See What Account Based Content Marketing Tricks The Celebs Are Using

Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services

With the help of account-based content marketing your marketing department and digital marketing agency can concentrate on a specific group of clients or accounts. This lets you create highly-personalized targeted content that talks directly to their issues and explains how your product can help them.

Effective ABM content should deliver the correct information to every stakeholder at the appropriate time in the buyer's center. This means identifying the different personas and their needs at various stages of their journey.

Targeting Accounts with Specific Goals

Unlike traditional content strategies that are designed to draw strangers into leads with broad marketing campaigns, account based content marketing is focused on interacting with specific accounts in a highly personal way. Marketers can create and present relevant content by identifying and understanding the key decision makers in each account, their issues, and their objectives. This results in a more productive dialogue with customers and prospects and ultimately results in greater business outcomes.

After identifying the accounts you want to target You must then create account plans for each one. This involves analyzing every account and determining the appropriate marketing channels to be employed, the buyers within each account that should be engaged and what kind of content is needed to drive engagement. This may include thought leadership content (e.g. whitepapers webinars, case studies, etc.), retargeting ads, personalized website experiences and other marketing strategies specific to each client.

Account-based content marketing can deliver a much higher return on your investment than traditional content strategies. 84 percent of B2B marketing professionals who have integrated account-based marketing into their strategies report higher returns on investment than any other marketing content strategist effort.

While it takes more time and resources to nurture the small number of targeted accounts, the benefits of an account-based content marketing approach are crucial for companies who want to increase revenues across all stages of the sales funnel. This is particularly relevant for professional service companies where the quality of each prospective client or customer is more important than the number of potential customers they could attract.

ABM is also a great option for businesses who want to grow their business with existing customers over time by developing trusting relations. Research has shown that it's far more cost-effective to invest in keeping existing customers than to spend money trying find and convert new ones.

Combining ABM with inbound marketing strategies can maximize the impact on content marketing. Marketers can improve the relevance of their content to buyers at every stage of their buying journey by mixing pillar content with the retargeting technique and landing pages for lead capture. This enables them to create more acquisition, acceleration, and growth revenue opportunities for their sales and marketing teams.

Creating Hyper-Personalized Content

ABM is among the most popular trends in marketing, and it's vital for marketers to know how their current content marketing consultant strategies are able to be integrated into this new method. But it can be difficult to understand how ABM is actually used in practice. Jenny Magic of Convince & Convert and Jennalee Reiff from Springbox gave a crash-course on ABM in a recent presentation. They explained the key factors to consider, as well as what to expect for a successful implementation.

The most effective ABM content strategy starts by understanding the needs of your ideal customer and goals. Content that is in line with these goals will allow you to provide a more personal service and boost conversions. Content must also be tailored to the specific needs of each account. It is therefore important to track the journey of each user within the account. By doing this you will be able to discern what kinds of content (and even individual items and pages) are the most interesting for these people. This information can be used to optimize the user experience for those with these accounts, and show the most successful content.

It's not easy to create hyper-personalized content, however, it's a crucial step to boost the effectiveness of ABM. According to State of Marketing 2023, 83% of consumers are willing to give their personal details in exchange for a more customized experience.

AI processing of real-time data is one method to create hyper-personalized content. This can help you control the way that your content is presented and offer suggestions for the future steps, and react to events in real-time. While it cannot replace your multivariate testing or strategic planning, it is a great tool for improving the effectiveness of your ABM campaigns.

The pillar and cluster structure is another method of personalize content. This allows you to create a an entire piece of content that addresses the issues that your target accounts have to face, and link to other pieces that specifically address the problem. For instance, a fitness tracker may have a variety of advantages and common goals, but how different types of people use it can vary significantly.

Aligning Marketing and Sales

Traditionally, professional services marketers focused on developing a linear sales funnel by using broad marketing campaigns that enticed large numbers of people with the hope that one or more would convert. This approach may have been effective when B2B marketing was more of a broadcast model however, it's not as effective 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 focus on attracting the most valuable prospects and providing them with content and experiences that are tailored to their individual needs and challenges.

The first step is to determine your ideal customer profile. This isn't as easy as creating buyer profiles as you also need to consider the types of solutions each customer is seeking and how best to make use of them.

Once you know your ICP the next step is to develop a content strategy that connects to each of these accounts across multiple channels. This could be anything from social media advertisements to email outreach.

It is essential that your sales and marketing teams are on the same page as you implement your ABM strategy. This will ensure that all of your content is relevant to each account, ensuring that you don't spend time and money attracting the wrong type of audience.

The most important thing to do is to utilize the information you have on your best-performing clients. By analyzing your historical customer data, you can determine what positive characteristics they have in common, such as being in the financial sector or falling within a certain company size. This data can be used to create targeted campaigns targeting similar prospects.

It's also important to track your ABM strategy's performance and make any necessary changes. If your target audience isn't responding to your content, you may want to reach out and find out what you can do to help move them further down the sales funnel. You can align your ABM strategy with your content strategies by following these steps.

Measuring the success

Account based content marketing is all about creating resources (videos reports, blogs, posts, and webinars) that are tailored and relevant to a particular persona or account. If you're aiming to reach healthcare businesses, for example your content should be focused on their problems and concerns. This personalization aspect is not just essential in ABM but also an excellent way to create strong relationships with your potential clients and customers.

The most appealing aspect of ABM is that it can be used throughout the sales funnel. In fact, it can be more effective than traditional lead generation when employed 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 than trying generate leads from a population that may not be interested.

While offline methods like phone calls and meetings in person, or handwritten notes are still effective, today's buyers are more inclined to online self-service and remote interaction. It's essential to provide the right content at the right time, and using the channel they prefer.

ABM is particularly effective in reaching out to C-suite executives who are difficult to reach who are usually skeptical of mass email marketing, but are more likely to react to content that is tailored to their needs and use cases. In addition, ABM can help you shorten the sales cycle by allowing you connect with prospects and keep them engaged at the most crucial stages of their journey, like when they're researching solutions to solve a particular business issue.

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 more 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.