The term ‘Account-Based Marketing’ has been around for 20 years or more, but it’s continuing to experience increased interest. As with so many terms in marketing, it describes something that most businesses do anyway, but it’s worth a discussion.
As I’ve always understood it, Account-Based Marketing is a different approach to conventional broad lead generation. Instead of throwing stuff out there and seeing what enquiries come back, it involves identifying the best target customer organisations and then marketing to them in an individualised manner.
In other words, Account-Based Marketing is particularly useful for when the ‘customer’ is a group of people within an organisation. Rather than starting with a lot of names and finding the few prospects we need to talk to, we start with a few names and find a lot of prospective people.
If you’re thinking “Who doesn’t do this already?”, the technique is probably more sophisticated than you imagine. It uses automation to target a broader group of people within an organisation and to show them customised content.
For companies aiming at large customer accounts with protracted sales cycles, thinking about marketing in this way can offer many advantages. It can sound a bit woolly, but if you’re even slightly curious, there are a lot of decent guides and other reading material available online.