Introduction
Thinking personalization only means adding someone's first name and company name to an email is like saying there's nothing more to the Beatles than "Here comes the sun."
Personalization is much more complex and subtle than that. It can range from adding a company's logo to a presentation to personalizing a whole page of your website based on someone's needs. It can also mean practicing Account Based Marketing (ABM).
ABM is about hyper-personalizing your approach based on specific accounts. For example, let's say you're selling shoes, and you desperately want Lady Gaga to buy your new pair. With an ABM approach, you're going to gather as much information as you can about Lady Gaga: her shoe size, her favorite color, the style she usually wears… Anything to create the fullest profile on her. Then, with this information, you're going to send her hyper-personalized content based on all the data you've gathered.
Most likely, you're not selling shoes to Lady Gaga, but this works for any product or service you might be offering.
We spoke with Matt Neal, managing director at Differentiated, an agency specializing in ABM. He shared his perspective on why he thinks ABM is efficient as a strategy and how his agency used it to create award-winning content for Vodafone in Foleon.
"This work won us an award for best use of ABM in B2B marketing, which is a large, industry-recognized award in this country, probably the largest for B2B organizations."
Matt Neal
Managing Director, Differentiated
Who's Matt, and what's ABM?
As their name implies, Differentiated is an agency that's set to do things differently. Here's how they describe themselves:
"No one ever sets out to be average. However, we also know that it’s easy to just do something because ‘that’s how it’s always been done.’ We refuse to accept that good enough is good enough."
From this state of mind, you can understand why they'd choose to specialize in ABM. In fact, Matt explained that they actually specialize in a particular type of ABM:
"We focus on what we would consider to be the purest ABM, which is what we call one-to-one ABM. So that is about creating bespoke or personalized and customized marketing campaigns between one brand and another brand where your target audience would only likely be a small number, a handful of people within that target brand."
There is indeed a difference between personalizing and customizing your content. Matt explained that personalization means you understand the basic information about your target (name, role…, etc.). Customization means you change your content to match what you've learned about your target. ABM requires deep personalization and customization of content for target accounts.
Why choose ABM?
Overcoming the common challenges of a one-size-fits-all approach
While traditional marketing approaches may have been effective in the past, Differentiated recognized the limitations of a one-size-fits-all mentality, particularly when it comes to Account-Based Marketing (ABM). As Matt explained, the old way of doing things just didn't work for them, especially when you're working on big accounts.
"On less targeted wider scale programs, you're sort of looking for data; you're looking for leads, you're looking for data capture. With ABM, because the majority of ABM strategies are often focused on brands that are in some form connected to or customers in the first instance, you're looking to measure the impact on your relationships."
Rather than just chasing leads and data points, Differentiated knew they needed to focus on deeper, more strategic metrics like reputation, relationships, and revenue impact. They also needed a way to get specific information that would allow them to see if their outreach was being read. That kind of data isn't available in PDFs or PowerPoint presentations.
By stepping away from the traditional "batch and blast" approach, Differentiated was able to craft highly personalized and customized content that truly resonated with their target accounts. This shift in mindset and strategy was crucial to the success of their ABM campaigns, allowing them to demonstrate real business impact beyond just lead generation.
Quality vs Quantity
In general, getting started with personalization means you need to change your mindset. A strategy like ABM requires you to start thinking about quality rather than quantity. It's not about the number of likes or readers you're getting on your content. But more about the time spent on the page and the potential replies you'd be getting afterward.
The same applies to the way you measure the success of your campaign.
"With things like ABM, there are different kinds of measures, really. You don't really measure based on leads, you measure on the impact on your reputation and the impact on your relationships that you have and the impact on your overall revenue."
This search for quantity in traditional marketing can lead to false results. When you're only looking at the number of people who read your content but not the actual quality of these people, you cannot know if these are potential leads. You might have thousands of readers, but if they're all students in need of content for their thesis, then what's the point for you? ABM solves this hurdle by focusing on specific metrics that truly show the impact of the work you're doing.
How Vodafone generated value with ABM
Royal Mail is the national mail service in the UK. They realized that their business needed to change—quite significantly—because their traditional model of delivering mostly letters was becoming less relevant. People still send letters, but mostly at Christmas. Beyond that, the bigger business for organizations like this lies in parcels because everybody does things on Amazon or eBay or those types of organizations.
Vodafone is a large global organization with the technical capability to help the Royal Mail with this transformation. While Vodafone’s heritage is as a mobile phone provider, they are now very much a technology innovator. In fact, based on their investments and growth, they've made huge investments in fixed-line technologies, and they've been the top right Gartner Magic Quadrant for IoT for many years.
Vodafone was clear that they had the technology and capability to help Royal Mail on its transformation journey, but they needed to make Royal Mail aware of this and put themselves front and center for the opportunity to work with them.
So here's what Differentiated came up with.
A Highly personalized ABM campaign towards Royal Mail
When you try to reach a giant like the UK's national postal service, you need to be smart. Granted, Vodafone was experienced in working with ABM strategies, and so they had the necessary capabilities to succeed with this campaign.
"We kept this as simple as possible. The very first thing we did was all that research to get the insight we needed to understand how to approach Royal Mail with the right kind of story, both customized as in relevant to the brand but also relevant to the people we're targeting and also personalized."
After gathering all the necessary data, they created a multi-channel campaign plan. They leveraged social media, Foleon Docs, videos, and email marketing to reach their target.
Targeting the right contacts, they sent personalized Foleon Docs with different messages.
And what made this campaign truly special, is their 360° approach.
"We also had the opportunity to do some executive bespoke mail to the organization, and then we also targeted the overall group of people, which we didn't necessarily have the full connection with, through LinkedIn, some highly targeted type of messaging."
So, from LinkedIn to email to actual deliveries, Vodafone was completely focused on Royal Mail for the duration of this campaign.
"We use Foleon and digital content for the majority of what we do. However, there is still a place for more traditional, physical, personalized approaches, as they can be very impactful. The bespoke digital content is a Foleon Docs that tells the story of how Vodafone can help Royal Mail transform their business through technology."
And their efforts really paid off.
Open Differentiated's full case-study
The results: a successful campaign for Vodafone, an award for Differentiated
The campaign's success was pretty impressive in its financial impact.
"The activity resulted in a tangible return on investment of a confirmed pipeline created from several different areas within Royal Mail."
This substantial pipeline generation validated the effectiveness of their personalized ABM strategy.
The campaign's reach extended to the highest levels of Royal Mail's leadership, which is the ultimate goal when using an ABM approach.
"The new CEO asked for a meeting within weeks, and other senior stakeholders referred us to more relevant contacts." This stakeholder engagement opened doors for deeper strategic partnerships.
Beyond the financial gains, the campaign significantly enhanced Vodafone's standing with Royal Mail; they created a new perception of themselves.
"It significantly impacted their reputation during a time of change at Royal Mail and generated significant tangible return for them."
As for Differentiated, the campaign helped turn many people who were cautious of the approach within Vodafone's sales team into enthusiastic supporters.
“At the outset, some people were skeptical of the approach and how it would work, mainly because they had not experienced anything like it before. However, by ensuring that they came on the journey of development with us, they understood and could see what we were trying to achieve. In the end there was a complete reversal in attitude, such that senior salespeople within Vodafone were coming to us with ideas for how to communicate with their target audience. One even had the idea of buying an old post office box and demonstrating IoT technology with it!”
This shift in mindset ensured ongoing support and collaboration for future ABM initiatives.
Won award for Best Use of ABM
The campaign's success reached industry recognition, with the Differentiated team winning an award for best use of ABM.
"This work won us an award for best use of ABM in B2B marketing, which is a large, industry-recognized award in this country, probably the largest for B2B organizations."
This award validated their innovative approach to personalized ABM.
Foleon features that changed everything:
Throughout this whole campaign, Differentiated used Foleon to create engaging content that would resonate with Royal Mail's pain points. In general, as an agency, Foleon allows them to create bespoke content for each of their customers in unique workspaces.
"In terms of content and content delivery, Foleon is a core platform for us. It really is."
Matt shared how Foleon is the perfect platform for them to deploy their ABM campaigns across different customer accounts, especially thanks to its collaboration capabilities.
"We can enable the sales team to take that story in. We can also use it as a fully digital platform to draw a wider audience from that brand into that content. We use Foleon, and that kind of full digital content which is delivered heavily within ABM programs."
On top of that, Matt stressed how being able to track reader behavior within Foleon Docs was crucial for them to measure the impact of their ABM campaign.
Personalization within Foleon
As we had this conversation, we were in the midst of launching Foleon's personalization features. Matt explained how these features are ideal to support ABM efforts.
"The personalizer role is important to help with data hygiene. If you're able to make people personalizers, and they don't need to change the content, they know the name, your CRM problems don't necessarily have to be problems. While you're sorting them out, you can still get on and do this kind of stuff."
Throughout the conversation, he explained that one of the main challenges you can face when working with ABM is CRM hygiene. As in, you need to be able to rely on your data to deploy your campaign. With the personalized role in Foleon, you make sure that only the right person with the right data personalizes your content.
Finally, Matt added that Foleon's personalization capabilities would tremendously improve processes in an ABM campaign. By scaling content creation processes, Foleon makes it easy for creators to personalize their documents and send them to several contacts.
CTA: interested in the whole conversation? Rewatch our webinar: The Personalization Revolution: How Differentiated Creates Award-Winning Content with ABM.
