Unless you live and breathe the LinkedIn marketing experience, it can take a few months to catch up on the new features and gizmos they add to their offering. Take the Account Targeting feature now available for advertisers, for example. It’s new(ish) but not old hat. And definitely one to add to your B2B marketer’s armoury if you’re pursuing an account based marketing strategy. So if you’re not already fully up to speed with it, it’s worth you reading on…
To recap briefly on what we’ve said previously, account based marketing excels under the following conditions:
- Effective identification of key accounts
- Detailed research into the profile of each account
- Tailored engagement of each account across multiple channels
- Tracking, analysis of data, and adjustment
- Results fed into the mix, for a new cycle to begin
LinkedIn makes for both a superb starting point and a central hub of activity for many types of ABM campaign. Once you’ve identified your key accounts, its Account Targeting feature can enable you to reach exactly who you want to reach. But it doesn’t stop there. LinkedIn offers additional support as well. It is rich with data on accounts, obviously, so detailed research is easy. And the analytics available are of genuine use when interrogated properly.
So if you’re planning a product launch, running an event, or looking to rebrand, LinkedIn is where you should start. And that’s even more the case now that their Account Targeting feature has properly bedded in.
Account Targeting on LinkedIn
Up until a year ago, the account targeting options available on LinkedIn were useful but limited. Put simply, you were restricted to reaching a hundred companies, and a lot of the process was manual. But that’s all changed and you can now upload lists of up to three hundred thousand contacts. That’s not really the ABM approach, of course, but it does illustrate what power is at your fingertips.
How Account Targeting can help you
- LinkedIn is particularly strong for B2B marketing. We’re teaching you to suck eggs with that statement really, but it does bear stating. If you have white papers you want to shout about, an e-book, or a webinar, LinkedIn advertising is an ideal place to start. If you have a product launch, event, or brand awareness campaign to organise, Account Targeting is an ideal feature to use.
- If your product or service is one of high-value and commitment, then often you’re actually only wanting to target a select few prospects. A scatter-gun approach doesn’t work from either a marketing perspective or servicing leads perspective. Account Targeting comes into its own here.
- If you want to weed out those LinkedIn users who might use the same keyword to search for something not directly related to your offering, then a good hook for engaging with a prospect is a useful piece of info like a white paper. LinkedIn’s upgraded Account Targeting feature makes this possible. You really are able to target who sees what.
It’s worth noting, however, that the minimum number on your contact list is three hundred. That’s not exactly a purist approach to ABM, but it’s the best that LinkedIn has to offer at the moment. And depending on the value of your product/service, conversion rate, and skill at advertising, it may well be worth the effort.
So what should you be doing?
Identify your target accounts
Speak to your sales and marketing teams, and ask them for the top ten (twenty, fifty, whatever suits your market) companies they’d like to connect with. Once you have your list, you’re going to need to get the names you upload pretty accurate, though. LinkedIn will try to match them, but it’s not a failsafe set up. If they don’t match, then those businesses/contacts won’t be shown your advert. So it’s worth putting the effort in ahead of starting.
LinkedIn can match your list using contact details, company name or company website domain. You can then narrow things down further by specifying other aspects such as the job function or title, seniority, skills, industry etc.
Identify who you don’t want to see your campaign(s)
LinkedIn Account Targeting gives you the ability to exclude a subset of an audience too. So you can operate under the radar of your competitors, for example. Or, really tailor different campaigns to different customers and not risk one subset seeing the campaign targeted at another.
Make the most of the B2B focus
Obviously campaigns can have many purposes, but with Account Targeting the more specific the better. If you want to get those golden customers to an event you’re holding… We’d say start with a LinkedIn Account Targeting campaign. If you have a B2B product launch… We’d say tap into LinkedIn’s powerful offering. If you’re going through a re-branding exercise… We’d say definitely make the most of LinkedIn’s powerful advertising features.
Get in touch to learn more on how to reap the rewards and the benefits of LinkedIn.
