Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services
With the help of account-based content marketing your
marketing content planner department and digital marketing agency can concentrate on a select group of clients or accounts. This lets you create highly-personalized, targeted content that speaks directly to their needs and explain how your product will help the issues.
ABM content that is successful must provide the right information to every stakeholder in the buyer's centre at the right moment. This means identifying the needs of each persona at different stages of their journey.
Targeting Specific Accounts
Account-based content marketing is a more personalized approach to content marketing compared to traditional strategies, which attempt to convert strangers using large marketing campaigns into leads. Marketers can create and present relevant content by identifying and understanding the key decision makers within each account, their pain points and goals. This can help create a more fruitful conversation with customers and prospects that ultimately results in better business results for the business.
After identifying your accounts of interest You must then make account plans for each. This involves analyzing each account and determining which marketing channels to employ and which customers within the account to engage with, and what types of content are needed to increase engagement and converts. This may include thought leadership content (e.g. whitepapers, case studies, webinars, retargeting advertising, personalized website experiences and other marketing strategies that are specific to each client are all possible.
Account-based marketing can yield a much higher return on your investment than traditional strategies for content. In fact 84% of B2B marketers who have integrated account-based marketing into their strategies have higher ROI than any other marketing effort.
Although it takes more resources and time to nurture a smaller group of targeted accounts, the benefits are significant for companies that seek to increase their revenues across all stages of the funnel. This is particularly true for professional service businesses in which the quality of the prospects or customers is more important than how many people they are able to attract.
In addition, ABM is a great choice for companies that wish to increase their reach 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 acquire new customers.
By combing ABM with traditional inbound marketing techniques companies can increase the impact of their content marketing efforts. Utilizing a combination of pillar content, retargeting, and lead capture landing pages, marketers can give more relevance to prospects at every stage of the buying journey. This enables them to create more acquisition as well as acceleration and expansion revenue opportunities for their sales and marketing teams.
Create content that is hyper-personalized
ABM is a hot topic in the field of marketing. It's crucial that marketers understand how to adapt their content strategies to the new method. It can be difficult to comprehend how ABM actually is working. In a recent presentation at ContentTECH, Jenny Magic and Jennalee Reiff of Convince & Convert and Springbox provided a crash course on ABM and explained the most important factors to be considered and what you can expect from a successful execution.
The most effective ABM content strategy begins with understanding the needs of your ideal customer and their goals. Making content that is in line with these goals will allow you to provide a personalized experience, which will ultimately improve conversions. The content you create should also focus on the unique needs of each account. It is crucial to trace the path of each user within the account. By doing this, you will be able to determine what kinds of content (and even individual pages and items) are the most interesting for those who visit your site. This information can be used to optimize the user experience on your website, and show top performing content to people who visit those accounts.
It can be difficult to create hyper-personalized content but it's an important step to boost the effectiveness of ABM. According to State of Marketing, 2023 83% of customers are willing to exchange their personal data for an experience that is more personalized.
One way to create hyper-personalized content is to use AI processing of 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 immediately. This tool can improve the effectiveness of ABM campaigns. It cannot replace multivariate testing and strategic planning.
The cluster and pillar structure is another way to hyper-personalize content. This lets you create a complete piece that explains the issue your target accounts are facing and then connect it to additional pieces that specifically address the problem. For instance, a fitness tracker may have many common goals and advantages, but how different types of users use it could vary significantly.
Aligning Marketing and Sales
Traditionally, professional services marketers focused on developing a linear sales funnel using broad marketing campaigns that targeted large numbers of people in the expectation that a few would be converted. This approach may have worked in the past when B2B marketing followed a more broadcast model, but is not as effective today with the Account Based Marketing strategy. Rather than trying to push all potential 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 tailored to their individual requirements and needs.
The first step is to identify your ideal client profile (ICP). This isn't as simple as establishing buyer personas since you need to consider the kinds of solutions each customer is looking for and how they can be best utilized.
Once you have identified your ICP The next step is to design an effective strategy for content that is connected to each of these accounts across multiple channels. This could include everything from social media advertisements to email outreach.
It's crucial that your marketing and sales teams are on the same page when you implement your ABM strategy. This will ensure that your content is pertinent for each account, and ensure that you do not spend time or resources on the wrong people.
One of the most important steps to take is to use the data you have on your best-performing clients. You can determine the positive characteristics that your customers share by looking at their historical data. For example, they may all be in the financial services industry or have a similar business size. This data can be used to design targeted marketing campaigns for similar potential customers.
It's also important to track your ABM strategy's performance and make any necessary adjustments. If your target audience doesn't respond to your content, you might want to reach out to see what you can do to get them down the sales funnel. By taking these steps you'll be able to make your ABM strategy and content strategies better aligned which, in turn, will increase conversions.
Measuring Success
Account based content marketing is about creating content (videos, reports, blog posts and webinars) that are personalised and relevant to a particular persona or account. For instance If you're focusing on healthcare businesses your content should be geared towards their challenges and pain points.