TLDR:
Marketers can sharpen their marketing know-how with three books— “F#ck Content Marketing” by Randy Frisch, “Conversational Marketing” by David Cancel & Dave Gerhardt, and “Account-Based Marketing” by Chris Golec, Peter Isaacson & Jessica Fewless.
ABM, as an industry, is heavily reliant on technology to advance it. What’s more is that as the tech grows, growing right with it is a B2B marketer’s strategy and tactics.
One way of keeping current in an industry is by reading the literature that exists within it. Currently, there are three book titles that ABM practitioners should not only be aware of but also take the time to check out.
The first book making an appearance on this list is F#ck Content Marketing: Focus On Content Experience To Drive Demand, Revenue & Relationship, by Uberflip CMO, Randy Frisch. The book itself argues that mindlessly creating content for the sake of content—as if that is what marketers should be doing 24/7—is useless.
What good is content if there’s nobody around to consume it?
Instead, Frisch advocates a content experience—how people interact with a marketer’s content—that involves personalization at scale, creating quality content, and the customer making a purchase. It makes sense to refine content if it isn’t delivering. Marketers need to create content at the right time and place and to do it at scale. This book will help them do just that.
The next book on the list is Conversational Marketing: How The World’s Fastest Growing Companies Use Chatbots To Generate 24/7/365 (And How You Can Too), by David Cancel & Dave Gerhardt.
This book is about how marketers can get rid of the lead-capture forms on their landing pages and replace them with a simple line of code. Not any ordinary code, though. This code enables the creation of a chatbot to handle website visitors and inquirers 24/7/365. The chatbot takes care of the menial tasks that sales reps would normally take care of—greeting visitors and customers, qualifying them, answering FAQs—so sales reps can focus on more meaningful activity.
These chatbots assist—but they can’t do a sales rep’s job.
The last entry is Account-Based Marketing: How To Target And Engage The Companies That Will Grow Your Revenue, by Chris Golec, Peter Isaacson & Jessica Fewless.
This book offers a wide variety of coverage on several ABM-related topics, such as targeting accounts, pulling in the right ones, marketing and sales alignment, and techniques promoting healthy ABM implementation.
While even newcomers to the ABM-game can understand the content of this book, it was the intention of the Demandbase executives that wrote it for the book to act as a reference. This way, the book even appeals to marketers who have a handle on how to conduct an ABM strategy.
Original article from DemandGen Report on 23 April 2019.
