What is Account Based Advertising?

With Account-Based Advertising (ABA) you align Marketing efforts towards the accounts with most Revenue potential.

In a highly connected digital world, new possibilities in the area of Account Base Advertising bring the chance to engage with audiences you could not otherwise reach.

In fact, for any given number of media spend, focusing on the top 20% of the accounts you generate nearly 80% of all clicks and web visits.

If your company depends on major, long-cycle deals where you need to communicate with and influence a large number of individuals, this could very well be the most important display strategy.

Unlike traditional SEO and Display Advertising, it’s time to recognize that we’re not marketing and selling to a lead, we’re marketing and selling to an account.

As such, Account-Based Advertising ( ABA ) uses digital advertising to target only the accounts with most revenue potential.

The outbound targeting starts by defining the companies you want to target. The most common implementations look at

1. Revenue Strategies: Accounts selected by Marketing and Sales based on known potential
2. Land and Expand: Accounts identified as already engaging with you. The key business objective is to reach with display enough decision-makers
3. Intent-Based Activation: Target companies based on the specific content they consume from you ( first-party intent ) or the media articles they read ( third party intent)

How does it work?

Account-based advertising is a fundamentally different martech approach to start with.

This level of targeting allows for higher relevance in the communication, you can tailor your banners to specific industry solutions and even specific pain points at company level! This level of relevance is really impossible to attain with traditional digital.

Instead of delivering content that’s relevant to an individual based on the geography, gender or age with Account-Based Advertising the content is delivered on the fact that the target works at a particular company.

This strategy relies on advertisers working with really tiny audiences and a handful of relevant media publications ( typically IT or Finance related as an example), so impression levels are high. The corollary is that unit prices for impressions are also higher, as you micro-target and ABA solutions typically need to out-bid any other concurrent digital strategy to ensure your banners are displayed.

There are many companies offering solutions for Account-Based Advertising. The majority have a strong footprint in the US, where the industry is more mature and, more importance, the abundance of cookie-based data helps in profiling the right contacts. Alas, some markets such as EU, with its global data protection legislation (GDPR) and the advertising industry as a whole, moving away from cookies, have opened a new alley to companies like AccountInsight.

How does AccountInsight implement Account-Based Advertising?

When AccountInsiht came into the market, cookies were already under pressure and the move was set to highly relevant contextual targeting. This is the basic cornerstone on the targeting approach:

1. Identify the right company to target by using the closest company surf IP address to the company site of choice.
2. Overlay contextual targeting to ensure only the relevant people within a company see the ads. Here strategies differ and can include the choice of specific media vertical, specific key-word targeting or, in markets where is still allowed, overlay a level of cookie targeting on top of the company IP addresses. One should not forget that, in any case, cookie-based targeting is based upon previous browsing history and has a very short lifespan whereas contextual targeting on the fly hits 100% the intent and interest of that person at the time of seeing the banner.

If your company depends on major, complex, long-cycle deals, this could well be the most important display advertising you’ll ever need.