10 Account Based Content Marketing Tricks All Experts Recommend
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Account Based Content Marketing for Professional Services
With account-based content marketing your marketing department and digital marketing agency can concentrate on a select group of clients or accounts. This allows you create hyper-personalized targeted content that talks directly about their pain points and describes how your product can solve them.
Effective ABM content must deliver the correct information to every stakeholder at the right time in the buyer's centre. This involves identifying the needs of each persona at different stages of their journey.
Targeting Specific Accounts
Unlike traditional content strategies that seek to attract and convert people who are not leads through broad marketing campaigns, account based content marketing focuses on interacting with specific accounts in a highly personalized way. By identifying the top account decision makers and understanding their pain points and objectives, marketers can create and provide content that is appropriate to the specific accounts. This can lead to a more productive interaction with customers and prospects, which ultimately leads to greater business outcomes.
Once you've identified the target accounts, the next step is to develop account plans for each account. This involves analyzing each account, determining which marketing channels to employ to reach the customers in the account should be engaging with, and what kinds of content are needed to encourage engagement and conversions. This could include thought leadership content, such as whitepapers or case studies. whitepapers webinars, case studies, etc.), retargeting ads, personalized experiences on websites and other marketing strategies that are customized to each customer.
This is why account based content marketing is able to yield a better ROI than traditional content marketing tactics. In fact 84% of B2B marketers who have integrated account-based marketing into their strategy report higher returns on investment than any other type of marketing effort.
Although it takes more effort and time to cultivate a smaller group of accounts, the advantages are significant for businesses who seek to increase their revenues across all stages of the funnel. This is particularly true for professional service businesses in which the quality of the prospects or customers is more important than how many people they can attract.
ABM is an excellent option for companies who wish to expand business with their existing customers over time, by establishing trusting relations. Research has revealed that it's more cost-effective to invest in keeping existing customers than it is to invest money trying to find and convert new customers.
Combining ABM with inbound marketing strategies can maximize the impact on content marketing. Through an array of pillar content, retargeting and lead capture landing pages, marketers can offer more value to potential customers at all stages of the buying process. This allows them to generate additional revenue opportunities through acquisition, acceleration and expansion for their sales and marketing teams.
Create Hyper-Personalized Content
ABM is a hot trend in the field of marketing. It is crucial that marketers understand how to adapt their strategies for content to this new approach. But it can be difficult 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 talk. They outlined the main aspects to consider, and what to expect from an effective implementation.
Understanding your ideal client's needs and pain points is the first step to developing an effective ABM strategy. Producing content that aligns with these goals will allow you to deliver a more personalized experience, which will ultimately improve conversions. Content should also be tailored to the requirements of each account. It is therefore important to track the journey of each user within the account. This will allow you to determine what content (and specific pages and items) is most engaging for your target audience. This information can then be used to improve the user experience on your site, showing top performing content to people who are on these accounts.
It can be difficult 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 respondents are willing to provide their personal information in exchange for a more personalised experience.
AI processing of real-time data is one method to create hyper-personalized content. This will help you determine how your content is distributed and provide suggestions for the future steps and react to events instantly. This tool can enhance the effectiveness of ABM campaigns. It is not a substitute for the need for multivariate testing or strategic planning.
The pillar and cluster structure is another way to personalize content. This allows you to create a a comprehensive piece of content that describes the issues that your target accounts face, and then link to other pieces that focus on specific aspects of the issue. For example a fitness tracker could have many common goals and benefits however, the manner in which different kinds of users use it could vary significantly.
Getting Sales and Marketing Aligned
Professional service marketers have traditionally focused on creating an efficient sales channel by using broad marketing campaigns that appeal to large groups with the hope that a few of them would convert. This strategy may have worked when B2B marketing employed a more broadcast approach, but it is no longer effective in today's Account Based Marketing strategy. Instead of trying to guide all leads through the same stages of the process, you should focus on the most valuable leads. You can do this by providing them with content or experiences that are tailored to their particular needs and challenges.
The first step is identifying your ideal customer profile (ICP). It's not as easy as creating buyer profiles, as you also need to look at the different types of solutions that each customer is looking for and the best way to use them.
Once you have identified your ICP, the next step is to create an effective strategy for content that is connected with these accounts across different channels. This could be anything 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 help ensure that your content is relevant to each account, so that you don't waste time and resources trying to reach the wrong kind of audience.
The most important thing to do is to use the data you have on your best-performing clients. By looking at your previous customer information, you will be able to determine what positive characteristics they have in common, like being in the financial services sector or being within a certain size. This information can be used to design targeted marketing campaigns targeting similar potential customers.
Additionally, it's important to track the performance of your ABM strategy and make adjustments as needed. If your targeted account isn't responding to your content, you may be able to contact them to see what you can do to move them along the sales funnel. You can integrate your ABM strategy with your content strategy by following these steps.
Measuring Success
Account-based content marketing is all about creating resources (videos reports, blogs, posts and webinars) that are personalized and relevant to a particular persona or account. If you're looking to target healthcare organizations, for example your content should be centered around their issues and pain points. This personalization aspect is not only important in ABM however, it's a great way to build strong relationships with your potential clients and customers.
The most appealing aspect of ABM is that it can be utilized at any stage of the sales funnel. In fact, it can be even more effective than traditional lead generation when used at the top of the funnel. This is due to the fact that you can identify and engage with a small number accounts that are more likely to convert rather than attempting to generate leads from a population that might not be interested.
While offline methods like phone calls and meetings in person, or handwritten notes are still efficient, today's buyers prefer digital self-service and remote engagement. It's crucial to provide the right content at the right moment and using the channel they prefer.
ABM is especially effective for engaging hard-to-reach C-suite executives who are usually skeptical of mass-email campaigns, but are more likely to engage with content that addresses their needs and use cases. ABM can also help you shorten your sales cycle by allowing you to engage with prospects at the most crucial stages in their journey, for instance when they are researching solutions to address specific business problems.
Although ABM isn't as well-known longer than traditional marketing and sales strategies, it's fast becoming the most popular strategy for B2B companies looking to increase their efficiency and generate greater 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.
