Listen to the Article
Longer buying cycles, the growth of AI, advanced data analytics, and increasing digital noise drive the need for more sophisticated, buyer-first B2B marketing tactics in 2025. Blending demand generation and account-based marketing strategies can help you meet the moment.
What does that entail? This article will explore each approach in further detail, unpack their individual differences, and explain the benefits of an approach where the two strategies complement each other.
Demand Generation
Demand generation differs from account-based marketing in that it casts a wide net, gradually narrowing its audience down to gently guide prospects towards becoming buyers. Its primary focus is to build consistent and strong interest and attention on your brand, create quality connections with potential customers, convince them of your products’ or services’ value, and establish a more qualified and engaged pipeline.
In this way, it differs from lead generation, which is a specific stage of the larger demand generation puzzle, a piece of marketing that transforms a lead’s interest in products or services into a buying action.
Successful demand generation campaigns establish the brand as a trustworthy industry name. They also set the foundation for significant cost reduction and long-standing, fruitful relationships with customers who regularly engage with your content and have demonstrated commitment to your brand vision.
However, marketers today face limited teams and budgets while under pressure to deliver strong returns. In addition, teams struggle with fragmented marketing tools and systems, hindering the overall effectiveness and success of their efforts. To address these emerging issues and stay competitive, leveraging AI, predictive analytics, hyper-targeting, and account-based marketing is a must.
Account-Based Marketing
Account-based marketing can add significant value to marketing efforts, regardless of your product or industry. It can help accelerate deal closures and improve Customer Lifetime Value, making it an increasingly popular component of modern demand generation strategies.
In fact, HubSpot found that 70% of marketers are leveraging an active account-based marketing program. On top of that, Forrester reports that 45% of B2B marketers who have implemented account-based marketing saw revenue gains of 10% or more within 12 months.
In contrast to demand generation, account-based marketing takes a reverse funnel approach. It starts by identifying and targeting high-value leads and concentrating its efforts on converting them into loyal buyers. The need to understand and speak to prospects’ challenges is more prominent in account-based marketing than in demand generation campaigns.
There are three different types of account-based marketing, each offering unique advantages that can benefit varied use cases. Let’s examine them in further detail.
Strategic account-based marketing
This approach, also known as one-to-one ABM, is generally reserved for engaging your company’s most important, high-value individual accounts. Strategic ABM empowers you to create customized, hyperpersonalized content, using a long-term strategy and a significant portion of marketing resources to strengthen and grow key customer relationships.
ABM Lite
ABM Lite, or one-to-few marketing, is deployed after sales and marketing teams identify tier 1 or tier 2 accounts that have similar challenges, goals, and needs, targeting them simultaneously with tailored messaging for each segment. As ABM Lite focuses resources on five to ten accounts at a time, instead of one, it consumes far fewer resources than one-to-one marketing and is therefore suited to businesses with the flexibility to adapt to changes as needed.
Programmatic ABM
Lastly, programmatic ABM is also known as one-to-many marketing because it targets large groups of accounts, leveraging automation to segment profiles and deliver customized content to each group. While programmatic ABM doesn’t offer the level of personalization present in the aforementioned approaches, it is ideal for teams with limited budgets, is highly scalable, and is the most commonly used account-based marketing strategy.
Top Account-Based Marketing Success Stories
When traditional marketing campaigns don’t work, regardless of the reason, account-based marketing provides a straightforward solution, as it can be layered on top of your existing strategy. That’s what a number of leading brands did after experiencing subpar results from previous marketing efforts. The following are a few notable examples:
T-Mobile for Business increases appointment rates
T-Mobile for Business understood the importance of effectively nurturing different personas with influence in purchase decisions through a data-driven, multichannel account-based marketing approach. With a nuanced understanding of targeted prospects, the T-Mobile marketing team engaged top-of-the-funnel accounts by syndicating buyers with thought leadership and white paper content. The team then leveraged display advertising to keep their solution story relevant and top-of-mind. As a result, the team achieved up to 5X increases in appointment rates for two key segments.
RollWorks drives social media brand awareness
RollWorks, a leading account-based marketing platform, identified key prospects who had not taken any action for 35 days and mailed them ‘how to get started kit” for their first ad campaigns. Inside the kit were key customer testimonials to further educate the prospect on the benefits of RollWorks’ services. On top of landing pages and display ad campaigns, the ‘Door Opener Kit’ helped RollWorks increase social media brand awareness and boost their closing rate by 41%.
Salsify secures more registrations
While preparing for a road show in New York City, the software company Salsify adopted a multichannel ABM approach to reach their objective of registering 60 more attendees. They targeted prospects with custom marketing messages, followed by targeted display ads and personalized emails. After just two hours, Salsify’s sales team closed dozens of accounts and outperformed its attendance goals by 22%.
How ABM Fits into Your Broader Demand Generation Strategy
It’s a common myth that these two powerful marketing systems are rivals. However, this is no longer true. Account-based marketing has become a fundamental part of full-funnel demand generation strategies in 2025, allowing marketers to refine their focus on nurturing qualified leads that have already been identified. It also ensures that marketing and sales resources are concentrated on the prospects with the most potential from the start.
The differences between the two approaches are stark. However, many businesses are leveraging these distinct characteristics of each strategy and using them to create a well-rounded, comprehensive approach to sales and marketing.
Demand generation is centered around quantity and capturing as many leads as possible. This sets the foundation for more quality-focused relationship-building efforts through account-based marketing. All it takes is to understand their respective strengths and find ways to let them feed into each other.
