67% of B2B brands used account-based marketing in 2021, according to HubSpot.

B2B marketers use ABM and demand generation to expand reach and generate new customers.

Understanding both approaches helps you choose the right tactic for each stage of your buyer journey, driving more pipeline and revenue.

Below, we cover what each approach does, how they differ, and when to use them.

What is account-based marketing?

Account-based marketing, also known as ABM, is a marketing tactic that involves going after and building relationships with strategic accounts. These prospects are likely already in your system and have been identified by your team as potential high-value customers.

These accounts typically convert at higher rates and sign larger contracts.

ABM shortens the sales cycle by focusing resources on high-value accounts with personalized outreach.

ABM requires sales and marketing alignment on target accounts, messaging, and timing.

ABM tactics include: Account-based marketing can take a variety of different forms. This includes email, paid ads, blog posts, ebooks, landing pages, case studies, direct mail with personal gifts, and other personalized content.

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What is demand generation marketing?

Demand generation is a marketing tactic that focuses on getting new leads. Demand gen captures a broad audience to build brand awareness and fill your pipeline with new leads. It’s commonly used to create a stable pipeline of new leads that can be handed off to the sales team.

Marketers commonly mistake B2B demand generation for lead generation.

Demand generation seeks to grow your audience, while lead generation converts the audience into qualified leads. Demand generation marketing can feed into lead generation, but they are two separate strategies.

So, what does demand generation marketing look like in action?

Test different demand gen tactics to see what drives the most qualified leads for your ICP.

Common tactics for demand gen. marketing include gated or downloadable content, podcasts, webinars, blog posts, SEO, video, direct mail, and contests.

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What’s the difference between account-based marketing vs demand generation?

Demand generation focuses on gathering new leads while account-based marketing develops relationships.

Demand gen casts a wide net to build awareness across a broad market. ABM targets specific high-value accounts with personalized outreach.

Each tactic also has a different campaign objective, customer focus, and metrics for success. Let’s compare each of those.

1. Campaign objective

Your business objectives will help determine which tactic is best for your sales and marketing goals. Define what you want out of your campaign before you implement your plan.

ABM, and sometimes ABE, works ideally when your team conducts enterprise sales with larger contract sizes and longer sales cycles. Let’s say you’ve identified 150 strategic, high-value accounts that you are looking to target. This is where ABM comes in. Use this tactic to focus on these viable prospects and increase conversions.

Demand generation tactics are ideal when you’re looking to broaden your list of prospects. Demand generation builds awareness across a broader market to create a steady flow of new leads.

This approach grows your list of prospects and captures as many leads as possible. You’re not targeting your hot leads just yet.

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2. Customer focus

The customer focus of demand generation and account-based marketing is not the same. Each tie directly to your campaign objectives as described above.

Use ABM for a specific target audience

Account-based marketing targets a more specific audience that your team has already identified. The focus of this tactic is to nurture leads with consistent messaging across all communication. This means sales and marketing teams must be in sync to successfully convert customers with an ABM campaign.

Use demand gen. for a broader audience

On the other hand, demand generation focuses on a broader market. Because Demand generation captures high volumes of leads, the customer focus is less targeted than an ABM campaign.

Of course, the leads generated in a demand gen. campaign can be sifted through and targeted in a later ABM push, but the customer focus will not be as specific for this step.

3. Success metrics

You’ll want to measure and analyze the results of any marketing initiative, whether you’re using a demand gen. approach or an account-based marketing strategy. Evaluating your metrics allows you to not only see how your campaign performed but also gives you an opportunity to optimize your marketing efforts over time.

Teams often measure account-based marketing using two types of metric groups: customer acquisition and expansion revenue. Customer acquisition metrics may include pipeline growth, sales velocity, and new customer revenue. Expansion revenue metrics will refer to upsells, cross-sells, retention rate, and customer lifetime value.

On the other hand, teams typically measure demand gen. using three types of metric groups:

• Engagement

• Performance

• And return on investment (ROI)

Engagement metrics may include click-through rates (CTR), unsubscribe rates, and read rates. Performance metrics may include the number of qualified leads and sales cycle length. ROI numbers often involve conversion rate, total revenue generated, and even the customer acquisition cost.

Is ABM a part of demand generation or a standalone marketing strategy?

While demand gen. and ABM are separate tactics, they work best together as complementary tactics in your revenue strategy. They're complementary tactics, not isolated approaches. While they work separately, they also complement each other.

Account-based marketing focuses on targeting specific prospects, taking a quality over quantity approach to new leads. On the other hand, demand gen. marketing delivers on quantity over quality by casting a larger net to generate new business.

A well-executed demand generation strategy increases the effectiveness of account-based marketing tactics. When used together, the two methods target customers at different stages of the buyer journey.

Demand generation marketing helps by setting up a viable pool of potential prospects. From there, account-based marketing narrows the field and selectively targets the highest-value customers.

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Choose whether account-based marketing vs demand generation is right for your business

Demand generation and ABM both have their places in B2B marketing strategies. Both help companies foster leads and boost conversions. The biggest difference between the two is where they’re implemented in the customer journey.

You wouldn’t expect a targeted approach to work without first identifying what makes a qualified lead. Likewise, you wouldn’t want to send out a general demand gen. message to a customer who’s more likely to buy with a personalized upsell.

You need to be selective about the tactics used at different stages of the buyer journey. That’s how you’ll know whether to implement demand gen. or ABM tactics.

Use demand gen to build your pipeline, then deploy ABM to convert your highest-value accounts.

Account-based marketing checklist

See how UserGems helps you identify and convert high-value accounts. Request a free demo of UserGems.

Why UserGems

UserGems identifies exactly which buyers are in-market using job change signals and relationship data, then helps you act on those insights with AI agents that write genuinely relevant outreach. Our customers see bigger pipelines and higher win rates because they're reaching the right buyers at the right time with the right message.