Guest Post By Renaye Edwards, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Digital Radish 

A recent addition to the Worldwide Partners global network, Digital Radish is the creative marketing agency for B2B brands at unforgettable moments of strategic change. 

Over the last few years, they’ve continued to gain notoriety and have won multiple awards for their numerous creative Account Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns. So, who better to give us the lowdown on this mysterious B2B art than their Co-Founder and MD, Renaye Edwards?

We asked Renaye to share her secrets to ABM success along with key lessons she’s learned along the way.

So what is ABM?

Account-Based Marketing is a marketing strategy that concentrates resources on a set of target accounts within a particular market. It uses personalised campaigns designed to engage each account, basing the marketing message on the specific business needs of that account. 

As Renaye explains:

‘ABM is a great way to cut through the noise and get your brand in front of the right people at the right time. Serving prospects with a personalised, highly relevant message isn’t always easy – that’s why using ABM frameworks is so powerful because it can turn intent into action quickly.’ 

And so, for those of you thinking your next campaign might just need to be an ABM one – here are four lessons straight from the expert. 

Lesson 1 – Assess how personal you go  

As mentioned, ABM is often highly personalised, with creative executions needing to be adjustable to the requirements of each account. And there are different kinds of programmes you can choose to run:  

• 1:1 ABM – which is highly customised to each account
• 1:few ABM – which is lightly customised for clusters of accounts with similar issues and needs
• 1:many ABM – which targets large clusters of accounts and reaches them with similar messages

The first thing anyone creating an ABM account will need to decide is how targeted to go. Renaye explains:

‘1:1 in our opinion is best reserved for customers. 1:1 is inherently expensive per account, and if your target accounts are not actively in-market for a solution then it is potentially wasted effort creating personalised offers. The reality is you are unlikely to have much intel about a prospect account to use for personalisation, unless you have had lengthy previous conversations with them or know someone on the inside. So, a rule we like to live by is, the more familiar with the account you are, the more personalisation you’ll need.’

Lesson 2 – Focus on culture, not just manpower 

One of ABM’s biggest benefits is its ability to align with an organisation’s sales team to form an effective, coherent way of reaching a B2B audience. But that takes the right mindset. According to Renaye, it’s all about identifying those salespeople who will buy into the campaign and what it can do for them.

‘The best ABM programmes we’ve seen are those where the marketing leader and sales leader have a great personal relationship. They go to the pub together, they have regular catch-ups and this good relationship cascades down their teams. Trying to convince unengaged, skeptical sales leads who prefer to use the same sales approach as they did 30 years ago won’t work. Build the programme around the best people.’

Lesson 3 – Patience is a virtue

To put it into terms for those more familiar with B2C marketing, ABM’s function works more like an awareness campaign than a promotional one. Its function is less about driving immediate sales and more about creating long-term consideration for the product once the target audience comes to need something of the like. 

Which is why, for any of you first-time ABM users out there, Renaye urges patience: ‘ABM is a long game. Deal cycles can be two years plus, and short-term results are often hard to prove, especially when there’s a small pool of accounts. So don’t expect to see too many results after three to four months. Ninety per cent of buyers go with a brand they already know – your job with ABM is to reinforce your brand rather than establish it.’

Lesson 4 – Focus on creating a powerful universal message first

ABM and personalisation are often discussed hand in hand (especially for 1:1 campaigns). When it comes to 1:few or 1:many programmes, personalisation can be a useful tool to show prospects that you understand their pain points and goals – especially when you have clustered accounts by sector, use case or challenges. 

But this can be tricky to achieve, especially when you start to scale it to 50+ companies and target prospects at an account level. Will one landing page in a 1:Few campaign personalised with the company name speak to all business lines, geographies and personas in the account you’re targeting? And let’s not forget, sometimes inaccurate personalisation is worse than no personalisation at all.

So, what works is having powerful creative backed by a strong universal message that can be scaled up and down in personalisation. This means you can dial back in a 1-many and dial it up for those gold 1:1 accounts.  

Over to Renaye: 

‘People can get quite purist about ABM, arguing that only 1:1 programmes that are personalised to individual people in the buying unit are “true ABM”. But that’s not the case. We’ve run all kinds of programmes over the years – 1:1, 1:few and 1:many – across the US and Europe, working with deal values of everything from £50k up to £200 million. The one thing they all had in common was a great unifying message and a clear creative concept.’

Learn more about Digital Radish and their award-winning B2B campaigns here.