Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services

Your marketing department and digital agency can concentrate their efforts on a particular group of clients or accounts that use account-based content marketing. This lets you create hyper-personalized specific content that speaks directly to their needs and describes how your product can help the issues.

ABM content that is efficient must convey the right information to every stakeholder in the buyer's centre at the right time. This means identifying the needs of each persona at different stages in their journey.

The goal is to target specific accounts

Account-based content marketing is a more personalized approach to content marketing than traditional strategies, which aim to convert visitors using large marketing campaigns into leads. By identifying the key decision makers for each account and Account Based Content Marketing understanding their pain points and goals, marketers are able to create and deliver customized content that is relevant to the specific accounts. This creates a more fruitful dialogue with customers and prospects and ultimately results in better business results.

Once you've identified the target accounts, the next step is to create account plans for each account. This involves analysing each account and determining the marketing channels to employ and which customers within the account should be engaging with, and what kinds of content are required to increase engagement and converts. This could be thought leadership content such as whitepapers, or case studies. whitepapers, case studies, webinars), retargeting ads, personalized website experiences and other marketing tactics specific to each client.

In the end, account based content marketing can provide a much higher return on investment than traditional content marketing techniques. 84 percent of B2B marketing professionals who have integrated account-based marketing into their strategies report higher returns on investment than any other marketing effort.

While it takes more time and resources to nurture the small number of targeted accounts however, the benefits of a strong account-based content marketing strategy are significant for businesses who want to increase revenue across all stages of the sales funnel. This is especially true for professional services businesses where the quality of each prospective client or customer is more important than the number of customers they can draw.

ABM is also a great option for businesses who want to expand business with their existing customers over time by building trusting relations. Research shows that investing in existing customers is more cost-effective than spending money to acquire new customers.

By combing ABM with traditional inbound marketing strategies, companies can maximize the effectiveness of their content marketing efforts. Utilizing the combination of pillar content, retargeting and lead capture landing pages, marketers can give more relevance to prospects throughout the buying process. This enables them to create more acquisition growth, acceleration, and growth revenue opportunities for their sales and marketing teams.

Create content that is hyper-personalized

ABM is one of the hottest trends in marketing, and it's vital for marketers to know how their current content strategies can be integrated into this new strategy. However, it can be a challenge to get your head around how ABM can be applied in real-world. In a recent presentation at ContentTECH, Jenny Magic and Jennalee Reiff of Convince & Convert and Springbox provided a crash course on ABM and explained the most important factors to be considered and what you can expect in a successful execution.

The most efficient ABM content strategy starts with understanding your ideal client's needs and their goals. Making content that is in line with these goals will allow you to provide a more personalized experience, which will ultimately improve conversions. Content should be tailored to the requirements of each account. It is therefore crucial to trace the path of each user within the account. This will help you determine the type of content (and particular pages and items) is most popular with your intended audience. This information can be used to optimize user's journeys on these accounts, displaying the most effective content.

Making content that is hyper-personalized can be a challenge, but it is an important step to increasing the impact of your ABM efforts. According to State of Marketing 2023, 83% of respondents are willing to give their personal details in exchange for a more personalised experience.

One way to create hyper-personalized content is by using AI processing on real-time data. This will allow you to control the way your content is delivered and provide suggestions for the next steps, and respond to events in a flash. This tool can improve the effectiveness of ABM campaigns. It cannot replace multivariate testing and strategic planning.

The cluster and pillar structure is another way to hyper-personalize content. This allows you to create a comprehensive piece that describes the problem that your accounts' target users are facing, and then connect it to additional pieces that address specific aspects of that problem. For instance a fitness tracker could have many common goals and advantages, but how different types of users use it can differ significantly.

Making sure that Marketing and Sales are aligned

Traditionally, professional services marketers focused on developing a linear sales funnel using broad marketing campaigns that appealed to large numbers of people in the expectation that a portion of them would convert. This approach may have worked when B2B marketing employed a more broadcast model, but is no longer effective in today's Account Based Marketing strategy. Instead of trying to guide all leads through the same stages of the process, you should instead focus on the most valuable leads. You can do this by providing them with content or experiences specifically tailored to their particular needs and challenges.

The first step is to identify your ideal client profile. This is not as simple as creating buyer profiles, as you need to consider the types of solutions that each client is looking for and the best way to make use of them.

Once you've identified your ICP, develop a strategy for content that connects with each account across several channels. This could be anything from social media ads to email outreach.

As you begin executing your ABM strategy, it's important to keep your marketing and sales teams on the same level. This will ensure that your content is relevant for each account and that you don't spend time or resources on the wrong people.

The most important thing to do is to utilize the information you have about your most successful clients. Through analyzing your customer information, you will be able to see what positive attributes they have in common, like being in the financial services industry or being within a certain size. This data can be used to develop targeted marketing campaigns to target similar prospects.

It's also important to track your ABM strategy's performance and make any necessary adjustments. If your target account doesn't respond to your content, you might be able to contact them and see what you can do to move them further down the sales funnel. By taking these steps you'll be able improve your ABM strategy and content efforts better aligned, which will 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 personalised and relevant to a particular account or persona. For instance If you're focusing on healthcare organizations your content must be geared towards their pain points and challenges. This level of personalization isn't just important in ABM but also an excellent method to establish solid relationships with your prospects and customers.

ABM can be used at all stages of the sales funnel. In fact, it could be more effective than traditional lead generation if employed at the top of the funnel. This is because it can help you identify and engage a small number of 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.

Although offline strategies like phone calls and meetings in person or handwritten notes remain effective, today's buyers are more inclined to digital self-service and remote engagement. That's why it's so critical to provide them with the right content at the right time, and on the channel that is most effective for them.

ABM is particularly effective for reaching out to C-suite executives who are difficult to reach, who are often dismissive of mass email campaigns but are more likely to react to content that is tailored to their needs and usage scenarios. In addition, ABM can help you shorten the sales cycle by enabling you to reach and engage your prospects at the most crucial stages of their journey, like when they're researching solutions to solve a particular business problem.

Although ABM isn't around for longer than traditional marketing and sales strategies, it's rapidly becoming the most popular strategy for B2B companies looking to increase their efficiency and generate more 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.