Many companies and organizations, especially in the B2B space, often struggle to find the right way to approach their target audience and generate high-quality leads who want to hear what they have to offer. Unlike B2C marketing, where the target audience is an individual consumer, in B2B marketing and advertising the target audience is a company or organization, and therefore outreach is usually directed at key decision-makers in those companies—such as CEOs, CTOs, CISOs, and more. So how do you reach these people, convey the right message the right way, and even turn it into a meeting or a sale? The answer is: ABM.
What is ABM?
ABM stands for Account Based Marketing, or in Hebrew: customer-based marketing. In short, account-based marketing allows us to automate sending personalized messages in a specific order to our target audience, which can be segmented and found on LinkedIn. The automation is carried out through the profiles of relevant team members in your company, directly reaching out to connect with the target audience. Using this method allows us to generate leads through a more personal process, with focused and relevant outreach done automatically. This way, you can reduce the time spent reaching out to and conversing with irrelevant leads, and even cut waste in your media budgets!
ABM LinkedIn
LinkedIn defines this advertising method as a growth-focused strategy that has become an essential part of B2B digital marketing. According to LinkedIn, audiences exposed to messages via ABM on LinkedIn are 25% more likely to respond to a personal LinkedIn message (InMail) from the Sales Navigator account of one of your company’s sales representatives. Don’t worry, we will cover Sales Navigator later as well.
Advertising on LinkedIn Using ABM
If you are a business owner, you are probably already familiar with and active on LinkedIn to some degree. Today, LinkedIn offers extensive advertising options, quite similar to Facebook’s options, including website traffic campaigns, engagement campaigns, video views, and even Lead Generation campaigns – yes, with a built-in lead form and everything. What you might not be familiar with is a new option, which is not available in LinkedIn’s standard advertising dashboard. An option that is gaining so much momentum that LinkedIn themselves published a guide detailing how to advertise this way. We are talking about ABM.
When Should You Run an ABM Campaign?
The most common goals when creating a personal-account-based campaign are:
- Generating leads interested in my service/product.
- Integrating the campaign as part of a marketing funnel and facilitating one of its stages—whether the top or bottom—such as an invitation to a webinar, a guide download, viewing website content, etc.
- Aligning the company’s sales operations with the marketing operations—you can combine a messaging strategy that includes outreach from one representative and follow-up or continued handling by a representative from another department.
- Expanding the company representatives’ network and increasing exposure and engagement with my LinkedIn company page.
ABM Marketing - How Do You Do It?
It is important to note that running an ABM campaign is not an option available directly within LinkedIn’s advertising system, even though they support and promote the practice on the platform. An ABM campaign is created using external systems that allow connecting to LinkedIn user accounts and managing them through the software. To fully maximize the potential of this marketing channel, it is recommended to combine a content strategy with your ABM campaign.
Content Strategy
Since your personal outreach comes from users in your company—whether sales reps, marketers, etc.—you must ensure their profiles showcase relevant and up-to-date content for the target audience.
Since LinkedIn is a professional social network, make sure these profiles clearly state that they work at your company and actively share content published from the company page on a regular basis. This achieves two goals:
- Presenting your company in a positive, professional, and relevant light to the audience you are targeting.
- Demonstrating the employees’ level of engagement with the company and the activities taking place within it.
Sales Navigator
Sales Navigator is a type of premium account on LinkedIn. Unlike Facebook or Instagram, LinkedIn, which offers a free profile, also provides an option for premium accounts that allow access to features not available on free accounts. Since an ABM campaign is based on sending personal messages, you will need to utilize the features embedded in one of LinkedIn’s premium options – Sales Navigator.
The monthly cost for this account type is $80, or $780 per year ($65 monthly total), and unlocks the following options for you:
- Targeting – you can focus your search for other accounts in a more detailed manner than standard accounts.
- Messaging – you can send connection requests and messages in higher quantities than standard accounts, and even send up to 20 InMail messages.
- Engagement – viewing everyone who has viewed your profile and receiving real-time updates on your target audience’s activity.
There are a variety of different systems that allow creating this automation in one way or another, the leading among them being – GrowthX, We Connect, Salesflow , and more…
After choosing the optimal system for us (based on pricing, accessibility, user experience considerations, etc.), and connecting our LinkedIn account to that system, we will move on to the key points in creating the campaign:
Building a Buyer Persona
If the marketing world is not foreign to you and you have previously advertised your service or product in one way or another, you have probably come across the term buyer persona. Here too, it is no different; before going live, you will want to analyze your target audience and focus it through a profile that represents your ideal customer.
Using a buyer persona makes the targeting process easier, which, unlike other platforms, on LinkedIn can include:
- Role in the organization
- Company size
- Industry
- Seniority
- Company name
- Company type (private, public, non-profit)
- Geographical location
- Education and even a specific institution
- Group membership
- Years of experience
- Years of experience
- Search terms
- And more
For example: I own a tech company that markets a SaaS product – short for Software as a Service, in short, software with a fixed monthly payment, targeting fintech (financial technology) startups. After in-depth research, we concluded that one of our ideal personas is a Chief Technology Officer (CTO), or even development team leads at such companies, as they are the decision-makers regarding this type of procurement in the company.
After defining our persona’s role, we will continue to establish the rest of the relevant characteristics: industry (fintech), geographical location (where we are marketing to), company size (is my product suitable for an organization of any size? Does it assist with solutions for companies of specific sizes?), and finally we get a complete persona that presents us with the full picture for segmenting one of our target audiences.
After segmenting our target audience, we will want to upload it to the system.
To advertise to our target audience, we have 2 options in the systems:
- Copying the link of the targeted search we conducted and uploading it to the system – in this example, in the We Connect system:
2. Uploading lists of emails and/or phone numbers (Custom Audience) from an Excel file, just like on other platforms such as Facebook, using data records we have from other marketing activities.
Message and Message Sequence
As with any advertising strategy, we will want to define our message. In this case, the message addresses each of our target audiences in a tailored, personalized way; therefore, we will build a unique message sequence for each target audience.
What is a message sequence?
After uploading the target audience to the system, we proceed to create the message sequence.
This is the sequence of all messages, broken down by stages, and on a schedule of our choice.
For example:
Step 1: Connection Request
“Hi, (Full Name), I see you are involved in the fintech space. I run a company that helps fintech companies grow. I’d love to connect!”
Step 2: After Connecting
“Hi, how are you? Glad to connect. Following up on that, I’d love to share an article with you about the new solution my company offers to businesses in your field looking to manage their data better! Link to the site: example.com”
Step 3: Follow-Up
“Hope you enjoyed the article. If you’d like, I’d be happy to schedule a short call to present the capabilities of our new financial data management system. What do you think?”
Of course, it is possible and even recommended to create more than one sequence if we have several different target audiences. In addition, it is recommended to limit the volume of sent messages to about 50 messages per day; this can be configured in any system you choose. Furthermore, you can and should pause the sequence once the potential lead replies, and develop the conversation according to a sales script you’ve developed.
Timing
After defining the target audience and the message sequence, we will set the schedule. We want to ensure that outreach is not sent too late in the evening or on weekends. In addition, we will make sure that follow-ups are sent after a reasonable timeframe without a response, thereby maximizing leads even when they do not reply the first time.
After setting everything up, all that remains is to launch the campaign! Your campaign will be approved and processed by the system and go live within minutes. Good luck 🙂
Summary
In this article, I explained how to run sponsored advertising on LinkedIn by creating a sequence of messages to people in specific roles at companies relevant to what I want to sell. I used LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator tool to find my target audience, and external tools to schedule the sequence of messages used to reach out to that audience. Of course, it is recommended to connect this tool with other marketing tools on LinkedIn, such as Sponsored InMail ads, as well as campaigns on other platforms to maximize campaign results. LinkedIn ABM is only part of your marketing efforts; do not rely on it alone without additional tools, and do not overdo it to avoid burning out your target audience.
Article Author
Raziel Noam, 25, CEO and founder of RCM Digital, located in Tel Aviv and specializing in B2B advertising across multiple platforms for tech companies and B2B organizations.
Raziel is a consultant and lecturer for various organizations on digital marketing and advertising for B2B organizations and startups.
