Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services

Your marketing department and digital agency can concentrate their efforts on a particular segment of customers or accounts that have account-based content marketing. This lets you create content that is highly personalized and is directly addressing their problems and demonstrates how your product can help them solve these issues.

ABM content that is successful must provide the correct information to each stakeholder in the buyer center at the right moment. This requires identifying the requirements of each individual at various phases of their journey.

Aiming at specific accounts

Account-based content marketing is a more personalized approach to content marketing compared to traditional strategies, which aim to convert visitors using large marketing campaigns into leads. By identifying the most important account decision makers and understanding their pain points and objectives, marketers can create and deliver customized content marketing funnel that is targeted to the specific accounts. This creates a more fruitful dialog with customers and prospects that ultimately results in better business results for the company.

Once you've identified the target accounts, the next step is to design accounts plans for each one. This requires analyzing every account and determining which marketing channels to be employed for each account, the types of buyers in each account and what kind of content is required to encourage engagement. This could include thought-provoking content such as whitepapers, or case studies. whitepapers webinars, case studies, etc.) Retargeting ads, customized website experiences and other marketing tactics tailored to each account.

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

Although it takes more resources and time to cultivate a smaller group of accounts, the benefits are significant for businesses who seek to increase their revenues at all stages of the funnel. This is particularly applicable to professional service companies, where the quality of customers or prospects is more important than the number of people they can attract.

In addition, ABM is a great fit for businesses that want to expand their business with existing customers by building trusting relationships over time. Research has shown that it's far more cost-effective to invest in maintaining existing customers than it is to invest money trying to find and convert new customers.

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

Create Hyper-Personalized Content

ABM is a hot trend in the field of marketing. It is crucial that marketers are aware of how to adapt their content strategies to this new approach. However, it can be a challenge 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 presentation. They explained the key factors to consider, as well as what to expect from an effective implementation.

Understanding your ideal client's goals and issues is the first step to developing a successful ABM strategy. Producing content that aligns with these goals will allow you to provide a more personalized experience and ultimately increase conversions. Content should also be tailored to the requirements of each account. It is crucial to track the journey of users within each account. This will help you determine the type of content (and particular pages and items) is most engaging for your target audience. This information can be used to optimize user's journeys on these accounts, and show the best performing content.

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

AI processing of real-time data is a method to create hyper-personalized content. This will allow you to determine how your content is distributed and make suggestions for the future steps and react to events in a flash. 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.

The cluster and pillar structure is another way to hyper-personalize content. This allows you to create a full piece that addresses the issue that your accounts' target users are facing and then connect it to other pieces that focus on specific aspects of the problem. For example, a fitness tracker may have many common goals and benefits however the way in which different types of people use it can vary significantly.

Aligning Marketing and Sales

Traditionally, professional service marketers were focused on creating a linear sales funnel using broad marketing campaigns that enticed large numbers of people with the expectation that a portion of them would convert. This strategy may have worked in the past when B2B marketing employed a more broadcast model, but is not as effective today with the Account Based Marketing strategy. Instead of trying to push all leads through the same phase of the process, it's crucial to focus on targeting high-value prospects and provide them with content and experiences specifically tailored to their individual needs and challenges.

The first step is identifying your ideal client profile (ICP). It's not as easy as creating buyer profiles as you need to consider the types of solutions each customer 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 connects with each account through multiple 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 all of your content is relevant to each account, so that you don't spend time and resources trying to reach the wrong type of audience.

Another important step is to utilize the information you have on your most successful clients. You can find positive traits that your customers share by analyzing their historical data. For instance, they may all be in the financial services industry or have a similar company size. This information can be used to create targeted campaigns for similar prospects.

It's also important to track your ABM strategy's performance and make any needed changes. If your targeted account isn't responding to your content, you might want to reach out to see what you can do to help move them further down the sales funnel. You can integrate your ABM strategy with your content strategies by following these steps.

Measuring the effectiveness

Account based content marketing is all about creating resources (videos reports, blogs, posts, and webinars) that are tailored and relevant to a specific persona or account. For instance when you're targeting healthcare companies your content should be geared towards their issues and concerns. This kind of personalization is not just essential in ABM but also a great way to build solid relationships with your prospects and customers.

The most appealing aspect of ABM is that it can be used at any stage 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 help you to identify and engage just a handful of accounts that are likely to convert, account based content marketing as opposed to trying to generate leads from a large audience that might not be interested in your product or service.

While offline tactics such as in-person meetings, phone calls or handwritten notes remain efficient, today's buyers prefer digital self-service 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 for engaging hard-to-reach C-suite executives who are typically skeptical of mass-email campaigns, but are more likely to react to content that addresses their requirements and Account Based Content Marketing use cases. ABM can also help accelerate sales by allowing you to engage with prospects at the most crucial stages in their journey, such as when they are looking for solutions to address specific business problems.

Although ABM isn't as well-known as long as traditional marketing and sales strategies, it's quickly becoming a leading strategy for B2B companies looking to enhance their performance and generate higher 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.