The more it’s used, the more brands are realising: ABM is the real deal. As its highly-targeted, strategic methodology pays dividends again and again (and again), the results are speaking for themselves.
Such is its flexibility, it can often be difficult to pin down an answer to that question, and due to its nature, great creative ABM examples rarely get the limelight. Then there’s the issue of brains vs beauty. Many ABM campaigns rely solely on data and insight (the brains) to do the job, and though they often generate positive results, they’re not as effective as they could be. When a campaign uses these insights to inform emotive, inspiring work, it hits twice as hard.
That’s the kind of ABM campaigns we’ll be focusing on in this guide. Those with brains and beauty. We’ve pulled together a collection of ABM examples to truly inspire your next programme. Some of them are campaigns of ours that we’re really proud of. Others are from brands and even rival agencies that we’ve admired from afar. We’re not afraid to recognise great work when we see it!
So, let the creativity flow!
By: Digital Radish
Karhoo is the global ride-hailing network with its customers’ name on it – a white-label mobility exchange platform that connects online travel customers with millions of rides worldwide.
Charged with creating an awareness campaign that could position Karhoo as industry innovators, Digital Radish produced Karhoo’s ‘Passports to success’. A highly personalised one-to-one ABM campaign that successfully reached key decision-makers, and which centred around our passport-style DMs. These were not only bespoke and highly creative by design, but with their messaging, too, adopting a customer-facing tone to offer three key pieces of thought-leading advice, specific to the target’s business. Other tailored digital content – including bespoke landing pages – was served across touchpoints, keeping the conversation going digitally and furthering the sales conversation. With this combination of razor-sharp insight and rousing creative, Karhoo’s message was clear: we know where you want to go, and we can take you there.
A print and digital document product company who is world-famous for the former, but not so much the latter.
They wanted to reach CTOs in the financial sector to show them that they may be overlooking an important part of their digital transformation: document analytics. They came up with this one-to-few ABM concept.
By: GumGum
GumGum is an artificial intelligence company with a focus on computer vision. They pride themselves in solving challenging technical problems across different industries.
GumGum wanted an ‘in’ with McDonald’s, which is easier said than done. They felt their technological insight and analysis could be a real boost to them, and they needed a way to show it. So, to try and turn the Fortune 500 brand’s head, they created this intricate piece of one-to-one ABM which included sending top prospects a burger kit which showed them how GumGum’s technology represented the famous ingredients of a Big Mac.
By: Digital Radish
An award-winning marketing agency, based in London, specialising in complex technology brands. We’re also ABM specialists and the writers of this blog!
We believe in the magic of ABM, and we wanted to show it, engaging CMOs from some of the leading tech brands in the process. We needed an inspiring, show-stopping piece of content that practically showed our targets the benefits of our ABM programmes in a way that also showcased our creativity. The result was this: a highly personalised, one-to-one campaign that sparked a giant response.
By: Purple Agency
Avios, originally founded in 1988 as Air Miles, is a leading international travel rewards company, turning everyday spending into travel and leisure rewards. Avios has over 7.7 million members worldwide.
Avios wanted to generate new leads for its partner programme by highlighting the benefits of its new card linking feature. This enables Avios users to collect Avios points on a credit card of their choice – to senior marketing and loyalty directors at a number of targeted organisations. So, they created a one-to-many ABM campaign to get the job done.
By: Digital Radish
Applaud is a HR platform that unites a given organisation’s complex HR systems into one employee-friendly, consumer-grade experience.
Applaud was looking for one-to-one ABM accounts, and we identified the top 40 UK B2C employers for them to target. Through deep-rooted analysis and technographic research that combed personal LinkedIn profiles and public domain technology systems, Digital Radish identified accounts such as Sainsbury’s, who operated more than 25 different systems across their employee network. We then calculated the kind of monetary loss the cracks between these systems might create, and served each account with a highly personalised report emphasising the benefits Applaud could bring.
To these brains, we added beauty, turning the organisation’s average employee HR landscape into a concise, striking visual to show the complexity being thrust upon their workers.
By: Digital Radish
Unity is the world’s most popular Gaming Development Platform, whose real-time visualisation software is considered the most advanced 3D software around.
Unity wanted to move into new markets, and Digital Radish identified the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) sector as a natural fit. By interviewing prospective buyers and influencers, and analysing personas and market trends, we interpreted the thoughts of 1,000 architects across 135 countries to develop our whitepaper, ‘The Future of Visualisation’.
We then developed an ABM campaign with multiple touchpoints. Our whitepaper was the first of three DMs within this targeted one-to-many ABM campaign. The second two – a notebook which contained an augmented reality map to demonstrate the software’s capabilities, as well as a stylus pen with an offer of Unity 3D’s demo – provided creative flair while keeping the target engaged over time.
By: GumGum
GumGum is an artificial intelligence company with a focus on computer vision. They pride themselves in solving difficult technical problems across different industries.
T-Mobile was rolling out its unlimited data plan, and GumGum felt their computer vision technology could help. They decided to take their strategy straight to the top, analysing the T-Mobile CEO’s social media activity to discover a long-standing love of comic books – a love they utilised perfectly with this highly-personalised one-to-one ABM piece. The work was praised publicly by the CEO, and led to a meeting between the teams.
By: Digital Radish
Veeam is the leader in backup solutions with Cloud Data Management, securing business continuity for 375,000+ businesses worldwide.
Veeam wanted to crack open the UK enterprise market, securing its stake as a leader in data protection. And Digital Radish were all set, with carefully-created content and a bulletproof strategy to impress 10-15 key contacts in chosen accounts. Then Covid hit. An in-depth analysis of the market, a reimagined strategy, some freshly-created comms and newly-researched content later, we launched the programme mid-pandemic. The human touch of a DM was replaced with personal videos from the Sales Team introducing themselves and speaking to contacts’ new pain points, as we combined constant strategic re-evaluation with a cautiously inspiring message: Backup, Move Forward.
By: Digital Radish
One of Europe’s largest fleet telematics providers, Masternaut aims to provide sustainable mobility through connectivity.
They wanted to cut through to key buyers with the benefits of their cold chain telematics product. To do so, they tasked Digital Radish with creating a one-to-many ABM campaign strategy. The resulting campaign, ‘Discover The Power of Both’, certainly didn’t disappoint.
As you can see, there isn’t exactly one single way to make ABM work. And that’s what’s great – it can be whatever you want it to be, so long as you’re backed by solid research and the right people. But if in doubt, we advise you give it the brains and beauty test: does it have both? If it does, you’re probably onto a winner!
For a little more ABM inspiration, why not take a look at more of our case studies here?
Or, if you think you’re ready to step into the big wide world of ABM, then we say go for it (and good luck)! Hopefully, we’ll be writing about your work in future.