Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services
With 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 content that is hyper-personalized and is directly addressing their pain points and shows how your product can help them solve their problems.
Effective ABM content should deliver the right kind of information to each stakeholder at the appropriate time in the buyer's center. This means identifying the needs of each individual at various stages of their journey.
Targeting specific accounts
Account-based content marketing is a more personalized approach to content marketing than traditional strategies, which seek to convert visitors using large marketing campaigns into leads. Marketers can develop and distribute relevant content by identifying and knowing the decision makers within each account, their challenges, and their objectives. This can help create more productive conversation with customers and prospects that ultimately drives better business results for the company.
Once you've identified your target accounts The next step is to design plans for each account. This involves analyzing each account and determining the marketing channels to be employed and the customers within each account that should be engaged and what kind of content is needed to drive engagement. This could include thought-provoking content (e.g. whitepapers, case studies, webinars), retargeting ads, personalized experiences on websites, and other marketing tactics specific to each client.
This is why account based content marketing is able to provide a much more ROI than traditional content marketing strategies. 84% of B2B marketing professionals who have incorporated account based marketing into their strategies report higher ROI than any other marketing approach.
While it requires more resources and time to nurture a smaller number of targeted accounts, the advantages are significant for companies that want to grow their revenue at all stages of the funnel. This is particularly true for professional service businesses where the quality of their customers or prospects is more important than how many people they can attract.
ABM is an excellent option for companies who wish to grow their business with existing customers over time by building trusting relationships. Research shows that investing in existing customers is more cost-effective than investing money to find and convert new customers.
Combining ABM with inbound marketing strategies can maximize the impact on content marketing. Marketers can improve the relevance of their content to prospects at each 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 as well as acceleration and expansion for their sales and market teams.
Create Hyper-Personalized Content
ABM is one of the hottest trends in marketing, and it's vital for marketers to understand how their existing content strategies fit into this new approach. However, it can be a challenge to get your head around how ABM is actually used in practice. In a recent presentation at ContentTECH, Jenny Magic and Jennalee Reiff of Convince & Convert and Springbox provided a crash course on ABM that explained the main factors to be considered and what you can expect from a successful implementation.
The most efficient ABM content strategy starts with understanding the needs of your ideal customer and their goals. Content that is in line with these goals allows you to provide a more customized service and increase conversions. Content must also be tailored to the requirements of each account. This is why it's essential to sketch out the user journeys within your accounts. By doing this you'll be able to see what types of content (and even individual items and pages) are most engaging for these people. This information can be used to improve the user experience for those with these accounts, displaying the best performing content.
It's not easy to create content that is hyper-personalized, but it's a vital step in increasing the impact of ABM. According to State of Marketing, 2023 83% of consumers are willing to share their personal information to receive a more customized experience.
AI processing of real-time data is a way to create hyper-personalized contents. This will allow you to determine how your content is presented and make suggestions for the future steps and react to events in a flash. While it cannot replace your multivariate testing or strategic planning, this can be a powerful tool to increase the effectiveness of your ABM campaigns.
The pillar and cluster structure is another method of personalize content. This lets you create a full piece that explains the issue that your accounts' target users are facing and link it to supplementary pieces that address specific aspects of that issue. For instance, a fitness tracker may have many common goals and advantages however,
paragraph the manner in which different kinds of users use it could differ significantly.
Making sure that Marketing and Sales are aligned
Traditionally, professional service marketers focused on developing a linear sales funnel by using broad marketing campaigns that enticed large numbers of people in the hope that a portion of them would convert. This approach may have been effective in the past when B2B
marketing content examples was more of a broadcast-based model, but it's no longer effective in the current Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy. Instead of attempting to push all prospects through the same phases of the process, you should focus on high-value prospects. You can accomplish this by providing them with experiences or content that are tailored to their particular requirements and issues.
The first step is identifying your ideal client profile (ICP). It's not as easy as establishing buyer personas as you must also consider the kinds of solutions that customers are seeking and how they will be utilized.
Once you know your ICP The next step is to develop an effective strategy for content that is connected with each of these accounts across multiple channels. This could include anything from social media ads to email outreach.
It's essential that your marketing and sales teams are on the same page as you implement your ABM strategy. This will ensure that your content is appropriate for each account, and ensure that you do not spend time or resources on the wrong audience.
One of the most important steps to take is to utilize the information you have on your best-performing clients. You can determine the positive characteristics that your clients share by analyzing their historical data. For example, they may all be in the financial services industry or have a similar business size. This information can be used to create targeted marketing campaigns to target 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 be able to contact them and see what you can do to move them along the sales funnel. By taking these steps, you'll be able to improve your ABM strategy and content strategies better aligned and ultimately help to drive more conversions.
Measuring the success
Account-based content marketing is the process of creating resources, such as videos, reports, blogs, and webinars, that are relevant and tailored to a particular persona or account.