LinkedIn Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
Account-based marketing
Account-based marketing (ABM) allows you to target and develop relationships with accounts that you’ve identified to be of high value to your business.
Instead of marketing to the masses, this can save time and energy to make your marketing efforts more concentrated and more effective. But it requires a personalized approach to marketing to help increase engagement and conversions, along with careful list creation.
ABM is perfect for digital businesses that sell high-ticket offers to other major companies. By customizing your marketing efforts to each potential customer, you can speak to them more effectively.
When you implement account-based marketing using digital LinkedIn ads, you can use ABM platforms to make the account selection and list building process easier.
Why use LinkedIn for ABM?
First, LinkedIn allows for audience targeting in all of the same ways that many of the other social media platforms do: location, age, and so on. But LinkedIn also offers some unique ways to target individuals that other platforms don’t necessarily include, such as specifying job titles, functions, and even specific companies.
LinkedIn allows for several campaigns to be run at once, and A/B tests are not only permitted by LinkedIn, but encouraged. Additionally, there are a plethora of different types of marketing campaigns provided by LinkedIn to ensure that the experience your team gives to your leads is at its peak.
Finally, LinkedIn’s analytics capabilities provide live updates on campaign performance metrics as well as overall insights in regards to what’s working best and what may need some tweaking.
How to Use LinkedIn for Account-Based Marketing?
Build Your Target Account List
Choosing the right TAL for your account-based marketing LinkedIn campaign is a foundational step that will inform the success of everything that comes after. In summary, developing your TAL is a collaborative, iterative process between sales and marketing that isn’t “one and done.” Whether you use existing CRM data, an ABM tool for account identification, or industry research paired with intent data, your TAL should reflect the ideal accounts your marketing company can serve.
Narrow Down Your Audience
After you’ve settled on your TAL, you can upload that list to LinkedIn for campaign targeting. When uploading an account list, LinkedIn recommends starting with a list of at least 1,000 companies. This is to ensure you have a good match rate and can meet the threshold of at least 300 users once you’ve applied demographic data to this list for custom targeting. In reality, the list size is more fluid than that, depending more on the size of the accounts you want to go after and how niche your persona targeting is.
Create Personalized Content
Content is king, they say. And good content is a king who wins over his people. So no matter who you target or who your audience is, make sure to show them relevant, engaging and quality content. If you are segmenting your LinkedIn account-based marketing campaigns by vertical, customize your content titles to catch their attention. If you segment by persona, address the biggest pain points of that ideal customer. Whatever it is, if you personalize your content, you’re already setting yourself up for a higher chance of success.
Set Up Your Ads
Time to get the ball rolling. You’ve done the groundwork of determining who you are speaking to and what you want to say. Now it’s time to get the message out there ans set up your ads.
Test and Optimize
Now the first ABM campaign (of hopefully many) is live! But the fun doesn’t stop there. Depending on your campaign’s objective and ad type, you may have varying KPIs per ABM program. Brush up on the most important ABM KPIs to track and make sure your reporting and analytics reflect them when reviewing campaign results. The beauty of LinkedIn for ABM is that it’s self-serve, so you can pause low-performing ads, refresh account lists and make optimizations in real time based on how your program is performing.