Putting ABM under the X-Ray
You’ve heard what the industry is saying.
You’ve heard Earnest’s point-of-view.
You’ve even seen ABM compared with the wonderful world of dating.
Now, in the final part of our ABM blog series, we take a look under-the-bonnet (or ‘under the hood’ for readers joining us from the US) of three examples of Earnest chasing the humdrum out of Account Based Marketing.
All three take a more human, more tactical, and more accessible approach to ABM by following our ‘Three C’s’ approach: Credibility, Capability and Creativity.
Cast your mind back to 2012:
And…Earnest won the Best B2B Creative award for our ‘Google Maps for Business’ ABM campaign.
Google came to Earnest with a very specific task: to develop a campaign to drive sales of its Google Maps for Business software.
Working with one of the world’s most recognisable companies didn’t mean the campaign could take care of itself. We needed to put across an important business case, attuned to the needs of different audiences, while remaining humorous, informative and on-brand.
Unlike Google, you may not have heard of ACI Worldwide – but you’ve probably interacted with them. ACI powers payments and banking around the world, processing $14 trillion in transactions every day.
ACI’s Universal Online Banker solution enables banks to offer a tailored approach to online transaction banking – so customers can bank on their terms with an approach that works for them.
The campaign challenge was to deliver this message to those hard to reach senior decision-makers in large banks, with panache and emotive impact.
Our strategy was to develop a highly-targeted campaign, coupled with highly disruptive creative.
Rather than deliver just a very factual message, our aim was to resonate with the audience on an emotional level and deliver real cut through using subtle psychological triggers:
The charming creative was supplemented with characters whose faces were made from wooden block puzzles, adding an element of fun to an otherwise potentially dry subject matter.
The campaign was delivered across personalised email, DM and online channels, supported by highly-personalised content and data points to ensure credibility in the eyes of knowledgeable banking executives.
This final example demonstrates the amazing impact a big creative idea can have on channel partner communications – traditionally one of the most difficult B2B audiences to engage.
Canon are most famous for their cameras, but they’re also a world-leading manufacturer of printers and scanners. They came to us to help increase sales into small businesses.
What’s more, Canon never sells direct; everything goes through distributors and resellers – a notoriously time and attention-poor audience, constantly bombarded with sales messages from competing vendors.
So, how could Canon leapfrog the competition and convince resellers to stock and recommend its products?
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[Header photo: Umanoide on Unsplash]
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