By Bev Burgess, Author, Senior VP, and ABM Practice Lead at ITSMA

Three Types of Account-Based Marketing

Bev Burgess (A Practitioner’s Guide to Account-Based Marketing), Senior Vice President/ABM Practice Lead at ITSMA, explains the three types of account-based marketing:

1. Strategic ABM – Creating and Executing Highly Customized Marketing Plans for Individual Accounts
   This original ABM approach is usually reserved for strategic accounts and executed on a one-to-one basis. With strategic ABM, account teams build stronger relationships with a company’s most-valued customers and prospects via highly targeted marketing interactions that demonstrate in-depth understanding of their business issues. Most important, strategic ABM is done with clients, not to them, to drive value for both companies. With this approach, a dedicated, senior-level marketer works directly with one or a few strategic or key account teams on the sales side as well as crafts fully customized individual marketing plans and programs as an integral part of the overall account plan.
2. ABM Lite – Creating and Executing Lightly Customized Programs for Clusters of Accounts with Similar Issues and Needs
   This is a one-to-few model, typically applied to groups of strategic and/or second-tier named accounts. With ABM lite, marketing programs and campaigns are typically focused on small groups of accounts rather than on individual accounts, usually 5 to 10 that share similar business attributes, challenges, and initiatives. Collaboration with sales is focused mainly on key decision points, such as which accounts to target, which business issues to highlight, which propositions to promote, and how to tailor existing content for these one-to-few programs and campaigns.
3. Programmatic ABM – Leveraging Technology to Tailor Marketing Campaigns for Specific Named Accounts at Scale
   This is the newest approach to ABM. With programmatic ABM, marketing shifts its traditional focus from generating, nurturing, and tracking leads by individual to an account-based view. This one-to-many approach is possible due to the latest technologies that enable razor-fine targeting, analytics, and personalization across hundreds or even thousands of identified accounts. With just one marketer working across hundreds of accounts, programmatic ABM is much less marketing-resource intensive and can provide coverage far beyond strategic ABM or ABM lite. Programmatic ABM can and should be aligned with the company’s sales-coverage model. Companies use programmatic ABM to target specific segments (e.g., horizontal or vertical markets) or other groups of named accounts selected from across an overall market.