Start by identifying your best clients. These clients are the ones you’re most connected to, the most comfortable with, and the ones most likely to provide you with a referral. Picture a client that fits the criteria and write as if you are speaking directly to them. Discussions feel natural when you’re talking to someone with whom you are at your most comfortable. Next, consider how that topic will benefit your audience and how it will help their company in the long run. I picture sitting down and talking over dinner in a relaxed setting, where we discuss an interesting service and topic that is going to help their company save money or get to the next level. From there, expand the process to other companies similar to your ideal client.
Don’t be afraid to use a ghostwriter to craft the initial draft. Writing isn’t natural for everyone. For example, in the accounting industry and other service firms, writing isn’t always an inherent talent. Using a professional writer who can sit with someone for an hour on the phone to create an initial draft and help get an article started, is money well-spent. No matter what you use to get your content out, the first step is still identifying who you are writing for and understanding what information is useful to them. The rest will follow.
Meaningful brands stand for something. They have a point of view and then deliver on it. In B2B, this is more important than ever, as services become more convergent. Meaningful brands deliver on both the functional and emotional needs of their customers, and the goal is to become an indispensable part of their lives. Brand purpose can play a significant part in this, but use purpose with caution – it has to be real and authentic, otherwise your customers will see right through it. Salience is about being front of mind.
In the B2B world, our clients are professionals but most importantly, they are people – with busy lives, multiple priorities and personal agendas. Just because they hold a senior job title, doesn’t mean that they suddenly lose their human touch and become pure algorithmic processors of data and information. On the contrary, human relationships matter even more in B2B. You want to be the first organisation they pick up the phone to.
Difference is perhaps the trickiest of the three qualities. As services become increasingly globalised and commoditised, and as technology levels the playing field, genuine differentiation within sectors is quickly becoming the marketers holy grail. However, even in crowded, convergent markets a sense of difference is still possible: find your ‘secret sauce’ that makes your brand special – be it your people, values, methodologies or creativity – and then activate it to reinforce your meaning and salience. As we begin the new year and the new decade, one of the most important things for any B2B organisation will be to double down on brand-building to drive long-term, sustainable growth.
It’s hardly surprising that ABM marketers want to achieve results with more than a handful of key accounts. Yet the challenge for many fledgling ABM programmes comes in scaling a successful approach and replicating the returns across tens, hundreds, or thousands of accounts.
Here’s how we tackled that problem with some of our biggest clients:
Step 1: Pick your targets.
The best place to start is with prioritisation and clustering of accounts. How accounts are segmented will vary across businesses, but we clustered companies by geographic region, industries, business challenge, level of digital transformation, or a combination of these.
Step 2: Win hearts and minds.
In order to scale ABM, buy-in of key stakeholders is a must. We always try to unite teams behind a customer-centric approach by including sales, marketing, engineering and many others. We ensure the assets speak to the highest level of thought leadership on the topics covered, while also making sure they resonate with each customer.
Step 3: Choose your weapons.
Once we have an idea of the sectors we’ll target and challenges faced by the companies within them, we can create content assets. In the past, we’ve created an interactive website that illustrates our client’s innovative capabilities right across the breadth of an account’s operations.
Step 4: All assets are stored on a central hub, providing a systemised approach to distributing customer-centric assets.
This content hub allows ABM to be scaled globally and cost effectively. These steps allowed us to accelerate more than €500M in pipeline revenue with one of our biggest clients.
