Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services

Your marketing department and digital agency can focus their efforts on a selected group of clients or accounts that use 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.

Effective ABM content must deliver the correct information to each stakeholder at the appropriate time in the buyer center. This requires identifying the different individuals and their requirements at different stages of their journey.

Targeting Accounts with Specific Goals

Account-based content marketing is a more personalized approach to content marketing than traditional strategies, which seek to convert people who are not familiar with marketing campaigns into leads. Marketers can create and deliver relevant content by identifying and knowing the decision makers within each account, their pain points, and their objectives. This creates a more fruitful dialogue with customers and prospects which in turn leads to better business results.

After identifying the accounts you want to target, you need to create accounts plans for each. This involves analysing each account, determining which channels to utilize, which buyers within the account should interact with, and what kinds of content are needed to increase engagement and converts. This could include thought leadership content, such as whitepapers or case studies. Whitepapers, case-studies webinars, retargeting ads, webinars personalized website experiences and other marketing strategies tailored to each account are all possible.

Account-based content marketing can deliver a much higher return on your investment than traditional content strategies. In fact, 84 percent of B2B marketers who have incorporated account-based marketing into their strategies report higher returns on investment than any other marketing campaign.

While it requires more resources and time to cultivate a smaller group of targeted accounts, the benefits are significant for companies who want to grow their revenue across all stages of the funnel. This is particularly applicable to professional service companies where the quality of their 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 building trusting relationships. Research has shown that it's far more cost effective to invest in keeping existing customers than it is to invest money trying to locate and convert new ones.

Combining ABM with inbound marketing techniques can increase the effectiveness of content marketing for b2b marketing. Marketers can improve the relevance of their content to prospects at each stage of their buying journey by combining pillar content with retargeting and landing pages for lead capture. This allows them to generate additional revenue opportunities through acquisition as well as acceleration and expansion for their sales and marketing teams.

Create Hyper-Personalized Content

ABM is one of the hottest trends in marketing, and it's important for marketers to know how their existing content strategies can be integrated into this new strategy. It can be hard to understand how ABM actually works. Jenny Magic of Convince & Convert, and Jennalee Reiff from Springbox gave a crash-course on ABM in a recent presentation. They outlined the main considerations, and what to expect for the success of implementation.

Understanding your ideal client's goals and pain points is the first step in developing an effective ABM strategy. Creating content that aligns with these goals will enable you to provide a personalized experience and ultimately increase conversions. The content marketing tools you create must be tailored to the specific needs of each account. It is crucial to map the journey of each user within the account. This will help you determine the type of content (and particular items and pages) is most popular with your intended audience. This data can be used to improve the user experience on your website, displaying the most popular content to users who are on the accounts.

It can be difficult to create content that is hyper-personalized, but it's an important step to boost the effectiveness 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.

One method to create hyper-personalized content is by using AI processing of real-time data. This can help you determine how your content is presented, make suggestions for next steps and respond to events in a flash. This tool can increase the effectiveness of ABM campaigns. It is not a substitute for multivariate testing and strategic planning.

Another way to personalize your content is to use the pillar and cluster structure. This allows you to create a an entire piece of content that describes the issues that your target accounts face, and then connect to additional pieces that specifically address the problem. Fitness trackers, as an example are able to provide a range of common benefits and goals but the method in which different people use them could be completely different.

Aligning Marketing and Sales

Traditionally, professional services marketers focused on developing a linear sales funnel using broad marketing campaigns that appealed to large numbers of people in the hope that one or more would be converted. This approach may be effective in the past in the past when B2B marketing was more of a broadcast model, but it's no longer efficient with today's Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy. Instead of trying to push all leads through the same stage of the process, it's important to concentrate on attracting high-value prospects and provide them with content and experiences that are adapted to their individual needs and challenges.

The first step is to establish your ideal customer profile. This isn't as easy as creating buyer profiles, as you need to think about the kinds of solutions each customer is looking for and how to make use of them.

Once you know your ICP, the next step is to create a strategy for your content that connects with each of these accounts across different channels. This could be anything from social media advertisements 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 your content is pertinent for each account, and ensure that you do not spend time or resources on the wrong audience.

Another key step is to utilize the information you have about your top-performing clients. You can determine the positive characteristics that your customers have in common by studying their past data. For instance they could all be in the financial services industry or have a similar business size. This information can then be used to create targeted marketing campaigns for similar potential customers.

In addition, it's important to track the performance of your ABM strategy and make changes when needed. For instance, if your target account isn't responding to your content marketing tools, it may be time to contact them and see what else you can do to help them move down the sales funnel. If you follow these steps, you'll be able to get your ABM strategy and content strategies better aligned, which will ultimately increase conversions.

Measuring Success

Account based content marketing is all about creating resources (videos reports, reports, blog posts, and webinars) that are personalized and relevant to a particular persona or account. If you're looking to reach healthcare companies for instance, your content should be focused on their problems and concerns. This kind of personalization not only helps with ABM but also helps build strong relationships with potential customers.

ABM can be used throughout the sales funnel. It can even be more efficient than traditional lead generation at the top of a funnel. This is because it will help you identify and engage just a handful of accounts that are likely to convert, instead of trying to generate leads from an audience that may not be interested in your product or service.

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

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 is tailored to their needs and use cases. Additionally, ABM can help you accelerate sales by enabling you to connect with prospects and keep them engaged at crucial points in their journey -- such as when they're researching solutions to address a specific business issue.

Although ABM isn't around for longer than traditional marketing and sales strategies, it's rapidly becoming a leading strategy for B2B organizations 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.