Persona Marketing vs Account-Based Marketing

Thanks to the rise of Marketo and its plethora of early adopters, the company has pushed the concept of why to switch (from Pardot, Eloqua, etc.) with Account-Based Marketing. The content language of which speaks to the many pain points of commonly used marketing automation tools. The fact of the matter is that both concepts require a lot of content to be created just to make a decent waterfall or drip marketing campaign.

Persona-based marketing really looks at data segmentation as its main focus for generating content for different decision makers and influencers in customer lifecycle management. For example. when targeting K-12 institutions as a software developer of an educational platform, your buyer personas may include superintendents, edtech buying consortiums (NY does this, for instance), principals; and the influencers may include teachers, students, and perhaps even PTA groups, if they are involved with new technology purchases or adoptions within a school district. It's also used by electronics manufacturers as well that sell direct or through distributors into businesses. With persona-based marketing, not every persona that is targeted with marketing content is a viable buyer. Most are information seekers and will eat up valuable production time creating digital content assets for their insatiable appetites. But, it is all good in the long run because these people are very vocal within their own organizations if they really like what you have to offer.

With both styles, your market strategy for reaching out to customers is based on a few firmographic segmentations to start: industry/vertical markets, revenue, location