Using LinkedIn for account-based marketing: social media marketing agency Warwickshire
Looking into account-based marketing? Make sure to pick the right channel for your campaign. Ideally, you should choose a place where you can access good lead data (i.e., get your hands on more than just an email address). LinkedIn is one of such places.
Using LinkedIn for ABM campaigns makes a lot of sense—the platform allows tight audience targeting, including by company name or job functions. But that does not mean you can repurpose any channel strategy and get results. Any social media marketing agency will tell you that LinkedIn AMB requires a specific approach.
Keep reading to learn:
- What is account-based marketing
- Why use LinkedIn for account-based marketing
- How to pursue account-based marketing on LinkedIn
What is account-based marketing?
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a highly focused B2B growth strategy in which marketing and sales align to convert a set of high-value accounts. The Pareto Principle in business suggests that 80% of a company’s revenue comes from 20% of its clients. Targeting accounts with high LTV can hugely benefit your firm.
ABM also helps to weed out bad leads and engage specific accounts with personalised content, offers, and campaigns. With tailored messaging, you’re building trust early in the sales funnel and maintaining it throughout the customer lifecycle. This trust often contributes to the improved ROI that corporations see from account-based marketing.
Another key benefit of ABM? A strong alignment between sales and marketing. Because ABM relies on the execution of a consistent, customer-centric experience, sales reps must partner with their marketing counterparts to learn the nuances of their prospects’ business. This knowledge can help them sell the value of the solution rather than just negotiate on price.
Why use LinkedIn for account-based marketing
LinkedIn is a natural fit for AMB campaigns—you can target people by their professional demographics, something other platforms don’t necessarily allow. It also has arguably the best B2B lead tools available, including:
- Sales Navigator, which lets you access more advanced lead data and build super-targeted lists
- Buyer Circle, which is a feature in Sales Navigator for profiling high-value accounts
- Company Targeting, which lets you deliver hyper-tailored pieces of content to key accounts
Additionally, LinkedIn offers a plethora of different campaigns to ensure your team is able to provide the best experience to your leads. You can run several campaigns simultaneously, as well as A/B test them to see what parameters are working and what should be dropped from the cadence.
How to pursue LinkedIn ABM: tips from social media marketing agency Warwickshire
When using LinkedIn for account-based marketing, you avoid wasting resources on channels that may never bring customers. Tech leaders like Genesys and Adobe use LinkedIn for AMB; it offers access to much more data and targeting options that help you reach accounts aligned with your mission.
Let’s go through the core steps of building a LinkedIn ABM campaign.
1. Make a list of target accounts
General marketing practices involve building an ideal customer profile (ICP), but ABM goes a lot deeper. Besides looking at the interests of businesses, consult the sales team with respect to who they imagine requiring your product or service in the future. Additionally, you’ll want to keep an eye out for current accounts willing to continue with your company.
2. Map individuals to accounts
For effective ABM, you want to identify people who can influence their company’s buying decisions. You can get a better idea of these individuals by going beyond specifying age and gender—look at things like education, job titles, and even location to identify the person you need to engage and persuade. For instance, if you want to target key decision-makers within a financial services account, the list might include the CMO, CFO, client servicing heads, and CIO.
3. Import the list
LinkedIn allows you to import the target lists to its platform for advertising. Once you have identified a minimum of 300 contacts, you can start targeting the list via paid advertising. You don’t have to do much here—the platform itself will take measures to match the data you provide with real accounts.
4. Choose your ad type
LinkedIn offers various ad formats for ABM marketers to display their content:
- Sponsored content lets you share information via articles, videos, presentations, single images, or carousel images.
- Text ads offer an affordable way to draw in influencers, professionals, and decision-makers with creative copy.
- Video ads offer a way to share your company’s message in a creative, visual manner.
- Display ads enable you to target highly specified accounts with text, images, audio, and/or video.
- Dynamic ads let you add more personalisation by taking account of your audience’s activity.
- InMail allows you to send highly tailored messages to your target contact’s LinkedIn inbox.
Choose the appropriate formats, then specify the audience you want to reach. You can include your list in the targeting settings (accessible via the Account Assets menu in LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager).
5. Map content to the accounts targeted
When considering content for your ads, know that every lead isn’t at the bottom of your sales funnel. Ideally, you should use content that draws attention and educates, like an ebook or whitepaper.
Although such offers are top of the funnel, they work well in the lead generation stage. Be sure to gate them so that people truly interested in viewing the content can provide their contact details. Once you have their email address and other information, you can enter them into your CRM, providing your team with the details they need to create engaging follow-up campaigns.
6. Launch and track performance
At this point, you’re ready to launch your ad campaign. While doing so, you’ll be asked to choose between cost per impression and cost per click. Cost per click is more feasible since it requires you to only pay when someone clicks to view information about your company. Select a bid structure, define your budget, and your campaign will be live.
Tracking the performance of your ABM campaign can help you determine when the right time is to follow up with leads (or which accounts may need another nudge to be moved along the funnel). Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to set up real-time alerts, so your team knows exactly when targeted accounts view your ads and content.
Expertise can help you design better ABM campaigns: social media marketing agency Warwickshire
Hailing from Warwickshire, UK, virtualROI is a social media marketing agency that has been helping clients run LinkedIn ABM campaigns since 2009. We have a diverse client base consisting of firms across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. We can help you with ABM content, LinkedIn ads and targeting, performance tracking, and much more. For more information, speak to us today.