Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services

Your marketing department and digital agency can focus their efforts on a specific set of clients or accounts with account-based content marketing. This lets you create content that is highly personalized and speaks directly to their pain points and shows how your product can help them overcome these issues.

Effective ABM content should deliver the right kind of information to each stakeholder at the right moment in the buyer's center. This involves identifying the various personas and their needs at various stages of their journey.

Targeting specific accounts

In contrast to traditional content strategies which seek to attract and convert strangers into leads with broad marketing campaigns, account based content marketing focuses on interacting with specific accounts in a highly personalized method. By identifying the most important account decision makers and identifying their issues and objectives, marketers can create and provide content that is targeted to the specific accounts. This helps to create a more fruitful dialog with customers and prospects that ultimately results in better business results for the company.

After identifying the accounts you want to target, you need to create account plans for each one. This involves analyzing every account and determining the marketing channels that should be utilized for each account, the types of buyers in each account, and what type of content is required to drive engagement. This could be 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 an even higher return on your investment than traditional strategies for content. 84% of B2B marketing professionals who have integrated account based marketing into their strategies have higher ROI than any other marketing strategy.

It takes more time and resources to nurture only a few target accounts, the advantages of an account-based content marketing approach are crucial for companies that want to grow revenue across all stages of the sales funnel. This is particularly 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 alternative for businesses looking to increase their business with existing customers over time by developing trusting relationships. Research shows that investing in existing customers is more cost-effective than investing money to find and convert new customers.

By combing ABM with traditional inbound marketing techniques, companies can maximize the impact of their content marketing efforts. Marketers can make their content more relevant to buyers at every stage of their buying journey by mixing pillar content with retargeting and landing pages to facilitate lead capture. This allows them to create additional revenue opportunities through acquisition as well as acceleration and expansion of their sales and market teams.

Creating Hyper-Personalized Content

ABM is a hot topic in marketing. It's important that marketers are aware of how to adapt their content strategies to the new method. It can be hard to comprehend how ABM actually is working. In a recent talk at ContentTECH, Jenny Magic and Jennalee Reiff of Convince & Convert and Springbox gave a quick overview on ABM that explained the main factors to be considered and what you can expect from a successful execution.

Understanding your ideal client's needs and challenges is the first step to developing an effective ABM strategy. Content that is in line with these goals allows you to provide a more personal service and boost conversions. The content you create must be tailored to the specific 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 individual items and pages) is most engaging for your target audience. This information can be used to improve the user experience on your website, and show top performing content to people who visit the accounts.

Creating hyper-personalized content can be a challenge but it's an important step to increasing the impact of your ABM efforts. According to State of Marketing, 2023 83% of customers are willing to exchange their personal information for a more customized experience.

AI processing of real-time data is one method to create hyper-personalized content. This will help you manage how your content is delivered, provide suggestions for next steps, and respond to events in real-time. This tool can enhance the effectiveness of ABM campaigns. It can't replace the need for multivariate testing or strategic planning.

Another way to hyper-personalize your content is by leveraging the pillar and cluster content structure. This allows you to create a comprehensive piece that describes the problem your target accounts are facing and connect it to additional pieces that focus on specific aspects of the problem. For instance a fitness tracker could have many advantages and common goals however the way in which different types of users use it could differ greatly.

Aligning Marketing and Sales

Professional service marketers have traditionally focused on creating a linear sales channel using broad marketing campaigns to draw large numbers of people in the hopes that a portion of them would become converts. This strategy might be effective in the past in the past when b2b content marketing marketing was more of a broadcast-based model, but it's no longer effective with the modern Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy. Instead of trying to push all potential leads through the same process of the process, it's more important to concentrate on attracting high-value prospects and provide them with experiences and content specifically tailored to their individual needs and challenges.

The first step is to establish your ideal customer profile. It's not as easy as creating buyer personas because you have to take into account the types of solutions that customers are seeking and how they can be best utilized.

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

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

Another important step is to make use of the data that you have about your top-performing clients. By analyzing your historical customer information, you will be able to determine what positive characteristics they have in common, such as being in the financial services industry or being within a certain size. This data can be used to develop targeted marketing campaigns targeting similar prospects.

It's also essential to keep track of your ABM strategy's performance and make any necessary adjustments. For example, if your target account isn't responding to your content, it might be the right time to get in touch with them and see what else you can do to help them progress through the sales funnel. You can integrate your ABM strategy with your content strategies by following these steps.

Measuring the success

Account based content marketing is about creating content (videos reports, blogs, posts and webinars) that are personalised and relevant to a particular account or persona. For instance If you're focusing on healthcare businesses, your content needs to be geared towards their issues and concerns. This personalization aspect is not only important in ABM but also an excellent way to create solid relationships with your prospects and customers.

ABM can be utilized at all stages of the sales funnel. It is even more efficient than traditional lead generation at the top of a funnel. This is because it can help you identify and engage a small number of accounts that are likely to convert, Account Based Content Marketing as opposed to trying to generate leads from a large crowd that may not be interested in your product or service.

While there's a place for offline relationship building tactics such as in-person meetings, phone calls, and handwritten notes, the majority of customers today prefer digital self-serve and remote engagement. It's important to deliver the right content, at the right time, and on the channel they prefer.

ABM is particularly effective in engaging executives from the C-suite, who are hard to reach. They are often oblivious to mass emails, but are more likely respond to content that speaks to their requirements and uses cases. ABM can also help shorten your sales cycle by allowing you to engage with prospects at crucial points in their journey, such as when they are looking for solutions to address specific business problems.

ABM isn't as old-fashioned as traditional selling and marketing strategies, but it's rapidly becoming a top choice for B2B businesses looking to boost 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.