Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services

Your marketing department and digital agency could focus their efforts on a particular set of clients or accounts that use account-based content marketing. This allows you to create content that is highly personalized and addresses their specific pain points and shows how your product can assist them in solving their problems.

Effective ABM content should provide the right kind of information to each stakeholder at the right time in the buyer center. This involves identifying the needs of each persona at different stages in their journey.

Targeting Accounts with Specific Goals

Unlike traditional content strategies that seek to attract and convert people who are not leads through broad marketing campaigns, account-based content marketing is focused on interacting with targeted accounts in a highly customized way. By identifying the key decision makers for each account and understanding their needs and goals, marketers can create and provide content that is targeted to the specific accounts. This creates a more fruitful dialog with prospects and customers and ultimately results in more profitable business results.

Once you've identified your desired accounts, the next step is to design account plans for each account. This involves analyzing each account and determining which marketing channels to employ to reach the customers in the account to engage with, and what kinds of content are required to drive engagement and conversions. This may include thought leadership content (e.g. Whitepapers, case-studies webinars, retargeting advertisements, webinars personalized website experiences and other marketing techniques that are customized to each customer are all possible.

Account-based content marketing can provide greater returns on your investment than traditional strategies for content. 84 percent of B2B marketing content examples professionals who have integrated account based marketing into their strategies report higher returns on investment than any other marketing strategy.

Although it takes more effort and time to cultivate small groups of targeted accounts, the advantages are significant for companies that want to grow their revenue throughout the funnel. This is particularly true for professional service businesses, where the quality of prospects or customers is more important than how many people they can draw.

In addition, ABM is a great choice for companies that wish to grow their business with existing customers by building trusting relationships over time. Research shows that investing in existing customers is more cost-effective than spending money to find and convert new customers.

Combining ABM with inbound marketing techniques can increase the effectiveness of content marketing. Marketers can improve the relevance of their content to potential customers at every stage of their buying journey by combining pillar content with the retargeting technique and landing pages for lead capture. This enables them to create more acquisition growth, acceleration, and growth revenue opportunities for their marketing and sales teams.

Create hyper-personalized content

ABM is a hot topic in marketing. It is crucial that marketers know how to adapt their strategies for content to this new approach. It can be hard to comprehend how ABM actually works. Jenny Magic of Convince & Convert and Jennalee Reiff from Springbox gave an overview of ABM in a recent talk. They outlined the main factors to consider, as well as what to expect for the success of implementation.

The most effective ABM content strategy begins with understanding your ideal client's pain points and objectives. Making content that is in line with these goals will enable you to provide a personalized experience and ultimately increase conversions. The content you create should focus on the specific needs of each account. This is why it is crucial to outline the user journeys in each of your accounts. This will allow you to determine what content (and particular items and pages) is most appealing to your intended audience. This information can be used to optimize the user experience on your website, and show the most effective content to visitors who visit those accounts.

Making content that is hyper-personalized isn't easy however it is an essential step to increase the impact of your ABM efforts. According to State of Marketing 2023, 83% of consumers are willing to share their personal information in exchange for a more personalized experience.

AI processing of real-time data is one way to create hyper-personalized content. This will help you control the way that your content is presented and offer suggestions for the next steps, and respond to events in real time. 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.

The pillar and cluster structure is another method to hyper-personalize content. This allows you to create a an entire piece of content that addresses the issue that your targeted accounts face, and then connect to additional pieces that address specific aspects of the issue. Fitness trackers, for instance can have a variety of common benefits and goals but the method in which different people use them could be quite different.

Aligning Sales and Marketing

Professional service marketers have historically focused on creating an efficient sales channel by using broad marketing campaigns to appeal to large groups with the hope that a portion of them would be converted. This strategy may have worked in the past when B2B marketing employed a more broadcast approach, but it is not effective in the current Account Based Marketing strategy. Rather than trying to push all potential leads through the same stage of the process, it's more important to concentrate on attracting high-value prospects and providing them with content marketing strategy course and experiences that are tailored to their individual needs and requirements.

The first step is to establish your ideal customer profile. This isn't as simple as establishing buyer personas as you must also be aware of the types of solutions that customers are looking for and how they can be used to the best advantage.

Once you have identified your ICP then, create a strategy for content that connects to each account on different channels. This could range from social media ads to email outreach.

It's crucial that your sales and marketing teams are on the same page as you implement your ABM strategy. This will help ensure that your content is relevant to each account, so that you don't waste time and resources attracting the wrong type of audience.

Another important step is to leverage the data that you have on your top-performing clients. You can identify positive attributes that your customers have in common by analyzing their historical data. For instance, they may 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 crucial to monitor the effectiveness of your ABM strategy and make adjustments as needed. If your target account isn't responding to your content, you may be able to contact them and find out what you can do to get them further down the sales funnel. By taking these steps you'll be able improve your ABM strategy and content efforts more aligned which, in turn, will help to drive more conversions.

Measuring the success

Account based content marketing is about creating content (videos reports, blogs, posts, and webinars) that are personalised and relevant to a specific account or persona. For example If you're focusing on healthcare businesses your content should be geared towards their challenges and pain points. This level of personalization is not just essential in ABM but also an excellent way to create strong relationships with your potential clients and customers.

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

While there's still a place for offline relationship building tactics 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 moment and on the channel they prefer.

ABM is particularly effective at engaging executives in the C-suite who are difficult to reach. They tend to ignore the mass email marketing however, they are more likely to respond to content that is relevant to their requirements and uses instances. ABM can also help you shorten your sales cycle by allowing you to engage with prospects at crucial points in their journey, like when they are researching solutions to solve specific business challenges.

Although ABM hasn't been around for longer than traditional sales and marketing strategies, it's rapidly becoming a top strategy for B2B companies looking to increase their efficiency 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.