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In this installment of our Level Up webinar series, we’re giving you the inside scoop on how the experts craft best-in-class content strategies for ABM.
Content marketing pros Adam Kaiser, 6sense’s VP of Growth and Brand Marketing, and Pete Lorenco, VP of Marketing at PathFactory, talked shop and shared best practices for strategic content creation for every step of the sales funnel.
Let’s get into the good stuff.
Picture Your Dream Customer
The first step on the path to killer content is creating your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). It’s like creating a dating profile for your business, considering factors like industry, location, size, and revenue, and seeing what your most successful, lucrative deals have in common.
That sounds pretty time-consuming, right?
Here’s a short-cut that not just saves time, but results in a more accurate ICP: Use an AI-powered platform to crunch historical data and buyer behavior to tell your revenue team which accounts are likely to be a match made in heaven.
Get Them in Groups
With a solid understanding of your ICP in mind, you can start building out content tailored to your prospects’ interests, needs, and pain-points. But first, you’re going to need to dig a bit deeper into your accounts and assign them to audiences to create content that is even more personalized.
You can group net-new prospects by:
- Industry verticals
- Regions
- Job titles/personas
If you’re working on campaigns to reengage, consider grouping prospects by lost opportunities, postponed or stuck opportunities, or dormant leads.
Your current customers should be a part of your strategy, too! Group your customers by cross sell, up-sell, and adoption to make sure they get content that speaks to their specific needs.
Putting Your Audience First
Do you ever feel like you’re shouting into the void with your content? Like it’s not moving the needle? You might be creating content that speaks to your organization’s interests, and not the needs of your audience.
To come up with messaging that resonates with your audience, you need to:
- Understand their pain points
- Address their triggers
- Craft content that speaks their language
Considering these questions will help you keep your audience front and center:
- What keeps your audience up at night?
- What do they believe about your industry?
- How can you reach them effectively?
Remember, it’s not just about what you say — it’s how and where you say it, so consider formats and channels that your audience engages with when you’re crafting content.
Be an Expert in Your Customers
Crafting effective content requires being more than an expert in your field. You need to be an expert in your customers, understanding their needs, goals, and pain inside and out.
The best way to do this? Just listen. A platform like 6sense gives revenue teams insight into prospect needs through their buyer behavior, but sales and customer success reps can also simply ask.
Just like your ICP tells you what factors your ideal customers have in common, prospect and customer feedback is a content goldmine that tells you what your audiences need to know. There’s no need to guess what questions prospects want answered or what sort of content would educate them best if you hear it straight from the source.
The Bottom Line
You already know the stakes: churning out content that falls flat with your audience is like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it sticks. You need a content strategy, and to have an effective strategy, you need to know your audience.
Expert content marketers use tools like 6sense and PathFactory to understand their prospects, craft content that sparks engagement, and serve up personalized content that resonates.
