Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services
With account based content marketing your marketing department as well as digital marketing agency can concentrate on a specific group of clients or accounts. This allows you to create content that is hyper-personalized and addresses their specific issues and demonstrates how your product can help them solve these issues.
ABM content that is successful must provide the right information to every stakeholder in the buyer’s center at the right moment. This requires identifying the requirements of each persona at different phases of their journey.
Aiming at specific accounts
Account-based content marketing is a more personalized approach to content marketing than traditional strategies, which attempt to convert visitors using large marketing campaigns into leads. By identifying the top decision makers at each account and understanding their pain points and goals, marketers are able to create and provide content that is appropriate to specific accounts. This results in a more productive interaction with customers and prospects which in turn leads to greater business outcomes.
After identifying your target accounts You must then develop accounts plans for each. This involves studying each account, determining which channels to utilize, which buyers within the account should interact with, and what kinds of content are required to increase engagement and converts. This may include thought leadership content (e.g. whitepapers webinars, case studies, or whitepapers) Retargeting ads, customized website experiences and other marketing tactics specific to each client.
In the end, account based content marketing is able to deliver much higher return on investment than traditional content marketing techniques. In fact, 84% of B2B marketers who have incorporated account-based marketing into their strategy report higher returns on investment than any other marketing strategy.
Although it takes more resources and time to nurture a smaller number of accounts, the rewards are significant for companies who seek to increase their revenues throughout the funnel. This is especially applicable to professional services companies 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 option for businesses who want to expand business with their existing customers over time by building trusting relationships. Research has proven that it’s more cost effective to invest in maintaining existing customers than it is to spend money trying to find and convert new customers.
By combining ABM with traditional inbound marketing techniques companies can increase the effectiveness of their content marketing efforts. Marketers can improve the relevance of their content to prospects at each stage of the buying process by mixing pillar content marketing tools with retargeting and landing pages to facilitate lead capture. This allows them to generate additional revenue opportunities through acquisition, acceleration and expansion for their sales and market teams.
Create hyper-personalized content
ABM is among the most popular trends in marketing, and it’s vital for marketers to understand how their existing content strategies fit into this new approach. But it can be 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 explained the key factors to consider, as well as what to expect from the success of implementation.
The most effective ABM content marketing strategy strategy starts by understanding the needs of your ideal customer and objectives. Content that is in line with these goals will allow you to provide a more personal service and boost conversions. The content you create must be tailored to the specific requirements of each account. This is why it is crucial to outline the user journeys within each of your accounts. By doing this you’ll be able to see what types of content (and even specific pages and items) are most engaging for those who visit your site. This information can be used to optimize the user experience for those with these accounts, and show the best performing content.
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 people are willing to share their personal information in exchange for a more personalised experience.
AI processing of real-time data is one way to create hyper-personalized content. This will help you determine how your content is delivered and provide suggestions for the future steps, and react to events in real-time. While it isn’t a substitute for multivariate testing or strategic planning, it can be a useful instrument to improve the effectiveness of your ABM campaigns.
The cluster and pillar structure is another way to personalize content. This lets you create a comprehensive piece that describes the problem your target accounts are facing, and then connect it to additional pieces which address specific aspects of that issue. Fitness trackers, as an example, may have a number of common goals and benefits but the method in which different people use them could be very different.
Aligning Marketing and Sales
Traditionally, professional services marketers focused on developing a linear sales funnel by using broad marketing campaigns that appealed to large numbers of people with the hope that a few would be converted. This strategy might have worked when b2b content marketing marketing followed a more broadcast approach, but it is no longer effective in today’s Account Based Marketing strategy. Rather than trying to push all potential leads through the same stage of the process, it’s more important to focus on attracting the most valuable prospects and providing them with content and experiences specifically tailored to their individual requirements and needs.
The first step is identifying your ideal customer profile (ICP). It’s not as easy as creating buyer profiles as you need to consider the types of solutions that each customer is looking for and the best way to make use of them.
Once you have identified your ICP, the next step is to develop a strategy for your content that connects with each of these accounts across multiple channels. This could range from social media ads, to email outreach.
When you are beginning to implement your ABM strategy, it’s important to keep both your sales and marketing teams on the same page. This will help ensure that 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 key step is to utilize the data that you have on your top-performing clients. You can determine the positive characteristics that your customers have in common by studying their past data. For example they could all belong to the financial services industry or have a similar company size. This information can then be used to design targeted marketing campaigns for similar potential customers.
In addition to this it’s also important to keep track of the performance of your ABM strategy and make adjustments as needed. 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 ask what else you can do to help them move along the sales funnel. You can integrate your ABM strategy with your content strategy by following these steps.
Measuring the success
Account based content marketing is all about creating resources (videos reports, reports, blog posts and webinars) that are personalized and relevant to a specific persona or account. For example, if you’re targeting healthcare businesses your content must be focused on their challenges and pain points. This level of personalization does not only help with ABM but also helps build strong relationships with prospects and customers.
The most appealing aspect of ABM is that it can be utilized at every stage of the sales funnel. It can be even more efficient than traditional lead generation at the top of a funnel. This is because you can identify and interact with a smaller number accounts that are more likely to convert than trying generate leads from a group of people who might not be interested.
While there’s a place for offline methods of building relationships such as in-person meetings, phone calls, and handwritten notes, most customers today prefer digital self-serve and remote engagement. It’s important to deliver the right content at the right time, and using the channel they prefer.
ABM is especially effective for reaching out to executives in the C-suite who are difficult to reach who are typically skeptical of mass email campaigns but are more likely to engage with content that addresses their needs and use cases. Additionally, ABM can help you accelerate sales by allowing you to connect with prospects and keep them engaged at the most crucial stages of their journey — like when they’re researching solutions to address a specific business problem.
ABM isn’t as old-fashioned as traditional selling and marketing strategies, but it’s rapidly becoming a top choice for B2B companies 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.
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