10 Unexpected Account Based Content Marketing Tips
Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services
With account based content marketing your marketing department as well as digital marketing agency can focus on a small number of accounts or clients. This allows you to create content that is highly personalized and addresses their specific pain points and shows how your product can help them overcome these issues.
Effective ABM content must deliver the appropriate information to each stakeholder at the right moment in the buyer center. This requires identifying the different types of people and their needs at various stages of their journey.
Aiming at specific accounts
In contrast to traditional content strategies which aim to attract and convert strangers into leads with broad marketing campaigns, account-based content marketing focuses on interacting with specific accounts in a highly personalized way. By identifying the key account decision makers and understanding their pain points and goals, marketers are able to create and deliver customized content that is appropriate to the specific accounts. This can help create a more fruitful dialogue with prospects and customers that ultimately drives greater business outcomes for the organization.
After identifying the accounts you want to target, you need to develop accounts plans for each. This involves analysing each account and determining which marketing channels to use and which customers within the account should be engaging with, and what types of content are required to increase engagement and converts. This could be thought leadership content such as whitepapers, or case studies. Whitepapers, case studies, webinars, retargeting advertising personalized website experiences and other marketing strategies that are tailored to each account are all possible.
Account-based content marketing can deliver a much higher return on your investment than traditional content strategies. 84% of B2B marketing professionals who have implemented account based marketing into their strategies report higher ROI than any other marketing effort.
Although it takes more effort and time to nurture a smaller number of targeted accounts, the advantages are significant for companies who are looking to increase their revenue at all stages of the funnel. This is especially true for professional service businesses in which the quality of their prospects or customers is more important than how many people they can attract.
In addition, ABM is a great choice for companies that wish to expand their business with existing customers by establishing trusting relationships over time. Research has shown that investing in existing customers is more cost-effective than investing money to acquire new customers.
By using ABM with traditional inbound marketing strategies companies can increase the impact of their content marketing efforts. Marketers can enhance the relevancy of their content to prospects at each stage of their buying journey by combining pillar content with retargeting and landing pages to facilitate lead capture. This enables them to generate more acquisition growth, acceleration, and growth revenue opportunities for their marketing and sales teams.
Create hyper-personalized content
ABM is among the most popular trends in marketing, and it's important for marketers to know how their current content strategies are able to be integrated into this new method. content marketers can be hard to comprehend how ABM actually works. Jenny Magic of Convince & Convert and Jennalee Reiff from Springbox gave a crash-course on ABM in a recent presentation. They explained the key considerations, and what to expect for an effective implementation.
Understanding your ideal client's goals and pain points is the first step towards developing an effective ABM strategy. Creating content that aligns with these goals will allow you to provide a personalized experience, which will ultimately improve conversions. Content should be tailored to the needs of each account. It is crucial to trace the path of each user within the account. By doing this you'll be able see what types of content (and even individual items and pages) are most engaging for these people. This information can be used to improve the user experience for those with these accounts, displaying the most successful content.
The process of creating hyper-personalized content isn't easy but it's an essential step to increase the effectiveness of your ABM efforts. According to State of Marketing, 2023 83% of customers are willing to exchange their personal data for 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 manage the way your content is distributed, make suggestions for next steps and respond to events instantly. This tool can increase the effectiveness of ABM campaigns. It can't replace the need for multivariate testing or strategic planning.
The cluster and pillar structure is another way to hyper-personalize content. This lets you create a full piece that addresses the issue your targeted accounts face, and then connect it to other pieces that address specific aspects of that issue. For instance, a fitness tracker may have many advantages and common goals however, the manner in which different kinds of people use it can vary significantly.
Getting Sales and Marketing Aligned
Traditionally, professional services marketers focused on developing a linear sales funnel by using broad marketing campaigns that targeted large numbers of people in the hope that a few would convert. This strategy may have been effective 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 experiences or content that are customized to their particular requirements and issues.
The first step is to establish your ideal client profile. This is not as simple as creating buyer profiles, as you also need to look at the different types of solutions each customer is looking for and the best way to use them.
Once you've identified your ICP then, create a strategy for content that can be linked with each account across different channels. This could range from social media ads 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 ensure that your content is appropriate for each account and that you don't spend time or resources on the wrong audience.
A key step to take is to make use of the data you have on your best-performing 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 services industry or falling within a certain size. This information can be used to create targeted marketing campaigns for prospects with similar characteristics.
It's also crucial to monitor your ABM strategy's performance and make any necessary adjustments. If your target audience doesn't respond to your content, you might be able to contact them and find out what you can do to help move them further down the sales funnel. You can align your ABM strategy with your content strategies by following these steps.
Measuring the success
Account based content marketing is all about creating resources (videos reports, blogs, posts, and webinars) that are tailored and relevant to a specific persona or account. For example If you're focusing on healthcare organizations, your content needs to be geared towards their issues and concerns. This level of personalization doesn't just help with ABM but also helps build solid relationships with prospects and customers.
The best part about ABM is that it can be used at every stage of the sales funnel. In fact, it could be more effective than traditional lead generation if employed at the top of the funnel. This is because it will help you to identify and engage just a handful of accounts that are likely to convert, as opposed to trying to generate leads from an crowd that may not be interested in your product or service.
Although there is still a need for offline methods of building relationships like in-person meetings, phone calls and handwritten notes, the majority of customers today prefer digital self-serve and remote engagement. This is why it's crucial 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 C-suite executives who are difficult to reach. They often ignore mass emails, but are more likely respond to content that is relevant to their requirements and uses instances. ABM can also help you accelerate sales by enabling engagement with prospects at the most crucial stages in their journey, such as when they are pursuing solutions to solve specific business challenges.
Although ABM isn't around for longer than traditional marketing and sales strategies, it's fast becoming a top strategy for B2B companies seeking to enhance their performance and generate 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.