Crash Course – Given the complexity of the current

Given the complexity of the current business-to-business procurement process, rising marketing costs and declining revenues from large-scale marketing campaigns, an ATM-based content strategy offers the best opportunity to create interdisciplinary alignment and efficiency, build strong relationships with the right customers and produce significant results for your business. From there, sales and marketing teams need to work together to determine the details of these accounts: the buying process, which is involved in the decision making process, and the key motivating factors and issues that will address your content. In an ATM model, the sales team leads the way by identifying the highest-priority accounts, identifying the teams and individuals directly involved in their purchasing processes, and creating detailed profiles of marketing needs for strategic message campaigns. Destructive content: To attract high value-added customers identified by sales, marketers need to deliver content at a personal level that meets their needs and interests. Both rightly point out that marketers cannot create personalized content without a deep understanding of the people in their target group and the goals that each audience tries to achieve at every stage of their decision-making process. Once salespeople have assessed and prioritized the perspectives that fit into these roles, they can work with the marketing team to create a well-informed profile of ideal customers. “You need to develop a strong sense of coordination between the sales and marketing team that can track the whole process,” says Jennalee. In their presentation at ContentTECH 2019, Jenny Magic from Convenince & Convert and Jennalee Reiff from Springbox gave an accelerated course on why this people-focused strategy deserves to be followed, what it takes to make it work and what role the content plays in the best execution. Individual ATMs: This is usually a sales driven initiative that uses highly personalized content to reach a handful of valuable customers – the ones who have the highest priority in sales. From there, marketers develop and deliver personalized content to meet these accounts as one group, based on their collective information needs as a decision-making unit. As a content strategy consultant, Jodi helps companies assess their content and resource needs, build infrastructure and operations, and create compelling articles across multiple channels and media platforms. “They have reached a significant number of people by planting the seed and ensuring that sales and marketing work together on these personalized messages,” says Jenny. For example, marketers can dynamically create promotional content that attracts a person to the account, while leveraging existing content that addresses the needs of a number of additional account stakeholders. MHI’s annual corporate content marketing survey shows that companies are willing to give ATMs a chance: 34% of respondents said they were using the technology and 21% said they intended to use it by the end of 2018. And because marketers start their process with clear goals and defined customer needs, they can benefit from a new and more effective marketing commitment that can open up new cross-selling and up-selling opportunities for them. Using content that helps sales teams generate demand and drive conversion becomes even more difficult with large and complex B2B purchases.