Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services

With the help of account-based content marketing your marketing content strategist department and digital marketing agency can focus on a select group of clients or accounts. This allows you create hyper-personalized targeted content that talks directly to their issues and explains how your product can solve them.

ABM content that is successful must provide the correct information to each stakeholder in the buyer center at the right time. This requires identifying the requirements of each persona at different stages of their journey.

Targeting Specific Accounts

Contrary to traditional content strategies that seek to attract and convert strangers into leads using broad marketing campaigns, account-based content marketing focuses on connecting with specific accounts in a highly personalized way. Marketers can create and present relevant content by understanding the key decision makers in each account, their challenges, and their objectives. This creates more productive conversation with customers and prospects that ultimately drives better business results for the company.

After identifying your accounts of interest After identifying your target accounts, you must create account plans for each. This involves analyzing each account and determining the appropriate marketing channels that should be utilized, the buyers within each account and what kind of content is required to encourage engagement. This could include thought leadership content, such as whitepapers or case studies. Whitepapers, case studies, webinars, retargeting advertising, personalized website experiences and other marketing strategies that are that are customized to each customer are all possible.

Account-based content marketing can deliver a much higher return on your investment than traditional content strategies. 84 percent of B2B marketing professionals who have implemented account-based marketing into their strategies have higher ROI than any other marketing strategy.

While it requires more resources and time to nurture a smaller group of targeted accounts, the advantages are significant for companies that seek to increase their revenues at all stages of the funnel. This is particularly true for professional service businesses in which the quality of the prospects or customers is more important than the number of people they can draw.

ABM is also a great option for businesses who want to increase their business with existing customers over time by building trusting relationships. Research has shown that it's more cost effective to invest in keeping existing customers than it is to invest money trying to find and convert new ones.

By using ABM with traditional methods of inbound marketing, companies can maximize the effectiveness of their content marketing efforts. Utilizing an array of pillar content, retargeting, and lead capture landing pages, marketers can provide greater relevance to prospects throughout the buying process. This allows them to create additional revenue opportunities through acquisition growth, acceleration, and expansion of their sales and marketing teams.

Create content that is hyper-personalized

ABM is a hot trend in the field of marketing. It's crucial that marketers understand how to adapt their strategies for content to this new approach. However, it can be a challenge to comprehend how ABM is actually used in practice. Jenny Magic of Convince & Convert, and Jennalee Reiff from Springbox gave a crash-course on ABM in a recent talk. They explained the key aspects to consider, and what to expect for an effective implementation.

The most efficient ABM content strategy starts with understanding your ideal client's pain points and goals. Content that is in line with these goals allows you to provide a more personalized service and tool increase conversions. Content should be tailored to the needs of each account. This is why it's crucial to outline the journey of people in each of your target accounts. This will help you determine the type of content (and particular items and pages) is most appealing to your target audience. This information can be used to optimize journeys for people using these accounts, displaying the most successful content.

It's not easy to create content that is hyper-personalized, however, it's a crucial step in increasing the impact of ABM. According to State of Marketing, 2023 83% of customers are willing to share their personal data for an experience that is more personalized.

AI processing of real-time data is one way to create hyper-personalized contents. This will allow you to control the way that your content is presented, provide suggestions for next steps, and respond to events in real-time. While it's not a replacement for multivariate testing or strategic planning, this can be a powerful tool for improving the effectiveness of your ABM campaigns.

Another method to personalize your content is to use the pillar and cluster content structure. This allows you to have an entire piece of content that explains the issue that your targeted accounts face, and then connect to additional pieces that focus on specific aspects of the issue. Fitness trackers, as an example, may have a number of common goals and benefits however the method by which different people use them could be very different.

Aligning Marketing and Sales

Professional services marketers have traditionally focused on creating a linear sales channel using broad marketing campaigns that reach large audiences with the hope that a few of them would become converts. This approach may have worked when B2B marketing followed a more broadcast model, but is not as effective today with the Account Based Marketing strategy. Instead of trying to guide all leads through the same stages of the process, you should focus on high-value prospects. You can do this by providing them with content or experiences that are tailored to their particular needs and problems.

The first step is to identify your ideal customer profile. It's not as easy as creating buyer profiles, as you need to consider the types of solutions each customer is looking for and how to make use of them.

Once you have identified your ICP and a strategy, you can create a plan for content that will connect with each account through several channels. This could be anything from social media ads to email outreach.

It's essential that your sales and marketing teams are on the same page as you implement your ABM strategy. This will ensure that your content is relevant to each account and ensure that you don't spend your time or resources on the wrong target audience.

A key step to take is to utilize the information you have about your most successful clients. You can identify positive attributes that your customers share by looking at their historical data. For example they could all belong to the financial services industry or have a similar business size. This information can be used to create targeted marketing campaigns to target similar potential customers.

In addition to this, it's important to track the performance of your ABM strategy and make adjustments as needed. For instance, if your target account isn't responding to your content, it may be the right time to get in touch with them and ask what else you can do to assist them progress through the sales funnel. If you follow these steps you'll be able to get your ABM strategy and content strategies better aligned and ultimately help to drive more conversions.

Measuring Success

Account based content marketing is all about creating resources (videos reports, reports, blog posts and webinars) that are personalized and relevant to a specific account or persona. For example when you're targeting healthcare companies your content should be geared towards their issues and concerns. This kind of personalization not only helps with ABM but also builds strong relationships with prospects and customers.

ABM can be utilized throughout the sales funnel. It is even more effective than traditional lead generation at the top of a funnel. This is because it can assist you in identifying and engaging only a few accounts that are likely to convert, rather than trying to generate leads from a large audience that may not be interested in your product or service.

While offline methods like phone calls and meetings in person, or handwritten notes are effective, today's buyers are more inclined to remote and digital content marketing agency self-service. It's important to deliver the right content, at the right time and using the channel they prefer.

ABM is particularly effective at engaging C-suite executives who are difficult to reach. They often ignore the mass email marketing and are more likely to respond to content that is relevant to their needs and use instances. In addition, ABM can help you reduce the time to sell by allowing you reach and engage your prospects at key stages of their journey -- like when they're researching solutions to solve a specific business problem.

Although ABM hasn't been around for as long as traditional marketing and sales strategies, it's rapidly becoming a top strategy for B2B companies looking to enhance their performance and generate greater revenue. In fact, 76% of marketers who have adopted the ABM approach say it improves ROI, while 81% report that it increases deal close rates and upselling/cross-selling rates.