Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services

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

ABM content that is effective must deliver the right information to each stakeholder in the buyer's centre at the right time. This involves identifying the various individuals and their requirements at different stages of their journey.

The goal is to target specific accounts

Unlike traditional content strategies that are designed to draw people who are not leads through broad marketing campaigns, account based content marketing focuses on connecting with specific accounts in a highly personal method. By identifying the most important account decision makers and identifying their issues and goals, marketers are able to create and deliver customized content that is relevant to specific accounts. This helps to create a more fruitful dialogue with prospects and customers that ultimately drives better business results for the company.

Once you've identified your target accounts, the next step is to create accounts plans for each one. This involves studying each account and determining the channels to utilize to reach the customers in the account should interact with, and what kinds of content are needed to drive engagement and conversions. This could include thought leadership content such as whitepapers, or case studies. whitepapers webinars, case studies, or whitepapers) as well as retargeting ads. customized website experiences, and other marketing tactics tailored to each account.

Account-based content marketing can deliver greater returns on your investment than traditional content strategies. In fact 84% of B2B marketers who have incorporated account-based marketing in their strategy report higher return on investments than any other type of marketing campaign.

It takes more time and resources to nurture only a few target accounts but the benefits of an account-based approach to content marketing are significant for businesses that want to grow revenue throughout all stages of the sales funnel. This is particularly relevant for 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 increase their reach with existing customers by establishing trusting relationships over time. Research has proven that it's much more cost-effective to invest in maintaining existing customers than it is to spend money trying locate and convert new ones.

By using ABM with traditional inbound marketing strategies, companies can maximize the impact of their content marketing efforts. Utilizing a combination of pillar content, retargeting and lead capture landing pages, marketers can give more relevance to prospects throughout the buying journey. This allows them to generate additional revenue opportunities through acquisition, acceleration and expansion of their sales and marketing teams.

Create hyper-personalized content

ABM is among the most popular trends in marketing, and it's crucial for marketers to know how their existing content strategies are able to be integrated into this new method. It can be hard to understand how ABM actually operates. Jenny Magic of Convince & Convert, and Jennalee Reiff from Springbox gave a crash-course on ABM in a recent presentation. They discussed the most important factors to consider, Content Marketing Tools as well as what to expect for a successful implementation.

Understanding your ideal customer's goals and challenges is the first step to developing an effective ABM strategy. Making content that is in line with these objectives will allow you to deliver a more personalized experience, which will ultimately improve conversions. Content must also be tailored to the requirements of each account. This is why it is important to map out the journey of people within each of your accounts. By doing this, you'll be able determine what kinds of content (and even specific pages and items) are most engaging for the people who are on them. This data can be used to improve the user experience on your website, and show the most effective content to visitors who visit these accounts.

Making content that is hyper-personalized can be challenging however it is an essential step in increasing the effectiveness of your ABM efforts. According to State of Marketing, 2023, 83% of consumers are willing to give up their personal information to receive a more customized experience.

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

Another way to hyper-personalize your content is to utilize the pillar and cluster content structure. This allows you to have an extensive piece of content that describes the issue that your targeted accounts are facing, and then connect to additional pieces that address specific aspects of the issue. For instance a fitness tracker could have a variety of common goals and benefits however the way in which different types of people use it can differ significantly.

Getting Sales and Marketing Aligned

Traditionally, professional services marketers were focused on creating an efficient sales funnel that was linear using broad marketing campaigns that appealed to large numbers of people in the hope that a portion of them would be converted. This strategy might have been effective when B2B marketing was more of a broadcast model but it's no longer efficient with today's Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy. Rather than trying to push all leads through the same phase of the process, it's more important to focus on attracting the most valuable prospects and provide them with experiences and content specifically tailored to their individual needs and challenges.

The first step is to identify your ideal client profile (ICP). It's not as easy as creating buyer profiles because you must also consider the types of solutions each customer is seeking and how best to utilize them.

Once you've identified your ICP and a strategy, you can create a plan for Content Marketing Tools that can be linked with each account through different channels. This could be anything from social media ads to email outreach.

It's crucial that your sales and marketing teams are on the same page as you implement your ABM strategy. This will ensure that your content is pertinent for each account, and ensure that you do not spend time or resources on the wrong target audience.

Another important step is to utilize the information you have on your top-performing clients. You can determine the positive characteristics that your customers share by analyzing their historical data. For instance, they may all belong to the financial services industry or have a similar business size. This information can be used to develop targeted marketing campaigns for similar potential customers.

In addition it's crucial to monitor the performance of your ABM strategy and make changes when needed. For instance, if you notice that your target account isn't responding to your content, it might be time to contact them and ask what else you can do to help them move along the sales funnel. By taking these steps you'll be able improve your ABM strategy and content strategies more in sync and ultimately help to drive more conversions.

Measuring Success

Account-based content marketing is the process of creating resources, such as blogs, videos, reports, and webinars, that are relevant and customized to a particular persona or account. For instance, if you're targeting healthcare companies, your content needs to be focused on their issues and concerns. This level of personalization is not only important in ABM but also an excellent method to establish strong relationships with your potential clients and customers.

The best part about ABM is that it can be used at any stage of the sales funnel. It can even be more effective than traditional lead generation at the top of a funnel. This is because you can recognize and interact with a smaller number accounts that are more likely to convert than attempting to generate leads from a group of people who may not be interested.

Although offline strategies like in-person meetings and phone calls, or handwritten notes remain effective, today's buyers prefer remote and digital self-service. That's why it's vital to provide customers with the right content at the right time, on the channel that works best for them.

ABM is particularly effective in engaging C-suite executives who are hard to reach. They tend to ignore mass email campaigns and are more likely to respond to content that is relevant to their needs and uses cases. Additionally, ABM can help you reduce the time to sell by allowing you to connect with prospects and keep them engaged at key stages of their journey, like when they're researching solutions to solve a specific business issue.

ABM isn't as old-fashioned as traditional selling and marketing strategies, but it's quickly becoming a top strategy for b2b content marketing businesses 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.