Account-Based Marketing, ABM, Content Creation

🦝Breaking the Rules: A Spicy ABM Proposal for Mutiny’s Content Lead Role — Thoughts & Approaches

If Mutiny reads and responds to this article, then ABM is officially undefeated. Let’s test it!

Why raccoons? Well, when you’re doing ABM, you should show that you’ve read up on the target company! (Image by Midjourney AI, btw.)

Many of you know me as a tech writer— one who blathers on far too much about NFTs, crypto, and blockchain. But, I’ve also been in the market lately for a new gig. And so I’ve been browsing ads on LinkedIn and other sites to see what’s out there.

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a particular buzz word I came across today in an ad for a Content Lead at an ABM platform company called Mutiny — and it struck home immediately, for a few reasons:

• As a tech guy who’s built countless dynamic, data-driven web sites, it makes a ton of sense; leverage all of the latest tech (including AI, natch) to essentially build out 1:1 campaigns at scale.
• For a single company to do this for themselves is deviously subversive and genius. For a startup to transform the idea into an entire platform is absolutely visionary.
• But also … it’s something I’ve done myself, just here on my little old blog. And I can personally attest: It works well!

Will it work HERE and NOW? Well, let’s find out. Let this article be my own ABM. The account is Mutiny, and this article is the proactive marketing piece in support of bringing me on as your new Content Lead!

My Weird Background: 🧮 → 🐶 →👴

Back in the stone age (I’m a 👴GenXer — older than everyone else), I worked for ages in jobs that required me to write B2B proposals — first at 🧮Deloitte for a few years, and later for another professional services firm that I used to refer to as 🐶Horn Dog Enterprises. Combined, I’ve written 700+ freakin’ proposals.

ABM marketing fits right into that persuasive language / sales / marketing mindset. It’s like writing proposals, only you’re doing it proactively instead of only after one is requested. That takes some marketing cojones, friends. Or, um, “spiciness” is how Mutiny phrases it. (This is the subversive nature I spoke about, above, as the entire business development process is flipped onto its head.)

The “Bad Vegan” Example: 🥦 →💰?

Want proof that ABM works? I once wrote a single article and almost landed a multi-million-dollar deal. Here’s what happened:

A few years back, I watched the documentary “Bad Vegan” on Netflix. My first reaction was: You know, doing an NFT set could be one hell of a project for her — maybe even help her get her restaurant back. So, I shifted into ABM mode and took the time-honored “open letter” approach:

An Open Letter to the “Bad Vegan,” Sarma Melngailis: Here’s a Legit Way to Get Your Restaurant Back

The tactic worked wonders. Within a few days, we were having group meetings with her and her team, doing serious brainstorming about a potentially multi-million-dollar project—all from my writing ONE piece of content directed at ONE person.

→ That’s 1:1 marketing. ✅

(BTW, I have one more amazing example, but it was so effective that I’m going to sit on it privately for a bit still. I’ll share it directly with Mutiny, though!)

🤔Does ABM ALWAYS work?

🤷‍♂️Well, no. And that’s one of the risks of the whole ABM world.

You’re going to do a LOT of stuff that won’t be seen at all, won’t be read or considered seriously, or won’t be the right timing/approach/solution. (I tried similar approaches to reach Dave Portnoy, Haley “Hawk Tuah” Welch, the hiring team at Medium, and others. But hey, a shot on goal is never a bad play, right?!)

Those failed attempts aside, putting an ABM approach to work for a business at scale is a 3D chess move when others are struggling to play marketing checkers.

🌶️Okay, Let’s Get Spicy!

Mutiny would like to work with someone who can produce spicy content. Now, I’m a dual-brained guy, which is my own private term to describe my multi-potentiate nature. I love to work on myself (and produce content) on two fronts — both creative and analytical.

So, yes, I have a lot of wildly varying content out there — two literary novels (one about the world’s richest dog, another about cat gangs on the west coast), a novella, a feature screenplay, a memoir, 750+ articles here on Medium (largely technical in nature), and several hundred more all over the internet.

ChatGPT thought that Mutiny may enjoy a wide sampling of my weirder material. As such, I’ll include some links below. I’d also recommend viewing my personal website at JPD3.com, which has all of my resumes, experience, publications, and pursuits well organized.

In true ABM style, I won’t be submitting a resume via the usual channels. It just wouldn’t be true to the position! If anyone at Mutiny would like to chat further with me, simply HMU at → Jim [at] GenerativeNFTs.io

I hope you DO reach out, of course. Let’s cook up something spicy for Mutiny together!

🙏Many thanks for reading. Here are those aforementioned strange and spicy items:

The Comma Sutra: Punctuation (and Beyond) for Controlling How Readers Hear Your Words

Get Them to Kick the Desk: Keeping the Potential Client Feeling Pain as a Sales Technique

Disaster Fantasy Dating: An Evening with Liv Tyler

Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer as Ideological War Machine Propaganda

The CIA Monitors and Analyzes My Bejeweled Gaming Activity

I Ate a $75 Salad Instead of a Filet Mignon and My Boss Wasn’t Happy

Postscript: The Results of This ABM Experiment

So, how did this little experiment in account-based marketing (ABM) play out? Well, I did get a response(!)— which is a win in and of itself. The hiring manager wrote back and suggested I apply via the usual channels.

But if I’m being honest, that response suggests that my approach didn’t land the way I’d hoped. As a marketer, I’m not excited about going back into a crowded queue when I’ve just blazed a direct path around it, you know? (Especially when marketing itself is essentially about fiding ways to stand out among already over-crowded environments.)

Some takeaways from this experiment:

• ABM definitely gets attention — I got a direct response from someone at the highest level of hiring. That alone is significant. It’s a huge win, actually.
• Not every company is receptive to unconventional approaches — which was surprising to me in this situation, but is good to remember.
• A ‘no’ is better than silence — because it confirms that my message was received and (probably) considered. (Then again, she may have sent me back into the system without fully reading my message — hard to say.)

Ultimately, while this particular company wasn’t the right fit, I still consider this approach a success because it reaffirmed that creative, direct outreach is a powerful tool. If you’re in marketing, sales, or job hunting, ABM can still be a great strategy.

Would I try this again? Absolutely. It’s just a matter of refining the method, target, and execution.

Final Notes for Mutiny:

One minor thing I noticed in my research, which may or may not be an issue for this company (as I’m not 100% sure of how the tech stack works) is that they have a page where their ABM micro-sites are available to view via sample URLs like this:

https://www.mutinyhq.com/account_microsites?mtl=K7mqDNaqcME

That would be a micro site intended for the software company Slack, in this example. Again, I’m not 100% sure if that would be an example of a final URL shared with a target at Slack, but I’m not super crazy about the structuring of the URL. I think it could be more elegantly structured if it were something like this:

// [domain] / [something cool] / [a better alias instead of a hashed ID]
// or, as an example, like so:
https://www.mutinyhq.com/we-love/slack

From what I can tell, their system loads a boilerplate base site and then layers the targeted micro-site info dynamically. That’s all well and good, except I use the Brave browser, as do many in the tech world. So, when I went to look, it showed the boilerplate site — not the customized one for Slack:

However, when I view the same URL in Edge, the correct micro-site appears as expected:

Of course, this may not reflect the actual behavior of their system when deployed in a real-life scenario. (It could be a quirk of their demo site.) But, for what it’s worth, there may be a little isue there.

Jim Dee is a prolific writer, developer, and multi-media creator from Portland. You can find him, his businesses, his books, and more at JPD3.com. Thanks for reading! Cat image here courtesy of Midjourney AI.