Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services
With the help of account-based content marketing, your marketing department and digital marketing agency can focus on a select group of clients or accounts. This allows you to create content that is highly personalized and speaks directly to their pain points and shows how your product can assist them in solving these issues.
Effective ABM content should deliver the right kind of information to each stakeholder at the right time in the buyer's centre. This involves identifying the needs of each individual at various phases of their journey.
Targeting Accounts with Specific Goals
Account-based content marketing is a more personal approach to content marketing than traditional strategies, which attempt to convert strangers using large marketing campaigns into leads. Marketers can create and deliver relevant content by understanding the key decision makers in each account, their challenges, and their objectives. This helps to create a more fruitful dialogue with prospects and customers that ultimately drives better business results for the organization.
After identifying your target accounts, you need to develop account plans for each one. This involves analyzing every account and determining the marketing channels to be used, the buyers within each account to engage and what kind of content is required to increase engagement. This could be thought leadership content such as whitepapers, or case studies. whitepapers, case studies, webinars, retargeting advertising customized website experiences, and other marketing techniques specific to each client are all possible.
As a result, account based content marketing is able to provide a much higher return on investment than traditional
Content marketing tools marketing strategies. In fact 84 percent of B2B marketers who have integrated account-based marketing into their strategy have higher ROI than any other marketing effort.
Although it takes longer and resources to cultivate only a few target accounts however, the advantages of an account-based content marketing approach are significant for businesses who want to increase revenue throughout all stages of the sales funnel. This is especially true for professional services businesses where the quality of each prospective client or customer is more important than the number of people they can attract.
ABM is also a great option for companies who wish to expand business with their existing customers over time by building trusting relationships. Research has revealed that it's far more cost-effective to invest in retaining existing customers than it is to spend money trying find and convert new ones.
Combining ABM with inbound marketing strategies can maximize the impact on content marketing. Marketers can improve the relevance of their content to buyers at every stage of the buying process by using pillar content in conjunction with retargeting and landing pages to facilitate lead capture. This allows them to create additional revenue opportunities through acquisition growth, acceleration, and expansion for their sales and marketing teams.
Create content that is hyper-personalized
ABM is among the most popular trends in marketing, and it's crucial for marketers to know how their existing strategies for content can be integrated into this new strategy. But it can be difficult to comprehend how ABM works in practice. Jenny Magic of Convince & Convert, and Jennalee Reiff from Springbox gave an overview of ABM in a recent presentation. They discussed the most important factors to consider, as well as
what content marketing to expect for the success of implementation.
The most effective ABM content strategy begins with understanding your ideal client's needs and goals. Content that is geared towards these goals allows you to provide a more personal service and boost conversions. Content should be tailored to the specific needs of each account. It is therefore crucial to map the journey of users within each account. This will allow you to determine the type of content (and individual pages and items) is most appealing to your intended audience. This information can be used to optimize journeys on your site, showing the most popular
content marketing consultant to users who are on the accounts.
It's not easy to create hyper-personalized content, however, it's a crucial step to increase the impact of ABM. According to State of Marketing, 2023 83% of customers are willing to give up their personal information for better-customized experiences.
One method of creating hyper-personalized content is by using AI processing on real-time data. This can help you control the way your content is distributed and provide suggestions for the next steps, 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 way to personalize your content is by leveraging the pillar and cluster content structure. This allows you to have a comprehensive piece of content that addresses the issues that your target accounts face, and then link to other pieces that focus on specific aspects of the issue. Fitness trackers, as an example, may have a number of common goals and benefits but the method in which different people use them could be very different.
Aligning Sales and Marketing
Professional service marketers have historically focused on creating a linear sales channel, using broad marketing campaigns to appeal to large groups in the hope that a few of them would convert. This strategy might have worked when B2B marketing followed a more broadcast-based model, but it's not effective in the current Account Based Marketing strategy. Instead of trying to push all prospects through the same phases of the process, you should concentrate on high-value prospects. This can be achieved by providing them with experiences or content specifically tailored to meet their specific needs and challenges.
The first step is to establish your ideal customer profile. It's not as easy as creating buyer personas, because you have to be aware of 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 and a strategy, you can create a plan for content that can be linked to each account on different channels. This could range from social media advertisements to email outreach.
It's crucial that your sales and marketing teams are on the same page when you implement your ABM strategy. This will ensure that your content is relevant for each account and that you do not spend time or resources on the wrong audience.
Another key step is to make use of the information you have on your most successful 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 information can then 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 does not respond to your content, you may be able to contact them and find out what you can do to help move them down the sales funnel. You can make sure that you align your ABM strategy with your content strategy by following these steps.
Measuring Success
Account-based content marketing focuses on creating content, such as blogs, reports, videos and webinars that are relevant and personalized to a particular persona or account. If you're aiming to target healthcare organizations, for example your content should be focused on their issues and pain points.