10 Excellent examples of Account-Based Marketing done right

With increasing digitalization, Account Based Marketing is trending in the world of marketing. Account Based Marketing is a marketing strategy where you set targets for top companies. It plays an important role in increasing the revenue of business-to-business sales. Next, ABM increases the chances of profit in your business by ruling out the unqualified leads that are not fit for your business. Thus, with the help of ABM strategies, you can personalize your targets, saving your energy and time from the wrong targets. 

Furthermore, you can remove the less-valuable companies at the very early stages of your planning. And can reach out directly to valuable targets without wasting much time advertising at the wrong places. 

What is Account Based Marketing

Account Based Marketing is about targeted marketing strategy. It is different from traditional marketing strategy. Further, it has revamped the traditional business-to-business. It starts by finding priority leads and recognizing accounts that fit your business the best. Next, it maximizes the revenue potential of the business you have established.

You can say that ABM focuses on individual business needs. Furthermore, it develops coordination between marketing and sales. In this regard, a business can implement three types of ABM account strategies: 

• One-to-One Marketing: Strategic ABM
• One-to-Few Marketing: ABM Lite
• One-to-Many Marketing: Programmatic ABM 

Ten Excellent Examples of Account-Based Marketing 

Accounts Based Marketing Strategies play an important role in efficiently growing the revenue of a business and reducing unnecessary costs of advertising here and there. They work directionally from the very beginning reaching out to their target accounts. The successful implementation of Account Based Marketing involves many factors. It requires having a clear vision of your targets. Your approach to the campaign matters as well. There are various companies that have successfully executed the ABM strategy for their business growth. 

ABM involves identifying the target audience and creating a customized campaign for them. The success of Account Based Marketing revolves around recognizing your highly personalized targets and then engaging and connecting with them. Further, it helps to increase your economic profits by increasing the flow of customers. 

Some excellent examples of Account Based Marketing done right can be stated below: 

1.  GumGum 

GumGum, an applied computer vision company, is an epic example that implemented ABM strategies successfully. The company wanted to land T-Mobile as a client. Firstly, they researched T-Mobile CEO John Legere, who was very active on social media. Thus, they came to know about his personality and his likes and dislikes. They realised that John Legere is a huge fan of Batman. Secondly, GumGum utilized this information tactfully and personalized it by publishing a comic book with Legere as a Batman-esque hero, T-Man, and his sidekick, Gums. And both of them together save the city from bad cell phone services.  

Thus, GumGum created a personalized Account-Based Marketing Strategy that helped it to campaign successfully for T-Man. Further, Gum’s image-recognizing marketing technology helped him to land T-Man as a client successfully. Not only GumGum landed the deal with T-Man, but it also gathered free positive social media exposure. Thus, in this way, they used the information about their target to build a personal connection and crack the deal. 

2. Snowflake 

Snowflake, a data warehousing company, presently is running approximately 500 Account Based Marketing drives. And each one of it is working for highly personalized target customers. Snowflakes started with working and engaging highly targeted customers and their customized content. And this highly specific targeted approach helped the company to flourish due to successful interactions with the target account. Further, they came up with high-quality content keeping in view its target account.  

3. Robin 

Robin is an organization that specializes in the sale of software for the scheduling of conference rooms. And it offers software tools to its customers that help them to keep their teams organized. And the company rightly implemented and executed Account Based Marketing to increase its revenue. It successfully executed ABM by showing beautiful pictures of the office spaces of its established customers. It was possible because they had an idea that their target accounts needed beautiful and organized office spaces. Hence, it appealed to this desire of its target account and increased the business revenue. 

4. Datanyze 

The successful Account Based marketing of Datanyze helped them to approach their targets directly. Datanyze, in order to promote its integration with Marketo, directly mailed and approached Marketo users. Datanyze sent personalized emails to Marketo users to understand how it could be more beneficial. 

5. Personify 

Personify coordinated its sales and marketing teams to discover and identify its target customers. They defined their ideal client and through this, they were able to identify high valued-account and personas for their business. Moreover, Personify is equipped with audience data to use as vital marketing material. 

Then, they rolled out various digital campaigns targeting their customized targets by appealing to their specific goals. With a successful ABM strategy, Personify was able to increase brand awareness and audience engagement. This helped in the growth of their business. 

6. Roll works 

RollWorks displayed one of the most creative and original ABM strategies. It concentrated on Tier-II & Tier-III customers in its conversion funnel, and it did so by using the traditional technique of direct mailing. They identified the accounts that had not progressed for 35 days & then mailed a “Door opener kit” to the account holders in question. The package included a notebook with a checklist of the procedures they needed to finish before moving on.  

Additionally, it included testimonials from previous customers placed every few pages throughout the document. It provided further explanation of the benefits of utilizing the full-suite package that RollWorks offers. They were successful in closing a whopping 41% of the deals. 

RollWorks’s experience demonstrates that ABM can be successful even when applied to Tier-II and Tier-III accounts. Assuming this is the case, you will have to layer the content effectively with the marketing campaign that is already in place. 

7. Salsify 

A unique method to ABM was utilized by Salsify. They intended to host a  roadshow in New York City, and they invited representatives from companies such as Johnson & Johnson and Google to give speeches at the event. During this time, their marketing department began using social media in an attempt to engage with the people they were trying to reach. After following up with targeted advertisements and emails, they handed the control of the situation over to the sales staff. Within the first two hours, they were able to successfully close a number of accounts thanks to the collaborative approach taken by their sales and marketing teams. Furthermore, they achieved a conversion rate that was 22% higher than their target. 

This demonstrates that the ABM strategy, which utilizes multichannel and collaborates between the marketing and sales teams, can bring results that are better than expected. 

8. Intridea  

It is a very dangerous move to take in a marketing campaign for a company with an approach that is confrontational to the target audience. If you are unsuccessful in imitating one of the examples that came before you, you run the risk of being disregarded or forgotten. However, if you try to capture the attention of a prospect by taking a shot across the bow & you miss, they may remember you, but not in a positive way at all. 

On the other side, an assertive approach can occasionally capture the attention of a large client who is difficult to contact, particularly if an audience is developing a buzz around the subject of whether or not they would reply. 

Intridea’s web developers and designers were hoping to secure a job with the advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather, so they purchased a billboard right across the street from their headquarters in Manhattan to promote themselves to the company. The simple message “Ogle this, Ogilvy” was shown in white writing on a background of brilliant red on the billboard. Below the message was Intridea’s emblem and a URL. 

Intridea was able to capitalize on the risk it took. They received a call from the CEO of Ogilvy to set up a meeting.  

9. DocuSign 

DocuSign is a company that provides solutions for managing electronic signatures and transactions. The fact that this company’s target audience was comprised of six different sectors posed the greatest obstacle that it needed to overcome. And it made use of the ABM strategy in order to offer its customers a more personalized experience while simultaneously driving traffic. It built content targeting and segmentation capabilities directly into its digital platform. There were six different industries that were targeted, and the visitors were each asked a set of questions to determine which industry they belonged to. After analyzing their responses, DocuSign provided them with industry-specific messages, testimonials, images, and peer logos. Their customers’ content offerings were segmented and adapted, which led to a 22% increase in the size of their sales pipeline.

This strategy has the potential to be quite successful for any B2B company that caters to clients in a variety of sectors. 

10. LiveRamp 

LiveRamp is an established name in the field of identity resolution service providers. They demonstrated that the hyper-targeted ABM is significantly more effective than comparatively broad marketing campaigns that are centered around making sales to as many people as they can. Several Fortune 500 companies were able to improve their marketing with the assistance of LiveRamp by utilizing multilevel and multichannel strategies. 

However, their primary strategy is to maintain an intense concentration on the target. When they first started implementing their strategy, they made a list of only 15 high-value clients, and in just four weeks, they were able to convert 33% of those clients into customers. They saw a 25-fold increase in the lifetime value of their customers over the course of two years. 

The most important thing to take away from LiveRamp’s campaign is the lesson about locating the most valuable accounts. This is the initial step that must be taken in order to run an effective ABM campaign. The subsequent action would be to plan appropriate strategies. 

Advantages of ABM 

The idea of ABM is clearly not new, and neither is the reaction from many businesses that are unwilling to change their status quo. Both have been around for quite some time. Change management has a number of obstacles, yet, this targeted sales and marketing technique presents a number of advantages that more than outweigh these challenges.

In the process of transitioning to an account-based strategy, your company might anticipate seeing the following benefits of account-based marketing (ABM). Let’s look into it. 

• Increased Productivity: Without ABM technology, it is practically difficult to utilize this kind of advertising strategy. ABM automation enables you to create a procedure once & then scale it across multiple campaigns, enabling your marketers to achieve more with fewer resources and manage far more accounts per individual. Automation makes media buying, modeling, ad targeting, and upselling significantly more efficient. 

ABM also boosts efficiency by concentrating on the important accounts that generate the most income and return on investment. If a user reaches a particular threshold where it is not valuable to continue marketing to it, you simply stop doing so. Time and money are your most valuable assets, and account-based marketing improves both. 

• Better Reporting: Since ABM is a focused method, it will leave you with fewer metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor. When you focus on a more manageable number of accounts, it is much simpler to not only set goals but also evaluate whether or not you have achieved those goals. In addition, the comprehensive plans you drew up at the start of your promotions make it simple to monitor your advancement in various areas. 

One of the most significant advantages of using account-based marketing is the volume of information that can be gathered. Your C-suite will remain pleased with you if you are able to establish a direct connection between the campaigns you run and the revenue that is in the pipeline. 

• Less Waste: ABM enables marketers to stop making standard sales pitches and instead concentrate on the essential requirements of their most valued clients. Because of the nature of ABM, marketers are able to target market programs that are clearly improved for targeted accounts. This enables marketers to concentrate their funds more efficiently and reduces the number of resources that are wasted. 

• Improvements in the Coordination of Marketing and Sales: Because the marketer’s mindset will be similar to that of the salesperson, account-based marketing will bring your strategies for sales and marketing and teams into alignment.

For instance, the ABM marketer will be required to think about potential accounts, as well as how to target customers, how to generate appointments, and, most importantly, how to generate revenue. 

• Simpler and more efficient lead distribution system, including account manager knowledge: The process of lead routing & assignment can be made to be more direct if account managers are assigned to certain regions, industries, or individual accounts. This makes the leading assignment automation in CRM systems such as Salesforce easier to use. Also, it enables account managers to become specialists in the accounts that fall under their purview. It also reduces the administrative time that would have been spent assigning leads, which frees up the sales rep to concentrate on increasing revenue. 

•  Give your focus and care to the key accounts: Your marketing and sales teams will be able to give high-value prospects the appropriate amount of care and attention if you implement an ABM strategy. It will work out in your favor in the long run if you give these potential customers excellent content. It is hoped that these accounts will wish to become a part of your customer base and will assist in spreading the word about the value that you provide. 

• Track how much money you are making off of your investments: When you use account-based marketing, it is simple to calculate the ROI for each individual account that receives your efforts, resources, and time. This is useful since it enables you to determine whether or not particular accounts that you invested in were suitable for your company. 

After that, you’ll be able to keep those accounts by treating them well over the long term, as well as identifying and going after accounts that are similar to them in the future. Utilize that data to advance your approach in the event that your ROI demonstrates that the ABM strategies you implemented were successful. 

Conclusion 

Account Based Marketing Strategy works as an effective method of business that involves personalized communication and increased engagement with the targeted account. Further, it shortens the sales process by coordinating between the sales and marketing departments. Instead of reaching out to different targets, it reaches specific targets for maximum advantages. Furthermore, ABM is about recognizing high-valued accounts and the process starts with collecting the required data to run a successful drive. Equally important is that it brings high returns.