Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services

Your marketing department and digital agency can concentrate their efforts on a selected group of clients or accounts with account-based content marketing. This lets you create hyper-personalized specific content that speaks directly to their issues and explain how your product will solve them.

Effective ABM content must deliver the correct information to every stakeholder at the appropriate time in the buyer's centre. This requires identifying the requirements of each person at different stages of their journey.

Aiming at specific accounts

Account-based content marketing is a more personalized approach to content marketing compared to traditional strategies, which seek to convert visitors using large marketing campaigns into leads. By identifying the key decision makers at each account and understanding their needs and goals, marketers are able to create and distribute content that is relevant to the specific accounts. This results in a more productive dialog with prospects and customers, which ultimately leads to more profitable business results.

After identifying your target accounts You must then develop accounts plans for each. This involves analyzing every account and determining which marketing channels to be used, the buyers within each account to engage and what type of content is needed to increase engagement. This could include thought leadership content such as whitepapers, or case studies. whitepapers webinars, case studies, or whitepapers), retargeting ads, customized website experiences and other marketing tactics that are customized to each customer.

Account-based marketing can yield greater returns on your investment than traditional content strategies. 84 percent of B2B marketing professionals who have implemented account based marketing into their strategies report higher returns on investment than any other marketing approach.

Although it takes more resources and time to nurture a smaller number of accounts, text the advantages are significant for companies who want to grow their revenue across all stages of the funnel. This is especially relevant for professional service companies, where the quality of the prospects or customers is more important than how many people they are able to attract.

ABM is also a great alternative for businesses looking to grow their business with existing customers over time, by establishing trusting relations. Research shows that investing in existing customers is more cost-effective than spending money to find and convert new customers.

By combing ABM with traditional methods of inbound marketing, companies can maximize the effectiveness of their content marketing efforts. By utilizing an array of pillar content, retargeting, and lead capture landing pages, marketers can offer greater relevance to prospects at every stage of the buying journey. This allows them to generate additional revenue opportunities through acquisition, acceleration and expansion for their sales and market teams.

Creating Hyper-Personalized Content

ABM is a rage in marketing. It is crucial that marketers understand how to adapt their strategies for content to this new approach. It can be difficult to understand how ABM actually is working. In a recent presentation at ContentTECH, Jenny Magic and Jennalee Reiff of Convince & Convert and Springbox gave a quick overview on ABM and explained the most important factors to be considered and what you can expect from a successful implementation.

Understanding your ideal client's needs and pain points is the first step in creating an effective ABM strategy. Making content that is in line with these objectives will allow you to provide a more personal experience, and ultimately increase conversions. Content should also be tailored to the needs of each account. This is why it's essential to sketch out the path of users within each of your target accounts. By doing this you'll be able see what types of content marketers (and even specific pages and items) are the most interesting for the people who are on them. This data can be used to optimize the user experience on your website, and show the most popular content to users who visit the accounts.

It's not easy to create hyper-personalized content but it's a vital step in increasing the impact of ABM. According to State of Marketing 2023, 83% of respondents are willing to give their personal details in exchange for a more customized experience.

AI processing of real-time data is one way to create hyper-personalized contents. This will help you determine how your content is delivered and provide suggestions for the future steps, and react to events in real-time. While it's not a replacement for multivariate testing or strategic planning, it can be a powerful instrument to improve the effectiveness of your ABM campaigns.

Another method to personalize your content is to utilize the pillar and cluster structure. This allows you to create a an entire piece of content that addresses the problem that your target accounts are facing, and then link to supplementary pieces that specifically address the problem. For example, a fitness tracker may have a variety of advantages and common goals however, the manner in which different kinds of people use it can differ greatly.

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 convert. This strategy might have served its purpose in the past when B2B marketing was more of a broadcast model, but it's no longer effective with the modern Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy. Rather than trying to push all leads through the same stage of the process, it's important to concentrate on attracting high-value prospects and providing them with content and experiences specifically tailored to their particular needs and requirements.

The first step is identifying your ideal client profile (ICP). This is not as simple as creating buyer profiles, because you must also look at the different types of solutions that each client is looking for and the best way to make use of them.

Once you've identified your ICP and a strategy, you can create a plan for content that can be linked to each account on different channels. This could include everything from social media advertisements to email outreach.

When you start implementing your ABM strategy, it's essential to keep both your sales and marketing teams on the same page. This will ensure that your content is appropriate to each account and ensure that you do not spend your 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 data, you can discover the positive traits they have in common, such as being in the financial sector or falling within a certain company size. This information can then be used to create targeted marketing campaigns targeting similar prospects.

In addition to this it's crucial to monitor the effectiveness of your ABM strategy and make changes as needed. For instance, if your target account isn't responding to your content, it may be time to contact them and ask what else you can do to help them move down the sales funnel. You can align your ABM strategy with your content strategies by following these steps.

Measuring Success

Account based content marketing is all about creating resources (videos reports, reports, blog posts, and webinars) that are tailored and relevant to a specific account or persona. For instance If you're focusing on healthcare businesses, your content needs to be geared towards their pain points and challenges. This kind of personalization doesn't just help with ABM but also builds strong relationships with prospects and customers.

ABM can be utilized at any stage of the sales funnel. It can be even more effective than traditional lead generation at the top of a funnel. This is due to the fact that you can identify and interact with a smaller number accounts that are more likely to convert than attempting to generate leads from a group of people who might not be interested.

While there's a place for offline relationships-building strategies such as in-person meetings, phone calls and handwritten notes, the majority of buyers today prefer digital self-serve and remote engagement. This is why it's crucial to provide them with the right content at the right time, on the channel that works best for them.

ABM is particularly effective in reaching out to executives in the C-suite who are difficult to reach, who are often dismissive of mass-email campaigns, but are more likely to engage with content that speaks directly to their needs and usage scenarios. Additionally, ABM can help you shorten the sales cycle by allowing you reach and engage your prospects at the most crucial stages of their journey, like when they're researching solutions to solve a specific business issue.

Although ABM isn't around for longer than traditional marketing and sales strategies, it's quickly becoming a leading strategy for B2B organizations looking to improve their performance and drive 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.