3 Approaches to Humanize ABM

August 31, 2022

One of the biggest challenges with successful ABM implementations are ensuring your customer / prospect experience is orchestrated in a way that makes the journey, well — a human experience. And I don’t mean personalization. That’s a given. But I mean how do you build an ABM program that feels like a human experience. Yet, is built in an automated environment.

Here are 3 tried and true approaches to make your ABM feel more human.

Approach #1: Map a Day in the LifeAs B2B marketers, we all use personas to articulate our segmentation approach. But we have to look beyond describing our prospects to really understanding the shared experience each group has. Ethnographers have done this for decades in B2C marketing. And we need to follow suit in B2B marketing for our key personas.

And it’s not just watching what our prospects do, but how they interact with the business brands they see throughout the workday. We need to take this knowledge and apply it to all the touchpoints that your brand engages with on that key account. Even potentially your product experience should be unique to that account. This approach will breathe empathy into your ABM implementation.

Approach #2: Messaging Day-PartingOur experience with B2B brands need to be dayparted. That is, the messages that resonate in the morning may not resonate at 5PM when we are looking to wrap our day. Over the years working in B2B, I’ve seen so many few companies employ this simple tactic. It will immediately result in message recall and purchase intent lift by 10s of percentage points.

So think about your accounts, your target persona and how their days may be. Or, better yet, survey them and ask. And you’ll see the benefits of bringing day parting to your messaging. And then tactically drive this messaging variation framework across all your ABM touchpoints: advertising, landing pages, email marketing, etc. It will drive that incremental conversion you seek.

Approach #3: Affinity MarketingA large finance client of mine was evaluating various sports sponsorships to promote their brand. The conversation went like this. CEO, “So which league should we support?” CMO, “Let’s do the PGA. We like golf”. CEO looks at me and says “Great. Adam Let’s get it done.” My response, “Do we really know that our employees, customers, shareholders, partners prefer golf?”

Obviously, no one did the homework so we didn’t really know. And since we didn’t have an evaluation mechanism the benefit of the affinity of the sports league and our brand, decision making focused on what the c-suite enjoyed. But that may not be relevant to your employees, shareholders, customers or key accounts. Co-branding and affinity marketing is important to convey the subtleties of your brand. And the right partner can make or break that investment’s return. And if you hit me up in slack I’ll tell you the rest of the story.

The net, net of all these approaches is bringing some of the best B2C experience marketing strategies to the B2B marketing world. This is how we can humanize account based marketing. Because at the end of the day each executive we speak with is human. And we must infuse our ABM effort with humanity.

What are your thoughts on the key traits marketing leaders should have? Share your thoughts on Slack.