Target Account Marketing

Target Account Marketing is a collection of protocols and tools that aims to let marketers execute programs against their most profitable accounts. This isn’t something that overrides account based marketing practices, but rather it’s a way for companies to further refine the qualification process in order to target ideal customers for quick and effective engagement.

Ideally, you’ll want your sales and marketing teams to align so that you can identify the key characteristics of a target account. From here you can start to generate relevant content, such as advertisements, and deliver this content specifically to the accounts that want it. Use your website as a tool that delivers content based on the account-type visiting the site. If it’s a target account, or more specifically, a named target account, make sure to place content that’s relevant to their business strategy. If they’re not a target account, get them started in the standard sales pipeline.

By identifying, segmenting, and engaging your accounts based on how well they meet your ideal characteristics, your efforts can be distributed evenly depending on the likeliness of the sale. For those customers that are a 100% match to the target account characteristics, you’ll want to launch campaigns immediately, and make sure the customer knows you’re here to do business. Those that fall lower than 50% can start to be placed within more general sales pipelines that aren’t as resource-heavy and time-sensitive.

You can think of target account marketing as a way to separate the best customers from the rest. It isn’t meant to say they’re better in any sense, other than the fact that their needs can be met effectively by you. Customers that don’t fall neatly into this category of the ideal customer can still be placed into existing account based marketing programs within your company.