Do you feel like your company’s marketing strategy isn’t driving the results you want? Consider account-based marketing and how it works on LinkedIn Ads.
The strategy can be an excellent way to reach high-value businesses online. By creating ads just for them, you can make buying from your company an easy decision.
Read on to learn more about why ABM is useful and how you can get started with it.
Why ABM Is Useful
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 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.
Using ABM also allows you to provide a better customer experience. You can spend more of your time marketing to a specific customer than trying to market to everyone who might want your product or service.
ABM Platforms
When you implement account-based marketing using LinkedIn ads, you can use ABM platforms to make the account selection and list building process easier. Programs such as Terminus and 6sense have a lot of powerful data and can integrate directly with LinkedIn Ads.
These platforms aggregate many market and company signals such as job postings, social posts, press releases, and more to determine which companies are most likely to be in-market and making certain buying decisions. They
For example, if HubSpot is hiring a lot of AI Engineers, they may be in-market for AI Software, or recruiting services.
That way, you can build lists in the ABM platform and import them into your LinkedIn campaign manager. Doing that will allow you to more easily find companies to use ABM with.
Whenever you add a company to your list, it will sync between your ABM platform and LinkedIn. Then, you’ll be able to use LinkedIn advertising to reach that new company.
A good ABM platform can help take away some of the stress of account-based marketing. That way, you and your team can focus on other parts of the strategy.
Example search options available in 6sense, a 3rd party ABM platform.
Account Matching
When you connect an ABM platform or another company list to your LinkedIn, you can use the account match feature. The feature lets you upload a company list or import a list.
Then, you’ll be able to use ad targeting to reach these target accounts. Set up tiers for the target accounts and categorize them based on the company size and how quickly you believe they will purchase.
Next, create specific LinkedIn ads to use to target each company match, or group them by segment, such as industry or size. That way, you can address that firm’s needs to encourage the people in charge to buy from your company.
Get the LinkedIn company match file template here (see Company Targeting template): https://www.linkedin.com/help/lms/answer/a423102
In campaign manager, go to Account Assets > Matched Audiences
Find account lists under Account Assets > Matched Audiences
Make sure your company list file matches the LinkedIn template
Example Account lists in LinkedIn Campaign Manager
Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great research tool when choosing your ABM accounts and setting up an ABM campaign.
Whether you find companies in or out of LinkedIn, the Sales Navigator allows you to monitor interactions. When someone who works for that company engages with your content, you can track that data.
If you’re planning to advertise on LinkedIn, then Sales Navigator is the easiest way to search for accounts on LinkedIn. Sales Navigator doesn’t have intent signals that platforms like Terminus or 6sense do, but it does have ways to search by industry, company size, location, keywords, and technologies used. It can tell you about companies with funding events and leadership changes. Plus, it’s very affordably priced.
Note that LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a separate tool from LinkedIn Campaign Manager. They don’t directly talk to each other and you can’t sync lists. It’s a great research tool, and then you will need to manually create a spreadsheet to upload to Matched Audiences, or manually add the companies to your campaign’s targeting.
If you have Sales Navigator, hop into the Account Search here: https://www.linkedin.com/sales/search/company
Sales Navigator example account search for mid-sized B2B tech companies using HubSpot or Salesforce.
Account Targeting
LinkedIn offers many useful features to target content to specific accounts by Company Name. You can develop content and use the account targeting feature to share that content with one company.
So if you know what one organization needs, you can create content that helps them specifically. The feature also offers A/B testing to help you figure out what works best.
That way, you’ll know what content to use when targeting companies with similar needs. Doing that early on will allow you to scale your ABM strategy more quickly and easily.
An excellent way to improve the results is to target content to individuals in those businesses. You can use their specific job titles and share how your company can alleviate their problems.
You can target your specific accounts right inside LinkedIn Ads, combined with other targeting, such as function and seniority.
Marketing Analytics
LinkedIn offers analytics to help you track the success of your ABM campaign. You can keep track of various metrics, such as engagement.
Seeing who is interacting the most with your content may help you reprioritize the companies to target. If people in your top company aren’t engaging but individuals from another are, you can prioritize the second business.
Using your analytics will help you adjust future ABM strategies to target the right companies and employees. There won’t be any questions about if something works or not.
The reports can show which A/B test is more successful to help you decide which option to continue using. Analytics may also help you determine the overall success of your LinkedIn ads.
This is super cool. LinkedIn will report back engagement metrics of your uploaded account lists. It’s a great way to keep an eye on your top accounts!
Account-Based Marketing Done Right
No matter what your company sells, you should consider using account-based marketing. However, you need to implement the best strategies to increase your chances of seeing results.
Whether you sell products or services, you can use ABM with LinkedIn ads. That way, you’ll be able to reach the people who make decisions about what their organization buys and uses.
Do you need help using ABM on LinkedIn? Schedule a free consultation today.