Does ABM work? Case Study Details and Insights

“A primary challenge of ABM and B2B marketing is often not the number of leads, but more so the quality of these prospects.” These wise words written by my fellow Brainlabber are why so many B2B marketers are understandably hesitant to go all-in on ABM. Not having a backend sales integration is also often a major reason why wading into the deep waters of ABM can be scary. We had similar hesitations, but choosing to go all-in on ABM has paid dividends thus far.

Before we walk through the results, here’s a bit of background:

For over a year, we were only driving leads through Google Search and Facebook campaigns, while Twitter and LinkedIn were occasionally used. Looking at the typical lead gen KPIs, performance was above average, but we weren’t able to scale our paid efforts for a very niche education audience. This prompted discussions of moving digital media budget over to a programmatic ABM approach.
We selected Rollworks after vetting several ABM vendors. Due to tight seasonality deadlines, we basically skipped the onboarding process and started launching campaigns. Going into the first month, we knew we wouldn’t have Salesforce synced so we would need to find other ways to test the bottom-line results.
Our client’s marketing team collaborated with their sales team to come up with an A/B test roughly 4 months after launching the first campaign.
We’ve run nearly 150 campaigns over the course of 8 months. Some campaigns are targeting massive target account lists (TALs), others are small regional campaigns with smaller TALs and/or CRM lists. As you will see from the below results, even the smaller campaigns were worth the time and money.

A/B Upsell Test:

Scope: A/B tested a list of upsell accounts. Half of the accounts were randomly selected to be included in the campaign, half were excluded.
Spend: $100k – 94% prospecting campaigns, 6% retargeting across 10 campaigns
Campaign results
- Reach: 91% of TAL (roughly 700) saw at least 1 ad
- Site Visits: Of the 91% reached, 67% visited one landing page which resulted in nearly 4k unique visitors
- Engaged: 62% visited at least 3 landing pages
Sales Results: Compared to the control group, our client saw a 32% increase in sales contact activities for accounts that were part of the ABM campaign.
What we learned: Aside from proving that ABM does drive significantly more quality leads, we also learned that native ads drove more traffic compared to web display ads: 0.32% compared to 0.19%.

Regional campaign:

Scope: Targeted a very specific TAL in one state. The accounts had previously signed up for a pilot so this was effectively “stage two” of the campaign.
Sales Results: 20% win rate and over half a million in revenue for our client
What we learned: You don’t always have to spend a crazy amount of your marketing budget to impact sales results. This was one of the smallest campaigns we have run to date.

National Brand Awareness for Current Customers:

Scope: This was purely aimed at improving current customers’ product knowledge.
Spend: $250k – 77% web account targeting, 23% native/social CRM targeting
Campaign results
- 17.5 million impressions, 74k clicks
- Visitors: 55k unique, 17k engaged
- Reach: 90% of TAL (roughly 400) saw at least 1 ad
- Engaged: 75% visited at least 3 landing pages
What we learned: This was a large investment for a non-sales focused campaign. However, we learned that we could leverage an ABM platform to target the primary users much more effectively than the traditional PPC platforms (see below stats) we had previously run on, as well as other non-paid campaigns.

Overall Digital Media Impact

Across all campaigns, we’ve seen a drop in cost-based marketing metrics including an 80% CPM reduction and an 86% lower CPC since moving digital ad spend over to an account-based marketing strategy.