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 that use account-based content marketing. This lets you create hyper-personalized targeted content that talks directly to their needs and describes how your product can solve the issues.
Effective ABM content should provide the appropriate information to each stakeholder at the appropriate time in the buyer's centre. This involves identifying the needs of each individual at various stages in their journey.
Targeting specific accounts
Contrary to traditional content strategies that are designed to draw strangers into leads with broad marketing campaigns, account-based content marketing focuses on connecting with targeted accounts in a highly personalized method. By identifying the most important decision makers for each account and identifying their issues and goals, marketers can create and distribute content that is relevant to the specific accounts. This creates a more fruitful dialog with prospects and customers, which ultimately leads to more profitable business results.
After identifying the accounts you want to target After identifying your target accounts, you must develop account plans for each one. This involves analyzing each account and determining the marketing channels to be employed and the customers within each account to engage, and what type of content is required to drive engagement. This could include thought-provoking content (e.g. Whitepapers, case studies webinars, retargeting ads, webinars personalized website experiences and other marketing strategies specific to each client are all possible.
Account-based marketing can yield an even higher return on your investment than traditional content strategies. 84% of B2B marketing professionals who have implemented account based marketing into their strategies report higher ROI than any other marketing effort.
It takes more time and resources to cultivate a small group of target accounts, the benefits of a strong account-based content marketing approach are vital for businesses that wish to increase their revenues across all stages of the sales funnel. This is especially applicable to professional services companies where the quality of each prospect or customer is more important than the number of people they can attract.
ABM is an excellent option for businesses who want to expand business with their existing customers over time by developing trusting relations. Research has revealed that it's much more cost effective to invest in keeping existing customers than to spend money trying to find and convert new customers.
Combining ABM with inbound marketing methods will maximize the impact of content marketing. Utilizing a combination of the pillar content, retargeting and lead capture landing pages, marketers can give more value to potential customers throughout the buying journey. This allows them to create additional revenue opportunities through acquisition growth, acceleration, and expansion of their sales and market teams.
Create hyper-personalized content
ABM is a rage in the field of marketing. It's important that marketers are aware of how to adapt their strategies for content to the new method. It can be hard to comprehend how ABM actually works. In a recent talk at ContentTECH, Jenny Magic and Jennalee Reiff of Convince & Convert and Springbox gave a quick overview on ABM, explaining the key aspects to consider and what to expect from a successful execution.
Understanding your ideal customer's goals and pain points is the first step to developing an effective ABM strategy. Making content that is in line with these objectives will allow you to provide a personalized experience and ultimately increase conversions. content creation ai tools create should focus on the unique needs of each account. It is therefore important to trace the path of users within each account. This will help you determine which content (and specific pages and items) is most engaging for your intended audience. This information can be used to improve the user experience for those with these accounts, displaying the most effective content.
Making content that is hyper-personalized can be challenging however it is an important step to increasing the effectiveness of your ABM efforts. According to State of Marketing 2023, 83% of respondents are willing to give their personal details in exchange for a more personalised experience.
One way to create hyper-personalized content is by using AI processing of real-time data. This can help you control the way your content is presented, make suggestions for next steps and respond to events instantly. While it isn't a substitute for multivariate testing or strategic planning, this is a great tool to increase the effectiveness of your ABM campaigns.
Another way to hyper-personalize your content is to utilize the pillar and cluster structure. This allows you to have a comprehensive piece of content that addresses the issue that your targeted accounts have to face, and link to supplementary pieces that address specific aspects of the problem. For instance a fitness tracker could have a variety of common goals and advantages however, the manner in which different kinds of users use it could differ significantly.
Aligning Marketing and Sales
Traditionally, professional service marketers focused on developing a linear sales funnel by using broad marketing campaigns that targeted large numbers of people in the expectation that one or more would be converted. This strategy may have been effective when B2B marketing was more of a broadcast model but it's no longer efficient with the modern Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy. Instead of trying to push all prospects through the same phases of the process, you should focus on prospects with high value. You can do this by providing them with content or experiences specifically tailored to their specific needs and problems.
The first step to this is identifying your ideal customer profile (ICP). It's not as easy as creating buyer profiles as you need to look at the different types of solutions that each customer is looking for and the best way to make use of them.
Once you have identified your ICP, develop a strategy for content that can be linked with each account through several channels. This could range from social media ads to email outreach.
It is essential that your marketing and sales teams are on the same page when you implement your ABM strategy. This will help ensure that all of your content is relevant to each account, so that you don't waste time and resources attracting the wrong audience.
Another crucial step is to make use of the data that you have about your top-performing clients. You can find positive traits that your clients share by analyzing their historical data. For instance, they may all be in the financial services industry or have a similar business size. This data can be used to design targeted campaigns for similar prospects.
Additionally, it's important to track the effectiveness of your ABM strategy and make adjustments whenever necessary. If your target account does not respond to your content, you may be able to contact them and see what you can do to help move them along the sales funnel. You can align your ABM strategy with your content strategies by following these steps.
Measuring the effectiveness
Account-based content marketing is about creating content, such as blogs, reports, videos, and webinars, that are relevant and tailored for a specific individual or account. If you're trying to reach healthcare businesses for instance your content must be focused on their pain points and issues. This kind of personalization not only helps with ABM but also helps build solid relationships with prospects and customers.
The best part about ABM is that it can be used throughout the sales funnel. It is even more efficient than traditional lead generation at the top of the funnel. This is because you can identify and connect with a limited number accounts that are more likely to convert rather than trying generate leads from a group of people who may not be interested.
Although there is still a need for offline relationships-building strategies such as face-to-face meetings, phone calls and handwritten notes, the majority of buyers today prefer digital self-serve and remote engagement. It's important to deliver the right content, at the right moment 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 react to content that speaks directly to their needs and usage scenarios. In addition, ABM can help you shorten the sales cycle by allowing you to reach and engage your prospects at key stages of their journey -- like when they're researching solutions to solve a particular business issue.
ABM isn't as old-fashioned as traditional selling and marketing strategies, but it's quickly becoming a top strategy for B2B companies 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.