PHASE 3:
Content

How to create personalized content for a wide portfolio of accounts

Personalization in ABM

Personalization is (of course) your go-to strategy for content in account-based marketing. However, many ABM teams struggle to scale custom content when their account lists grow. First, let's look at the different levels we can personalize to in ABM:

Level 1: Account

You have to start off by looking at your account and the interests, context, and needs the organization has. The longer your lists, the more intensive this is. But ABM isn't always one-to-one, you can also adopt a one-to-few strategy if you have groups of accounts that share similar contexts and challenges. This will cut down on workload but to the end-user will seem just as effective (if you group them accurately).

Level 2: Persona

Your account 360 should have revealed common roles that appear across multiple accounts. You can flesh those roles out into personas through user research and by looking at trends in data on what content different roles interact with. For example, the CFO is almost always a gatekeeper, regardless of industry or account type. Messaging and content for that persona will simply need a little industry context to personalize it.

Level 3: Buyer journey

When you're targeting a persona, you can get even more specific by personalizing content based on which stage they're at in the buyer journey. Contextual data, like which types of pages on your website a person has read, can give you the insight you need to understand where they are and what their intent is. You can then send or surface the content that best serves that person's indicated needs to encourage them to progress to the next stage in their journey.

Level 4: Individual

Individual content personalization is the most granular way to tailor your output. You create and build custom content specific to one particular person’s unique context, interests, and pain points. Your output is as relevant to them as it can be and as such far more difficult for them to ignore. It can be incredibly time-intensive and costly to do personalization at this level beyond personalized emails and offers, but new technology is helping to close this gap and allow small ABM teams to scale effectively.

How to map out an ABM content plan

Once you've decided how deeply you're going to personalize your content, you should get into the habit of mapping out your plan for each account.

This might not seem necessary when you're only working with a handful of accounts, but as those companies, personas, and individuals rack up, you'll be thankful to have it all mapped out. Here's an example:

Source

You'll need to define rules and criteria at each stage, and create the appropriate workflows within your automation platforms and content management systems. In the early stages, it's perfectly okay to hypothesize this for personas and accounts you're less familiar with. As you progress with your ABM program, you can return to and refine based on performance data.

The best technique for scalable content creation

The key to scalable personalization in ABM is to recycle and reproduce new content based on the content you already have available to you.

Modular content - where you create something that's designed to be broken down and rearranged to suit the end reader- is becoming increasingly popular. The benefits of this approach include:

Less time spent recreating documents
With the modules already signed off, the content created from them doesn't need to be
The ability to deliver personalized content quickly and easily
Avoidance of version control problems

Modular content strategies allow ABM teams to update and manage content centrally so that the marketing and sales members can quickly pull together "new" content without any additional creative involvement. There are three steps to this:

1. Define what modules look like

A module should be something self-contained, so it makes sense out of context, but small enough in scope to be applicable to a variety of channels, accounts, and contexts. Like a product description, or an industry-specific chapter of a report. Set requirements for modules so content creators are aligned on what they need to do. Once you have a definition of what a module is for your particular strategy, you can begin to either produce content by building it up from smaller modules, or by breaking up and adapting existing resources into independent components ready to use elsewhere.

2. Create a user-based tagging system

One thing to do before you start creating and publishing anything is to establish a taxonomy for how modules are going to be tagged within your library of content. This is absolutely necessary for the creation of any kind of automation but also helps your ABM team locate and use what they need.

3. Create your core content

You can take a modular approach to any format, so long as you bake it into the entire planning and production process - particularly for more costly formats, like video ads. This goes back to how you've defined your modules. Within each one, you can also determine whether certain elements can be personalized at the point of distribution - such as dynamically adding in the recipient's name or company, a custom note or video, an image of their website, or references to their key competitors.

For long-form written content, especially key documents like product overviews and thought leadership reports, you can build out the core material as a single project. Write each chapter to work independently, and then tag each module to link it up to your decisioning mechanism or make it available to anyone building content from your module library.

Pack a powerful personalized punch

A practical example

Say you’ve created a report on the marketing-finance rift. It's great for the key contacts in your account who want an in-depth guide, but other personas just want a very specific bit of analysis. Because you've created the report with a modular content approach, you can break out and tag each chapter to stand on its own:

‘Improve transparency with better data tracking’
‘Involve finance in strategic decision-making’
‘Less emotion, more behavioral economics’

These shorter pieces can then be targeted and personalized for subsets of your audience. You can also equip the content with dynamic fields to allow for personalization within the body copy. Say your ABM team is pulling together a resource for a target who is particularly interested in data tracking. Without having to edit a thing, they can pull in the relevant chapter from your report into their custom resource, and adapt the title to reference the client: "How [client] can improve transparency with better data tracking."

This all packs a powerful personalized punch without turning into a huge resource drain as you scale.