Is Person-Based Marketing an Upgrade to ABM?

Person-Based Marketing Means You Get to Talk to the Person, so You Know Who Sees Your Message and What Is Relevant for This Person to Use in Your Communication

Your customers are real people, and they want to be treated with real experiences. That’s the whole context of Person-based marketing (PBM). Customers react to personalized experiences positively compared to bland, traditional messages, promoted across marketing channels, sans logic. Earlier this month, Influ2 platform, powered by machine learning, announced the launch of first PBM solution for B2B marketing teams. The solution generates and sends personalized advertising on behalf of B2B marketers to decision makers at enterprises on an individualized basis.

We sat down with CEO of the company, Dmitri Lisitski, to better understand the growing scope of PBM solutions in B2B marketing and how CMOs can add this tech to their existing ABM stack for more refined account’s targeting.

Does Influ2 replace the dependency on ABM platforms? 

Influ2 doesn’t replace or erase the concept of ABM; instead, it takes ABM further. It narrows it down to the level of a person, rather than the account. That is why it is more effective.

You wouldn’t talk to the marketing manager of the company the same way you’d talk to its CFO. ABM offers very limited capabilities to differentiate between the two when showing them an ad.

We use a PBM (person-based marketing) approach, which means you get to talk to the person, so you know who sees your message and what is relevant for this person to use in your communication.

What made you launch a B2B person-based marketing platform?

When I first learned about account-based marketing, it was love at first sight. The concept of an account as a target market was such an obvious breakthrough for B2B marketing. However, a more diligent analysis of the concept raised tough questions.

• Would you like all people inside the account to see your ads or just the stakeholders?
• How do I limit my campaign to reach just the stakeholders?
• How do I know that those stakeholders actually saw my campaign?
• What drew their attention?
• Which of them visited my website and which didn’t?

So, we came up with an upgrade to the ABM concept — person-based marketing, or PBM.

Our primary focus was making advertising efficient, ideally by showing ads only to the decision-makers within the targeted company, tracking ad impact at the individual level and providing the background for actionable follow-up as soon as a click happened.

How does Influ2 exactly fit into a B2B CMO’s tech stack?

Influ2 is integrated with major CRM systems, so you can import a list of people who you want to see your ads and then export all the data about who viewed and clicked your ads back to the CRM.

Our solution allows you to warm up leads before your demand generation or lead generation teams reach out to them. It is an additional, yet unique, touchpoint in the client journey.

How do you add and provide legitimacy to the content you would share with the B2B community?

Our clients upload the content they want their clients to see. The content then goes through a moderation process, and its legitimacy is reviewed twice — first by Influ2’s moderators, then by moderators of platforms that we partner with.

What are the major points of differentiation between influencer marketing and social selling from a B2B marketer’s perspective?

The difference is already in the name – while influencer marketing focuses on targeting an influential person who will, later on, broadcast your ideas/product/service to his or her audience/followers, social selling assumes more of a one-on-one interaction with the consumer-led by a company’s sales representative (and is not necessarily famous or even known).

You can look at it as push-and-pull. With influencer marketing, you are pushing out the idea via an influential person, while with social selling you are reaching out to the consumer directly to pull them in.

Which markets, geographies, and customer profiles could best benefit from Influ2’s platform?

Influ2 is a solution for B2B companies, with no geographic limitation. However, most of our clients are US-based.

Users will benefit from Influ2 if they are trying to reach decision-makers at the enterprises and if the product is hard to explain in one word.

What does your product roadmap look like for 2018-2020? 

When we visualize Influ2 in 2020, we surprisingly see little changes to the user experience. Influ2 is not a workflow application, like say a CRM software, so we don’t expect major changes in the UX. We always advise our customers to manage campaigns from their CRMs where they design their customer funnel across all marketing automation tools.

That’s why our product focus is to deliver highly precise and effective personalized ad campaigns across all available ad platforms. By 2020, Influ2 will provide more opportunities to reach customers and gather more data about ad impact across these initiatives.

Thank you, Dmitri, for chatting with us!