Great ABM Campaigns: What Did These Brands Do Differently?

Businesses are determined to derive the maximum value from their efforts. How can they spearhead their strategies toward the most promising accounts?

In the era of hyper-digitization, originality has taken a back seat. Every approach, which promises to be different, lacks authenticity and a voice that calls out to the masses. The essence at the base of almost everything entails a specific monotony.

It is prevalent in marketing.

ABM used to be a niche practice, but today it’s become a common B2B marketing strategy. Initially, the focus was only on leveraging this hands-on approach for long-term growth and a handful of accounts.

But with the increasing market competition and customer demands, different priorities were introduced in marketing. There was a pressing question as to why ABM was being used in the first place. We know the answer now – to create trust and a loyal relationship with the buying committee.

Modern marketing has a focused approach toward ABM strategies – one that is as narrow as it could possibly be – fewer but high-value accounts. It’s not about catching just any fish in the sea, but the ones with the highest conversion potential.

Overall, finding the key focus on which to base the strategies will always remain a forerunner.

The primary undertaking is not forgetting the lighthouse accounts and understanding the exact nuances to make the targeting more effective. Thus, a strategic ABM approach has helped curate user-specific content and segmented email marketing campaigns.

Marketing, at its crux, is about creativity and unique storytelling that offers significant value to those at the receiving end of it. This should be evident, not in the technical functionalities, but in campaign creation and execution.

It is where creativeness in marketing shines the most – across its practical application.

And some intelligent brands understand how this aspect is to be leveraged for their profit. From GumGum and Intridea to Snowflake and DocuSign, their marketing teams knew what should be done to gauge the attention of some of the leading companies.

But before diving into campaign strategies that worked for these brands, why not outline the basics of the know-how of effective ABM?

The Purpose Behind Running an ABM Campaign

If we wish to understand a single point, we can say that – because, according to Salesforce, B2B organizations with a robust ABM strategy have reported 38% win rates and 24% revenue growth.

While these stats facilitate brands to implement ABM in their marketing plans, is it as easy as just going ahead and implementing one? Not quite.

It requires in-depth research and planning on the marketers’ side to create a workable strategy for a brand.

Marketers have noticed how attention-deficit users have become. It often ranges from a few minutes to an entire customer lifecycle, but it is what marketers seek. The objective of any campaign is to grab and maintain a prospect’s attention.

In the times of scrollable 10-second long short-form videos, this is not easy at all.

Imagine the complexity of grabbing an individual’s attention as well as swaying their opinions. Now, consider the B2B landscape and the group of key decision-makers.

How complex would that be?

Trust is that commodity that offers to tie the threads together. And this is often introduced through personalized marketing campaigns such as ABM. Once the prospect starts hearing out what the brand offers, a marketer knows the prospect is engaged. One has to take the first leap towards this initial stage.

Afterward, when the prospect has converted into a buyer, the objective is to stay on top of their mind. If a brand loses this connection with a customer, it’s possible to lose out on them as clients. Hence, the steps after a successful purchase also hold significant weight.

The reasons for developing an ABM strategy are ample. However, they might not always work or drive results like Intridea or Personify did with their campaigns. For the strategy to one, there should be a focus – treating a single high-value account as the target market.

Technically, it’s changing the psychology behind how, as a marketer, one approaches a prospect. Concentrating on one account to theoretically encompass the significance of the entire target market can make a difference.

It has to go hand-in-hand with the traditional and the modern lead gen techniques instead of totally rendering them aside.

A Glimpse at the Key Aspects of Great ABM Campaigns

To ideally align with other marketing campaigns, what does a 360-degree, all-inclusive, and tailored ABM tactic entail?

1. It focuses on high-value accounts – the ones with the maximum conversion potential. The initial stage is identifying the correct accounts and those willing to spend through comparison and contrast. Leverage your CRM platforms that offer a 360-degree view of all the accounts.
2. You’re using the channels with the highest engagement. Personalized storytelling that caters to the heart of the decision-makers paired with a suitable channel can drive a lot of prospects to the next step of the funnel.
3. There is no disconnect between sales and marketing. Often, these teams’ functionalities don’t often align with each other. The goals are divided or unclear. But for campaigns to work, both teams should streamline their objectives to offer a consistent experience across all touchpoints.
4. Your brand has a trust-based and loyal connection with the buyers. Buyers are also humans and not merely a revenue source. Hence, connecting with them is highly vital to form a long-lasting relationship.
5. There are performance metrics and roadmaps set in place. Marketing is not only about creation and execution. It’s also about what comes after. How else will the team know what is amiss? Sometimes, the strategies don’t work in one go, so refining them is necessary to witness results.

Because an ABM strategy cannot just work wonders on its own, it requires support and consistent reshaping. Especially when brands carry out a multi-channel approach to boost their campaigns’ reach, ABM must complement the others, increasing their effectiveness.

It increases the sense of urgency and significance on one account, as losing it would lead to losing the entire market standing. A sturdy ABM campaign will allow businesses to retain these accounts for a long time while elevating the generated revenue.

But first, decide whether ABM is right for the brand to avoid unnecessary waste of resources.

A couple of leading brands did this. They found out that ABM actually works for them and crafted effective and praiseworthy ABM campaigns, illustrating a significant boost in their revenue.

Five Global Brands with Great ABM Campaigns

GumGum

GumGum, a global leader in computer intelligence, has one objective – innovate digital advertising through AI-empowered solutions. It leverages AI to assess text, video, and audio and then derive insights from the data gathered. It allows them to help their clients place their ads in the best possible location.

GumGum had one goal in sight – securing a loyal partnership with T-Mobile.

T-Mobile is a subsidiary of the German mobile telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom AG, with 230 million subscribers across the globe. And engaging them would be no easy feat.

To engage T-Mobile and persuade them to a deal, GumGum researched their client vigorously. They found that T-Mobile’s CEO, John Legere, is enthusiastic about Batman. After gaining this information, their marketing team curated a tailored approach to gain the prospect’s attention, facilitating them to engage with GumGum. GumGum created several copies of a comic book with two superheroes – T-Man and Gums, aligning with the T-Mobile CEO’s interest.

The comic was titled “T-Man and Gums, the Girl Wonder, in the Data Knight.” Data Knight – owing to the movie, “Dark Knight,” which reflected how cautiously the marketing team at GumGum had researched and considered their prospect’s preferences – personalizing their initial engagement with T-Mobile. They sent over 100 copies of this comic to T-Mobile’s offices.

Their ABM campaign helped them land T-Mobile with ease due to hyper-personalization and unparalleled creativity in their campaign. By keeping the potential client, instead of themselves, as the leading hero, GumGum expressed the need for a trustworthy partner.

2. Snowflake

Snowflake is a cloud-based data storage organization. Being a scalable and cost-effective cloud data warehouse, Snowflake can scale its platform up and down to accommodate, integrate, and analyze data.

Hence, this made it possible to run several workloads virtually without any worries about resource contention.

Snowflake used to face a crucial problem – their advertisements and promotions didn’t receive enough click-throughs from their high-priority accounts. They had to transform their advertising campaigns to increase the number of clicks and significantly improve their conversion rates.

How could Snowflake make their prospects feel significant and not just one among many?

ABM came to their rescue. Their marketing team adopted a strategic approach where personalized ads were curated to resonate and engage their audience. The generic ad content was removed. Snowflake leveraged personalized and customized content to catch the accounts’ attention.

“We knew that to hit our targets, we were going to have to be laser-focused with the resources available to us,” said the Director of ABM at Snowflake.

They not only created personalized content that would remain consistent for similar accounts but rather developed customized attributes for each account they wished to target. Each target profile for them was unique.

How did they pull this off?

They did this by ensuring seamless alignment between their marketing and sales teams. Snowflake built a team of six dedicated marketers who simultaneously ran 500 one-on-one ABM campaigns. Their custom-made content, when perceived, seems to communicate with one potential client. It’s part of a library of such content published openly on their platform.

By not locking their content behind the gates, Snowflake’s initial step was to establish credibility. Now, 50% of their content is downloaded by their top 500 target accounts – only engaging those they want to convert – casting a narrower net.

Snowflake has. one could say, mastered the art of creating a successful ABM campaign.

3. Personify

Personify, a community experience platform, holds a digital suite of products meant to help non-profits and similar member-based businesses. Some of its services comprise membership management, event management, and productivity tools.

Amber Whatley, the first member of the demand gen team at Personify, discerned that the company required a dedicated ABM approach. The traditional tactics weren’t working out for Personify’s targeted market.

With an extremely limited budget, Amber and her team could only target specific fishes in the pond. Any alternative deemed impossible. So, the primary step was to align product marketing and sales to help find the ICP, considering their annual revenue and staff size and deciding the threshold.

This gave them a priority account list to target within the ICP. After this, they outlined the key segments and the personas within the buying centers. The next significant step here was to create personalized experiences for the buying committee. It must also be aligned with each persona’s positioning in the buyer’s journey.

The marketing team at Personify curated digital ad campaigns tailored around the sales funnel stage, persona, and company size, among others. It refined its ABM strategies to create brand awareness and boost engagement.

By tailoring a well-structured ABM campaign, Personify developed convincing arguments which appealed to the key personas. How? Marketing would discern the content each persona engages with and communicate this to sales. Sales would introduce topics the personas previously interacted with during their negotiation stage.

Collating accurate data about their audience and creating personalized messages improved their revenue stream by a large margin.

This is why Personify’s ABM campaign is one of the best.

4. DocuSign

DocuSign is a leading platform for streamlined digital agreements and signatures. With everything becoming digitized, an increasing number of businesses are sealing contracts online. And DocuSign is their go-to for a legally binding and seamlessly functioning platform.

DocuSign illustrated how ABM works better than prevalent conventional methodologies. They wanted to boost sign-ups on their gated content and the conversion rates of their high-value accounts. Additionally, there was an increasing need to drive traffic and boost CTRs for their ads.

With accounts spanning six diverse industrial domains, how could they manage all the leads?

DocuSign boosted its marketing campaign with a robust inbound strategy.

Their strategy was well-thought-out and straightforward – launching a creative display ad campaign to over 450 accounts. The ads comprised very specific visuals and messages, including whitepapers, case studies, and testimonials.

The crux of their ABM strategy was a tailored approach – from websites to logos and ads curated for each industry and across different buying stages. These were then integrated into their online platform to help reach the targeted accounts.

DocuSign’s ABM campaign was backed by content optimization and data analytics to ensure that the content reaches the right accounts at the ideal time. Through well-outlined web analytics, they were able to refine their content.

The results? A 22% increase in the sales pipeline, a 59% engagement rate, and a drastic decrease in bounce rates from 39% to 14%.

5. Intridea (now acquired by Mobomo)

Intridea is globally known for curating intuitive and straightforward web applications for optimized user experiences. They offer diverse web products and services for startups as well as enterprise clients.

Intridea’s executive idea behind this billboard campaign was simple – to catch the attention of one of the biggest advertising firms, Ogilvy & Mather. This unconventional campaign targeted a single account but a quite high-value one.

This customized billboard was set up near Ogilvy’s Manhattan office and challenged them to hire Intridea. After all, only a giant billboard would engage an advertising giant, isn’t it? The billboard had one personalized message “Ogle this, Ogilvy” with a URL leading them to Intridea’s cofounder’s profile, hoping the former would request a meeting.

This not only highlighted Intridea’s creative brilliance but also made them stand out among its competitors. And obviously, their campaign didn’t go to waste.

Intridea received a call from Ogilvy’s office to arrange a meeting.

What did we take away from these ABM campaigns?

The key takeaway here is sometimes traditional marketing means (with a modern twist) do contribute significantly to marketing efforts. It doesn’t always have to be a billboard, but dragging someone’s attention from the screen is a feat. And with the right advertising tactics, it wouldn’t be difficult to engage an account – be it offline or online.

As the great ABM campaigns outlined above, meticulously planned and executed strategies can work wonders to generate ROI for a business. ABM marketing, in its own right, ticks the right boxes – from targeting high-value accounts and shortening the sales cycle to boosting ROI and adopting customer-centrism.

ABM is more than just a marketing trend.

ABM is no longer a business trend but a resource – a catalyst that can elevate pipeline conversion rates by over 14%, says Gartner. Implementing it with the right expertise can prove transformative for a business.

And in the long term, harnessing ABM with the dynamic prowess of intent data can prove beneficial for modern marketing in the long term.

We are told that this appeals to a nostalgic past where simplicity and generality were the only way. But in an age where users lack the child-like wonder of the olden days, we are desperate for something fresh and unique.

We want to ask whether this is due to an exaggerated use of emerging tech at hand. But we are cautious – the answer might be an echo that we brought this upon themselves. And now we have to adapt and navigate the gloomy waters.