Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services
Your marketing department and digital agency could focus their efforts on a specific set of clients or accounts that use account-based content marketing. This lets you create highly-personalized, targeted content that speaks directly to their needs and describes how your product can help these issues.
ABM content that is effective must deliver the right information to every stakeholder in the buyer’s centre at the right moment. This requires identifying the different personas and their needs at various stages of their journey.
Aiming at specific accounts
Account-based content marketers marketing is a more personal approach to content marketing than traditional strategies, which seek to convert strangers using large marketing campaigns into leads. By identifying the key account decision makers and understanding their needs and goals, marketers can create and provide content that is targeted to the specific accounts. This can lead to a more productive dialog with prospects and customers, which ultimately leads to better business results.
After identifying your accounts of interest You must then develop account plans for each one. This involves analyzing each account and determining the marketing channels to be used, the buyers within each account and what type of content is needed to drive engagement. This could include thought-provoking content, such as whitepapers or Business to business content marketing case studies. Whitepapers, case-studies webinars, retargeting ads, webinars customized website experiences, and other marketing techniques that are customized to each customer are all possible.
Account-based marketing can yield greater returns on your investment than traditional content strategies. 84% of B2B marketing professionals who have integrated account based marketing into their strategies report higher ROI than any other marketing strategy.
While it takes more time and resources to nurture the small number of targeted accounts but the advantages of an account-based content marketing strategy are vital for businesses that want to grow revenue across all stages of the sales funnel. This is especially relevant for professional service companies where the quality of the prospects or customers is more important than how many people they can attract.
Additionally, ABM is a great fit for businesses that want to expand their business to business content marketing (talks about it) with existing customers by building trusting relationships over time. Research has shown that investing in existing customers is more cost-effective than spending money to acquire new customers.
Combining ABM with inbound marketing methods can maximize the impact on content marketing. By utilizing the combination of the pillar content, retargeting and lead capture landing pages, marketers can offer more relevance to prospects throughout the buying journey. This allows them to create more acquisition, acceleration, and growth revenue opportunities for their marketing and sales teams.
Making Hyper-Personalized Content
ABM is a rage in the field of marketing. It’s crucial that marketers are aware of how to adapt their strategies for content to the new method. It can be difficult to understand how ABM actually is working. Jenny Magic of Convince & Convert, and Jennalee Reiff from Springbox gave an overview of ABM in a recent talk. They outlined the main considerations, and what to expect from the success of implementation.
Understanding your ideal customer’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 deliver a more personalized experience, which will ultimately improve conversions. The content you create should be tailored to the specific needs of each account. It is therefore crucial to map the journey of each user within the account. This will help you determine which content (and specific items and pages) is most engaging for your intended audience. This information can then be used to improve the user experience on your website, and show the most popular content to users who visit those accounts.
Making content that is hyper-personalized isn’t easy however it is an essential step in increasing the effectiveness of your ABM efforts. According to State of Marketing, 2023, 83% of consumers are willing to exchange their personal information to receive an experience that is more personalized.
AI processing of real-time data is a way to create hyper-personalized contents. This will allow you to determine the way that your content is presented and offer suggestions for the next steps, business to business content marketing and react to events in real time. This tool can enhance the effectiveness of ABM campaigns. It can’t replace multivariate testing and strategic planning.
Another method to personalize your content is to utilize the pillar and cluster content structure. This allows you to create a an extensive piece of content marketers that describes the problem that your target accounts face, and then connect to additional pieces that focus on specific aspects of the issue. For instance, a fitness tracker may have a variety of advantages and common goals, but how different types of users use it can vary significantly.
Making sure that Marketing and Sales are aligned
Traditionally, professional service marketers were focused on creating an efficient sales funnel that was linear using broad marketing campaigns that enticed large groups of people with the hope that a portion of them would convert. This strategy might be effective in the past when b2b content marketing agency marketing was more of a broadcast model but it’s no longer efficient in the current Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy. Instead of trying to force all potential leads through the same stage of the process, it’s crucial to focus on attracting the most valuable prospects and provide them with content and experiences that are adapted to their individual requirements and needs.
The first step is identifying your ideal client profile (ICP). It’s not as easy as establishing buyer personas as you must also take into account the types of solutions each customer is seeking and how they can be best utilized.
Once you have identified your ICP, develop a strategy for content that can be linked to each account on different channels. This could include anything from social media ads 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 relevant to each account and ensure that you don’t spend time or resources on the wrong audience.
The most important thing to do is to use the data you have about your most successful clients. You can find positive traits that your clients share by analyzing their historical data. For example they could all be in the financial services industry or have a similar business size. This data can be used to develop targeted campaigns for similar prospects.
It’s also essential to keep track of your ABM strategy’s performance and make any needed changes. If your target account isn’t responding to your content, you may want to reach out to see what you can do to move them down the sales funnel. You can integrate your ABM strategy with your content efforts by following these steps.
Measuring Success
Content marketing based on account is all about creating resources (videos reports, reports, blog posts, and webinars) that are personalized and relevant to a particular persona or account. For example, if you’re targeting healthcare businesses, your content needs to be geared towards their pain points and challenges. This personalization aspect is not only important in ABM but also an excellent method to establish strong relationships with your prospects and customers.
The greatest benefit of ABM is that it can be used at every stage of the sales funnel. In fact, it could be even more effective than traditional lead generation if utilized at the top of the funnel. This is due to the fact that you can identify and connect with a limited number of accounts that are more likely to convert rather than trying generate leads from an audience that might not be interested.
Although there is still a need for offline relationships-building strategies like in-person meetings, phone calls and handwritten notes, most customers nowadays prefer digital self-service and remote engagement. It’s crucial to provide the right content at the right time, and on the channel they prefer.
ABM is particularly effective in engaging executives in the C-suite who are hard to reach. They are often oblivious to mass emails, but are more likely respond to content that speaks to their requirements and uses cases. Additionally, ABM can help you accelerate sales by allowing you to reach and engage your prospects at the most crucial stages of their journey — such as when they’re researching solutions to solve a particular business issue.
Although ABM isn’t around for as long as traditional marketing and sales strategies, it’s quickly becoming a leading strategy for B2B organizations 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.