How and why you should leverage Account-Based Marketing on LinkedIn

I would start by saying, stop thinking about Facebook, it's a mistake to base your digital strategy on this channel and start thinking about LinkedIn, especially if 80% or more of your customers are B2B.

LinkedIn turns out to be an option that offers a large number of possibilities that will allow you to make yourself known in a professional network and thereby achieve different business objectives.

That's right, you read that right, LinkedIn, apart from being a professional social media where there are more than 650 million registered users, has the great advantage of allowing you to manage advertising campaigns with LinkedIn Ads.

How to define LinkedIn advertising?

LinkedIn Ads is basically LinkedIn's tool that will allow you to place ads based on user attributes, which allows advertisers to position their business and this generates leads.

It is a very convenient tool to work on brand image, promotes interaction with users, increases web traffic and therefore meets business objectives in B2B lead generation.

Because LinkedIn is a social network where networking and a network of professionals can take place, it is the ideal advertising window to find potential leads, because it allows us to find the professional profiles we are looking for in a very precise way.

The reason is thanks to the advantages offered by this tool that allows us to target very specific audiences, as it can be segmented by:

• Profession
• Country
• Industrial sector
• Company size
• Key words
• University where you studied
• Work experience
• Among others

This makes it the perfect platform to develop a B2B strategy.

Key strategies that will lead you to success on LinkedIn

You are probably wondering how to carry out a strategy on LinkedIn?

Well, at Imagineer we have guided our clients in the use of this platform to help them grow their business, here we want to share some of our experiences, this will help you to reduce the learning curve and get results in less time.

1. Develop valuable content for your buyer personas: you must be sure that you are creating valuable content, it is the way to be on the radar of your potential customers. To do this, you need to ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the most pressing problem for your audience today?
• How can you help solve their problem with a content offer?

2. Experiment with LinkedIn ads: clearly this is not an exact science, when starting with LinkedIn advertising you have to be open to testing, so that you can identify the type of content, CTA's, forms, among others, that prove to be most effective, this over time will improve metrics and results.

3. Take advantage of the data to identify potential customers by segmenting: using the data you have in the CRM of your current customers, by managing the data you can achieve two things:

• Identify the criteria to segment the pattern in a much more effective way, as you know industries, sizes of companies, etc., that are currently buying your products or services.
• Analyse the behaviour of leads, which allows you to specifically target companies of people you have identified as having some kind of activity consuming your content.

However, to get the most out of such a large and powerful platform, we can consider complementing the LinkedIn strategy with ABM or key account management.

What is account-based marketing or ABM?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a marketing concept that is based on the management of strategies focused on specific accounts where we identify great difficulties in moving forward with business opportunities or, on the contrary, that are simply difficult to identify.

ABM is a strategy that works in parallel to inbound marketing, but focused on very specific "accounts", it focuses on a series of steps that must be executed with great caution:

1. Select potential customers.
2. Manage a campaign to attract only them.
3. Generating an interaction
4. Lead qualification
5. New business opportunities.

If we look at this, it is probably the opposite of normal lead management, where what we do is execute efforts that generate opportunities and from there we work on them. By contract, ABM is based on identifying the potential leads we are interested in and then executing a strategy to contact them.

Thanks to a methodology like this we can focus on those accounts that can be more relevant to our business.

The complement between ABM and LinkedIn advertising

An advertisement on LinkedIn can be much less annoying than a direct message by email, as this message will be the first contact between the company and the target account. For this reason, it is necessary to be clear about how to carry out an ABM execution through the LinkedIn campaign, following the right steps and above all showing personalised messages.

Under the ABM strategy we must avoid at all costs that potential customers are going to feel rejection, we must prevent the use of aggressive advertising techniques as this could achieve undesirable results. As an example, we must avoid a campaign in which we offer a demo or free trial of our product or service, if the customer does not know us, this could be intrusive and ineffective.

Even if we have done a very good segmentation and we are sure exactly who to target, it is necessary to elaborate a careful nurturing process before a potential lead or account comes in contact with the sales department, as we could miss that window.

Now, none of what we have described is possible to execute without a powerful platform like HubSpot that allows us to precisely orchestrate the execution of the strategy as well as the tracking of ABM accounts.

There is a HubSpot integration with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which allows us to view LinkedIn information in HubSpot contact records and companies, as well as send InMail messages directly from HubSpot. 

In addition, HubSpot has the following functionality:

Contact and company information:

• Contacts: provides information such as job title, company, time in current position, location and industry. HubSpot uses first name, last name, email, company and job title to search the profile.
• Companies: provides the industry, size and location of the company. HubSpot uses the company name and domain to locate the company profile.

• Icebreaker: offers data such as connections, shared experiences and interests, and a link to the contact's recent activity streams.
• Presentation: gives the facility to request a connection to make a presentation to a contact.
• Related sales opportunities: gives the option to easily find other sales opportunities in the same company and add them to the Sales Navigator sales leads list.
  
  

And for companies, it allows you to:

• Recommended sales opportunities: connect with other sales prospects in the company based on interests and experiences.
• Connections: gives you contact visibility of all the contacts in a company you are already connected to.
• News: you can see the company's news which is a good input to have more context for a more effective contact.

To find out more we invite you to schedule a consultancy session by clicking on Meeting.