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 lets you create hyper-personalized, targeted content that speaks directly to their needs and explains how your product can solve the issues. Effective ABM content must deliver the right kind of information to every stakeholder at the appropriate time in the buyer's centre. This means identifying the needs of each persona at different stages in their journey. Targeting specific accounts Unlike traditional content strategies that seek to attract and convert strangers into leads using broad marketing campaigns, account-based content marketing focuses on connecting with specific accounts in a highly personal way. By identifying the top decision makers for each account and identifying their issues and goals, marketers can create and provide content that is targeted to the specific accounts. This can help create a more fruitful conversation with customers and prospects that ultimately results in better business results for the organization. Once you've identified your target accounts, the next step is to create plans for each account. This involves studying each account and determining the 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 may include thought leadership content (e.g. whitepapers, case studies, webinars, retargeting advertising, personalized website experiences and other marketing techniques specific to each client are all possible. Account-based marketing can yield an even higher return on your investment than traditional content strategies. In fact 84 percent of B2B marketers who have incorporated account-based marketing in their strategy report higher return on investments than any other marketing campaign. Although it takes longer and resources to nurture only a few target accounts, the benefits of an account-based content marketing strategy are significant for businesses who want to increase revenue throughout all stages of the sales funnel. This is especially true for professional services businesses 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 grow their business with existing customers through building trusting relationships over time. Research has revealed that it's far more cost-effective to invest in retaining existing customers than to spend money trying locate and convert new ones. Combining ABM with inbound marketing techniques can maximize the impact on content marketing. Marketers can improve the relevance of their content to buyers at every stage of the buying process by mixing pillar content with retargeting and landing pages to facilitate lead capture. This enables them to create more acquisition as well as acceleration and growth revenue opportunities for their marketing and sales teams. Create content that is hyper-personalized ABM is a rage in the field of marketing. It's crucial that marketers know how to adapt their strategies for content to the new method. However, it can be a challenge to get your head around 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 discussed the most important considerations, and what to expect for an effective implementation. Understanding your ideal customer's goals and pain points is the first step in developing an effective ABM strategy. Producing content that aligns with these goals will enable you to deliver a more personalized experience and ultimately increase conversions. Content must also be tailored to the needs of each account. This is why it is important to map out the user journeys within your target accounts. This will allow you to determine which content (and specific pages and items) is most popular with your intended audience. This information can be used to improve user's journeys on these accounts, showing the best performing content. It's not easy to create hyper-personalized content but it's an important step in increasing the impact of ABM. According to State of Marketing 2023, 83% of people are willing to share their personal information in exchange for a more personalized experience. One method to create hyper-personalized content is through AI processing on real-time data. This will help you determine how your content is presented, make suggestions for next steps, and respond to events instantly. This tool can increase the effectiveness of ABM campaigns. It can't replace multivariate testing and strategic planning. The pillar and cluster structure is another way to hyper-personalize content. This allows you to create a comprehensive piece that describes the problem your target accounts are facing, and then link it to supplementary pieces that focus on specific aspects of the problem. Fitness trackers, for example can have a variety of common advantages and goals however the method by which different people use them could be very different. Aligning Marketing and Sales Professional service marketers have traditionally focused on creating an efficient sales channel by using broad marketing campaigns to reach large audiences in the hope that a few of them would convert. This approach may have been effective in the past when B2B marketing was more of a broadcast model but it's no longer effective with today's Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy. Instead of attempting to push all prospects through the same phases of the process, you should focus on the most valuable leads. You can accomplish this by providing them with content or experiences that are customized to their particular requirements and issues. The first step is identifying your ideal customer profile (ICP). It's not as easy as creating buyer profiles, because you must also 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, develop a strategy for content that can be linked to each account on multiple channels. This could include anything from social media ads to email outreach. When you are beginning to implement your ABM strategy, it's essential to keep your marketing and sales teams on the same team. This will ensure that your content is appropriate for each account and that you don't waste time or resources on the wrong target audience. A key step to take is to use the data you have on your best-performing clients. Through analyzing your client data, you can determine what positive characteristics they have in common, like being in the financial services sector or falling within a certain size. This information can then be used to create targeted marketing campaigns for similar potential customers. It's also important to track your ABM strategy's performance and make any necessary adjustments. For instance, if you notice that your target account isn't responding to your content, it may be time to reach out to them and find out what else you can do to assist them progress through the sales funnel. You can integrate your ABM strategy with your content strategies by following these steps. Measuring Success Account-based content marketing is the process of creating resources, like videos, reports, blogs, and webinars, that are relevant and tailored for a specific persona or account. If you're looking to reach healthcare businesses, for example your content must be centered around their problems and concerns. This kind of personalization is not only important in ABM but also an excellent method to establish strong relationships with your prospects and customers. The most appealing aspect of ABM is that it can be utilized at any stage of the sales funnel. In fact, it could be more effective than traditional lead generation if utilized at the top of the funnel. This is due to the fact that you can identify and engage with a small number of accounts that are more likely to convert rather than trying to generate leads from a group of people who might not be interested. Although there is still a need for offline methods of building relationships like in-person meetings, phone calls and handwritten notes, most buyers today prefer digital self-serve and remote engagement. It's crucial to provide the right content at the right time and using the channel they prefer. what is content in marketing is particularly effective for 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 addresses their needs and use cases. Additionally, ABM can help you reduce the time to sell by allowing you connect with your prospects at the most crucial stages of their journey, like when they're researching solutions to address a specific business issue. ABM isn't as old-fashioned as traditional marketing and selling strategies, but it's quickly becoming a top strategy for B2B companies seeking 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.
what is content in marketing
