Inverta’s murder mystery reached 18% of their target accounts

Let’s not do Yet Another Whitepaper Nobody Sees (YAWNS)

If you’ve been in marketing long enough, you probably remember how account-based marketing (ABM) swept onto the scene in the mid-2010s. So young. So fresh. So new and full of promise! This was going to change everything. Nearly a decade later, it doesn’t feel like all that much has changed. Companies are still measuring “marketing qualified leads” (MQLs) over pipeline and arguing over sales and marketing misalignment. What happened?

Inverta knows this conundrum better than most—an elite, woman-owned growth marketing agency that has, among its many success stories, a plethora of ABM campaigns—they know that ABM has the potential to drive incredible results. But they’re also very aware that ABM is frequently misunderstood, watered down, and not implemented in the way that it can be the most effective.

They wanted to make the case to their audience that ABM is still an incredibly effective strategy—and actually, more necessary than ever in our current moment.

They even had a meaty ebook worth of insights to back it up (plus all of the juicy goodness living in their founders’ brains). But everyone they talked to agreed that an ebook wasn’t the right play. Who wants to read another ebook on ABM? It’d be Yet Another Whitepaper Nobody Sees (YAWNS*).

Because Jessica Fewless, VP of Marketing and Partnerships, knows what she’s doing, she posed these most delightful words to us creatives at Fenwick: What would you do instead?

What we came up with might have struck fear into the heart of a lesser marketer—but it earned them far more respect and recognition than any ebook ever could (and even got nominated for an award).

Yes, we made it up. Yes, you can borrow it.

Kill Your Darlings

After noodling on Jessica’s question, we came up with three pitches. But, the morning of the meeting, we actually decided that we shouldn’t even pitch ideas two and three. We asked ourselves, how would we feel if Jessica selected one of those? We'd have less fun, readers would have less fun, and it'd work less well. So we pitched one thing—the best thing.

That best thing was a murder mystery.

Here’s the idea behind it: Everyone talks about ABM, a strategy that was the darling of the 2010s. But few succeeded. It was an Emperor’s New Clothes situation. Secretly, everyone was whispering about whether it was actually still working. We suggested to lean into that. Amplify it. Poke it! Do the most marketer-ey thing possible: Call the whole affair dead. Then, explain how it can work by examining all the ways it didn’t, and validate their frustration.

All those means of failure became suspects, and this became a murder mystery à la Murder on the Orient Express.

This idea didn’t come out of nowhere—84 percent of the U.S. population regularly engages with true crime content (and it’s one of the top podcasting genres), so we figured there was a pretty good chance there would be at least some overlap with our marketing audience.

As it turns out, our hunch was right, but it would take some validation to get there.

From a hunch to a suspect list

The team's initial reaction was, this sounds way fun, but what if it's hokey? We felt certain it could be both fun and serious; entertaining and informative. So we produced a first look and developed a cast of characters. We promised if it went off the rails, we could always revert to writing the white paper.

Inverta’s co-founder, Patrice Greene, decided to tease the story at a field marketing event to see how other marketers would react. We built the deck and awaited the response with bated breath.

We also ran our samples past a trusted group of marketers and network connections to get their take.

The response was overwhelmingly positive. And Patrice’s test? It went swimmingly. “This was the most fun I’ve ever had doing a preso,” Patrice reported back. With that glowing endorsement, we were sure this was the right campaign—and we were free and clear to continue crafting it.

Gathering the Evidence

Because we were able to leverage Inverta’s deep expertise on ABM for this series, we had the substance we needed very much covered. You’ll notice that Who Killed ABM? is peppered with charts, questionnaires, templates, and real-life customer case studies—it’s all the first-hand knowledge that Inverta has accumulated over many years of doing this. That’s the real value of the series.

Now, we just needed to take that insight and turn it into a story. This included not only written chapters for each “suspect,” but a whole immersive experience, including a landing page, emails, LinkedIn posts, suitably spooky graphics—even an active tip line where people could leave voicemails explaining their pet theories (yes, really).

With their profile pictures changed to shadowy silhouettes and the launch plan in place, Inverta was ready to launch. But would their audience find their marketing caper as intriguing as they did?

The Post Mortem

In short, it was a resounding success. A mystery to be solved created the perfect framing device—creating fresh intrigue about a topic that’s already been written about to death (pun very much intended).

Inverta reaped all the benefits they wanted—more LinkedIn followers, more engagement from their target accounts, more web traffic, and even rose in the rankings on Google Search for six key ABM-related search terms. Not too shabby.

More exciting than these stats though (and you know how much we love stats as marketers), are some of the intangible effects of this campaign. As evidenced by numerous love notes and off-the-record conversations, sharing Who Killed ABM? resonated with Inverta’s key buyers and also inspired them.

“We’ve gotta do a campaign like this” is a sentiment we heard over and over. This has helped with Inverta’s overall name recognition and brand awareness—helping them land more of the customers they want, who are already educated on ABM and how Inverta’s approach is different.

And this was just the first campaign—many more followed, as Inverta had its biggest year ever.

“It's hard to pick my favorite part about this work!” says Jessica. “Who Killed ABM? was obviously the standout, and really got us noticed by our audience. But the consistent drumbeat that followed with our Annual Planning and Always-On workbooks/campaigns helped us to take advantage of that newfound audience and engage them with meaningful content to keep Inverta front and center.”