Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services

With account based content marketing your marketing department and digital marketing agency can focus on a specific group of accounts or clients. This lets you create hyper-personalized specific content that speaks directly to their needs and describes how your product can help these issues.

Effective ABM content should deliver the appropriate information to every stakeholder at the right moment in the buyer center. This involves identifying the various types of people and their requirements at different stages of their journey.

Targeting specific accounts

Account-based content marketing is a more personalized approach to content marketing content examples than traditional strategies, which attempt to convert strangers using large marketing campaigns into leads. Marketers can create and present relevant content by identifying and knowing the decision makers in each account, their issues and goals. This creates a more fruitful conversation with customers and prospects that ultimately drives better business results for the company.

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 the marketing channels to employ and which customers within the account should interact with, and what kinds of content are required to drive engagement and conversions. This may include thought leadership content (e.g. whitepapers webinars, case studies, account based content marketing or whitepapers), retargeting ads, customized website experiences and other marketing strategies tailored to each account.

Account-based content marketing can deliver a much higher return on your investment than traditional strategies for content. In fact, 84% of B2B marketers who have integrated account-based marketing in their strategy report higher return on investments than any other marketing effort.

Although it takes more effort and time to nurture small groups of accounts, the benefits are significant for companies who are looking to increase their revenue across all stages of the funnel. This is particularly relevant for professional service companies where the quality of each prospect or customer is more important than the amount of people they can attract.

In addition, ABM is a great fit for businesses that want to grow their business with existing customers through building trusting relationships over time. Research shows that investing in existing customers is more cost-effective than investing money to acquire new customers.

By combing ABM with traditional inbound marketing strategies companies can increase the impact of their content marketing efforts. Marketers can make their content more relevant to buyers at every stage of the buying process by mixing pillar content with retargeting and landing pages to facilitate lead capture. This enables them to create additional revenue opportunities through acquisition growth, acceleration, and expansion for their sales and market teams.

Create hyper-personalized content

ABM is a rage in marketing. It's important that marketers understand how to adapt their content strategies to the new method. However, it can be a challenge to comprehend how ABM can be applied in real-world. In a recent presentation at ContentTECH, Jenny Magic and Jennalee Reiff of Convince & Convert and Springbox gave a quick overview on ABM that explained the main factors to be considered and what you can expect from a successful implementation.

Understanding your ideal customer's goals and challenges is the first step to creating an effective ABM strategy. Content that is geared towards these goals will allow you to provide a more personalized service and increase conversions. Content should be tailored to the needs of each account. It is therefore crucial to track the journey of each user within the account. By doing this, you'll be able determine what kinds of content (and even specific pages and items) are most popular with the people who are on them. This data can be used to improve the user experience on your site, showing the most popular content to users who are on the accounts.

It's not easy to create content that is hyper-personalized, but it's an important step in increasing the impact of ABM. According to State of Marketing 2023, 83% of people are willing to give their personal details in exchange for a more customized experience.

One method to create hyper-personalized content is to use AI processing on real-time data. This will allow you to manage the way that your content is presented, provide suggestions for next steps, and respond to events in real-time. While it's not a replacement for multivariate testing or strategic planning, it is a great instrument to improve the effectiveness of your ABM campaigns.

Another way to hyper-personalize your content is to use the pillar and cluster structure. This allows you to create a an entire piece of content that describes the issue that your targeted accounts face, and then connect to additional pieces that specifically address the issue. Fitness trackers, as an example are able to provide a range of common advantages and goals however the method by which different people use them can be very different.

Aligning Marketing and Sales

Professional service marketers have traditionally focused on creating an efficient sales channel by using broad marketing campaigns to appeal to large groups with the hope that a few of them would be converted. This strategy 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. Rather than trying to push all leads through the same phase of the process, it's crucial to concentrate on attracting high-value prospects and provide them with content and experiences that are adapted to their individual needs and requirements.

The first step to this is to identify your ideal client profile (ICP). This isn't as simple as creating buyer personas as you must also take into account the types of solutions that customers are looking for and how they will be utilized.

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

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

A key step to take is to utilize the information you have about your most successful clients. You can identify positive attributes that your clients share by studying their past data. For instance, they may all be in the financial services industry or have a similar company size. This information can be used to design targeted campaigns targeting similar prospects.

It's also essential to keep track of your ABM strategy's performance and make any necessary adjustments. If your targeted account doesn't respond to your content, you might be able to contact them to see what you can do to move them further down the sales funnel. You can align your ABM strategy with your content efforts by following these steps.

Measuring the effectiveness

Content marketing based on account is about creating content (videos reports, reports, blog posts, and webinars) that are personalized and relevant to a particular persona or account. For example If you're focusing on healthcare organizations your content of marketing strategy must be geared towards their pain points and challenges. This kind of personalization is not only important in ABM, but it's also a great way to build solid relationships with your prospects and customers.

ABM can be utilized at all stages 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 because it will help you to identify and engage just a handful of accounts that are likely to convert, rather than trying to generate leads from an audience that might not be interested in your product or service.

While offline tactics such as in-person meetings, phone calls or handwritten notes are still effective, today's buyers prefer remote and digital self-service. It's crucial to provide the right content at the right time, and on the channel they prefer.

ABM is especially effective for reaching out to C-suite executives who are difficult to reach who are usually skeptical of mass-email campaigns, but are more likely to react to content that is tailored to their requirements and Account based content marketing use cases. In addition, ABM can help you accelerate sales by allowing you connect with prospects and keep them engaged at crucial points in their journey, for instance, when they're looking into solutions to address a specific business issue.

ABM isn't as old-fashioned as traditional marketing and selling strategies, but it's rapidly becoming a top choice for B2B companies seeking 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.