A How-To Guide For Account Based Content Marketing From Beginning To End

Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services

With the help of account-based content marketing your marketing department as well as digital marketing agency can focus on a select group of clients or accounts. This allows you to create content that is hyper-personalized and addresses their specific issues and demonstrates how your product can help them overcome them.

Effective ABM content must deliver the right kind of information to each stakeholder at the right moment in the buyer center. This requires identifying the requirements of each persona at different stages in their journey.

The goal is to target specific accounts

Account-based content marketing is a more personalized approach to content marketing compared to traditional strategies, which seek to convert people who are not familiar with marketing campaigns into leads. Marketers can develop and distribute relevant content by knowing the decision makers within each account, their challenges and goals. This helps to create more productive dialog with customers and prospects that ultimately drives greater business outcomes for the business.

After identifying your accounts of interest You must then develop account plans for each. This involves analyzing each account, determining which channels to utilize, which buyers within the account to engage with, and what types of content are required to increase engagement and converts. This could include thought-provoking content such as whitepapers, or case studies. Whitepapers, case-studies, webinars, retargeting advertising, personalized website experiences and other marketing techniques tailored to each account are all possible.

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

Although it takes longer and resources to cultivate a small group of target accounts but the advantages of an account-based approach to content marketing are vital for businesses that want to grow revenue across all stages of the sales funnel. This is especially true for professional service businesses where the quality of the customers or prospects is more important than the number of people they can attract.

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

By combining ABM with traditional methods of inbound marketing, companies can maximize the impact of their content marketing efforts. By utilizing a combination of pillar content, retargeting, and lead capture landing pages, marketers can offer more value to potential customers at every stage of the buying journey. This allows them to generate additional revenue opportunities through acquisition growth, acceleration, and expansion of their sales and market teams.

Create Hyper-Personalized Content

ABM is among the hottest trends in marketing, and it's crucial for marketers to know how their existing strategies for content can be integrated into this new strategy. However, it can be a challenge to get your head around how ABM works in practice. 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 factors to be considered and what you can expect in a successful execution.

The most efficient ABM content strategy starts by understanding the needs of your ideal customer and objectives. Content that is aligned with these goals allows you to provide more personalized service and increase conversions. The content you create should also focus on the unique requirements of each account. It is therefore important to trace the path of each user within the account. This will allow you to determine what content (and individual pages and items) is most appealing to your intended audience. This data can be used to improve the user experience on your site, showing the most effective content to visitors who visit those accounts.

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 customers are willing to give up their personal information to receive a more customized experience.

AI processing of real-time data is a way to create hyper-personalized content. This will allow you to control the way your content is presented and provide suggestions for the next steps, and respond to events instantly. This tool can increase the effectiveness of ABM campaigns. It cannot replace multivariate testing and strategic planning.

The pillar and cluster structure is another method of hyper-personalize content. This lets you create a full piece that explains the issue your targeted accounts face and then connect it to other pieces that specifically address the problem. For example fitness trackers may have many advantages and common goals, but how different types of people use it can differ significantly.

Getting Sales and Marketing Aligned

Professional service marketers have historically focused on creating a linear sales channel using broad marketing campaigns that draw large numbers of people in the hopes that a portion of them would convert. This approach may have been effective when B2B marketing was more of a broadcast-based model, but it's no longer efficient with today's Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy. Rather than trying to push all potential leads through the same phase of the process, it's more important to focus on attracting the most valuable prospects and provide them with experiences and content that are adapted to their particular needs and requirements.

The first step to this is to identify your ideal client profile (ICP). This isn't as easy as creating buyer profiles because you must also look at the different types of solutions each customer is seeking and how best to make use of them.

Once you have identified your ICP, develop a strategy for content that connects to each account on several channels. This could include anything from social media advertisements to email outreach.

As you begin executing your ABM strategy, it's crucial to keep both your marketing and sales teams on the same page. This will help ensure that all of your content is relevant to each account, so that you don't waste time and resources trying to reach the wrong audience.

One of the most important steps to take is to utilize the information you have about your most successful clients. You can determine the positive characteristics 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 develop targeted marketing campaigns to target similar potential customers.

It's also crucial to monitor your ABM strategy's performance and make any necessary changes. For instance, if you notice that your target account isn't responding to your content, it could be time to reach out to them and see what else you can do to assist them move down the sales funnel. If you take these steps you'll be able improve your ABM strategy and content strategies better aligned and ultimately help to drive more conversions.

Measuring Success

Account based content marketing is all about creating resources (videos reports, blogs, posts and webinars) that are personalised and relevant to a specific account or persona. For example If you're focusing on healthcare companies your content must be geared towards their pain points and challenges.  content marketer  of personalization doesn't just help with ABM but also builds solid relationships with prospects and customers.

The best part about ABM is that it can be utilized at any stage of the sales funnel. It can even be more effective than traditional lead generation at the top of a funnel. This is because it will assist you in identifying and engaging just a handful of accounts that are likely to convert, instead of trying to generate leads from a huge crowd that may not be interested in your product or service.

While offline methods like in-person meetings, phone calls or handwritten notes are effective, today's buyers prefer online self-service and remote interaction. It's essential to provide the right content at the right moment and on the channel they prefer.

ABM is especially effective for reaching out to executives in the C-suite who are difficult to reach, who are often dismissive of mass email marketing, but are more likely to respond to content that addresses their requirements and use cases. Additionally, ABM can help you shorten the sales cycle by allowing you connect with your prospects at crucial points in their journey, such as when they're researching solutions to solve a specific business issue.

ABM isn't as old as traditional selling and marketing strategies, but it's rapidly becoming the most popular strategy for B2B businesses 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.