Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is quickly growing to be one of the strongest tools for B2B marketers. According to Salesforce, “Almost 85 percent of marketers who measure ROI describe ABM as delivering higher returns than any other marketing approach; half of those marketers cite significantly higher returns.” Who could ignore those results? This marketing strategy is proving to be more than just another buzzword: more and more marketers are realising how the elements of account-based marketing are leading to better results.
These elements include finding relevant leads that are most valuable to your business, and focussing your marketing efforts on them. This means that, even if you have fewer leads, you’ll be targeting Sales and Marketing Qualified Leads (SQLs and MQLs respectively).The best part is, you don’t need expensive technology and complex tactics to accomplish ABM: you can use tools you’re already familiar with, like LinkedIn.
Here’s how you can use LinkedIn to scale your ABM efforts:
Create an Account Target Segment
For ABM to be successful, you first need to find the accounts and individuals you want to target. Do you have an idea of what your ideal customer looks like? Fortunately, you don’t have to sift through every account on LinkedIn manually to find them; you can use LinkedIn Account Targeting to do that for you. With LinkedIn Account Targeting, a LinkedIn representative will match your ideal customer list with existing LinkedIn Company Pages, and identify your target audience. Once this is done, you can target exactly the type of person or account you’re looking for by narrowing your target down even further with additional criteria such as title and job function.
Use LinkedIn Ads to Reach Target Contacts
Now that you have this great tool at your fingertips, you might as well use it to its full potential. LinkedIn’s advertising options allow you to target your ads based on helpful factors like company name, company industry, job title, member skills, and job seniority. This will allow you to push out sponsored content, inMail and text ads directly to the companies you’re targeting. LinkedIn’s “InMail” service gives you an opportunity to engage with otherwise hard-to-reach audiences. There’s also an account targeting feature specifically designed for ABM. You can even send LinkedIn a list of the key accounts you’ve created and the platform will match it to a database of organisations to create a specific account segment for your targeting.
Use LinkedIn to Contact Leads Directly
With a multitude of professionals all in one place, how do you engage only with the contacts that are relevant to your organisation? Firstly, you can contact the people you’re connected with for free. With a LinkedIn Premium account, you can send a certain number of messages to people you’re not connected with through InMail. If this isn’t done correctly, you could come off as intrusive and put off a prospective customer. Think carefully about the message you want to send, and make sure it provides value to your audience. If the the email’s subject line catches their interest or speaks directly to their needs, you probably have a higher chance of engaging with them.
Using LinkedIn for account-based marketing can be highly effective. If you want to know more about account-based marketing and how it can help your business, download our free guide.
