Account-based marketing helps a business reach out to high-value clients and build a stronger and more personalized relationship between them.
It is not a fixed method of how the campaigns need to work, but can be customized based on specific needs, to drive success.
There are three types of ABM marketing campaigns— One-to-One, One-to-Few, and One-to-Many.
Let’s take an in-depth, real-life case study of each type and how the companies attained success with ABM.
GumGum’s Comic Book for T-Mobile: One-to-One ABM
- GumGum is a contextual intelligence company that offers specialised innovative solutions for digital advertising.
- They primarily focused on winning the highly lucrative T-Mobile account, but T-Mobile was led by a highly visible and social media-savvy CEO, John Legere.
- It was a hard nut to crack him to seal the deal. So the team decided the best plan to target the Legere directly.
- The main aim of the targeting is to highlight the potential collaboration, which can benefit their unlimited data plan rollout using computer innovations.
Strategy Implementation
- GumGum instead of using the conventional outreach methods, used their creative team to develop a custom comic book with the title “T-Man and Gums”.
- This comic book featured Legere, himself as a superhero, aligning the narrative with T-Mobile’s brand culture, and his love for Batman.
- GumGum delivered hundreds of comic books to T-Mobile and their agencies.
- The book highlighted GumGum’s services and demonstrated their value proportions in an innovative and customised way.
Outcome
As a result of their highly personalised effort, the marketing campaign impressed Legere, who praised GumGum for their innovative approach through Twitter within hours. This directly led to a meeting, and securing a deal with T-Mobile.
Key Takeaways
- The one-to-one ABM campaigns can be highly risky and, in the same way, can be highly rewarding.
- For most companies, spending too many resources to just win over one account can be crazy.
- However, GumGum’s approach to T-Mobile risked it by targeting the passions and enthusiasm of Legere.
- The right plan at the right time and expense involved in customizing the comic book for him, and the influencers added a lot of sense in closing the deal.
- Scaling the approach more precisely is the key to attaining success in this one-to-one approach to reduce the long cycles, and quickly reach the audiences.
BlueBotics: One-to-Many and One-to-Few ABM
- BlueBotics is a leading autonomous navigation technology firm, and they wanted their propositions to be better known and understood within the industry.
- Their flagship products include ANT (Automotive Navigation Technology) which powers Automotive Guided Vehicles (AGVs), Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs), and Automated Forklifts.
- With growth as their primary goal, they adopted a hybrid ABM strategy combining scalable tactics with deep personalization.
Strategies Implementation
- BlueBotics used both the One-to-Few and One-to-Many approaches leveraging segmentation and personalization, through relevant content to each group, and tailored messages to the right account, at the right time.
- The combined approach helps in offering cutting-edge solutions, resonating with a wide range of prospects, by building trust in high-priority accounts.
- They used advanced data tools and identified 400 target accounts based on relevancy, company size, and the role of key decision-makers.
- By combining the efforts of both sales and marketing teams, the data were analyzed to shortlist 12 high-value accounts for deeper personalization.
Outcome
As a result, the campaign produced remarkable outcomes including.
- The generation of over $4.5 million in pipeline opportunities.
- Secure $1 million in closed-won revenue.
- Won big multi-national clients like Michelin, Toyota Forklift, ABB, Creform, and Yaskawa.
- They achieved a 100% engagement rate with the 12 one-to-few accounts, to close two deals.
- They also established approximately 160 new relationships through the one-to-many program.
Key Takeaways
This is a highly complex and time-consuming approach, that takes multi-years, to achieve the campaign goals, precise marketing efforts are crucial.
Orbit Media: ABM One-to-Many
Orbit Media is a digital marketing and web design agency that wanted to build ABM into its content marketing program to generate customers and prospects.
They plan to augment their highly customized and data-driven approach, promoting conversion rate.
Strategies Implementation
They identified the list of ideal prospects including the marketing decision-makers, and mid-sized companies using the tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and Lead Score, based on industry, company size, and job roles.
Based on the data insights, they sorted the top 100 manufacturing companies, based on the trends and best practices in UX design. They used the data in an invite for a digital webinar with the title “What the Top 100 Manufacturing Websited Get Right and Wrong”.
They promoted their webinar with a short, compelling video invite across multiple platforms such as LinkedIn Ads, Emails and more, They kept their landing page optimised with clear benefits, a strong call to action, and easy registration.
Outcome
The webinar attracted 150 highly qualified accounts, with 30% requesting follow-up consultations.
The presentations delivered actionable insights and instant reviews, describing practical and engaging.
Five new clients sealed a deal with Orbit Media, within the next three months, increasing the quarterly revenue by 20%.
It created a strong mark in the market, building trust and becoming a pioneer in the industry.
Key Takeaways
One-to-many AVM campaigns like this show that it doesn’t need a massive budget. The target accounts can be converted into clients by leveraging original research, targeted outreach, and high-value content.
The key to this ABM is to create content that is more relevant and actionable, which makes it easy for prospects to set the value of your offerings.
To understand the effectiveness of this case study, it’s helpful to review other Account Based Marketing Examples that showcase successful ABM strategies in different industries.
Conclusion
ABM is not a fixed algorithm that can fit all solutions. It is a flexible framework that can be tailored to meet specific business objectives. Being aware of the types of account based marketing will help businesses choose the right approach for their needs.
The one-to-one approach of GumGum’s ABM campaign is an example of highly personalised marketing for high-stakes opportunities. BlueBotics’ hybrid approach helps reach a wider audience and nurture key accounts.
Orbit Media’s One-to-Many content marketing approach shows that generating scalable success doesn’t need massive budgeting.
