sales-focused terms:
- Learn more
- eBook
- Sign up
- Buy now
- Book a demo
A good rule of thumb: when the wording of your content feels more like you’re providing education around a topic of interest (instead of selling a product or service), you're likely to see an uptick in engagement.
Using Content to Get the Most Out of ABM
Creating valuable content and avoiding sales language is the first part of building a successful ABM campaign. Here are some more strategies to help you market your content - and your brand - effectively:
Know Your Audience
Make sure the content you create is of direct interest to your audience. For example, you would want to avoid placing a piece of content designed to appeal to IT in front of a campaign directed at the accounting department. Make sure the language you use and the content you create:
- Make sense for your audience
- Addresses their direct interests, skills, or requirements
- Offers solutions to the challenges being addressed
Use Content to Answer Questions and Solve Problems
When building an ABM campaign, make sure you can answer these two questions about your content:
- Who is it for?
- What value will the lead get by interacting with it?
Think about your ads in the same way you think about SEO. Ask yourself what questions your audience is likely asking, create content around these concerns, and then deliver it in a way that makes it clear that their concerns or curiosities are getting addressed by your brand. For example, consider these:
- How CEOs Are Protecting Their Organizations from Ad Fraud
- A B2B Marketer's Guide to Cold Calling
- Tips and Tricks for Recruiting for Niche Roles in the Construction Industry
For the above examples, it’s pretty clear, in one line, who the content is directed at and what issue or concern is being addressed.
An effective content-driven ABM campaign will take one central question, cater it to a specific audience, and then continue to answer that question in each piece of content you create for that particular ABM campaign.
Be Specific
It's essential in everything you do to be as specific as possible. It doesn't matter if it's an email or an ad; the viewer needs to know that whatever the content is, it is directly targeted toward them and their interests. Therefore, avoid vague titles.
For example, a title like this:
"Enhance your ROI"
is too vague; however, a title like this:
"How B2B Marketing Leaders Are Enhancing ROI"
Contains more information and is better targeted. Even better is this title:
"How B2B Marketing Leaders Use AI to Enhance ROI".
As you can see, while the first title is too broad, the second makes it very clear the content is geared toward marketers in B2B companies. The third version goes a step further and even hints at how these marketers are improving their ROI by mentioning the tool they are using.
Make Your Content Omnichannel
ABM is effective at building brand awareness and is at its most powerful when ABM marketers use every channel. Therefore, make sure your account list is being fed your content via:
- Programmatic ads
- Facebook and Linkedin
- Direct mail
- Etc.
The more channels you are on, the more visibility you have. While leads may not click on every ad you feed them, they see you everywhere and subconsciously absorb your brand. That way, when they are ready to buy, you're top of mind.
Leverage Content Sections in Email Campaigns
You don't have to reinvent the wheel for every piece of content. In fact, there might be a key passage or paragraph you can pull from the content you're using and place it right into your campaign. Doing so will give your audience a "taste" of the whole article or piece of content you share to help develop engagement within your campaign.
Put SEO Right Into the Inbox
Looking for content ideas? Start studying the intent data. If you have an audience searching for a specific topic, build content around it. If a lead was just researching a particular topic, and your blog or article appears right in their social feed or inbox, they're more likely to click on the ad/link as the subject is already top of mind (since they've already shown intent around it). Not only does it not feel like you're directly selling anything, it feels like you're delivering an answer to a question they were already asking themselves.
Use Email Campaigns to Help Tell Your Story
Email campaigns can link your company to the problems your audience is trying to solve. Start by introducing your company, and work towards how you can solve a specific problem. Then, drive home how your product or service is the perfect fit for your target audience. Think of each email as one part of a larger story. Try using this model for your email campaigns:
- Email 1: Introduce your brand/company
- Email 2: Introduce the problem you are trying to solve (then directly introduce an article they can read and consume that addresses the problem)
- Email 3: Add more insights about the issue and reintroduce the article
- Etc.
When it comes to ABM email campaigns, it's best to have just one link to direct your audience to and to refrain from using gated content, as that creates an extra barrier between your audience and the information you want them to see.
Create a Seamless Brand Experience
An expert move is to ensure the visuals of your content are uniform and well-branded so that there's a cohesive visual experience between your ads, emails, and digital content. You don't want your audience to become disoriented or confused by clicking on a well-designed ad and being directed to a website with a completely different look and feel. The more seamless you make the experience, the more likely your audience will stay engaged.
Have the CTA Right on Your Content Page
Part of your ABM campaign will involve directing your audience to a piece of value-added and educational content. Maybe it’s a blog or a guide. Maybe it’s a whitepaper or case study. Whatever the content, ensure you have a CTA front and center on the page. If your audience likes what they see, they can leapfrog right into the next step of the sales funnel. By having a button that invites leads to book a demo or talk to experts, you’re bridging the gap and empowering them to take the next step toward closing a sale.
Understand the Nuances Between Different Outreach Channels
Each outreach avenue will have slight differences in engagement patterns you must be aware of.
For example, while email campaigns gain more engagement over time, LinkedIn ads gain the most engagement in the first week, with engagement decreasing over time. Therefore, every LinkedIn ad needs to be impactful at the outset. In contrast, email campaigns can reveal more and more over time so that, by the third email, you want to make sure your most intriguing value proposition is heavily highlighted to really cash in on the engagement opportunity.
KPIs for CTRs (click-through rates) are also slightly skewed, depending on the channel. Typically, a good CTR for programmatic ads is between 0.08 to 0.12. However, on LinkedIn, the reflection of an effective campaign is a CTR of around 2.5. If you are averaging less than 0.08 on programmatic ads and 2.5 on LinkedIn ads, you'll need to look at your content and how you are marketing it.
A/B Test
Sometimes, you end up with two conflicting images to market a piece of content or two slightly different wordings for ads and/or emails. Both have merits, and they may be great additions to your latest ABM campaign. The good news is that you can use ABM to A/B test your campaigns! Feel free to experiment with your marketing messaging. By trying new approaches and testing one against another, you’ll get closer to nailing down what language or images work best for your brand and have the strongest resonance for your ICP.
Conclusion
The foundation of a strong ABM campaign is the content you put into it. Once you have content specific to your audience and offers value by providing solutions to problems, the next step is to ensure you’re marketing it correctly throughout your campaign. Make your ads and emails specific, and stay away from sales-y language. Try to tell a story about your product or service to help your audience picture how it can help them solve their problems. And, when in doubt about wording or visuals for your ads and social media outreach, A/B test to see what resonates the best!