Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services
Your marketing department and digital agency can focus their efforts on a particular group of clients or accounts that use account-based content marketing. This lets you create highly-personalized specific content that speaks directly about their pain points and explain how your product will help the issues.
ABM content that is effective must deliver the right information to each stakeholder in the buyer's center at the right moment. This means identifying the different individuals and their requirements at different stages of their journey.
Aiming at 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 is focused on interacting with specific accounts in a highly personal method. By identifying the most important account decision makers and identifying their issues and goals, marketers are able to create and deliver customized content that is targeted to specific accounts. This can lead to a more productive interaction with customers and prospects and ultimately results in greater business outcomes.
After identifying your target accounts You must then develop account plans for each. This involves studying each account and determining which marketing channels to use, which buyers within the account to engage with, and what types of content are required to drive engagement and conversions. This could include thought leadership content (e.g. whitepapers webinars, case studies, or whitepapers) Retargeting ads, customized website experiences and other marketing tactics tailored to each account.
In the end, account-based content marketing is able to yield a better ROI than traditional content marketing techniques. In fact, 84 percent of B2B marketers who have incorporated account-based marketing into their strategies report higher return on investments than any other type of marketing effort.
It takes more time and resources to cultivate a small group of target accounts but the benefits of an account-based approach to content marketing are significant for businesses that wish to increase their revenue throughout all stages of the sales funnel. This is particularly applicable to professional service companies in which the quality of customers or prospects is more important than the number of people they are able to attract.
In addition, ABM is a great option for companies looking to grow their business with existing customers through building trusting relationships over time. Research has proven that it's far more cost-effective to invest in keeping existing customers than to spend money trying locate and convert new ones.
Combining ABM with inbound marketing strategies can increase the effectiveness 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 generate additional revenue opportunities through acquisition, acceleration and expansion of their sales and market teams.
Create ai content marketing sickseo -Personalized Content
ABM is one of the most popular trends in marketing, and it's important for marketers to know how their current content strategies fit into this new approach. It can be difficult to understand how ABM actually works. In a recent presentation at ContentTECH, Jenny Magic and Jennalee Reiff of Convince & Convert and Springbox presented a nifty course on ABM and explained the most important considerations and what to expect from a successful implementation.
The most effective ABM content strategy starts by understanding your ideal client's pain points and goals. Creating content that aligns with these goals will enable you to provide a personalized experience, which will ultimately improve conversions. Content must also be tailored to the requirements of each account. This is why it is essential to sketch out the journey of people in each of your target accounts. By doing this, you will be able to see what types of content (and even specific pages and items) are most engaging for these people. This information can be used to optimize journeys for people using these accounts, displaying the best performing content.
Making content that is hyper-personalized can be challenging but it's an essential step to increase the impact of your ABM efforts. According to State of Marketing, 2023 83% of consumers are willing to give up their personal information to receive an experience that is more personalized.
AI processing of real-time data is one method to create hyper-personalized content. This will allow you to control the way your content is presented and provide suggestions for the future steps and react to events instantly. While it's not a replacement for multivariate testing or strategic planning, this can be a useful tool to increase the effectiveness of your ABM campaigns.
The pillar and cluster structure is another way to personalize content. This lets you create a complete piece that explains the issue your targeted accounts face and then connect it to additional pieces which address specific aspects of that issue. For instance fitness trackers may have a variety of common goals and advantages, but how different types of people use it can vary significantly.
Making sure that Marketing and Sales are aligned
Traditionally, professional service marketers focused on developing a linear sales funnel by using broad marketing campaigns that targeted large numbers of people in the expectation that one or more would be converted. This approach may have served its purpose in the past when B2B marketing was more of a broadcast model, however, it's not as effective with today's Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy. Instead of trying to guide all prospects through the same phases of the process, you should instead focus on high-value prospects. This can be achieved by providing them with content or experiences specifically tailored to meet their specific requirements and issues.
The first step is identifying your ideal customer profile (ICP). It's not as easy as establishing buyer personas as you must also be aware of the types of solutions 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 connects to each account on several channels. This could be anything from social media advertisements to email outreach.
As you begin executing your ABM strategy, it's crucial to keep your sales and marketing teams on the same level. This will ensure that your content is relevant for each account and that you do not spend time or resources on the wrong target audience.
Another key step is to leverage the information you have about your top-performing clients. By analyzing your historical customer data, you can discover the positive traits they have in common, like being in the financial sector or being within a certain size. This data can be used to create targeted marketing campaigns for prospects with similar characteristics.
Additionally it's also important to keep track of the performance of your ABM strategy and make changes whenever necessary. If your targeted account isn't responding to your content, you might want to reach out and find out what you can do to help move them further down the sales funnel. If you take these steps, you'll be able to get your ABM strategy and content strategies more aligned, which will ultimately increase conversions.
Measuring the success
Content marketing based on account is about creating content (videos reports, blogs, posts, and webinars) that are personalized and relevant to a particular persona or account. For example, if you're targeting healthcare companies, your content needs to be geared towards their pain points and challenges. This level of personalization is not only important in ABM, but it's also an excellent way to create solid relationships with your prospects and customers.
The greatest benefit of ABM is that it can be used throughout the sales funnel. It can be even more efficient than traditional lead generation at the top of a funnel. This is due to the fact that you can identify and interact with a smaller number of accounts that are more likely to convert than trying generate leads from a population that may not be interested.
While there's a place for offline methods of building relationships such as in-person meetings, phone calls, and handwritten notes, most customers nowadays prefer digital self-service and remote engagement. It's essential to provide the right content at the right time and using the channel they prefer.
ABM is especially effective for reaching out to C-suite executives who are difficult to reach who are typically skeptical of mass email marketing, but are more likely to engage with content that speaks directly to their needs and usage scenarios. ABM can also help accelerate sales by allowing you to engage with prospects at the most crucial stages in their journey, such as when they are researching solutions to address specific business issues.
Although ABM isn't as well-known as long as traditional sales and marketing strategies, it's rapidly becoming the most popular strategy for B2B organizations looking to improve their performance and drive more 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.