Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services

With the help of account-based content marketing your marketing department and digital marketing agency can concentrate on a select group of accounts or clients. This allows you create hyper-personalized, targeted content that speaks directly to their needs and explain how your product will help them.

Effective ABM content should deliver the right kind of information to every stakeholder at the right moment in the buyer center. This means identifying the different types of people and their needs at various stages of their journey.

Targeting specific accounts

Unlike traditional content strategies that aim to attract and convert people who are not leads through broad marketing campaigns, account-based content marketing focuses on connecting with targeted accounts in a highly personal way. By identifying the top decision makers for each account and understanding their pain points and goals, marketers are able to create and deliver customized content strategy marketing that is targeted to specific accounts. This creates a more fruitful dialog with prospects and customers, which ultimately leads to better business results.

After identifying your target accounts, you need to create accounts plans for each. This involves analyzing each account, determining which marketing channels to use to reach the customers in the account should be engaging with, and what kinds of content are needed to encourage engagement and conversions. This could include thought leadership content (e.g. whitepapers, case studies, webinars) as well as retargeting ads. personalized experiences on websites, and other marketing tactics specific to each client.

This is why account based content marketing can yield a higher return on investment than traditional content marketing strategies. In fact 84% of B2B marketers who have incorporated account-based marketing into their strategies report higher return on investments than any other marketing campaign.

It takes more time and resources to nurture only a few target accounts, the advantages of an account-based approach to content marketing content strategy are significant for businesses that wish to increase their revenue across all stages of the sales funnel. This is particularly true for professional services businesses where the quality of each prospective client or customer is more important than the number of customers they can draw.

Additionally, ABM is a great option for companies looking to grow their business with existing customers through building trusting relationships over time. Research has revealed that it's much more cost-effective to invest in keeping existing customers than to spend money trying find and convert new customers.

By using ABM with traditional inbound marketing strategies companies can increase the effectiveness of their content marketing efforts. By utilizing an array of pillar content, retargeting and lead capture landing pages, marketers can provide greater relevance to prospects throughout the buying process. This enables them to create more acquisition, acceleration, and growth revenue opportunities for their sales and marketing teams.

Create content that is hyper-personalized

ABM is a hot trend in the field of marketing. It's crucial that marketers are aware of how to adapt their strategies for content to this new approach. It can be difficult to comprehend how ABM actually is working. In a recent talk at ContentTECH, Jenny Magic and Jennalee Reiff of Convince & Convert and Springbox gave a quick overview on ABM that explained the main factors to be considered and what you can expect in a successful execution.

The most effective ABM content strategy starts by understanding your ideal client's pain points and their goals. Producing content that aligns with these objectives will allow you to provide a personal experience, and ultimately increase conversions. The content you create must focus on the specific requirements of each account. It is therefore important to map the journey of each user within the account. By doing this you will be able to discern what kinds of content (and even specific pages and items) are most popular with those who visit your site. This information can be used to optimize the user experience on your site, showing the most effective content to visitors who are on those accounts.

Creating hyper-personalized content can be a challenge, but it is an essential step to increase the effectiveness of your ABM efforts. According to State of Marketing, 2023 83% of consumers are willing to share their personal information for a more customized experience.

AI processing of real-time data is one way to create hyper-personalized contents. This can help you determine how your content is delivered, provide suggestions for future steps, and react to events in real time. While it's not a replacement for multivariate testing or strategic planning, it can be a useful tool for improving the effectiveness of your ABM campaigns.

The pillar and cluster structure is another method to hyper-personalize content. This lets you create a complete piece that explains the issue that your accounts' target users are facing, and then link it to supplementary pieces which address specific aspects of that problem. Fitness trackers, for example are able to provide a range of common benefits and goals but the method in which different people use them can be completely different.

Aligning Marketing and Sales

Traditionally, professional service marketers were focused on creating an efficient sales funnel that was linear using broad marketing campaigns that appealed to large numbers of people with the expectation that one or more would convert. This strategy might have been effective in the past when B2B marketing was more of a broadcast model, but it's no longer effective in the current Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy. Instead of trying to guide all leads through the same stages of the process, you should concentrate on prospects with high value. This can be achieved by providing them with content or experiences specifically tailored to meet their specific needs and problems.

The first step is to determine your ideal customer profile. It's not as easy as creating buyer profiles, as you need to think about the kinds of solutions that each client is seeking and how best to make use of them.

Once you have identified your ICP and a strategy, you can create a plan for content that can be linked with each account across different channels. This could be anything from social media advertisements to email outreach.

It's crucial that your sales and marketing teams are on the same page as you implement your ABM strategy. This will ensure that all of your Content Marketing Tools is relevant to each account, ensuring that you don't spend time and money attracting the wrong kind of audience.

Another important step is to utilize the information you have on your most successful clients. By analyzing your historical customer information, you will be able to determine what positive characteristics they have in common, like being in the financial sector or being within a certain size. This information can be used to create targeted campaigns for similar prospects.

In addition, it's important to track the effectiveness of your ABM strategy and adjust it whenever necessary. If your targeted account does not respond to your content, you may want to reach out and see what you can do to help move them along the sales funnel. By taking these steps, you'll be able to make your ABM strategy and content marketing examples efforts better aligned which, in turn, will increase conversions.

Measuring the success

Account-based content marketing is about creating resources, such as blogs, reports, videos and webinars that are relevant and personalized for a specific individual or account. If you're looking to reach healthcare businesses, for example your content must be centered around their pain points and issues. This level of personalization not only helps with ABM but also helps build strong relationships with potential customers.

The best part about ABM is that it can be utilized at any stage of the sales funnel. It is even more efficient than traditional lead generation at the top of the funnel. This is because you can identify and connect with a limited number accounts that are more likely to convert than attempting 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 still efficient, today's buyers prefer digital self-service and remote engagement. It's important to deliver the right content, at the right moment and on the channel they prefer.

ABM is particularly effective in engaging C-suite executives who are hard to reach. They are often oblivious to mass email campaigns and are more likely to respond to content that is relevant to their requirements and uses cases. In addition, ABM can help you shorten the sales cycle by enabling you to connect with prospects and keep them engaged at key stages of their journey, like when they're researching solutions to solve a specific business issue.

Although ABM hasn't been around for as long as traditional marketing and sales strategies, it's rapidly becoming a top strategy for B2B organizations looking to enhance their performance and generate higher 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.(Image: https://www.sickseo.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/sickseo-logo-grey-text.png)