Account-Based Marketing

5Attracting Your Target Accounts:

How ABM Turbo-Charges Your Ability to Attract Accounts

We know our target account list, and that means we’ve built our first of six pillars of ABM—“Identify.” Now it’s time to target those target accounts, so to speak, by using marketing methods that are tailored to be most effective.

There’s a science and little bit of an art that goes into the process of attracting your target accounts. It’s largely the job of the demand-gen team, and it’s a combination of different methods to capture the attention of the target accounts. ABM enables the demand-gen folks to spend their money more wisely because of the highly specific list of accounts they are going after.

Some of these methods are online and digital, but others are offline and low-tech. Both the high-tech and low-tech methods can be effective if they’re executed properly. We review many of them in this chapter and how they’re best put to use in conjunction with ABM.

Marketing Automation Systems

You most likely had been using a MAS before you found out about ABM. If you haven’t, they are tools that maintain the marketing database, launch and manage email campaigns, and provide analytics into marketing performance. Some MA systems are sophisticated, with the ability to create campaigns using visual drag-and-drop tools.

It’s possible to have a highly sophisticated MAS—which is a technology platform—but get little return on your investment if that MAS is not coupled with the focus that the ...