How to Build Out Your LinkedIn for Account-Based Marketing

Partners 21 Jan 2020

LinkedIn is without a doubt the go-to social media platform for professionals.

Whether it’s endorsing your fellow coworkers, updating your summary to attract hiring managers, or making sure your profile picture is a recent headshot, there’s so much the platform has to offer.

More people are finding themselves on LinkedIn than ever before, in fact, over 260 million LinkedIn users are logging in each month. It shows no signs of slowing down either with a whopping 87 million millennials also on the platform.

Due to this growth in popularity, we’re also seeing an increase in sales and marketing teams utilizing the platform for various outreach tactics, including account-based marketing (ABM).

Account-based marketing, also known as key account marketing, is the strategy used that directs specific marketing resources to engage a specific set of target accounts with the goal of achieving higher revenue in a shorter period of time. This strategy allows for marketing and sales teams to work closely as they identify key prospects and tailor specific programs and messages to the buying team within those target accounts. Making use of account-based marketing software can help align your teams in automation and outreach in order to maximize closing opportunities.

Bringing this strategy to LinkedIn means that you’ll use targeted content to attract a specific audience on LinkedIn’s platform. When choosing to engage with specific accounts, you’ll be able to learn more about their pain points and how your ads and landing pages can better address and solve these issues.

With 87% of B2B marketers agreeing that ABM delivers higher ROI than any other marketing activities, how do you ensure you’re utilizing LinkedIn, and the over 500 million users, to your advantage? Keep reading to find out.

Getting Started With Account-Based Sales – a Practical Guide

Let’s face the truth: The “spray and pray” approach no longer works in sales. Today, the ability to reach the right audience at the right time with the right message is crucial to close high-ticket opportunities.

This guide will help you build an effective account-based sales strategy to get sustainable pipeline growth, and as a result, more won deals.

Utilize LinkedIn Matched Audiences

LinkedIn Ads recently released a tool called Matched Audiences, allowing users to upload lists of audiences to the platform. With Matched Audiences, you can:

Define your target audiences & deliver ad content based on the pages they visited on your website.
Upload various email addresses or connect your contact management platform to build out a customized audience.
Run account-based marketing campaigns using LinkedIn data.

Since Matched Audiences allows for uploading target accounts to the platform, you’ll be able to easily target your high-quality prospects with specific types of content. You can even get more advanced by segmenting your accounts by industry or company size before uploading them to LinkedIn.

When you segment these audiences to fit a certain type of content, you can customize your LinkedIn advertising efforts to the specific wants, needs, concerns, and pain points of each account.

Integrate your CRM

If you’re running ads on LinkedIn, it’s in your best interest to have your CRM integrated within the platform so you can send leads directly into your CRM. With account-based marketing, you can take this one step further and ensure that your CRM sends audiences back into LinkedIn.

Taking this step allows you to send audience segmentations directly into your LinkedIn ads, further helping you to target specific accounts. Since no two leads are the same, take the time to use separate messaging with your ABM strategy to accounts that have been marked as opportunities versus the accounts marked as qualified leads.

Optimize your company LinkedIn profile

There are various elements of your company’s LinkedIn profile that you can edit and optimize so that they’re ready for a fully ramped up ABM strategy. For starters, take a look at the header photo. If you’ve launched a new exciting piece of content or hosting an industry event, make it the social header. The same can be done for the company tagline. This short and sweet phrase is a great way to hammer home brand awareness and make your company stand out.

One of the more recent updates to LinkedIn is that it now allows for the use of hashtags, which makes it easy for you to further build out your community for social selling. Make sure that your marketing team is fully aware of this new feature and that they take the necessary steps to implement specific tags that target the audiences you’re looking to pinpoint within your ABM strategy.

One last minor tactic you can do within your company LinkedIn profile is to keep a watchful eye on your mentions. Any time a current or potential customer calls out your company, make sure to engage with their feedback, whether it’s positive or negative.

Make the most out of LinkedIn advertising

If you’re looking to advertise on LinkedIn for account-based marketing, there are two ways to go about it. As a marketing team, think of ways that you can utilize each channel to spearhead your ABM tactics.

Test your strategy

You’ve found your target audience, you’ve generated the right types of content, but before your teams jump in with both feet, first test out all of your hard work.

Utilize A/B testing on your ABM approach to see which methods are curating positive results and which aren’t. Make sure you’re only targeting one option at a time so you can truly see what works and what isn’t. Project management tools can help you track which iterations you’ve made and the success you’ve seen with them. Then, consider switching that option out if it isn’t performing the way you’d like it to.

Unlock the Power of LinkedIn: Your Hands-on Guide to Social Selling

With over 900 million users worldwide, LinkedIn offers an unparalleled opportunity to reach a highly targeted audience and grow your business.

Whether you’re a small business owner, a sales professional, or a marketer, here’s a hands-on guide to building your brand, generating leads, and closing more sales through LinkedIn.

Not your average social media platform

LinkedIn is the perfect social media platform for ABM, as it offers you with the largest network of professionals. Plus, with so many features at your fingertips, account-based marketing is easier than ever before to scale your advertising strategy. Even if the amount of data you have is limited, you can still utilize LinkedIn to prioritize accounts, identify the right people to target, and deliver the right kind of content.

It’s all about identifying the high-value companies that would be ideal clients as you combine digital marketing and data together. When this list is prioritized, your sales and marketing teams can effectively create a custom approach to engage each business, regardless of their needs and industry. Join the many businesses already using effective ABM on LinkedIn and you’ll quickly see just how much insight there is out there that you could be using to drive revenue to your business.

Mara Calvello
Mara Calvello is a Senior Content Marketing Specialist at G2. In her spare time, she’s typically at the gym polishing off a run, reading a book from her overcrowded bookshelf, or right in the middle of a Netflix binge. Obsessions include the Chicago Cubs, Harry Potter, and all of the Italian food imaginable.