• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, September 13, 2016

Marketo, a marketing automation technology platform, on Tuesday announced the launch of Marketo ABM (account-based marketing), which integrates account-based marketing natively within a single marketing automation platform. The new product, added to the the Marketo platform, aims to help sales and marketing teams to collaborate and identify and target the accounts that matter most, and engage them in a personalized way.

Account-based marketing focuses on the accounts that are most important to marketers’ sales teams. Some organizations use it to target strategic accounts and to generate more revenue faster, while others use it to focus on their existing customer base. “It’s not a revolution, but an evolution of marketing the way we see it,” said Mike Telem, VP of product marketing, Marketo. “Marketers have gotten pretty good at digital marketing at scale. As analytics have gotten  better, they’re now able to see that not all the leads are as relevant. This is a substantial change in the way B2B companies are marketing today,” he said.

Telem said Marketo identified with its customers three essential capabilities for account-based marketing programs:

• The ability to target and manage accounts where you can collaborate with salespeople, etc.

• Cross-channel engagement in order to implement both the same and differing message across channels.

•  Account analytics in which marketers receive a unified view of their analytics. Their existing analytics capabilities will be account-enabled as well.

“We’ve changed the data model underlying the Marketo platform—it was lead-based and now it’s accounts-focused,” Telem said. Previously, he said, the technology didn’t exist to target accounts very specifically in a scalaeble, programmatic way. In the past, some organizations developed account-based marketing for a few accounts with manual labor. Today, most of the tasks are automated and now you can target different types of accounts, for example, by industry vertical.

Marketo ABM will be made available to all customers and prospects on Sept. 23.

For the launch of Marketo ABM, the company has partnered with 12 firms including AdRoll, Bluewolf, Digital Pi, and Dunn & Bradstreet, that will implement the service immediately.