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 accounts or clients. This lets you create hyper-personalized specific content that speaks directly to their issues and explains how your product can help these issues.
Effective ABM content must deliver the right kind of information to every stakeholder at the right moment in the buyer's center. This involves identifying the needs of each individual at various stages of their journey.
Targeting specific accounts
In contrast to traditional content strategies which aim to attract and convert strangers into leads using broad marketing campaigns, account-based content marketing focuses on connecting with specific accounts in a highly customized way. Marketers can develop and distribute relevant content by understanding the key decision makers within each account, their pain points and goals. This creates an effective dialog with customers and prospects which ultimately leads to greater business outcomes for the company.
After identifying your target accounts After identifying your target accounts, you must create account plans for each one. This involves analyzing each account and determining which marketing channels to employ to reach the customers in the account to engage with, and what types of content are required to increase engagement and converts. This could be thought leadership content, such as whitepapers or case studies. whitepapers, case studies, webinars, retargeting advertising personalized website experiences and other marketing strategies specific to each client are all possible.
Account-based marketing can yield an even 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 returns on investment than any other type of marketing campaign.
It takes more time and resources to cultivate the small number of targeted accounts however, the advantages of an account-based content marketing strategy are crucial for companies that wish to increase their revenue across all stages of the sales funnel. This is particularly relevant for professional service companies in which the quality of the prospects or customers is more important than how many people they can draw.
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 has shown that investing in existing customers is more cost-effective than investing money to find and convert new customers.
By using ABM with traditional inbound marketing techniques, companies can maximize the effectiveness of their content marketing efforts. Utilizing the combination of the pillar content, retargeting and lead capture landing pages, marketers can give more relevance to prospects throughout the buying journey. This allows them to create additional revenue opportunities through acquisition as well as acceleration and expansion for their sales and marketing teams.
Create content that is hyper-personalized
ABM is a hot trend in the field of marketing. It's important that marketers are aware of how to adapt their content strategies to this new approach. It can be difficult to comprehend how ABM actually works. In a recent talk at ContentTECH, Jenny Magic and Jennalee Reiff of Convince & Convert and Springbox provided a crash course on ABM, explaining the key considerations and what to expect from a successful implementation.
Understanding your ideal customer's goals and challenges is the first step in developing an effective ABM strategy. Producing content that aligns with these goals will enable you to provide a personalized experience and ultimately increase conversions. Content should also be tailored to the specific needs of each account. This is why it's crucial to outline the user journeys within each of your accounts. This will help you determine which content (and individual pages and items) is most popular with your target audience. This information can be used to improve the user experience on your website, and show the most effective content to visitors who are on these accounts.
The process of creating hyper-personalized content can be challenging however it is an essential step in increasing the effectiveness of your ABM efforts. 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 real-time data. This can help you manage the way your content is delivered, make suggestions for next steps, and respond to events immediately. While it isn't a substitute for multivariate testing or strategic planning, this can be a powerful tool to increase the effectiveness of your ABM campaigns.
Another way to hyper-personalize your content is by leveraging the pillar and cluster structure. This allows you to create a an extensive piece of content that describes the issue that your targeted accounts face, and then link to supplementary pieces that focus on specific aspects of the problem. Fitness trackers, as an example, may have a number of common advantages and goals however the method by which individuals use them may be very different.
Aligning Marketing and Sales
Traditionally, professional services marketers were focused on creating a linear sales funnel using broad marketing campaigns that appealed to large groups of people with the hope that a portion of them would be converted. This strategy might have worked in the past when B2B marketing employed a more broadcast approach, but it is not effective in the current Account Based Marketing strategy. Instead of trying to guide all leads through the same stages of the process, you should focus on prospects with high value. You can do this by providing them with content or experiences that are customized to their particular needs and challenges.
The first step is to identify your ideal client profile. This isn't as easy as creating buyer profiles, because you must also look at the different types of solutions each customer is looking for and how to use them.
Once you've identified your ICP and a strategy, you can create a plan for content that will connect to each account on several channels. This could range from social media advertisements to email outreach.
When you are beginning to implement your ABM strategy, it's crucial to keep both your sales and marketing teams on the same page. article rewriting tool will ensure that your content is relevant for each account, and ensure that you don't waste time or resources on the wrong target audience.
Another important step is to utilize the data that you have on your top-performing clients. You can find positive traits that your clients share by studying their past data. For instance, they may all belong to the financial services industry or have a similar business size. This information can be used to design targeted marketing campaigns to target similar potential customers.
It's also crucial to monitor your ABM strategy's performance and make any needed adjustments. If your targeted account does not respond to your content, you might need to reach out to see what you can do to move them further down the sales funnel. You can make sure that you align your ABM strategy with your content efforts by following these steps.
Measuring the success
Account-based content marketing is the process of creating content, such as videos, reports, blogs and webinars that are relevant and personalized for a specific individual or account. For example If you're focusing on healthcare companies your content must be focused on their pain points and challenges. This kind of personalization is not only important in ABM however, it's an excellent way to create strong relationships with your prospects and customers.
The greatest benefit of ABM is that it can be used at any stage of the sales funnel. It can even be more efficient than traditional lead generation at the top of the funnel. This is because you can identify and interact with a smaller number accounts that are more likely to convert rather than trying to generate leads from an audience that may not be interested.
While offline methods like phone calls and meetings in person or handwritten notes are efficient, today's buyers prefer remote and digital self-service. That's why it's so critical to provide customers with the right content at the right time, and on the channel that's most suitable for them.
ABM is particularly effective in reaching out to C-suite executives who are difficult to reach who are typically skeptical of mass-email campaigns, but are more likely to engage with content that speaks directly to their needs and usage scenarios. In addition, ABM can help you reduce the time to sell by allowing you connect with prospects and keep them engaged at key stages of their journey, like when they're researching solutions to address a specific business problem.
ABM isn't as old as traditional selling and marketing strategies, but it's fast becoming a top strategy for B2B companies seeking 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.