AmplifyED
Posts
EdTech Account-Based Marketing vs. Inbound-Led Outbound

EdTech Account-Based Marketing vs. Inbound-Led Outbound

Account-Based Marketing is slow, and rarely for EdTech's. Here's a better use of ABM:

Rod Vronscki | AmplifyED
July 16, 2025

In short, ABM is a tactic where you target a specific company or set of companies with custom messaging to that audience.

But there’s a series of requirements for ABM to be successful, especially for EdTechs:

Must be multi-channel
Demands a lot of ad spend
The value of the contract – if won – must be huge to make sense
Must target companies that, depending on the ad platform, might not be feasible
Is slow to see results

Specifically when targeting K-12 districts, it becomes problematic.

The reason is that the K-12 audience is vastly on Meta, which is not a good platform to target “companies” – without the help of costly external tools.

Then you have the Higher Ed and B2B targets that “live” on Linkedin – allowing you to target specific companies.

Great, right? Not exactly.

The average “active” Linkedin user visits the platform once a month.

Yes! A single time per month.

After that, you have the remaining Display networks to try and reach these people – which, again, depend on costly additional platforms to allow you to target companies.

WHAT IF you could reach deep into companies with a considerably smaller budget?

Here’s the catch: you will NOT use ABM

The secret is ABR: Account-Based Retargeting

ABR retargets entire institutions – but only the ones that are warm to your message and product.

ABR is part of a larger strategy: Inbound-Led Outbound

I-LO brings together DemandGen and LeadGen to discover the institutions that:

Have a problem you solve
Are interested in your product
Or are in an early solution research stage – free from your competitors

Once you discover the Warm/Hot institutions, then you add them to a Company-Based Audience.

Inbound-Led Outbound will then:

Generate leads 30% less expensive
Find prospects free from competitors
Bring buying committees to the same awareness level
Create contextualization for SDRs to reach out

I’ve created an entire guide to explain how I-LO works and how you can apply it to your EdTech.

It connects content, signals, and outreach – so Sales acts on warm timing with context.