What Is Person-Based Marketing? How Is It Different From ABM?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade, you’ve heard of Account-Based Marketing (ABM). Odds are you’ve already tried it out and it didn’t live up to your expectations. The good news is – that this article is not going to force ABM on you, but neither is it going to trash it.

We love ABM, or better said, we love the idea of ABM, what it was meant to be – a way to engage specific clients, not some abstract target audience.

Imagine, a dream came true…[First Last Name] is reading your white paper AND you learn that this is Sheryl Sandberg! This is soooo exciting! As the good marketer you are, wouldn’t you take on this opportunity and send her a follow-up email on this white paper?

That’s what Person-based Marketing( PBM) is about! Talking to people you want and taking action.

Person-Based Marketing puts a human in the center of communication. Traditional marketing was talking to target audiences, ABM is talking to accounts, while PBM talks to the person.

In PBM you start by putting together a wish-list, which is basically a list of real people you want to talk to. These are your decision-makers, stakeholders, or potential investors. Once you have the list, you can use any PBA tool or platform to start a conversation with these people. You can use any creatives to engage your prospects – ads, blog articles, website sections, and social media posts. Once a person from the list is engaged you can use the personalized tracking to decide on how you want to carry on the conversation.

Personalized tracking means that you know who clicked on your display ad, read your content, and visited your website. You know the name of the person, their contact details, the company they worked at, their position in this company, right after they interacted with your content. So your further interaction with the prospect is 100% personalized.

PBM campaigns perform with 1-4% CTR. I am sure you can appreciate it, knowing that an average CTR rate is 0.05-0.1% (on a sunny day). How is that possible? A high degree of personalization and precise targeting. That’s where PBM had outrun ABM.

In some sense, person-based marketing is a logical next step in the evolution of account-based marketing. However, while ABM lets you talk to key accounts, PBM lets you talk to key people. And this is crucial for the B2B sector. It does matter who you talk to – stakeholders at Intel Capital or their director of first impressions.

Another major difference between ABM and PBM is the timeline. Account-based marketing indeed allows you to develop a close relationship with your key accounts, but it takes a long time to do that. More so, you can’t be certain that you’re talking to the right people. Numerous ads, newsletters, great content, and email marketing get wasted on the wrong audience.

Person-Based Marketing is more precise in that manner, it allows you to be more efficient and actionable. PBA tells you who engaged with your content right away. On the spot, you can direct your potential clients to the most appropriate marketing or sales workflow (it becomes super-easy if you know your way around automation).

“Account-based marketing lets you talk to key accounts, while person-based marketing lets you talk to key people.”

Use it!

Personalization, customization, and other similar ‘-zations’ skyrocket our CTRs. PBM gets you that personal touch. You know exactly who you are targeting, you know exactly what they read and you can use that knowledge to better engage new and existing clients.

Any thoughts?