Account-Based Marketing vs. Inbound Marketing: What's the Difference?

 Think about how much easier marketing is when you know exactly what companies to target and what marketing messages would best resonate with them. That's the dream, right?

While we don't live in a perfect world, we do live in a world where inbound marketing and account-based marketing (ABM) exist. And, when these two strategies work together, this dream can become a reality.

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You may be pretty familiar with inbound marketing — creating content that attracts, converts, and delights customers.

You may also know a thing or two about account-based marketing: aligning marketing and sales to deliver a consistent, personalized buying experience for prospects. But, because of their definitions, perhaps you think you have to choose between the two.

Fortunately, you don't have to choose. In fact, instead of thinking "ABM versus inbound," you should be thinking "ABM and inbound."

To clarify, let's define the two and offer some tactics around how to work these strategies into your existing marketing campaign.

What is account-based marketing?

Account-based marketing is a highly-targeted, focused growth strategy. It works by aligning marketing and sales functions to create a personalized experience for accounts, rather than an individual buyer.

Instead of treating each of those buyers as an individual entity, ABM is a strategy that says, "Let's make sure we plan how to market and sell to all of those buyers as one account."

This starts with aligning Sales and Marketing to mutually choose a select set of accounts. Then, together they create marketing and sales strategies that target each account. This saves time for marketing and sales and delivers a far more consistent buying experience for the customers within each account.

Businesses that are typically a good fit for using an ABM strategy are those that sell high-value products or services to other businesses, like B2Bs.

The alignment of Sales and Marketing when using an ABM strategy helps you make more streamlined business decisions. It eliminates the time you would spend trying to sort out the best accounts to target, and instead, speeds up the process of delighting those prospects.

ABM treats accounts as if they're individual buyers, and because of this, you'll be able to delight the key decision-makers with a personalized content strategy.

So, ABM is a go-to strategy for shortening sales cycles, increasing ROI, and effectively selling to your highest value accounts in the way they each prefer to buy — but how is it comparable to inbound marketing? Let's talk about that next.

Account-Based Marketing and Inbound Marketing

ABM allows you to delight high-value accounts with a focused approach. Inbound marketing lets you attract customers through the creation of valuable, SEO-optimized content — it provides audiences with the information that's important to them in an organic manner.

But what do they have in common?

Both strategies require a deep understanding of your target buyer to inform what type of content you're creating & how you choose to deliver it. This increases discoverability by that target.

According to HubSpot's ABM Product Marketer, Ryan Batter, "Every growth story begins with the same foundational elements of inbound marketing — building great content, crafting a publishing strategy, optimizing search presence to enable discovery of your brand and generate leads."

You can repurpose content and use the same channels for ABM as you've already put into place with inbound. ABM is often just taking that foundational content and personalizing it even more.

Both inbound and ABM are focused on delivering a great buying experience across the entire flywheel. ABM helps accelerate the flywheel once inbound foundation is in place.