Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services

With account based content marketing, your marketing department and article digital marketing agency can concentrate on a select group of accounts or clients. This lets you create hyper-personalized specific content that speaks directly about their pain points and explain how your product will help them.

ABM content that is effective must deliver the right information to every stakeholder in the buyer's center at the right time. This involves identifying the needs of each person at different stages in their journey.

Targeting Accounts with Specific Goals

Unlike traditional content strategies that aim to attract and convert strangers into leads with broad marketing campaigns, account-based content marketing focuses on interacting with targeted accounts in a highly customized way. Marketers can create and present relevant content by understanding the key decision makers within each account, their pain points and goals. This results in a more productive dialog with prospects and customers, which ultimately leads to greater business outcomes.

After identifying your target accounts After identifying your target accounts, you must develop account plans for each one. This involves analyzing every account and determining the appropriate marketing channels to be used and the customers within each account and what kind of content is required to drive engagement. This could include thought leadership content (e.g. whitepapers webinars, case studies, or whitepapers) as well as retargeting ads. personalized experiences on websites, and other marketing tactics specific to each client.

In the end, account-based content marketing is able to yield a higher return on investment than traditional content marketing strategies. 84 percent of B2B marketing professionals who have incorporated account-based marketing into their strategies report higher returns on investment than any other marketing content examples effort.

Although it takes longer and resources to cultivate only a few target accounts however, the benefits of a strong account-based approach to content marketing are crucial for companies who want to increase revenue across all stages of the sales funnel. This is particularly applicable to professional service companies, where the quality of prospects or customers is more important than the number of people they can attract.

ABM is also a great option for companies who wish to grow their business with existing customers over time by developing trusting relations. Research has proven that it's far more cost effective to invest in maintaining existing customers than to spend money trying to locate and convert new ones.

Combining ABM with inbound marketing techniques can maximize the impact on content marketing. Marketers can improve the relevance of their content to buyers at every stage of the buying process by combining 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 of their sales and marketing teams.

Creating Hyper-Personalized Content

ABM is among the hottest trends in marketing, and it's crucial for marketers to know how their current content strategies are able to be integrated into this new method. But it can be difficult to understand how ABM can be applied in real-world. In a recent talk at ContentTECH, Jenny Magic and Jennalee Reiff of Convince & Convert and Springbox presented a nifty course on ABM that explained the main factors to be considered and what you can expect from a successful execution.

The most effective ABM content strategy starts with understanding your ideal client's needs and goals. Creating content marketing for b2b that aligns with these goals will allow you to deliver a more personal experience, and ultimately increase conversions. The content you create must focus on the unique needs of each account. It is therefore crucial to track the journey of users within each account. By doing this, you'll be able discern what kinds of content (and even individual pages and items) are most engaging for those who visit your site. This data can be used to optimize the user experience on your website, and show top performing content to people who visit 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 better-customized experiences.

One method to create hyper-personalized content is by using AI processing on real-time data. This can help you manage the way your content is presented and provide suggestions for the next steps and respond to events in a flash. While it isn't a substitute for multivariate testing or strategic planning, this can be a powerful tool to increase the effectiveness of your ABM campaigns.

The cluster and pillar structure is another method to hyper-personalize content. This lets you create a an extensive piece of content that describes the problem that your target accounts face, and then connect to additional pieces that focus on specific aspects of the issue. For instance fitness trackers may have a variety of common goals and advantages however the way in which different types of users use it could differ greatly.

Getting Sales and Marketing Aligned

Professional service marketers have historically focused on creating a linear sales channel, using broad marketing campaigns to appeal to large groups in the hopes that a few of them would become converts. This strategy may have served its purpose when b2b content marketing marketing was more of a broadcast model, but it's no longer effective in the current Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy. Instead of attempting to push all leads through the same stages of the process, you should focus on the most valuable leads. You can accomplish this by providing them with content or experiences that are tailored to their particular needs and problems.

The first step is identifying your ideal client profile (ICP). It's not as easy as creating buyer personas, as you must also consider the kinds of solutions that customers are looking for and how they can be best utilized.

Once you've identified your ICP then, create a strategy for content that connects with each account through different channels. This could include anything from social media advertisements to email outreach.

When you are beginning to implement your ABM strategy, it's crucial to keep your marketing and sales teams on the same team. This will ensure that your content is relevant to each account, so that you don't spend time and resources trying to reach the wrong kind of audience.

Another key step is to leverage the data that you have on your top-performing clients. By looking at your previous customer information, you will be able to determine what positive characteristics they have in common, like being in the financial sector or falling within a certain company size. This information can be used to design targeted marketing campaigns for prospects with similar characteristics.

Additionally it's also important to keep track of the performance of your ABM strategy and adjust it as needed. If your targeted account isn't responding to your content, you may want to reach out and find out what you can do to move them down the sales funnel. By taking these steps you'll be able get your ABM strategy and content efforts better aligned, which will ultimately help to drive more conversions.

Measuring the success

Account-based content marketing is about creating resources, such as blogs, reports, videos, and webinars, that are relevant and tailored for a specific persona or account. For instance when you're targeting healthcare businesses your content must be geared towards their issues and concerns. This type of personalization does not only help with ABM but also helps build strong relationships with potential customers.

ABM can be used at all stages 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 engage with a small number accounts that are more likely to convert than attempting to generate leads from a population that may not be interested.

While there's still a place for offline methods of building relationships such as in-person meetings, phone calls, and handwritten notes, most buyers nowadays prefer digital self-service and remote engagement. It's important to deliver the right content, at the right time and using the channel they prefer.

ABM is particularly effective at engaging executives from the C-suite, who are difficult to reach. They are often oblivious to mass email campaigns however, they are more likely to respond to content that speaks to their needs and use instances. ABM can also help accelerate sales by allowing engagement with prospects at the most crucial stages in their journey, such as when they are pursuing solutions to address specific business problems.

Although ABM isn't around for as long as traditional sales and marketing strategies, it's fast becoming a leading strategy for B2B organizations looking to enhance their performance and generate greater 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.