If there is one hard truth every business must face, it is this: You need content. A lot of it. And it needs to be personalized. This is especially true for ABM content, which is all about connecting with your audience at the right time, in the right place, with the right message.
Looking at all that content you need can be daunting. It’s tempting to take shortcuts. But doing so – or not personalizing your content at all – is one of the biggest reasons ABM campaigns fail. So don’t skip out on creating your ideal customer profile and your target account list, and definitely don’t skip out on personalization.
Now the good news: ABM content personalization doesn’t have to be daunting. Use these 9 tactics to easily personalize your content at scale.
Let’s start with the basics: Email personalization is one of the most proven ways to get results, and you don’t have to stop at first name. Most email platforms allow you to personalize by the data you have, so you can insert things like last name, company, occupation or job title into your emails. On LinkedIn – one of the most effective platforms for B2B content – you can use macros to insert first name, last name, company name, industry or job title as well.
Speaking of LinkedIn, Spotlight Ads offer another easy way to personalize your advertising. They run in the right-hand column on the page and automatically pull in the contact’s profile picture alongside your company logo. There’s room for a short headline, description and CTA. Spotlight ads work well for every funnel stage and often drive to landing pages, webinar registration pages and demo bookings.
Geotargeting is a super-simple ABM content personalization method. It utilizes your target’s IP address to automatically personalize their experience. You can use it to customize the visuals on a landing page, display different languages, show the right products or list nearby offices or sales agents. When it’s this easy, why not?
Do you tag your content? If not, you should. Tags allow you to easily send segmented prospects to the content that applies to them. You can even use tags to personalize your blog or resource page to your target, automatically populating the page with the content they want to see. You can tag by vertical, industry, persona, job title and more.
Dynamic content takes tags a step further. Instead of tagging an entire piece of content, you can personalize certain aspects of your content. Within an email, you could show product images based on buyer persona. On a landing page, you could personalize the header or images based on industry, or show different content in your resource carousel based on job title. Dynamic popups might display a different offer to new visitors than to those who have visited your site before. The opportunities for dynamic content are nearly endless.
Landing pages and emails are all good, but as you build your personalized ABM content strategy, you’ll likely notice a need for more in-depth assets, like ebooks and whitepapers. Now is the time to take a good look at your existing content and see what you can repurpose. Take your long-form content and turn it into quick ebooks or infographics that tackle the topics your various personas care about. Change the title and cover image of a whitepaper to relate to a certain industry and leave the rest the same. Repurposing content is a classic ABM personalization tactic.
What’s even better than repurposing content? Creating it with the intention to be repurposed! Writing modular content just requires thinking ahead. You could include the industry name in a way that’s easy to swap out. You could use sidebars and stats that can be updated based on persona, industry and more. Or you could write a longer piece of content that speaks to all of your product’s features and benefits, then mix-and-match them into shorter pieces based on job title, whether they are a user or decision maker, and other criteria.
Thought you couldn’t personalize video? Think again. The easiest way to personalize video is to swap out the first and last frames – the first frame might show the target company’s name and a relevant industry picture, and the last your company logo side-by-side with theirs. You can also use an online video platform like Vidyard to add a prospect’s name, company name, industry, job title and more to videos at scale.
This is a more manual tactic and is best used for 1:1 campaigns, but it works. All you have to do is set up Google alerts for your target’s name, company and industry. You can even check their LinkedIn profile for their interests and hobbies and set up alerts for those, too. If you see them in the news, shoot them an email and get a conversation started!
Ready to step up your personalization game? There are a lot more ways you can personalize your ABM content at scale – or you can leave it to the experts. Check out our website to see how we create content that delivers, then contact us to learn more.