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Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services

Your marketing department and digital agency can concentrate their efforts on a selected segment of customers or accounts with account-based content marketing. This allows you to create content that is highly personalized and is directly addressing their problems and demonstrates how your product can help them solve their problems.

ABM content that is effective must deliver the correct information to each stakeholder in the buyer’s center at the right time. This requires identifying the requirements of each person at different phases of their journey.

Targeting specific accounts

Unlike traditional content strategies that are designed to draw strangers into leads with broad marketing campaigns, account based content marketing focuses on interacting with specific accounts in a highly personal way. By identifying the most important account decision makers and understanding their needs and goals, marketers can create and provide content that is relevant to specific accounts. This can lead to a more productive dialogue with customers and prospects and ultimately results in greater business outcomes.

After identifying your target accounts, you need to develop accounts plans for each. This involves analysing each account and determining which marketing channels to employ and which customers within the account should interact with, and what types of content are required to increase engagement and converts. This could include thought-provoking content (e.g. Whitepapers, case studies webinars, retargeting ads, webinars personalized website experiences and other marketing strategies that are tailored to each account are all possible.

Account-based content marketing can deliver an even higher return on your investment than traditional strategies for content. 84% of B2B marketing professionals who have implemented account-based marketing content strategy into their strategies report higher returns on investment than any other marketing effort.

Although it takes more effort and time to cultivate a smaller group of accounts, the rewards are significant for companies who seek to increase their revenues across all stages of the funnel. This is particularly true for professional services businesses where the quality of each prospective client or customer is more important than the amount of customers they can draw.

ABM is also a great option for businesses who want to grow their business with existing customers over time, by establishing trusting relationships. Research has revealed that it’s much more cost effective to invest in retaining existing customers than it is to invest money trying to find and convert new ones.

By combining ABM with traditional inbound marketing techniques businesses can maximize the impact of their content marketing efforts. Marketers can make their content more relevant to potential customers at every stage of the purchasing journey by mixing pillar content with the retargeting technique and landing pages for lead capture. This enables them to create additional revenue opportunities through acquisition, acceleration and expansion of their sales and marketing teams.

Making Hyper-Personalized Content

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 the new method. However, it can be a challenge to understand how ABM is actually used in practice. Jenny Magic of Convince & Convert, and Jennalee Reiff from Springbox gave a crash-course on ABM in a recent presentation. They explained the key factors to consider, as well as what to expect for a successful implementation.

Understanding your ideal customer’s goals and pain points is the first step in developing an effective ABM strategy. Creating content that aligns with these objectives will allow you to deliver a more personal experience, and ultimately increase conversions. The content you create should also focus on the specific needs of each account. This is why it’s crucial to outline the path of users in each of your target accounts. This will help you determine the type of content (and specific items and pages) is most appealing to your target audience. This information can be used to improve user’s journeys on these accounts, and show the most effective content.

The process of creating hyper-personalized content can be challenging, but it is an essential step in increasing the effectiveness of your ABM efforts. According to State of Marketing 2023, 83% of consumers are willing to provide their personal information in exchange for a more customized experience.

AI processing of real-time data is a way to create hyper-personalized content. This can help you manage the way that your content is presented, provide suggestions for next steps, and respond 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 of hyper-personalize content. This allows you to create a full piece that addresses the issue that your accounts’ target users are facing and then link it to supplementary pieces which focus on specific aspects of the problem. Fitness trackers, for instance can have a variety of common advantages and goals, but the way that individuals use them may be completely different.

Aligning Marketing and Sales

Traditionally, professional services marketers focused on developing a linear sales funnel using broad marketing campaigns that enticed large numbers of people with the expectation that one or more would be converted. This approach may have worked when B2B marketing employed a more broadcast-based model, but it’s not effective in the current Account Based Marketing strategy. Instead of attempting to push all leads through the same steps of the process, you should instead focus on high-value prospects. You can do this by providing them with experiences or content specifically tailored to their particular needs and problems.

The first step is to determine your ideal customer profile. It’s not as easy as creating buyer profiles, as you also need to look at the different types of solutions that each client is looking for and how to make use of them.

Once you’ve identified your ICP and a strategy, you can create a plan for content that connects with each account across several channels. This could include anything from social media ads to email outreach.

As you begin executing your ABM strategy, it’s essential to keep your sales and marketing teams on the same page. This will ensure that your content is relevant for each account, and ensure that you don’t spend your time or resources on the wrong target audience.

Another crucial step is to leverage the data that you have about your top-performing clients. You can find positive traits that your customers share by studying their past data. For example, they may all be in the financial services industry or have a similar company size. This information can then be used to create targeted marketing campaigns for similar prospects.

In addition to this it’s also important to keep track of the performance of your ABM strategy and make adjustments as needed. For instance, if you notice that your target account isn’t responding to your content, it might be time to reach out to them and ask what else you can do to help them move down the sales funnel. By taking these steps, you’ll be able to get your ABM strategy and content strategies more aligned which, in turn, will increase conversions.

Measuring the effectiveness

Account based content marketing is all about creating resources (videos reports, blogs, Account based content marketing posts, and webinars) that are personalized and relevant to a particular persona or account. If you’re trying to reach healthcare businesses, for example your content should be focused on their pain points and issues. This kind of personalization is not only important in ABM however, it’s a great way to build solid relationships with your prospects and customers.

ABM can be used throughout the sales funnel. It can even be more effective than traditional lead generation at the top of a funnel. This is because it can help you identify and engage only a few accounts that are likely to convert, rather than trying to generate leads from a large audience that may not be interested in your product or service.

While there’s still a place for offline methods of building relationships like in-person meetings, phone calls and handwritten notes, most customers today prefer digital self-serve and remote engagement. That’s why it’s so critical to provide them with the right content at the right time, on the channel that’s most suitable for them.

ABM is particularly effective in engaging executives from the C-suite, who are hard to reach. They are often oblivious to the mass email marketing however, they are more likely to respond to content that speaks to their requirements and uses instances. ABM can also help accelerate sales by enabling engagement with prospects at crucial points in their journey, for instance when they are looking for solutions to solve specific business problems.

ABM isn’t as old-fashioned as traditional selling and marketing strategies, but it’s quickly becoming a top choice for B2B companies looking to boost 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.