What You Need to Know About Target Accounts for ABM Success

One of the fundamental characteristics of account-based marketing is the use of marketing messages and content that are tailored for specific target accounts. When company leaders adopt an ABM strategy, they make a conscious decision to focus most of their demand generation efforts on a relatively small number of potential customers. In this situation, it's critical to make marketing communications as effective as possible, and the best way to do that is to use customized content resources that are hyper-relevant for each target account.

Many marketers believe that the need to customize marketing content for individual target accounts constitutes one of the biggest challenges associated with ABM. But it reality, the more difficult job is developing the insights about target accounts that are needed to make customized content truly effective. Deep account insights are required to customize content in ways that will resonate with the buyers in target accounts. Without such insights, any customization that's done will be superficial and largely ineffective.

So, what kinds of account insights are needed to develop effective ABM content? In The Clear & Complete Guide to Account Based Marketing, Engagio provides a "laundry list" of the things marketers need to know about:

• The target account's industry - The competitive structure, key trends, and growth dynamics of the industry in which each target account operates
• The target account - The account's stated business strategy, its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, its financial condition, its major competitors, its buying structure and process, its organizational culture and values, and the presence or absence of any recent buying triggers
• The buying group - The identity of the members of the relevant buying group, and their priorities and communication preferences
• Account connections - Any existing relationships or connections between the selling company and the target account and/or the members of the buying group

It should be clear that developing deep account insights is a significant undertaking, and it's a job that must be done primarily by people. Technology can play a role in developing deep account insights by making it easier to gather data about target accounts and perform the other research that's required for insight development. But you still need human creativity and judgment to translate the raw data and information into meaningful insights. Therefore, the ability to scale this component of ABM using technology is somewhat limited.

Many companies have addressed the "insight challenge" by adopting a tiered approach to account-based marketing. The top tier, also known as Strategic ABM, is reserved for those accounts that offer the greatest potential value. In a recent survey by ITSMA, the median number of accounts included in Strategic ABM programs was 10. 

Companies focus most of their insight development work on these Strategic ABM accounts. They develop detailed account profiles, and they update those profiles frequently. This in-depth research enables companies to create and use highly customized marketing content and programs for Strategic ABM accounts.

The second tier of account-based marketing, often called ABM Lite, will include a larger number of accounts that have less potential value than Strategic ABM accounts. Therefore, companies typically perform less in-depth research and build less detailed profiles for their ABM Lite accounts. 

For example, a company may have several ABM Lite accounts that operate in the same industry. In this situation, the company will probably conduct sufficient research to develop detailed insights regarding the relevant industry, but it will gather only basic information about each individual account.

Developing the appropriate level of account insights isn't easy, but it's absolutely essential for ABM success. As Engagio wrote in its ABM Guide, "The entire strategy [ABM] depends on doing your homework and learning as much as you possibly can about target accounts (and key buyers at those accounts) so you can maximize your relevance and resonance within each." (Emphasis in original)

Illustration courtesy of Nico Kaiser via Flickr CC.