Account Based Marketing is like a cross between Account Planning and marketing. Instead of marketing to everyone and then qualifying the leads in your funnel to focus on the target leads, you do the qualifying up front, selecting the companies you want to work with, strategising on where and how they might need your help and targeting them with personalised messages.

Thanks to something called web personalisation, you can take a lot of the leg work out of your in-funnel marketing. You can automate the assets you deliver to certain people depending on the type pf person they are and their stage in the buying process. Web personalisation software uses functionality called reverse IP look-up, allowing you to know a lot about a website visitor, like industry, company size, and so on.

If you also recognise this visitor as one of your target accounts, then you can literally present customised web pages to them on the fly. Which is nice.

This is very powerful, and, understandably, has got a lot of people excited about more focused, higher return marketing investments.

Remember, though, that Account Based Marketing is not a silver bullet. You should do it in parallel with other more ‘traditional’ demand generation activities, because you need a good spread of differently sized opportunities for a healthy, forward-moving pipeline.