Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services

Your marketing department and digital agency can concentrate their efforts on a particular set of clients or accounts that use account-based content marketing. This lets you create hyper-personalized content that is directly addressing their issues and demonstrates how your product can help them overcome these issues.

Effective ABM content should deliver the correct information to each stakeholder at the right time in the buyer's center. This involves identifying the various individuals and their needs at various stages of their journey.

Aiming at specific accounts

Contrary to traditional content strategies that seek to attract and convert strangers into leads with broad marketing campaigns, account-based content marketing focuses on connecting with specific accounts in a highly customized method. By identifying the top decision makers at each account and understanding their needs and goals, marketers are able to create and distribute content that is appropriate to specific accounts. This can help create more productive conversation with customers and prospects that ultimately drives greater business outcomes for the business.

Once you've identified your target accounts The next step is to develop 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 encourage engagement and conversions. This could include thought leadership content (e.g. Whitepapers, case-studies webinars, retargeting ads, webinars personalized website experiences and other marketing strategies specific to each client are all possible.

As a result, account-based content marketers marketing can provide a much higher return on investment than traditional content marketing tactics. In fact 84 percent of B2B marketers who have integrated account-based marketing into their strategies have higher ROI than any other marketing campaign.

Although it takes longer and resources to cultivate a small group of target accounts however, the advantages of an account-based content marketing strategy 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 prospective client or customer is more important than the amount of customers they can draw.

In addition, ABM is a great fit for businesses that want to grow their business with existing customers by establishing trusting relationships over time. Research has shown that investing in existing customers is more cost-effective than spending money to find and convert new customers.

Combining ABM with inbound marketing methods can maximize the impact on content marketing. By utilizing a combination of pillar content, retargeting, and lead capture landing pages, marketers can provide greater relevance to prospects at all stages of the buying process. This enables them to create additional revenue opportunities through acquisition growth, 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 understand how their existing content strategies are able to be integrated into this new method. It can be a bit difficult to understand how ABM can be applied in real-world. Jenny Magic of Convince & Convert and Jennalee Reiff from Springbox gave an overview of ABM in a recent presentation. They explained the key aspects to consider, and what to expect for an effective implementation.

The most efficient 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 more customized service and increase conversions. The content you create must be tailored to the specific requirements of each account. This is why it's important to map out the journey of people in each of your accounts. By doing this, you will be able to see what types of content (and even individual pages and items) are most popular with these people. This information can be used to improve the user experience for those with these accounts, and show the most effective content.

Making content that is hyper-personalized isn't easy but it's an important step to increasing the impact of your ABM efforts. According to State of Marketing, 2023 83% of consumers are willing to share their personal data for better-customized experiences.

One method to create hyper-personalized content is to use AI processing real-time data. This will allow you to determine how your content is distributed and make suggestions for the next steps, and respond to events in a flash. While it cannot replace your multivariate testing or strategic planning, it is a great tool to increase the effectiveness of your ABM campaigns.

Another way to hyper-personalize your content is to use the pillar and cluster content structure. This lets you create a comprehensive piece that explains the issue your target accounts are facing, and then connect it to other pieces that focus on specific aspects of the problem. For example, a fitness tracker may have a variety of common goals and benefits however, the manner in which different kinds of people use it can vary significantly.

Aligning Marketing and Sales

Traditionally, professional services marketers were focused on creating a linear sales funnel using broad marketing campaigns that targeted large numbers of people with the hope that a portion of them would be converted. This approach may have served its purpose in the past when B2B marketing was more of a broadcast-based model, however, it's not as effective in the current Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy. Instead of trying to push all leads through the same phase of the process, it's more important to focus on targeting high-value prospects and providing them with experiences and content that are tailored to their particular needs and challenges.

The first step is to determine your ideal customer profile. It's not as easy as establishing buyer personas since you need to take into account the types of services that each customer is looking for and how they can be used to the best advantage.

Once you have identified your ICP, develop a strategy for content that can be linked with each account through multiple channels. This could be anything from social media ads, to email outreach.

When you are beginning to implement your ABM strategy, it's crucial to keep both your sales and marketing teams on the same level. This will ensure that all of your content is relevant to each account, so that you don't waste time and resources trying to reach the wrong type of audience.

Another important step is to utilize the data that you have about your top-performing clients. You can find positive traits that your customers share by looking at their historical data. For example, account based Content marketing they may all belong to the financial services industry or have a similar company size. This information can be used to develop targeted marketing campaigns targeting similar potential customers.

Additionally, it's important to track the performance of your ABM strategy and make changes whenever necessary. For instance, if your target account isn't responding to your content, it may be time to contact them and see what else you can do to help them move 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 account or persona. For example when you're targeting healthcare companies your content must be focused on their issues and concerns. This personalization aspect is not only important in ABM however, it's an excellent method to establish solid relationships with your prospects and customers.

ABM can be used throughout the sales funnel. In fact, it could be more effective than traditional lead generation if employed at the top of the funnel. This is because you can identify and interact with a smaller number of accounts that are more likely to convert rather than trying generate leads from a population that may not be interested.

While offline methods like in-person meetings, phone calls or handwritten notes are effective, today's buyers prefer online self-service and remote interaction. That's why it's so critical to provide customers with the right content at the right time, and on the channel that's most suitable for them.

ABM is particularly effective at engaging executives in the C-suite who are hard to reach. They tend to ignore the mass email marketing and are more likely to respond to content that speaks to their requirements and uses instances. ABM can also help accelerate sales by enabling engagement with prospects at the most crucial stages in their journey, such as when they are pursuing solutions to solve specific business issues.

Although ABM hasn't been around for longer than traditional marketing and sales strategies, it's rapidly becoming the most popular strategy for B2B companies seeking to improve their performance and drive greater 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.