Persona-Based Marketing vs ABM; which should you choose?

For a B2B business, there are two broad marketing strategies you can pursue to gain new clients and grow new sales revenue. These are often referred to as Persona-Based and Account Based Marketing strategies.  So, what’s the difference between the two?

What is Persona-Based Marketing?

This is a traditional inbound strategy that involves creating a small number of buyer personas – fictional profiles of typical buyers who you believe would make ideal customers for your business. These buyer personas will form the target for all your future content and marketing efforts. By aligning your marketing offerings and CTAs with their needs and preferences, you can channel more right-fit customers into your sales funnel more effectively.

What is Account-based marketing?

In contrast, an ABM approach identifies certain key players within your industry; the real companies you would really like as your customers. You then gather as much information about these organisation as you can and create bespoke strategies to approach, engage and convert them in to customers. This is known as Account-Based Marketing or ABM.

Persona-based vs Account Based Marketing

You might think of these strategies as embodying two opposing ‘quantity versus quality’ approaches to lead generation.  

Inbound marketing focuses on casting a wide net to attract a large volume of potential leads in your target market. It leverages content marketing, SEO, social media, and other techniques to draw in a broad audience that fits the general buyer persona, which you then further qualify and nurture to conversion.

ABM, on the other hand, upends the traditional B2B sales and marketing funnel by shifting the focus from a broad audience to a narrow audience of high-value, pre-qualified accounts. 

This enables contract manufacturers to concentrate on the key targets that will offer deeper and richer sales opportunities over time.

Famously the ABM approach is likened to fishing with spears, in contrast to fishing with nets.

Nets vs spearfishing?

The persona-based strategy aims to catch lots of potentially suitable prospects in a net, This approach has the advantage of being scalable and capable of speaking to an audience of qualified leads, but it may result in a lower conversion rate since not all leads will be ideal fits.

The ABM strategy typically engages leads from fewer companies. But the quality and conversion rate of these leads are significantly higher due to the tailored approach you take. The hunter has carefully ‘speared’ the perfect fish. They're not rummaging around in the net to find their perfect leads!

Persona-Based Marketing vs ABM: Pros and Cons

The buyer persona approach is capable of attracting a large number of leads, but it may fail in landing that one big customer that can make or break a company

On the other hand, the success of account-based marketing is based on its precisely targeted marketing approach, designed to land large-scale, ongoing sales and major long-term customers. 

However, it can be a bit of an all-or-nothing approach – if it fails, then a lot of marketing time, effort and budget will have been wasted.

So which should you choose

The choice

In the real world, the choice is not quite so clear-cut.

Take a buyer persona strategy. You develop a small set of buyer personas, publish content, use social media and other marketing channels, and land the client. 

What happens next? 

Well, unless they are very small, there is every possibility that you could sell more products to them in the future, and it would make sense to expand out and look at other sales opportunities within other departments of that company. So you dedicate at least part of someone’s time to looking after them and making the most of any possible opportunities.

You profile the company and identify key players, work out the way their buying process works, you work with them and even publish content aimed at them. Does that sound familiar? Yep – we’ve pretty much just described account-based marketing. 

Even if you pursue a buyer persona-focused strategy, it is still likely that you will end up doing at least some level of account-based marketing at some point.

ABM does not preclude other forms of lead generation 

Conversely, when pursuing an account-based marketing strategy you will inevitably still get enquiries from other companies you haven’t deliberately targeted. Companies that have seen your website, who have approached you because of recommendations from your customers, or who have seen your social media or maybe met one of your managers at a trade fair and been impressed. 

So do you turn them away? No, of course not, they represent a source of revenue for your company. Why would you turn that down?

Is a hybrid approach possible?

There is in fact, no reason why you can’t take a hybrid approach to your Persona and Account Based marketing, even with limited resources. 

When you develop a buyer persona you are trying to fill in as much detail as you can, you looking to define:

• Demographics
• Goals and aspirations
• Sources they go to for information
• Job role and responsibilities
• Challenges and pain points
• Decision criteria

This is really no different from the approach that you would take for account-based marketing. You would still want to define those areas for a targeted account. It might be that it is easier with a targeted account as those areas will have real, and specific information associated with them, but then again, it may be just as difficult to find out that information as to define them for a buyer persona approach.

Content creation

In both cases, you would be creating content tailored to your audience. If you are pursuing a hybrid approach, then although you should be creating content specifically for your targeted accounts, the likelihood is that there will still be a lot in common between those accounts and your buyer personas.

As long as your targeted accounts are not outliers or atypical, then you could use the experience, knowledge and insight you gain with your account-based marketing to inform the refinement of your buyer personas.

Key differences

There are some key differences between the two approaches.

Account-based marketing is a useful strategy when there are a small number of major players in your industry and going after a few of these would provide you with a significant revenue stream if they became long-term customers. 

But if there are no significant players, then a buyer persona approach is likely to be a better use of your marketing resources.

Account-based marketing typically targets large accounts where the buying decision is often taken by a group of people over a longer period. So part of the strategy must be figuring out how those people, teams or departments interact. These groups are still made up of individuals though, so figuring out who you need to target, with what content and when, is crucial to account-based marketing success.

And the winner is…

Whichever approach you take, account-based marketing, buyer persona or hybrid approach, the process of defining personas will still be the key to delivering the right content to attract sales. There will be slight differences in approach and the information that makes up the persona, but the process will be very similar.

The strategy that’s best for you will depend on your industry, your resources, your attitude to risk and the flexibility and talent of your sales and marketing teams.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in August 2019 and republished in June 2024 to ensure accuracy.