Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services
With account based content marketing, your marketing department and digital marketing agency can concentrate on a small number of clients or accounts. This allows you create hyper-personalized, targeted content that speaks directly about their pain points and explains how your product can help the issues.
ABM content that is effective must deliver the right information to every stakeholder in the buyer's centre at the right time. This involves identifying the needs of each individual at various stages in their journey.
Targeting specific accounts
In contrast to traditional content strategies which are designed to draw people who are not leads through broad marketing campaigns, account based content marketing is focused on interacting with targeted accounts in a highly customized way. Marketers can develop and distribute relevant content by identifying and knowing the decision makers within each account, their pain points, and their objectives. This can help create a more fruitful dialogue with prospects and customers which ultimately leads to better business results for the company.
Once you've identified your target accounts, the next step is to create accounts plans for each one. This requires analyzing every account and determining which marketing channels that should be utilized, the buyers within each account that should be engaged and what type of content is needed to increase engagement. This could include thought-provoking content (e.g. Whitepapers, case studies webinars, retargeting advertisements, webinars personalized website experiences and other marketing strategies tailored to each account are all possible.
Account-based content marketing can provide an even higher return on your investment than traditional content strategies. 84% of B2B marketing professionals who have incorporated account based marketing into their strategies have higher ROI than any other marketing approach.
It takes more time and resources to cultivate only a few target accounts however, the advantages of an account-based content marketing strategy are vital for businesses that want to grow revenues across all stages of the sales funnel. This is especially relevant for professional service companies where the quality of each prospect or customer is more important than the number of potential customers they could attract.
Additionally, ABM is a great option for companies looking to expand their business with existing customers by establishing trusting relationships over time. Research shows that investing in existing customers is more cost-effective than investing money to find and convert new customers.
Combining unique content writing software with inbound marketing strategies will maximize the impact of content marketing. Marketers can make their content more relevant to prospects at each stage of their buying journey by mixing pillar content with retargeting and landing pages to facilitate lead capture. This allows them to create more acquisition as well as acceleration and expansion revenue opportunities for their marketing and sales teams.
Making Hyper-Personalized Content
ABM is a hot topic in the field of marketing. It's crucial that marketers understand how to adapt their strategies for content to this new approach. However, it can be a challenge to get your head around how ABM works in practice. Jenny Magic of Convince & Convert, and Jennalee Reiff from Springbox gave a crash-course on ABM in a recent talk. They explained the key aspects to consider, and what to expect from a successful implementation.
Understanding your ideal client's goals and pain points is the first step to developing an effective ABM strategy. 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 track the journey 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 improve journeys for people using these accounts, showing the best performing content.
It's not easy to create content that is hyper-personalized, but it's a vital step to increase the impact of ABM. According to State of Marketing 2023, 83% of consumers are willing to provide their personal information in exchange for a more personalized experience.
AI processing of real-time data is one way to create hyper-personalized contents. This will allow you to manage the way that your content is presented and provide suggestions for the next steps, and react to events in real time. 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 to hyper-personalize content. This allows you to have an entire piece of content that describes the issue that your targeted accounts are facing, and then link to other pieces that specifically address the issue. For instance a fitness tracker could have many common goals and benefits, but how different types of users use it can differ greatly.
Aligning Marketing and Sales
Professional service marketers have traditionally focused on creating an efficient sales channel by using broad marketing campaigns that draw large numbers of people with the hope that a few of them would be converted. This strategy might have served its purpose in the past when B2B marketing was more of a broadcast-based model, however, it's not as effective with today's Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy. Instead of trying to push all leads through the same stage of the process, it's more important to concentrate on attracting high-value prospects and provide them with experiences and content that are tailored to their particular requirements and needs.
The first step is to identify your ideal client profile. This isn't as simple as establishing buyer personas as you must also be aware of the types of services that each customer is seeking and how they can be best utilized.
Once you have identified your ICP then, create a strategy for content that can be linked to each account on multiple channels. This could be anything from social media ads to email outreach.
It is essential that your marketing and sales teams are on the same page when you implement your ABM strategy. This will ensure that all of your content is relevant to each account, ensuring that you don't spend time and money attracting the wrong kind of audience.
The most important thing to do is to utilize the information you have about your most successful clients. By looking at your previous client data, you can determine what positive characteristics they have in common, like being in the financial sector or being within a certain size. This data can be used to develop targeted campaigns targeting similar prospects.
Additionally it's crucial to monitor the performance of your ABM strategy and adjust it as needed. If your target account isn't responding to your content, you might be able to contact them and see what you can do to get them down the sales funnel. If you take these steps, you'll be able to improve your ABM strategy and content efforts better aligned, which will ultimately aid in generating more conversions.
Measuring the effectiveness
Account-based content marketing is about creating content, such as blogs, videos, reports and webinars that are relevant and customized for a specific individual or account. For example, if you're targeting healthcare businesses your content must be geared towards their pain points and challenges. This kind of personalization doesn't just help with ABM but also builds strong relationships with potential customers.
The greatest benefit of ABM is that it can be utilized at any stage of the sales funnel. In fact, it could be more efficient than traditional lead generation when employed at the top of the funnel. This is because it can assist you in identifying and engaging just a handful of accounts that are likely to convert, rather than trying to generate leads from an audience that may not be interested in your product or service.
Although there is still a need for offline methods of building relationships like in-person meetings, phone calls and handwritten notes, the majority of customers nowadays prefer digital self-service and remote engagement. This is why it's crucial to provide customers with the right content at the right time, on the channel that's most suitable for them.
ABM is particularly effective for reaching out to executives in the C-suite who are difficult to reach, who are often dismissive of mass-email campaigns, but are more likely to engage with content that is tailored to their needs and use cases. In addition, ABM can help you accelerate sales by allowing you to reach and engage your prospects at the most crucial stages of their journey, such as when they're researching solutions to solve a particular business issue.
ABM isn't as old-fashioned as traditional selling and marketing strategies, but it's fast becoming a top strategy for B2B companies looking to improve their 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.