Friction in the buyer journey is a significant hurdle for marketers, with nearly 60% of B2B marketers saying their biggest challenge when implementing account-based marketing (ABM) is “moving accounts down the funnel faster”. The challenge might be related to the disconnect between what marketers create as content experiences and what buyers expect. When asked, B2B buyers said they're more likely to engage with personalized content. But what does personalization mean to a buyer? Content needs to be based on the problem buyers are looking to solve. A few years back, personalized email greetings were the holy grail of a personalized experience. Today, personalization is more complex—it now needs to speak to an entire buying team, not just one person. 

When it comes to satisfying your buyers’ needs with content, creating a content experience based on known pain points accelerates the journey. Identifying accounts is a good start for ABM. But it’s exactly that: the start. So what would happen if you took a step back and created a content experience based on buyer pain points and the ways your product can help solve them? 

Achieve the gold standard for personalization 

An integral part of ABM is engagement and putting the right content in front of the right buyer at the right time. Buyers said boring or irrelevant content is the most frustrating part of researching. Testing and learning what topics and formats your buyers engage with most are vital to creating that customer-first experience. 

Matching content to your buyer is step one. Marketing and sales teams must also align on customer profiles and personas so there is agreement on what content and messaging should be served up. When asked what tools marketers use for their ABM programs, social media management tools were number one, with 64% of marketers leveraging them. While marketers can target segmented audiences with relevant messaging on social and search, you could create a disappointing content experience when the destination the buyer clicks through to isn’t aligned to the message that first attracted them and, worse, isn't relevant to the problems they’re looking to solve. The more you break down the data and role barriers between your ABM lead, sales, and other marketing departments to become the go-to-market team, the more consistent the messaging and the better the buyer experience. 

Gaining insights and understanding what content resonates best allows you to provide more relevant content, which means you’ll earn the buyer’s trust faster, ultimately moving them down the funnel quicker. You can achieve success when you curate a branded experience with content your buyers need based on what they’ve engaged with previously. ContinuumCloud did this perfectly with their ABM campaign that increased pipeline by 267%. The team couldn’t create true 1:1 messaging for each of their accounts, but they wanted it to feel 1:1 to the buyers. They took cues from prospects to understand what and how much content was engaged with. Building off of that helped them to create a tailored experience with Uberflip. They used sales streams and dynamic tags and included logos to make their marketing efforts scalable without losing that essential personalization.

By leveraging intent data to target the right accounts, and with the right content experience platform, you can create a personalized content destination that serves up decision-enabling content and encourages self-nurturing—which is fundamental to engaging your buyers. 

Eliminate data silos and fragmentation across the buyer journey 

Gaining a holistic view of content performance data is a challenge for the majority of B2B marketers and impacts the ability to know your audiences and to serve up the right content—especially when it’s likely your teams have separate reporting based on their favorite (vanity) metrics. Over half (56%) of marketers said “better data” would have the most impact on their ability to run a successful ABM program. Without the ability to compel your buyer to engage, you have little chance of accelerating the journey and a higher chance of frustrating prospects. Data informs your entire team and you need insights throughout the journey and from all parts of the marketing team to build a holistic picture.

With more in-depth insights, sales and marketers can create:

• Better-targeted ads
• More engaging sales outreach 
• Topics that best meet the buyer where they are in their journey 

Your team receives quantitative and qualitative feedback on what kind of engagement your content experiences are getting, so make sure you’re leveraging both to get a holistic picture. A combination of content analytics and collaboration with your sales team can provide insight into the content that is working best and is most helpful to your buyers at the different stages in their journey. When sales and marketing teams collaborate through consistent data, they can support one another, enabling relevant and timely conversations and campaigns that truly resonate with the buyer.

Snowflake provides a great example of how collaboration on content insights can power pipeline success. Their marketing team worked closely with sales to curate content based on conversations with prospects. Marketing then coupled human intelligence with data insights leveraged from modern-day technologies, like the integration between Uberflip and 6sense, to power their ABM campaign that increased the average deal size by 2.5x.

What a customer-first experience can achieve

Breaking down silos between teams and marrying machine learning with human intelligence will help you better map out the buyer journey and provide a consistent experience. Your entire team needs to be aligned on goals and messaging. If the content and messaging you’re serving up to your buyer isn’t consistent, relevant to their stage in the journey, and personalized to their pains, prospects’ engagement will drop off, and this disconnect will ultimately prevent them from moving down the funnel.

Speak to an expert today to find out how Uberflip can help you implement a customer-first experience to improve your ABM strategy.

Methodology

Marketers survey:
Uberflip surveyed 250 US-based marketers at the manager level or above in mid-February 2022.

Buyers survey:
Uberflip surveyed 250 US-based B2B buyers in early February 2022. All respondents were full-time employees at the manager level or above, working at companies with $50m or more in annual revenue.