Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services

Your marketing department and digital agency can concentrate their efforts on a selected set of clients or accounts that have account-based content marketing. This allows you create hyper-personalized, targeted content that speaks directly about their pain points and explains how your product can help the issues.

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

Targeting Accounts with Specific Goals

Account-based content marketing is a more personal approach to content marketing than traditional strategies, which seek to convert people who are not familiar with marketing campaigns into leads. Marketers can create and deliver relevant content by knowing the key decision makers in each account, their pain points and goals. This results in a more productive interaction with customers and prospects which in turn leads to greater business outcomes.

After identifying the accounts you want to target After identifying your target accounts, you must develop account plans for each one. This involves analyzing each account, determining which channels to utilize, which buyers within the account should be engaging with, and what kinds of content are needed to encourage engagement and conversions. This could include thought-provoking content (e.g. whitepapers webinars, case studies, etc.) Retargeting ads, customized website experiences and other marketing tactics tailored to each account.

This is why account-based content marketing is able to provide a much higher return on investment than traditional content marketing tactics. In fact 84% of B2B marketers who have incorporated account-based marketing into their strategies report higher returns on investment than any other type of marketing campaign.

It takes more time and resources to cultivate a small group of target accounts however, the benefits of an account-based content marketing strategy are crucial for companies that wish to increase their revenue across all stages of the sales funnel. This is particularly applicable to professional service companies where the quality of their customers or prospects is more important than how many people they can attract.

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 investing money to acquire new customers.

By using ABM with traditional methods of inbound marketing content planner companies can increase the effectiveness of their content marketing efforts. Marketers can improve the relevance of their content to buyers at every stage of the buying process by mixing pillar content with the retargeting technique and landing pages for lead capture. This enables them to create additional revenue opportunities through acquisition as well as acceleration and expansion for their sales and marketing teams.

Creating Hyper-Personalized Content

ABM is among the most popular trends in marketing, and it's crucial for marketers to comprehend how their existing content strategies fit into this new approach. It can be a bit difficult to get your head around how ABM can be applied in real-world. Jenny Magic of Convince & Convert, and Jennalee Reiff from Springbox gave an overview of ABM in a recent talk. They outlined the main factors to consider, as well as what to expect for the success of implementation.

The most effective ABM content strategy begins with understanding your ideal client's needs and goals. Producing content that aligns with these goals will enable you to deliver a more personalized experience and ultimately increase conversions. The content you create should also focus on the specific needs of each account. It is therefore crucial to track the journey of users within each account. By doing this, you'll be able see what types of content (and even individual pages and items) are most engaging for those who visit your site. This information can be used to optimize journeys on your website, displaying top performing content to people from those accounts.

It's not easy to create hyper-personalized content, but it's a vital step to increase the impact of ABM. According to State of Marketing, 2023, 83% of consumers are willing to share their personal information to receive a more customized experience.

AI processing of real-time data is one way to create hyper-personalized contents. This will allow you to control how your content is delivered and offer suggestions for the next steps, and react to events in real-time. While it isn't a substitute for multivariate testing or strategic planning, this can be a useful tool to increase the effectiveness of your ABM campaigns.

The cluster and pillar structure is another method to hyper-personalize content. This allows you to have a comprehensive piece of content that explains the issues that your target accounts have to face, and connect to additional pieces that specifically address the problem. For example, a fitness tracker may have a variety of common goals and benefits, but how different types of people use it can vary significantly.

Getting Sales and Marketing Aligned

Professional service marketers have traditionally focused on creating a linear sales channel using broad marketing campaigns that draw large numbers of people in the hope that a portion of them would be converted. This strategy may have served its purpose in the past when B2B marketing was more of a broadcast-based model, but it's no longer effective with today's Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy. Instead of trying to push all potential 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 specific requirements and needs.

The first step is to identify your ideal customer profile. This isn't as easy as creating buyer profiles, because you must also consider the types of solutions that each customer is seeking and how best to utilize them.

Once you have identified your ICP, develop a strategy for content that will connect with each account across different channels. This could range from social media advertisements to email outreach.

When you are beginning to implement your ABM strategy, it's important to keep your marketing and sales teams on the same level. This will help ensure that your content is relevant to each account, ensuring that you don't spend time and resources attracting the wrong audience.

The most important thing to do is to utilize the information you have on your top-performing clients. Through analyzing your customer information, you will be able to see what positive attributes they have in common, such as being in the financial sector or being within a certain size. This information can be used to create targeted marketing campaigns to target similar potential customers.

In addition it's also important to keep track of the effectiveness of your ABM strategy and adjust it as needed. If your targeted account does not respond to your content, you may want to reach out to see what is content in marketing you can do to help move them along the sales funnel. You can make sure that you align your ABM strategy with your content strategy by following these steps.

Measuring the success

Account based content marketing is about creating content (videos, reports, blog posts, and webinars) that are personalized and relevant to a particular persona or account. If you're aiming to reach healthcare businesses, for example, your content should be centered around their problems and concerns. This type of personalization not only helps with ABM but also builds strong relationships with 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 when employed at the top of the funnel. This is because it will assist you in identifying and engaging just a handful of accounts that are likely to convert, rather than trying to generate leads from an audience that may not be interested in your product or service.

While there's still a place for offline relationship building tactics like in-person meetings, phone calls and handwritten notes, most buyers nowadays prefer digital self-service and remote engagement. That's why it's so critical to provide them with the right content at the right time, on the channel that works best for them.

ABM is particularly effective at engaging executives from the C-suite, who are hard to reach. They tend to ignore mass emails and are more likely to respond to content that is relevant to their needs and uses cases. ABM can also help shorten your sales cycle by allowing you to engage with prospects at the most crucial stages in their journey, like when they are researching solutions to address specific business challenges.

ABM isn't as old-fashioned as traditional selling and marketing strategies, but it's fast becoming a top strategy for b2b content marketing companies looking to improve performance and increase 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.