There’s a lot of noise out there on whether you should adopt demand generation or an account-based marketing (ABM) framework. In this blog, we’ll go over both strategies to help you decide what works best for your needs.
Demand generation is a series of marketing and sales programs that seeks to optimize the volume and cost of leads generated. Demand generation is an effective inbound methodology for B2B companies that have seen success with SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, etc., and are looking to optimize lead generation channels.
A company who is ready to take on demand generation likely has:
And is likely missing:
Demand generation is designed to increase the effectiveness of all inbound marketing activities. By shifting your focus to sales and marketing alignment, you start to focus resources on generating high quality leads with the highest conversion probability, bringing more opportunities and closed deals.
When this focus is consistently applied, marketing and sales teams can optimize channels towards increasing lead generation efficiency (more leads generated for the same effort) and revenue generation (more leads are qualified and closed). Shifting to demand generation from inbound and traditional marketing is a natural evolution of B2Bs when they’re ready to start scaling revenue.
Sirius Decisions defines ABM as “a strategic approach that aligns demand creation programs and messaging against a set of defined accounts and goals in a way that is relevant to those accounts and sales.” This definition drives home the identifying characteristic of ABM: the highest level of integration between marketing and sales. Marketing moves from being focused on inbound content generating leads and more focused on outbound activities to generate a complete view of an account with multiple individuals, intents, and paths to success identified.
A company who should consider ABM likely has:
While ABM has been around as a strategy in some form for several years, well-established B2Bs are continuing to find success in shifting towards ABM because it aligns your best resources with your best opportunities. Sirius Decisions found that companies leveraging ABM see an increase of 25 percent or higher in engagement. Additionally, 91 percent of companies with ABM see average deal size increase. ABM is the right strategy for companies who can integrate marketing sales to drive more efficient growth.
B2B companies focused on driving results need to be moving marketing and sales teams up towards demand generation and ABM. If you haven’t begun building your demand generation engine, start there. If you have successful experiences with demand generation, then start looking at how to trial ABM while you continue to fine-tune demand generation programs.
A great approach to take while in transition from demand generation to ABM is to do a mix of both. As you can see, there are many characteristics that both methodologies share, such as healthy, content-rich campaigns using tools like email nurtures and PPC. By combining ABM and demand generation, you can use the best of both worlds to tailor a marketing strategy program that suits your business and goals for optimal results.
We realize that you can’t do everything at the same time so take the time to build out programs and build a content foundation in traditional and inbound marketing, get some wins under your belt, and move upstream as your time and resources allow. If you’re looking to jumpstart you demand generation program in the upcoming year, we suggest taking a look at our B2B Demand Gen Guide to get started.