One of the questions we get asked a lot at Inflexion Group is how to balance the need for relevant and timely content to engage buyers and influencers with the limited budgets and resources available. As is so often the case with ABM, the answer is it depends. And one of the key dependencies is what type of ABM you are doing.
In our highly-targeted ABM benchmarking study, we found that large, complex organisations take a number of approaches to developing the right thought leadership and content for their campaigns.
Tailoring existing content is the most popular option
When looking across all types of ABM, tailoring thought leadership and content that you already have available is the most popular (and pragmatic) choice for ABM-ers. This relies on having visibility of what already exists and can be used — or what is planned and in production — something many ABM-ers find elusive. It also relies on all marketing teams understanding how to create content that can be tailored for different audiences, and why it is important to do so even when it incurs additional upfront costs. Close collaboration with your campaign and content teams from across marketing is needed, ideally with a content management system, assets that are built with tailoring in mind, and a calendar of activity (that everyone sticks to).
The second choice for ABM-ers is to create custom thought leadership and content. This always sounds like a heavy lift, but doesn’t need to be. I was chatting with a global programme leader a few weeks ago who recommended custom webinars and events as a great source of content that can be leveraged across multiple formats afterwards, engaging a wider audience in the account than those who could attend in person.
The third choice for ABM-ers is to select and curate existing content which relies on the same visibility and scheduling that tailoring content depends on. Finally, there is the self-service option; providing account teams with the ability to customise existing content themselves. This has the same dependencies as our first option, but involves less work for the ABM team, other than to ensure that the standard of asset developed hits the right bar by providing easy to use templates with clear guidelines on how to customise, and then doing spot checks of the results!
Approach to content varies by type of ABM
Unsurprisingly, custom content creation such as new thought leadership and insights are mostly reserved for Strategic ABM accounts — often your most important customers — with the next best option for these accounts involving tailoring existing material. This could be as simple as taking a thought leadership study and providing an Infographic of the data most relevant for your customer.
Lighter versions of Strategic ABM and Cluster or Segment ABM opt most often for tailoring existing content, while Programmatic typically selects and curates it for audiences by industry, topic, buyer persona and journey stage. Meanwhile, Deal-based, or Pursuit Marketing takes advantage of all approaches to content through the life of a bid.
The impact of generative AI
Clearly, this is one area in ABM that could be hugely impacted by the availability of generative AI tools, enabling tailored and even custom content to be created for more accounts based on insights that more analytical AI engines can offer. Really powerful data-driven personalisation. But this still comes with a health warning today, as while the tools are emerging to enable ABM-ers to be more productive, there are still issues around accuracy, hallucination, bias, copyright, plagiarism and data privacy. And the need for transparency, that has been ushered in with the EU AI Act, means that if you do use a generative AI system to create targeted ads or personalised content, you must inform end-users that AI was involved.
We’ll publish more about how to ensure you are using AI ethically and in line with the EU AI Act in the next few weeks and months, since this is one area in ABM that is evolving fast.
Highlights from our full ABM benchmarking survey can be found here: http://bit.ly/3YhzJBX
