Hey friend,
How’s it going? 🌻
We’re back with Part 2 of the #BeyondBlogs series.
If you missed Part 1 (published April 18), here’s the short version: ABM or account-based marketing is not the sales team’s job alone. Content marketers are in the room, whether they know it or not.
Every email, one-pager, landing page, and ad running through an ABM campaign is a piece of content. If that content is generic, the targeting is a waste of money.
📚 Read part 1 here: Content marketing in ABM, and why it’s more your job than you think
This edition is about what to actually do. Specifically, the strategies that make ABM content work. Not theory, not a framework someone drew in a boardroom. These are the real things that make a target account pause, feel seen, and actually want to respond.
Let’s get into it 👇
📌 TL;DR
Write for the vertical, not just the persona. Same product, completely different content for different industries.
Match your CTA to where the buyer is. Cold accounts want a reason to trust you, not a demo link.
Build around a real trigger. A deadline, a funding round, a leadership change. Connect it to what you solve.
Give sales content they can actually use. Short, objection-specific assets that fit the conversation they’re already having.
Use interactive content mid-funnel. Let buyers do their own math and self-qualify.
Co-create with someone the account already trusts. The credibility transfer does what vendor content alone can’t.
Strategy #1: Write for the vertical, not just the persona
Here’s something that sounds obvious but isn’t practiced enough.
The same product, pitched to two different industries, needs two completely different pieces of content, not a light edit, a full rethink. The pain is different, the vocabulary is different, and the KPIs your reader is accountable to are different.
For example, a Head of IT at a mid-market SaaS company thinks in terms of ticket resolution time and shadow IT risk. A VP of HR at an enterprise thinks in terms of compliance exposure and retention data. Same product category, completely different entry points. If your content tries to speak to both with the same language, it ends up speaking to neither.
ABM gives you the opportunity to go narrow. Use it. Write the version that sounds like you’ve spent time in their world, because in the research phase, you should have.
Strategy #2: Match the CTA to where the buyer is
This one comes up constantly in ABM campaigns and almost always gets it wrong.
A cold target account that has received its first touchpoint is not ready to book a demo. The jump is too big. The trust isn’t there yet. A CTA that asks for too much, too early, tells the account that you’re not really paying attention to them, you’re just running a campaign at them.
Better ABM CTAs move with the relationship.
Early stage: read something useful, download something relevant, attend something low-commitment.
Mid-stage: have a conversation and explore a use case together.
Late stage: see the product, talk to an expert.
The content’s job is to make the next step feel logical, not like a sales trap.
Strategy #3: Use a real hook, not a manufactured one
ABM content works best when there’s a genuine reason to reach out at that specific moment, for example, a regulatory change, a funding announcement, a leadership hire, an industry event, or a compliance deadline your target account is suddenly under pressure about.
This is called a trigger, and it’s what separates ABM outreach that feels timely from ABM outreach that feels random. The content you build around it: an email, an insight doc, a short blog, needs to connect that trigger to a specific problem your product solves. Not loosely, specifically. The linkage has to be real, or it falls apart immediately.
The hook only works if the product can actually deliver on what the content promises. Attracting the right audience with a hook and then disappointing them with the product is worse than not reaching out at all.
Strategy #4: Give sales something they can send
A lot of ABM content fails because it lives on the marketing side and never makes it into the actual sales conversation.
Think about what a sales rep does when they’re working a target account. They’re sending follow-up emails referencing points that came up in a discovery call, trying to keep the account warm between meetings. They need content that slots into that workflow: not a 2,000-word blog, but a short insight doc, a checklist, a one-pager that addresses a specific objection.
Writing sales enablement content is a content marketer’s job, even if nobody has explicitly said so. The closer your content is to the actual conversation happening in the account, the more it moves things forward.
Strategy #5: Let accounts self-qualify with interactive content
This one is underused and very effective at the mid-funnel stage.
A calculator, a readiness assessment, a diagnostic quiz: these work in ABM because they let the buyer do their own math. They’re not reading about why your product helps companies like them. They’re putting in their own numbers and seeing what the output looks like for their situation. That’s a completely different level of buy-in.
It also helps your sales team walk into the next conversation with actual data: this account filled out the calculator, here’s what they said their current cost is, and here’s where they see the gap. That’s a warmer conversation than cold outreach.
Strategy #6: Co-create with someone the account already trusts
Target accounts are skeptical of vendor content. It’s not personal — they’ve seen a lot of it and learned to filter fast.
One way around that: create content with someone whose word already carries weight with that audience. A mutual customer, a relevant analyst, and an industry voice they follow. A webinar, a report, an interview, something where the credibility transfer is natural because the other party genuinely has skin in the topic.
This takes more effort to set up, but the trust dividend is significant. It’s not your company telling the account they should care about this problem. It’s someone they respect saying it to.
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💡What’s coming next in #BeyondBlogs
Part 3: The most common mistakes content marketers make in ABM: the things that quietly tank campaigns even when the strategy looks right on paper.
Part 4: How to track ABM content performance + the channels that actually work (spoiler: it’s not where most people are spending their energy).
If any of this connects with something you’re working on right now, hit reply and tell me what you’re dealing with. The messy real-world version is always more interesting than the theory.
Say Hi on LinkedIn 👋
Onwards and upwards,
Sreyashi