Content creation is a key challenge for marketers. Even more for the marketers doing ABM. Folks in the B2B space are well versed with the revolution brewing in the world of B2B marketing. Building content to achieve top-of-the-funnel goals like brand awareness and audience education is what every content creator tries to attain.
As ABM is a highly targeted sales and marketing approach, it becomes important for B2B marketers to interact with their target accounts with the right messaging. People deal with people, and not machines. Having a better understanding of your target audience, their industry, their challenges and pain points can help to speak their language better. So, what is the best way to create content that truly resonates with your prospects?
Research can help B2B marketers in building engaging content. Believe it or not but marketers who make effort to understand their audience are the ones who can develop targeted and specific content instead of boilerplate content. Recent eMarketer shows digital B2B ad spend is up 22.6% from 2019.
This is one of the findings from 2020 B2B Benchmarks Budgets, and Trends. Three most-cited content marketing goals achieved in the last 12 months were:
- Creating brand awareness (86%)
- Educating audience(s) (79%)
- Building credibility/trust (75%)
How Research can help in building content that truly resonates with the target audience?
Creating personalized content
High-quality content is what every B2B marketer aims to build. That becomes possible only if one is aware of their target audience’s priorities and challenges. Research becomes extremely instrumental to build tons of personalized content that will help to drive traffic and engagement. B2B marketers always create a segmented content marketing strategy for different form of content.
Also, marketers need to realize that they always do not need to build content from scratch. Repurposing existing content is a great way to create personalized content at scale. Revisiting content library time and again can reveal newer ways of tweaking content to resonate with the target audience. For instance, can you personalize an e-book for your target accounts by adding in more industry examples and changing some terminologies? Industry-specific contents like videos, white papers, blogs, webinars can give an edge to B2B marketers trying to sell into large accounts.
Building better relationship
Research helps to understand what target account care about and allows marketers to offer solutions that match their prospects priorities or challenges. There are numerous ways to spin the same content to speak to a CMO versus a CIO. However, tailoring customized messages for key accounts never goes wrong.
Creating quality content helps to develop a relationship with the target audience. When research is integrated with marketing campaigns, there is a higher probability of hammering your target account constantly with the kind of message they’d like to see. Research helps tremendously in creating TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU marketing collaterals and developing a relationship with the target audience.
Balance between gaining trust and personal aspirations
Research helps in balancing these two aspirations that all sales professionals have. This is done through fueling understanding of the companies that the marketers are targeting, which makes them understand what their target account care about and allows them to offer solutions that match their prospects priorities or challenges. Without research, marketers are left only to guess what their prospects are interested in, and fall into a trap of not being able to establish a relationship.
How we helped one of our clients achieve 100% customization at scale?
We’ve been in the B2B space for quite some time now. And, having worked with enterprise clients, we cannot be elevated how our services have been instrumental for them to achieve their marketing campaign goals. The insight reports build by our team for enterprise accounts have been used to prepare different forms of content for our client’s marketing initiatives. Be it a video or a white-paper or a blog, our research can certainly add value to their ongoing ABM campaign.
One of our clients is a global identity resolution SaaS firm headquartered in the US. Since, their targeted content was generating low engagement, the marketing team wanted to ensure that they have all the data and facts in place before they launched their industry targeted campaigns.
We worked with both the UK and US-focused marketing team to deliver detailed and highly tailored industry insight reports. Our report helped them position as a company that understood customer challenges better and gained significant visibility across digital channels.
Final thoughts
Content is a critical tool for account-based marketing and research helps to fuel meaningful conversations and content. Secondly, research helps in building credibility and stronger relationships with the target audience. The complex nature of B2B landscape demands research; otherwise it leaves the marketers to fall into a trap of not being able to establish a meaningful relationship. Finally, research enables marketing teams to reach high levels of personalization with their target accounts through their content marketing initiatives.