12 Effective Ways To Find Target Accounts For Your Business

This time, in the 41st edition of the Elevate Your Marketing newsletter, we discuss a topic that is fairly simple - identifying target accounts. To address a broader audience, I have covered everything from the basic techniques to some of the advanced (or rather not so conventional) methods to build a super-pointed TAL (Target Account List) for your business.

As always, I have made sure that you have something to take away from this article even if you are an advanced marketer.

That said, let's roll.

12 powerful methods to find target accounts for your B2B business

1. Your own data

This is the simplest yet the most overlooked of all the methods. If you have been doing business for a while, you are very likely to have a healthy list of accounts lying in your CRM or marketing automation tool.

Many a time, what happens is that these accounts in the company's own database stay untouched without any remarketing activities. And one of the best ways to build a highly targeted list of accounts is to tap into this internal data.

2. B2B databases

This is probably the most common of all the external sources you would depend on for building a TAL. B2B databases like ZoomInfo and Crunchbase help you create a list of accounts by firmographic (and sometimes technographic) criteria - such as industry, revenue, region, number of employees, etc.

Depending on the database you are using, the search criteria might change. For instance, Demandbase offers technographic data of target accounts using which you can filter accounts based on their tech stack.

3. Your own network

Just like how you would look within (as explained in method #1), you also need to look around. Think about people in your network who could:

• be your potential customers (influencers or decision makers in relevant accounts).
• refer you to relevant people within their organization.
• point you to accounts/people that could be your customers.

4. Visitor tracking tools

I have spoken about visitor tracking tools multiple times before. They are nothing but tools that help you identify the accounts visiting your website. Examples include LeadFeeder, VisitorQueue, and LeadForensics. Some of these tools can also be integrated with Google analytics - which will help you further narrow down your target list based on the accounts' behavior on the website. An example of such a tool is Kickfire.

5. Intent intelligence tools

This is my favorite, and probably the most expensive among all the methods.

Intent intelligence platforms like Demandbase, Terminus, and 6sense analyze content consumption patterns online to identify accounts that have the highest propensity to buy what you offer.

Pro tip: You can use these tools to identify accounts that are surging for more than one of your offerings to create a universal TAL than product or service-specific account lists.

Also read: Navigating the ABM jungle - what is ABM and what is an ABM platform?

6. Industry events and conferences

This method is time-consuming, but worth it - because, unlike the other methods in the list, events offer the ability to interact directly with your potential customers.

Let's look at the two ways in which you can identify target accounts in events and conferences:

• By identifying potential customers from companies exhibiting or participating in an event (you can collect this data either from the event host's website or by physically or digitally attending the event. If you remember, we discussed the same method for identifying competitors in the previous edition of the newsletter. Check it out here - point #12 in the article).
• By networking at the event (I guess this doesn't need an explanation).

7. Online events and webinars

Online conferences today offer various avenues to interact with each other like 1 to 1 e-meeting setups and chat rooms. All these are opportunities for you to look for potential buyers.

In addition to these, here are a few more ways in which you can identify prospects during online events and webinars:

• Once you RSVP for an event on LinkedIn, you will be able to see who else is attending the event. You can go check out the companies where these people are working. You might identify some new accounts that were not previously on your radar (this is a time-consuming process. So make sure you have enough resources before initiating this. As you know, focus is key in marketing. Hence, prioritize what's most important for you always).
• Chats and interactions during events: Some online event platforms allow attendees to leave comments in public. LinkedIn live events are an example of this. Irrespective of the streaming platform you use for it, people attending the event on the LinkedIn platform can use the comment section as a chat window. This is another place where you can identify prospect accounts.
• Purchase the data from the host: Some event hosts sell the data of their attendees to interested parties to generate additional revenue from the event. If that's an option, you can go for it. This is one of the easiest but slightly more expensive ways to acquire account data.

8. Partners

Partnerships are one of the biggest levers of growth for any B2B business. But most partners wouldn't be sharing their leads or target account data unless you have a strategic partnership with them.

In the B2B space, businesses have multiple tiers of partnership. Usually, the top-tier partnership involves combined go-to-market activities wherein both partners share campaign and target account data with each other. This is typically possible only when you get into a mature stage of collaboration with high levels of trust - with each partner adding a tremendous amount of value to the other.

Partnerships are also an excellent tool to identify relevant high intent accounts. For instance, if your company is into offering Workday implementation and support services, getting a list of accounts using Workday - from the company Workday itself - in your geography of interest is a great way to build a highly targeted account list.

9. Analyst and market research reports

Analyst organizations publish reports annually on leaders in different niches. Gartner's magic quadrant and Forrester wave are examples of this. Analysts also publish detailed reports mentioning the key players in various domains.

There are also reports published by various market research organizations such as MarketsandMarkets and Research And Markets. You can easily find market research reports in your niche by googling 'market research reports in {target market name}'.

10. Look alike lists

Look-alike lists broadly refer to lists generated by keeping a base list of accounts as a reference. This is a powerful method to generate a new list of accounts based on the characteristics of an account list you already have.

Here are a few ways in which you can generate look-alike account lists:

• Intent tools like Demandbase come with a feature to generate look-alike lists based on the firmographic characteristics and intent signals shown by a reference list.
• A simple yet effective technique is to take each account in your existing TAL and google '{company name} competitors'. Websites like G2, ZoomInfo, Owler, etc., will give you a list of companies playing in the same space. Here as well, you need to do additional filtering to pick the most relevant accounts for your business.

11. Competing domains

Finding the list of competing domains using a tool like Ahrefs is usually seen as an SEO activity alone. But it's a super cool way of identifying target accounts.

This is what you need to do for this:

1. Take the key accounts in your target account list.
2. Plug the domains of these companies' websites into the competing domains section of any SEO tool (I use Ahrefs for this).
3. Select your region/geo of interest.
4. From the list of domains you get, filter out blogs and other irrelevant websites.

Now you got a refined list of target accounts that you otherwise might have missed.

12. Accounts interacting with personal posts

This is probably the least used of all the techniques we discussed today. I had spoken a few months earlier about the importance of using your employees' social media profiles (especially LinkedIn) to expand your reach.

[To learn how to use personal branding effectively for your B2B business, check out this post]

As you might be knowing, LinkedIn's post analytics shows you the top accounts that interacted with your content. So, if your employees make it a practice to collate the list of relevant accounts viewing their content whenever they post something related to the business, over time you will have a great list of target accounts that have already seen content .

This requires an unconventional approach where you need to encourage those who post to collate and share the data with you. To make it easier for them, you can have a person from the marketing team do the consolidation (of data from multiple people) and account qualification.

Final words

Identifying target accounts is only one of the first steps in your demand generation and lead generation journey. So, instead of overdoing it or spending too much effort on this, try to move on to the next stages (like campaign planning, content strategy, messaging strategy, etc.) pretty quickly.

Also, please note that the tools I mentioned in this article are just taken as examples. If you plan to consider any of those, please make sure to do a thorough evaluation on your own. You can always reach out to me in case you need any help with it.

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