Naturally, marketing tends to focus on buyer audiences, and some of that content needs reuse or rework to fit other audiences, like journalists and analysts. However, ABM often involves particular conversations about segments where the provider has an unfair advantage. These are especially useful with analysts with whom you already have a relationship and want to build favourability.
Great ideas are the key to all of this. We need insights into the target audiences in our key segments. We need to talk about their challenges broadly. Of course, we can prove the materiality of the gap between what other providers have hitherto made available and the opportunity of our solutions. However, we will have a much more compelling narrative if we more broadly capture our audiences’ personal, social and internal challenges. We can engage our audience by showing the context of our audiences and why they are already heroes.
These conversations often allow AR professionals to take features (the sort of thing analysts might score in things like Critical Capabilities and Forrester Wave documents) and enrich materials to ‘hero customer’ challenges and innovative opportunities to create customer value. This content often works well at the narrower bottom end of the sales funnel.
Marketing teams also plan a lot of awareness-building content, which is helpful with the long tail of analysts.
Primary research has a unique place in making ideas concrete and in spotlighting sectoral differences. That’s especially important with high-growth scale-ups identifying the successive layers of the Total Addressable Market to prioritise.
Even if one sector appears to be a single market, primary research can show nuances that can help sales, marketing and analyst relations. For example, healthcare and education are globally ubiquitous but very different in national markets. Customers’ top needs in most US markets are different from European customers’ needs.
Segments differ too: the enterprise market is a more significant part of the pie in the US market, but the European SMB sector makes up most of many tech markets. That difference could be helpful: for example, the discussion about some technologies are more developed in Europe and Asia than in the Americas or Africa. Showing the differences can help people not thinking about an issue understand how the benefits realised in other regions could be a source of comparative advantage in their market.
Primary research campaigns are quick: many CCgroup clients can go from survey ideation to campaign rollout with full deliverables in three months. Our five-step approach for following out a content campaign works as well with ‘long tail’ analysts as with more mainstream marketing audiences.
- Gate the content
- Gather insights into relevant hooks
- Built a topic architecture with smaller content assets
- Map the assets to the awareness, interest and action stages of the outreach funnel
- Finalise and publish assets using CRM-driven email and social media to drive the downloads of the core thought leadership document.
What makes all of this better is that AR teams have a more comprehensive range of formats to use. Ebooks, videos, solution comparison sheets, web collateral, and TCO tools give us more hooks to engage analysts. Furthermore, marketing is better at ‘showing its working’ with internal resources, like messaging briefings. That means that AR has more and more to do with marketing resources. Book a call with our Head of Analyst Relations to learn more about our approach.
