ABM vs Demand Gen: how to blend both tactics to boost your revenue engine?

It’s not uncommon to find marketers who make a clear distinction between ABM and demand generation (while they don’t have to). Some even argue that demand generation is better than ABM, while others take the opposite stance.

See, demand generation and account-based marketing (ABM) are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to combine both marketing strategies to achieve optimal results.

In this article, we’ll take you through the ins and outs of ABM vs demand generation, and then show you how to get the most out of these two marketing strategies. 

Let’s dive right in.

What is demand generation?

Simply put, demand generation is the process of creating awareness and demand in a target market. It consists of creating a pool of engaged accounts that are curious about your product.

Demand gen gets you lots of qualified leads and helps your brand drive long-term engagement and acquisition.

But how?

By raising awareness and positioning your company as a reference through insightful and useful content that shows potential customers that you are the right company to do business with. That awareness can be created through:

• Thought leadership SEO;
• Emails;
• Podcasts;
• Webinars;
• Newsletter;
• Whitebooks;
• Guest posts;
• LinkedIn organic;
• LinkedIn advertising, etc.

You can use demand gen to:

• capture the interest of companies and prospects that meet your Ideal Customer Profile;
• deliver the right content to the right people, at the right time, with total confidence that what you are offering meets their specific needs;
• drive awareness throughout the entire buyer and customer lifecycle;
• help customers understand your brand;
• make sure you’re not leaving good revenue on the table.

Now that you know what demand gen is, and what you can use it for, let’s tackle how you can develop a successful demand gen strategy for your company. 

How to build a successful demand generation strategy?

As mentioned above, demand generation can help you make your company’s marketing messages more credible and resonate with potential customers. Down the road, this will help you increase your revenue by attracting quality leads.

But what are the steps to developing a successful demand generation strategy?

Step 1: Build awareness

In today’s competitive sales and marketing landscape, brand awareness is critical to achieving a consistent flow of quality leads. While it may seem like an easy thing to do, brand awareness isn’t just about grabbing a potential buyer’s attention. 

A real and lasting brand awareness strategy leaves potential buyers with a persistent positive impression of your brand and puts you in a prime position when the prospect is finally ready to move forward with a purchase decision.

Here are some ways to achieve positive brand awareness:

1- Have a clear brand identity

First and foremost, you must have a consistent and strong brand identity:

• Who are you? 
• What problem do you solve? 
• What is your unique value proposition? 

Building a strong identity will act as a guide for your outreach campaigns.

2- Leverage positive reviews

One of the best ways to build brand awareness is to leverage testimonies and customer reviews. Reviews are important in the sense that they provide an unbiased view of your business, and it’s something many people value when making purchasing decisions. Customer reviews act as candid consumer feedback related to real-world use, free from marketing hype. 

3- Establish a strong social media presence

These days, almost everyone is on social media in one way or another (even my grandmother). But be careful, don’t sign up for every social network out there just because your competitors are doing it. 

Do your due diligence and identify the platforms most used by your potential and current customers. Once you’ve done that, establish a strong presence on those platforms and you’ll continually stay in their mind.

4- Position yourself as an authority and an expert

Developing industry expertise is a key component of successful demand generation. Industry expertise means your brand is perceived as an authority in its field from the first interaction with a potential customer. 

This type of expertise helps build customer trust and lays the groundwork for important conversations about customer pain points and the solutions your company has to offer. Because the fact remains that people buy from people they know, like, and trust. 

So, position your company as an authority with insightful and useful content related to your industry to show potential customers that you are the right company to do business with.

In today’s market, every day is a battle to cut through the noise. But the truth is, maintaining positive brand awareness will ensure that new prospects flow into your funnel on a regular basis.

Step 2: Develop a content strategy

A solid content strategy that offers timely and helpful insights at every step of the buyer’s journey is the best way to generate demand. 

Whether it’s increasing traffic, customer loyalty, or upselling, content plays a critical role in every stage of demand generation. 

Case in point. Jason Fried, CEO @Basecamp, launched his email service, Hey, in 2020. But long before that, he had painstakingly been building an audience interested in data privacy content. Come launch day, Jason collected the email addresses of 13,000 people eager to try the new product.

13,000 people in less than 24 hours. How did he do it? He strategically generated demand for a privacy-centric email service by using content as a communication channel.

However, it didn’t happen overnight. While it’s possible to speed up demand generation, it still takes time. It is essential or even indispensable to diversify your content marketing canvas.

This typically involves creating content that aligns with the traditional marketing funnel; content and resources to meet the goals of:

• the top of the funnel (TOFU), 
• the middle of the funnel (MOFU), and
• the bottom of the funnel (BOFU).

After all, the goal is to capture a large volume of attention at all stages of the funnel.

But this is not as simple as it sounds. What should a demand generation-focused content strategy look like?

1- Clear and specific goals of your company: what are you trying to achieve and how can content help you in your marketing and sales strategy at large?

2- Organic growth: even though your SEO strategy is a stand-alone entity, it’s still important to clarify how content contributes to organic growth.

3- The Who (target audience): who are you targeting? What are their pain points? How do they relate to your offer? What keeps them up at night? What are the specific results they want to achieve?

4- The What (materials): how will you help your audience overcome their difficulties? At this point, detail as best as you can the topics and content formats you will cover. Formats include blog posts, newsletters, podcasts, social media posts, and videos, just to name a few.

5- The Where (distribution channels): as explained in the previous section, identify the favorite channels of your target audience:

• Where do they spend most of their time? 
• How will you generate qualified traffic and make your content available to them where they are? 
• Where can you establish an “omnipresence in the market”? 

Here, Sparktoro can be of great help.

6- Key performance indicators (KPIs): what would success look like for you?  How will you track progress and what indicators will you measure?

7- The workflow: describe your content production process, specifying all the players involved at each step of the process, from ideation to distribution (planning, briefing, production, promotion, etc.).

Step 3: Nurture high-quality leads

Once you’ve made first contact with a potential customer, your marketing team hands over the lead details to the sales team and congratulates each other on a job well done, right?

WRONG! Healthy, reliable demand generation requires a full lead nurturing strategy from first contact through decision and purchase. 

Marketing teams should work alongside sales throughout the purchase journey, remaining in tune with the buyer’s questions, concerns, and attitudes. Depending on how robust their resources are, marketing teams should continue to interact with the leads all the way through purchase by providing helpful content to answer their questions.

Your marketing team should focus on the types of content prospective clients need, as well as the most appropriate channels to share that information. The goal of this kind of targeted nurturing campaign is to reach customers with the right content or assets at the moment when that information is most helpful to them.

Having made this clear, let’s now move on to Account-Based Marketing 

What is ABM and how does it work 

Definition of ABM

To put it simply, account-based marketing (ABM) is a targeted growth strategy in which your right hand (marketing) and your left hand (sales) work together to create personalized buying experiences for a pool of highly qualified accounts that they have both identified.

Among other things, you can use ABM to:

• better personalize your marketing approach: with ABM, your team can customize marketing touchpoints directly with key contacts in target accounts. 
• better align your sales and marketing teams: with ABM, marketing and sales teams can work closely together to develop a scoring and targeting system
• accelerate the sales cycle: by targeting key contacts in high-potential accounts, ABM gives you the opportunity to nurture the key decision-maker and all relevant prospects individually in order to facilitate and expedite the sales process.
• focus on the right accounts: ABM only targets the accounts that are most likely to close. Why spend half of your team’s energy and resources on low-level leads, when a single deal with the right type of prospect can account for half of your revenue? The right leads generate more revenue than hundreds of low-quality leads combined.

With ABM, you basically have 3 tiers. 

• Tier 1: companies with the highest revenue potential. One-to-one tactics. 100% personalized campaigns. 
• Tier 2: companies with medium revenue potential. One-to-few tactics. Here, you can personalize by vertical and job roles. 
• Tier 3: mass market campaigns. One-to-many tactics. This is a normal marketing campaign, with little personalization.

Depending on how many target accounts you’re including in your pilot campaign and the internal resources you have, you can pick the approach that makes the most sense for you. But keep this in mind, the more personalized your ABM approach is, the bigger lift it will be for your team.

How to do ABM like a boss?

First step: Select the right accounts

Once you have created a pool of accounts using demand generation, you do not automatically activate these accounts. You need to define your qualification and disqualification criteria to ensure that you are selecting the right accounts. 

To do that, you must first define your general and specific goals: what are the business objectives that closing these target accounts would help achieve? 

Then define your ICP. Be specific here. This is a one-page document that clearly outlines the type of companies you are targeting as part of your ABM initiative. Afterward, ensure the accounts fit with your ICP, and that there is a certain engagement threshold. 

The engagement threshold here can be them signing up once or twice to your webinar and then checking your demo or case study page. After this step is intent data analysis.

Second step: Do intent data analysis

Intent data analysis is all about making sure the account is really willing to buy your product.

For example, 30 minutes on your website, checking out your product page, pricing page, or whatever key page is there and you consider this is enough of a signal, for you to decide that there may be some buying intent.

If you are doing your approaches on LinkedIn for example, what you do is check if the account is interacting with you, what they are saying under your content, if they click to book a call or to try the demo or your app, that definitely means they may want to buy from you. 

Third step: account segmentation

Account segmentation involves dividing your list of accounts into appropriate segments, allowing you to target them with highly relevant messages that address their specific challenges.

For example, you may segment your entire list of prospects into 2 or 3 groups. Then you build your ABM team and assign specific roles and duties.

The question you may be asking yourself now is: can we really blend ABM and demand generation?

Here’s your answer.

ABM vs Demand Gen: do you have to separate both tactics?

The short answer is NO. And the long answer is still NO.

In fact, ABM and demand generation are two marketing operations that are part of full-funnel marketing, and it stands to reason that ABM can’t exist without demand gen.

Why? Mainly because before you even do activation in ABM, you need to have engaged accounts. Your contacts must be aware of your company, your product, or your service. And how do you do that? Through demand gen.

But unfortunately, most B2B marketers get it wrong. Because they’re obsessed with scaling fast, they set up huge wishlists of accounts based on firmographic data. 

Here’s a quick example:

• We want FinTech companies from the United States 
• Team size: 50 to 1,000 employees 
• Revenue: $50k MRR 

Then they define the roles based on ICP and upload those accounts to Linkedin. In case they have a budget, they purchase software like Metadata or Demandbase and try hard to create engagement via display ads.

But here’s the question: would people just purchase a six or even five-figure product by clicking on a display ad? In all likelihood, it’s a big NO. 

In fact, clicking on a display ad doesn’t equal buying intent. Neither does it mean awareness. The attention span is very low because people can forget about your ad within a few seconds. That’s why you need to have a completely different approach to demand gen and ABM. 

How to blend ABM and demand generation?

While demand gen is critical to expanding the base of qualified leads, ABM is more effective in targeting specific customers. 

Demand gen and ABM are different strategies. Nevertheless, it happens that ABM can play a key role in the demand gen strategy by nurturing high-quality leads (from leads generated by demand gen). These are steps you can take to merge your demand gen strategy with an ABM approach: 

When you are doing demand generation activities, you’re creating a pool of accounts that are aware of your product or service. As you begin to see a reliable trickle of leads coming in from your demand gen strategies, you may want to fast-track high-value leads. This is where an ABM strategy comes into play.

ABM requires marketing and sales teams to strategically select accounts to target and nurture through customized engagement and support. It involves having:

• a tailored sales and marketing approach 

Demand gen works at the top of the funnel by creating awareness in the prospective leads. Not only that, it generates some interesting data that can be useful down the funnel by the ABM team to target the right accounts. The sales team can then use those data to close a lead while the marketing team will work on attracting high-quality accounts by creating a customized experience in the buyer’s journey. 

• a good persona 

This important step helps you target the right accounts for your business. By using the data acquired from demand generation, sales and marketing teams can create the perfect persona for the business. That will drive more qualified leads in the funnel that ABM strategy can narrow to get the best accounts and create an even better persona for future campaigns.

For further efficiency of the blending approach, 

• Marketing teams should design target company personas based on high-value clients that are most likely to convert. 
• Evaluate what business objectives and values these target accounts tend to share, as well as what major steps in their buying journey precede purchase. 
• Use the target personas to inform how you market to these leads, providing them with personalized content that directly addresses their unique pain points and questions.

Before adding the accounts generated by your demand gen tactics to the ABM program, you need to make sure they are engaged enough, checking metrics like 

• the time the account spent on the website checking the product page and, at least, one of the case studies.
• Somebody from the buying committee signing up for a product webinar.

Demand generation and ABM overlap significantly, as both approaches emphasize lead nurturing and maintaining constant contact with prospects and customers. According to propensity.com, ‘’When you converge your demand gen strategy with ABM, you’ll see up to 7X more opportunities and 5X more engagement.’’

So, if you’ve only been doing ABM or demand generation before, you’re missing out on opportunities. Lots of opportunities, in fact. It’s time to combine the two strategies. Demand generation will act as an amplifier, enhancing the ABM approach to make an impact and connect you with your best accounts.

Recap

Don’t make the mistake of preferring one of these two tactics to the other. Build a blended model instead. You’ll get a lot of value by taking a blended “ABM + demand gen” approach.

Would you like an ABM playbook that will help you land sales opportunities with your dream clients in 6 weeks or faster? Check out our 6-week ABM playbook now.