After you have your ICP and personas nailed down, it is time to communicate with them. But how do you make sure that you are effectively communicating with each person and properly showcasing the value that your solution can drive for their companies?
For an impactful account-based marketing campaign, you should create content for each stage of the customer’s journey: from general product & company information for awareness, technical details and pricing for consideration, and urgency for conversion. In your marketing playbook, every piece of content in each stage should be designed to appropriately educate prospects for where they are in the customer journey and push them on to the next phase.
Here are some example types of content you need:
- Emails to each persona (initial outreach, follow-ups, responses, newsletters)
- Landing pages that support key benefits, provide more information, and facilitate form-fills.
- Thought leadership & blog articles for the awareness stage (top of funnel, educational).
- Product-specific pages for consideration (pricing, versions, specs) - a quick sample of how your solution can add value. Include tutorial videos wherever possible.
- Testimonials, specials, & incentives for the conversion stage.
- Industry reports (whitepapers, yours or not), expert interviews.
Consider organizing your content into a framework that shows each customer persona, each funnel stage, and the content that applies to each. This allows you to find and fill content gaps while you create a comprehensive plan to address each persona, all the way through the customer journey.
Once you have built out your content repository, you should be able to effectively contact each persona in each stage of the customer journey and guide them down the sales funnel.
Content is King
Account-based marketing is all about establishing a relationship and educating prospects, driving awareness, and nurturing prospects to the consideration stage. It is not about selling a prospect something. I repeat, it is not about selling a prospect something. At least not yet.
Now is the time to address their pain points. Once prospects feel you know what they are going through, more likely to listen to what you have to say. Demonstrate your knowledge of the industry. Be seen as a thought leader, a subject matter expert. Be prepared to nurture the relationship by providing valuable content with each email.
As mentioned above, that could be a case study that shows how a company in a similar situation solved their problem with a solution you provided. It could be a testimonial, a quote from a current customer on what it is like to work with you and how your product or service delivered. Or verifiable metrics of how your solution can improve their productivity, reduce errors, decrease costs. It could be an ROI calculator showing what returns they might expect given their investment.
Educate them on what the market looks like for the specific solutions you are selling into that market. What the problems are that customers may be facing and how you think you can help them. People will be willing to engage with the right topics if they are presented in the right way.
Keep in mind that it is better to show something than to say something. Do you have a video you can provide a link to? A demo they can download? The entire nurture campaign has one goal in mind: to show the prospect what is in it for them should they purchase your solution.
At some point, you will get an indication that they want to learn more, that they want to have a real conversation about their problems and your specific solution. Then and only then can you ease into selling mode.