3 Attention-grabbing ABM campaign ideas

What does it take to capture the attention of a target buyer?

I’ll tell you one thing; a generic email or boring display ad won’t cut it. For account-based marketers, one creative idea can be just the thing you need to get a foot in the door. Once you’re able to capture the attention of the influencer at your target accounts, your ABM strategy can kick into high gear.

We looked for some of the most creative and attention-grabbing campaigns out there. Here are three marketers sharing their most successful campaigns to jump-start your brainstorming:

Try direct mail — but hold back the goodies.

Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing tested big-ticket items in a direct mail campaign to reach executive targets. He says, “We sent two-day packages to executives in advance of a big conference. The package was an empty iPad box. We wrote in the direct mail to come by our booth to pick up the iPad. Most executives came by just to compliment us. It worked.”

Personalize your experiential marketing

To get in front of target accounts in the retail market, ExactTarget identified the 100 fastest-growing retailers from an Internet Retailer report and had team members visit the stores and monitor any follow-up engagement from the brands to understand the customer experience. ExactTarget not only created an industry report, but customized it to show how each of the target accounts compared to its competitors. The sales team was armed with customized data — and it’s hard to ignore data about your brand — rather than a generic report and used it to successfully get meetings with the brands’ CMOs. Says Kyle Lacy, “We were saying, ‘Hey, we have a report card on how you interacted with us over 30 days, and guess what, we have report cards for all of your competitors as well. Would you like to chat about how you could change your customer journey for the better?’”

Bring your buyer back to the good ol’ days

Rapid7 tried an old-school throwback in its campaign for a new product launch and sent View-Masters to target buyers, with photos promoting the instant detection response product. Says Allison MacLeod, “I think it was creative, it was clever, it was a little bit different, it had a bit of nostalgia to it as well. We got a lost of great responses, not only from what it did to help open doors for reps, but even just from a social perspective, from people saying, ‘Hey, if you’re going to send me something, send me something cool. And this is really cool.’”

While these ideas focus on one aspect of the campaign, remember that successful ABM campaigns cross many channels. You should plan to target your accounts via multiple touchpoints, whether that includes direct mail, personalized content, retargeted ads, social media messages, email, sales calls, or something else.

What’s your most successful ABM campaign? Share below.

This post originally appeared on the Metis Communications blog.