I saw this quote from David Ogilvy about this time last year. Reading it again in Bev Burgess' book 'A Practitioner's Guide to Account-Based Marketing' resonated with the advice we often give to subject-matter experts we work with. 

When it comes to authoring content it is very easy to get lured in by the potential falsehood of vanity metrics. The idea that a successful blog is characterised by thousands of reads and shares. 

In reality however, within B2B service lines, there are often a finite group of people you are actually trying to sell to / to influence. In many instances, it might be just one account. 

With Ogilvy's quote in mind, here are my tips which focus on writing content with the purpose of nurturing target accounts and driving commercial growth:

Where to start? 

1. Think about which companies you want to influence
2. Write a list of the people within those companies you want to influence (this could be a single stakeholder or a group)
3. Write a list of topics that are important to them. You can discover these by checking out their posts, tweets, likes and shares on LinkedIn. Also Google their name and company. To point out the obvious, you can ask them.
4. Create content that resonates with these topics

What next? 

1. Share your insight across relevant social networks your targets frequent i.e. LinkedIn, Twitter
2. Identify the people within your team who can help you bring your insight to market 
3. Share 1-2-1 with a personalised note. Including email, you can also use a LinkedIn InMail, What's App/WeChat, a Slack message depending through which tools you use to communicate directly

Top tip: address the topics using your audiences’ language.