There’s plenty of buzz around what businesses can achieve with successful account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns. ABM programs increase the number of created opportunities by 70%. Companies that leverage account-based marketing reported a 171% increase in annual contract value.
While these statistics are certainly inspiring on their own, it’s natural to want to pull back the curtain and see how these results are achieved. After all, the success of an ABM campaign is only as powerful as the strategy behind it.
Here are three account-based marketing examples backed by a well-thought-out plan and proven results.
What does it take to successfully reach your target market?
Every season, a large number of businesses send out holiday emails to connect with current subscribers. That means your holiday message designed to spread cheer and encourage engagement is competing with quite a few others — and often overshadowed by the noise.
In an effort to stand out, the software company Vidyard put a creative twist on the traditional holiday message: they inserted their audience in the story. This was achieved through a personalized video that leveraged the first name of the subscriber and offered sentiments of thanks throughout.
While Vidyard received quite a bit of positive feedback from the personalized email — in some cases from prospects who had stopped responding — the metrics speak for themselves. The email had a 35% higher open rate and a 157% higher click-through-rate than the industry average, and the video was viewed over 10,000 times in a matter of days with an average watch time of more than a minute.
And in several cases, the engagement didn’t end there. Prompted by a call-to-action to “regift” the video, more than 3,500 people created their own personalized holiday video to share with colleagues and clients.
Just as a library offers books in a variety of genres, a content library should serve the same purpose. Content pieces should be developed for different stages of the buyer’s journey, while also targeting the different buyer personas that you’ve defined through stakeholder interviews.
By creating a comprehensive library of high-quality content, the cloud-based data warehouse company Snowflake has the resources needed to create individualized ABM campaigns for high-priority accounts (in collaboration with the sales team). These connections were made via laser-focused Terminus ads that offer personalized messages and genuine content experiences.
The outcomes of these tailored conversations have been significant. Not only do Terminus ads account for 50% of the content consumed on the Snowflake website, but the targeted top 500 accounts (all of whom are targeted concurrently) are also downloading 50% of the content.
While account-based marketing has a lot to do with the role and lifecycle of prospects, it can also be centered around their interests outside of work. If you learn that a target account is particularly passionate about a movie or book (to name a few examples), you can leverage this insight for your ABM marketing efforts.
Take it from GumGum, a leading computer vision company. While on a mission to sell their technology to T-Mobile as the business rolled out its unlimited data plan, they saw that the CEO of T-Mobile mentioned being a big Batman fan on social media. With this new information, the team at GumGum collaborated to develop a comic book that tells the story of their product
After 100 copies of the book were shipped to T-Mobile and its relevant agencies, the CEO praised the work of GumGum and a follow-up meeting was scheduled just a few days later. What followed this account-based marketing tactic was a conversation that resulted in T-Mobile evolving from a high-priority prospect to a valued client.
While your target audience may seem too difficult to reach, strategic and creative account-based marketing campaigns like those highlighted above can prove otherwise. To learn more about what it takes to successfully reach your target market, visit this resource that highlights different ways to distribute content, using examples from our own client portfolio.
