For all you skeptics out there that think I am just click-baiting you by using fancy B2B words, sorry to disappoint you but this is actually an “account” approach for B2C.
Why ABM is the “spear” compared to other “net” tactics
You fish with nets to catch small fish, you go with the spear to get that “big kahuna”. That’s what ABM is.
If you are a B2B tech company with above 50 employees chances are you are either doing some sort of account-based marketing or you are lacking behind.
If done right, ABM can bring massive results. And the idea behind it is pretty simple really. You target only certain companies that really fit your ideal customer persona, and personalize the entire customer experience from start to finish.
Snowflake, a data company that IPO-ed this year and is currently worth 83B is well known for executing really successful account-based marketing campaigns. So let’s take a look at them for an example of what they did right.
Personalized top of the funnel ads
Just by looking at the ad, it will catch your eye way more than anything random out there. How can it not, it has your company name there!
According to Snowflake’s stats this more than 5x-ed the number of people that would normally click on an ad.
Personalized content/offer
Getting people to click is one thing, getting them to a great landing page and keeping them on site is another. Snowflake managed to do both.
They had a separate personalized landing page or content piece (if the company was super, duper valuable).
If a prospect booked a call, amazing. If they didn’t but left their email for a content upgrade the email sequence was personalized as well.
For all non-B2B marketers, Snowflake is just an example. All the biggest and greatest in B2B do this. Here is the landing page Procurify used for their ABM approach:
This landing page is built to address *one person* at Procurify’s target prospect. Talk about personalization.
A lot of work? – Not really.
I know that this sounds like a lot of work but it honestly isn’t if you do it right. First of all, all ads were based on a template and it’s easy to just replace the logo automatically and make a ton of them. Clearbit has an amazing API that would return the logos of any given company automatically.
The only thing left is to personalize the landing page. If you are not a developer you can literally make a template landing page and then clone it, replace the logo, find and replace all mentions of one company with another, and then that’s it. You are done.
If you are not a dev though, some plugins for Shopify, WordPress, or WooCommerce can help.
Cool Nikola, thanks. But how are we going to do this in B2C?
To answer your question right away: By targeting followers of your competitors on Instagram.
Think about it, what is one account in B2B? It’s the employees of a given company. They all have something in common which (duh) is the company.
Now for D2C, we need to find something in common for a group of people that would catch their eye and we can use to personalize. Well, that’s an account they follow.
Use-case: Gymshark
(Gymshark is a placeholder for another company that didn’t want this to be revealed publicly)
Gymshark is an activewear brand based out of Europe. They approached us to get a list of micro-influencers to help with a certain campaign. We got to talking with their CEO “Nicolas” because I was super interested in how they cope with a super competitive space like that.
Especially because all companies use pretty much the same two things:
- FB Ads
- Influencer marketing
His reply was and I quote “Better FB Ads, that’s pretty much it”. But they wanted to go for micro-influencers with this campaign that are not following any competitor brands. Sure that made sense.
And then I asked the question: “But if you are better than your competitors, why aren’t we going after their market instead of trying to stay away from it?”
“I don’t know. Really why do we?” – The answer I got. To not prolong the story, one thing led to another and I pitched him the ABM approach outlined below that I had in mind.
Targeting competitor followers on Instagram
It’s easy for us to just scrape a competitor’s account and provide you with the email address of their followers. But not a lot of people know that they can do that. We explain how that works in detail in the article “Target Competitors’ Followers on Instagram”.
Again, not to bore you with details, but we can get the emails of people who follow your competitors. We also remove invalid emails, filter by geo, gender, age, etc, and validate the emails to make sure you are actually reaching out to your ideal customers.
From there, you can upload that list to a custom audience on FB, Twitter, Quora, Reddit, LinkedIn… anywhere really. The match rate is on average above 80% because typically the email that is associated with their IG account is the personal one they used for signing up.
Ok, we have the audience – amazing. What’s next?
Target Your Competitors' Followers
Personalized Ads
Well, it’s really simple from now because we can just copy and paste the same approach that works so mind-blowingly good for B2B for B2C.
You make personalized creatives for those followers something like:
How cool, right? For Gymshark, the ads were not this crisp but they were still personalized.
All of these big companies are able to do this because they know that most of the people seeing the ad will probably either drink coke or Pepsi + they have the luxury of spending a ton of money.
But you probably don’t. So we are not wasting a single eyeball in this campaign.
Personalized Landing Page
Again, copying B2B. On your landing page, you can have a landing page detailing all benefits that people would get from buying your product and not your competitors, reasons your company is better, etc.
If they buy your product amazing – personalize the first email to show them that you care and then just treat them like normal folks.
If they leave their email address somewhere but don’t buy – start a sequence asking them what they like better in the different product and genuinely try to get some intelligence out of it to help you long-term.
Scaling – you don’t need to personalize for competitors only
Let’s say that we are coke now. They are sponsoring events, working with other brands for self-promotion, etc. You can literally do this with anything in the world.
For GymShark an activewear brand, we did this with:
- Personalized ads for marathons runners they supported
- Moms that run (yes, we can get that using our extensive 70M DB)
- Fitness coaches
- … etc etc etc
You can personalize based on anything really as long as it’s something that you know those people feel strongly about.
And with a database of 70M people including profile categories, bios, the number of followers +28 more data points, I am sure we can help.
GET INSTAGRAM EMAILS
If you are interested in learning more about how you can get validated Instagram data, make sure to schedule a quick call with our team, where you can discuss the details related to your targeting.
