How To Personalize The ABM Content Experience At Scale
Account-Based Marketing can increase marketing ROI, help your customers become more successful, boost advocacy, and spark innovation. But for the all the benefits, there’s one thing many marketers have a hard time conquering: the ABM content experience. According to ITSMA, personalizing marketing for key contacts at each account is the number two challenge marketers face when practicing ABM, just second to getting the data needed to track program results.
After all, creating multiple versions of every piece of content based on the needs of each decision-maker is a scary proposition. It just isn’t scalable. Especially when you consider that, on average, B2B buying committees are now made up of about seven people. That’s a lot of personalized content that many marketers don’t feel they have the resources to handle.
Maybe it’s time to step back and think about what personalization really means. Is it changing out the logo on the cover of your latest eBook? Or writing 47 different versions of that thought leadership article? The good news is that buyers aren’t really looking for that kind of personalization. They simply want content that’s relevant and useful for the stage of the buying journey they happen to be in.
Here’s how you can take the fear out of personalizing the ABM content experience so you can better reach more decision-makers, and help them make buying decisions faster and easier.
1. Know how buyers consume content
When B2B buyers research a purchase, they don’t have time to wade through every page on your website looking for that one important asset. They want as much information as they can gather in the least amount of time possible. And they want to be thorough so they can be sure their purchase is justified while reducing the risk of making the wrong decision.
In fact, buyers consume an average of 10.4 pieces of content before they purchase. So why is it that marketers continue to drip-feed buyers giving them one piece of content at a time for only one click? Keep up with the speed of today’s buyers by giving them the content they seek at the pace they prefer.
2. Personalize the entire journey, not just the front door
Many marketers do a good job of personalizing the landing page or website homepage experience for their visitors, but what happens beyond the front door typically leaves buyers looking for the exit. You can’t just leave them to fend for themselves in your resource center or abandoning them on a dead-end PDF.
While some of your contacts may just be getting started, others may have gotten a jump on their research, and have moved on to comparing your product with the competition. Be sure you have a steady stream of curated content to serve up no matter where buyers are in their journey so you can build a relationship that lasts longer than single click.
3. Focus on quality, not quantity
You can only really get to understand buyer behavior — and their content preferences — when you quantify how they’re consuming your content. For example, let’s say that Steve, a contact in one of your key accounts, just visited your site, downloaded a white paper, and clicked on a blog link. While this helps you track clicks and downloads, you still don’t know whether or not Steve consumed the content.
Now, if you knew that Steve spent five minutes reading a white paper about X, four minutes reading an eBook about Y, and two minutes scanning an article on Z, then the big picture starts to come into focus. This information tells you which topics he’s most interested in, where he is in the buyer’s journey, his buying intent, and most importantly, which content he should see next.
4. Automate your recommendations
Once you have a better understanding of which content your buyers have consumed, as well as their interests and buying intent, you can move on to recommending the most relevant content to move them forward in their journey. And here’s where the secret to personalizing the ABM content experience comes in.
By automating your content recommendations, you never have to leave your buyers searching for the one piece of content they really need. And you don’t have to worry about where you’ll find the resources to create thousands of pieces of customized content.
Scale your ABM content experience
With so many buyers to consider, and so little time to make an impression, personalizing the journey for just one person won’t help you realize all the benefits that ABM has to offer. By providing personalized content experiences at scale, you can reach every decision-maker in your key accounts, and put the fear of personalization behind you.