Mastering ABM Marketing with LinkedIn Ads - A Walkthrough Tutorial

Use slides of information quickly and it allows you to convey a lot of information to the reader. So displaying them in the LAN network, I'm, I'm not exactly sure how that's going to work. I need to see some of these in practice because ad on the LAN are like, you know, an ad showing up on the New York Times website. And you know, usually people, when they see ads on the New York Times website, they might read that ad, maybe they click through expecting a New York Times article. I'm not sure how that ad would show up to be swipeable and if that's clear when they see it or kind of exactly how that works. So I need to see this, see this in action. But it's interesting to see, you know, I'm, I am interested to test out the LinkedIn audience network more. The land's a very interesting feature. All right, so in part one here, let's talk about understanding ABM and defining what ABM is. I'll go very briefly here because I assume most people already kind of know about abm, but ABM is account based marketing where you're going to set a list of target accounts that you want to reach and you're going to focus your marketing efforts on those target accounts. Very often in company strategy, your both your sales team and your marketing team are aligning on those same target accounts, which allows you to kind of put more focus, put more marketing budget, more sales effort behind that to these target accounts that you're going to have more impact on this set list of companies instead of going broad to a lot of different companies out there. You know, when you're using kind of standard targeting on LinkedIn, you're often setting an industry, maybe a company size and you're setting, you know, job title targeting on top of that. So there's, there are probably a lot of companies that are ending up in this umbrella. When you use an ABM list, you're going very narrowly on the companies and then maybe you're going deeper into those companies when you reach them. So ABM allows you, both you, your marketing team and your sales team to focus on the same set of target accounts. There's some other interesting things out there for intent data to identify which accounts are in market at any time and stuff like that. So the reason why it's useful in B2B is often we're sending a, maybe a quarterly set of target accounts. Maybe there's different triggers or different signals that we look for to know when a company's in market or is A potential prospect for our company. Finally, using an ABM approach allows you, depending on what facets you're building your lists based off of, it allows you to create some more personalized marketing efforts. Maybe you're doing an ABM list by industry, maybe you're doing it by company segment, maybe funnel stage that the company is in. So if you're doing it by industry, then you know what the industry that these companies are in and that allows you to create your marketing materials to really speak to them and reflect them. Maybe you use imagery from reflecting their industry and you're going to use words that reflect their industry too. And if you go all the way down to the company level, maybe you're focusing on just one company per campaign and then you can write your ad so they, so ads of that campaign speak directly to that company. So that's kind of the quick, quick rundown of what ABM is. Some of the different lists that people often build are Maybe your, your Dream 100 list of dream companies that you want to reach. Maybe your sales team is setting a quarterly target, accounts that they're going to focus on. And then sometimes you have your CRM already has deal stages of where companies are in your pipeline. Those, those deal stages themselves can be different ABM lists so that you know and have the ability to focus on. I want to focus on companies that have booked a demo, or I want to focus on companies that have been qualified to buy, or I want to focus on open opportunities so I can make sure I'm focusing my budget at different stages of those of that journey. And some of the benefits of using an ABM strategy is, you know, when you consider a, a traditional strategy, you're putting in, you know, industry targeting, company size targeting into the, into LinkedIn and you're letting it go out there and find those companies that match that. So there's there that, that's a variable that you're introducing that you're not sure who these companies are. Maybe you do reach some and you're like, oh, that company wasn't a fit. I'm going to adjust my targeting. Using an ABM list allows you to start with a known list of good companies. So it kind of removes that variable of are these good companies or not? And when you have a known set of good companies that you want to reach, that that allows you to be more specific in your targeting towards them. So it just removes a variable and makes tends to improve your results. All right, so next let's talk about the three main ways that people tend to use ABM lists in their marketing and on LinkedIn. So the number one way is setting a target accounts list that these are the accounts that you want to focus on for a period of time. Sometimes either leadership or the sales team is setting those target accounts. And you're going to say hey, these are the a hundred accounts, maybe a thousand accounts that we want to make sure that we're focusing on and that we want to put our budget dollars behind. So that target accounts list will be. These are the new prospects we want to go after. Let's focus all of our marketing on those. So target accounts that you then can start that start prospecting into those target accounts. You can direct your ads to those target accounts and then add those as people from those target accounts start to interact with your ads, then they can start to flow through your normal ad funnel from there where they might enter a retargeting campaign and then so on from there. The second way is using them as opportunity stages in your pipeline. And, and when you do that then you could say hey, these are our maybe, maybe you do have your target accounts, your prospecting accounts in one list. And then maybe you have your engaged accounts accounts that you know have reached your website or maybe read a couple blog posts. You can have your engaged accounts and then you can have your qualified accounts maybe of those engaged accounts who meets our our qualification criteria. That can be your engaged list. And then you can have your open opportunities as the companies that have like requested a demo or maybe started a trial ones that are actively talking to your sales team. That can be your open ops list. And then finally you can have your customer list from there where maybe you want to do some customer expansion or retention types of marketing to your customer list. That can be another one to, to create. So it kind of creates these stages that you can then control the ads and the budget that you're delivering to each to companies in each stage here. And like for an specific example, you know you're going to usually lead with like what's the pain point you're solving? Or the opportunity that you're off the benefit you're offering to the customer, their target audience. And then as people get laid in your funnel stages, maybe in remarketing or in open ops, then maybe you're going to show them social proof ads such as like testimonials and AW awards you've won. But you wouldn't use those awards and testimonial ads in cold audiences because they don't know who you are yet. So talking about your awards to somebody who's never heard about you before, that doesn't really mean anything to them. But as they get through later stages in the funnel and they're considering you or considering you versus somebody else, that's where in using your social proof and you know, showing them the awards you've won, reasons to go with you and stuff like that, you'll then put those at those stage. So it gives you a lot, a lot of control to, to as to like how much budget and what ads you want to deliver to each company in each stage of that funnel. And then the third way to use them is, is for exclusion lists. So maybe you have your customer list as a, maybe it could be a CSV or maybe you're using HubSpot, you can sync that list, which is nice. So you'll often want to suppress existing customers from new customer marketing. Maybe you want to deliver a different message to customers. So ABM list can also be used for the exclusion side of things. Maybe you have a competitor list that of course you want to exclude maybe your customer list so that you can separate out that marketing. And then maybe once a company gets to the contract stage, you're also then going to exclude them from cold marketing and then make sure that they're only getting certain types of marketing from there. Now what does this look like in the campaign level? So one of the best ways to use account lists on LinkedIn is by using the company list, getting your account list and then overlaying job titles of people at those companies. Because if you have, if you have the, the contact level, you have their email address, then you know, often email is like the cheapest way to reach these people. So using cold email. The value of LinkedIn is when you don't have those people's email addresses, but you know the companies. LinkedIn then allows you to reach those members and then you can do lead gen or drive them to your website or whatever you want to do from there. But LinkedIn offers the way to reach these people at these companies when you don't have their contact address. When you do have their contact address, maybe you do want to use a, an email. Starting with email and then consider adding ads after that. So what this looks like is you'll, you'll bring in this company list. This company list will sync from either you can either upload a CSV of those companies or, or you can sync this through a third party platform. There's lots of third party platforms these days. HubSpot can sync company lists and then you'll have platforms like 6Sense or Terminus or Snow and stuff like that who can generate lists and sync them into other platforms. So it'll look a little bit something like this where we'll be able to pull in this company list. And I want to say I want to target all these companies and I want to target these very specific job titles at these companies. I don't know who these individuals are, but I want to use this as a way to reach these ICP job titles at my target accounts lists. Now, if you want to upload this list as a CSV, you can do that by coming to the Audiences tab over here. In LinkedIn ads, you can do create audience and then company slash contact. It'll then give you an upload dialog where you can type in the name of the list and then you can select company list. LinkedIn will auto detect based on the CSV you uploaded, but you also want to start with using the template that they provide you. This is a CSV template that you can then add your data into. It's best to use their template info and the column headers and the order that they're in so that you can maximize the match rate. I talked to LinkedIn support before and sometimes if you upload data out of order or with different headers, it might not match in the back end. LinkedIn might not know what it's detecting. So it's best to use their template to maximize your match rate. And then for companies, most ideal is using the company name and the company page URL that'll maximize your match rate. Also if you can add in other, other options are adding in the website URL, maybe country that that company's located in. The more info you add into it, the more specific and the more, the higher the match rate can be. If you add too much info, you might be confusing it. If maybe like the country of like a big enterprise company, you're listing one country whereas the headquarters is in another country. So most ideal is is company name, website URL and LinkedIn page URL and then from there all the other info. If you want to get more specific, you can add that in too. Now how do you report and track your progress on your ABM marketing campaigns? So there's a couple different ways that we like to do it. Number one is right inside LinkedIn. Once you have your company list or your account list, you can then click into that in the Audiences tab and you can see some data like this. This is nice because number one, you can, you can verify that your accounts have matched. You can see if there's any unmatched ones in this unmatched tab. If there is, you can see why that data doesn't match. But number one, you can verify that your accounts have matched. You can see the companies on the list. And then number two, it starts to give you some data on the engagement of those accounts. So I like this first, this first like progress bar, like meter to show you like the engagement level of different accounts. And then now you can also create a sub segment of this list. So maybe you want to target unengaged accounts to get them engaged and maybe you want to focus more spend on the most engaged accounts. So it's a, it's a cool way to sub segment your, your ABM lists or whatever company list you're using. And then from there it'll tell you how many members you've reached at that company, how many impressions you've served and how many ad engagements and organic engagement you've driven from those companies. And then you can kind of filter, this is a new list, there's not a ton here, but you can see which company has engaged the most and stuff like that. So good, good metrics to kind of keep your eye on so you can see which companies are the most engaged. You know, this is something that your sales team will probably also want to keep their eye on to know, okay this, these top three or five or ten companies have been most engaged. We want to make sure that we're reaching them, you know, in the time frame that they're, that they're engaging. And then from there after this, we want to have, you know, our reporting based on CRM data to know how many leads have been captured from each target account, what stage that target account is at. And then we can make, we can adjust our marketing based off that. So if you have a company that did close, maybe you then want to remove them from the target accounts list so that you can get your ad spend towards more companies to move them through the funnel. So based on CRM data, you want to know how many, how many leads you've gotten from each account, how many opportunities and what stage that account is at. And you want to make sure that these dashboards are accessible to both the sales team and the marketing team so that you know you're both aligned on the same page and looking at the same data. So to discuss a couple of case studies here, there's lots of times when we're going to separate out being very specific on the target accounts list. All right, now let's talk through a couple of case studies of how these are used in practicality and implementation. So number one is an account where we're separating out account lists based on funnel stage. So we have our list of prospecting accounts and these are the ones that we work with a sales team on to identify, hey, this quarter, these are the accounts we want to put most of our effort to. And then we have various pipeline stages of accounts so that we can focus the budget on each stage. As you can see here, we have these broken out into different campaign groups so that the right, right ads and right budget can live under the right staging. And we can see those metrics on a, on a company level basis. And we can see those metrics on a stage level basis, how much money is going to them, how many leads and opportunities have been generated from each. This is a very granular approach. You gotta, you gotta make sure you have to be effective with this. You, number one, you have to have enough target accounts to go after. You have to have enough account in each stage of the pipeline. So this is better for more mid sized to large companies that have big pipelines so that it makes sense to break them all down. You know, if you only have like one or two companies in each of these stages, then this is going to be too granular and you might not even have enough people to reach at each stage here. And then you also need enough budget to, to spend towards all these campaigns. Because if we're creating, you know, a few different campaigns in each of these stages and that's going to be a lot of like daily budget, you need to allocate to all these. So you need to have a hefty enough budget to cover all this. And then another case I did talk about is when you have just, just one target accounts list and you're like, hey, I just know that these are the, the companies in my market that I want to reach and I don't want to reach anybody else. We do use this at certain times. So there's several accounts where we'll, we'll just have one ABM list and like these are the accounts we want to reach. This is better for maybe smaller earlier stage companies that you might have just your 100 target accounts that we want to go after or a very well defined industry. You're like, these are, these are the only companies out there that are even potential customers for us. We want to make sure all of our marketing goes towards these companies and we don't want to waste any marketing on anybody outside of this, because those people are not prospects for us. So we do have lots of accounts where you'll be very focused on your target accounts list because you know that these are the right and maybe only companies you want to reach. All right, now for a sneak peek into some platforms out here. There's so many platforms out there for list building these days. Snov is just one example that I'll go through first and then we'll go to Six Sense next. But there's lots of platforms. Palo's another good platform. Then HubSpot can generate their own company lists, but there's tons of platforms out there. So. But the basic idea is that you can build a list of companies. Maybe you want to use certain filters here and maybe it's company location. Maybe I want companies in the United States. Maybe I want companies in a certain industry. It's just software. Maybe I want a specific size of companies, 11 to 50. Now I can use a lot of this same stuff when I'm in LinkedIn, but I want this to eventually spit out a list of companies and then maybe I want to go review all those specific companies. You know, that's something that LinkedIn ads isn't going to give me out of the box. I can do that in sales now, but I can't do that in LinkedIn ads. So maybe I want to generate a list of companies and then do some future additional filtering on top of that. Some of these platforms give you some options that LinkedIn doesn't offer in the platform. So that's where sometimes these list builders are nice because they'll give you certain options that you're not getting inside the platform. And here's an example using Apollo, which has more filters here that I like, but you can, you can search for maybe the company's location. So maybe you want to search for a company at the US Number of employees. I can set a certain number here and you can see how they offer even more granular than LinkedIn does. LinkedIn doesn't have 51 to 100. LinkedIn only has 50 to 200. So maybe you want to get even more specific on company sizes, maybe industries and keywords. So you can do. You know, that's something that LinkedIn ads isn't going to give me out of the box. I can do that in sales now, but I can't do that in LinkedIn ads. So maybe I want to generate a list of companies and then do some future additional filtering on top of that. Some of these platforms give you some options that LinkedIn doesn't offer in the platform. So that's where sometimes these list builders are nice because they'll give you certain options that you're not getting inside the platform. And here's an example using Apollo, which has more filters here that I like, but you can, you can search for maybe the company's location. So maybe want to search for a company in the U.S. number of employees. I can set a certain number here and you can see how they offer even more granular than LinkedIn does. LinkedIn doesn't have 51 to 100. LinkedIn only has 50 to 200. So maybe you want to get even more specific on company sizes, maybe industries and keywords. So you can do keywords here. LinkedIn doesn't have that on the in the ads platforms with cloud computing and then buying intent. So this is really interesting when you can use buying intent to say are these companies in market or not? Obviously, you know, ideally you could, you focus as much of your budget as companies who are actively looking to buy your solution, focusing on them to start and then, you know, going from there. So there's some interesting buying intent signals out there that these companies use by analyzing, you know, various data on the web. Most of these platforms don't tell you exactly how they do it, but is by analyzing data on the web, you know, our people from these companies are searching certain keywords on various platforms. Are they visiting certain blog posts and reading and visiting pricing pages on certain websites. Have they signed up for demos of other platforms? So data platforms like Apollo will aggregate a lot of data on the back end to give us those signals, insights. They have other features for technologies. They're using revenue numbers, maybe job postings that they posted. So those are some interesting stuff you can see there. Other signals like rapid growth are available here. Buying stage, those are available here as well. So I'm just kind of showing a basic view here. If you upgrade and use all the features, there's lots of options here that you can use to build your target accounts list and identify those good companies. And then usually you want to actually look at the companies on that list just to verify like, oh, these are the right companies. Maybe you find a couple companies that aren't a good fit and you want to exclude them. And maybe you want to also, maybe you also want to add in a couple of different sub lists together and then match your target accounts list for the quarter. And it might be a combination of a few different lists just kind of picking and choosing the best companies to reach There. Then finally Sixth Sense over here. I really love a lot of the data that six Sense offers and how they can break it down into different stages of the buying journey that certain companies can be in and ideal customer fit profile to know how good of a fit that these companies are going to be. So since Sixth Sense seems to have the best, most detailed data of all the platforms out there, I think it is the most expensive to use. So you know, if you're a bigger enterprise account and you want to use an ABM approach, I'd love, you know, I Recommend Checking out 6 sense. There's lots of data platforms out there now. A couple quick pitfalls to be careful of as you go as you think about an ABM approach now, a couple quick pitfalls to kind of keep in mind as you plan out your ABM marketing. Number one is that is that sometimes it's also possible to have too small of a company list or a target accounts list. And if there's not, if those companies aren't big enough or there's not enough people at those companies, you might be over focusing and over segmenting on these Pew accounts. So a lot of times we'll run a EBM list alongside of cold targeting using LinkedIn's targeting to see how those performance stats compare. If there's enough room in this target accounts list to reach them, we'll focus on that as much as possible. But if we start to see that fatigue or get saturated, then we'll start to move budget over to the LinkedIn targeting to find more companies that maybe we want to add into the list later. So be careful, use the ABM approach often. I recommend split testing that with LinkedIn's targeting options just to make sure you have enough people to reach. Number two is being careful when using intent signals, especially at really big companies. The example is, you know, say somebody in finance at IBM was looking at, you know, QuickBooks software or something like that. I'm just making up an example and it says they're in market for financial, you know, for accounting software. IBM's such a big company that, you know, wouldn't that will start to move budget over to the LinkedIn targeting to find more companies that maybe we want to add into the list later. So be careful, use the ABM approach often. I recommend split testing that with LinkedIn's targeting options just to make sure you, you have enough people to reach. Number two is being careful when using intense signals, especially at really big companies. The example is, you know, say somebody in finance at IBM was looking at, you know, QuickBooks software or something like that. I'm just making up an example. And there's one person in one finance department at IBM mean about that company being in market. There's probably, you know, dozens or more teams at IBM and departments where maybe they're using different accounting software and systems, maybe they're subsidiaries of IBM using their own accounting systems and you know, maybe just one of those teams is in market and thinking about switching their accounting system. So be careful when using intense signals at really big companies because it can get pretty muddy in terms of like who that specific person researching that and then what does that mean for the company as a whole. Intense signals are best for like those small to mid sized companies where, where one person researching it does mean that that company is really in market for that solution. All right, so we covered a lot today on this ABM podcast. For a quick recap, we went over the basics of abm. What it is, it says they're in market for financial, you know, for accounting software. IBM's such a big company that, you know, what is one person in one finance department at IBM mean about that company being in market? There's probably, you know, dozens or more teams at IBM and departments where maybe they're using different accounting software and systems, maybe they're subsidiaries of IBM using their own accounting systems and you know, maybe just one of those teams is in market and thinking about switching their accounting system. So be careful when using intense signals at really different ways that people tend to use it. Number one is a target accounts list, number two as a funnel stage list, and number three as customer remarketing and exclusions. We talked about how you might craft your different ad campaigns to talk to those different companies either by industry that they're in. So you can have your ad creative reflect that in companies because it can get pretty muddy in terms of like who that specific person researching industry and speak directly to that industry or so that you can pick and choose the messages that you're delivering at each stage of the funnel journey for those companies, for example, you'd want to save your awards and testimonials ads for people who are not. And then what does that mean for the company as a whole? Intent signals are best for like those small to mid sized companies where, where one person researching it does mean that that company is really in market for that solution. All right, so we covered a lot today on this ABM podcast. For a quick recap, we went over the basics of abm. What it is, different ways that people tend to use it. Number one is a target accounts list. Number two as a funnel stage list later in the buying journey who already know who you are and what you do. After that we talked about how to measure performance of ABM campaigns. We talked about and went over what it looks like inside of LinkedIn and then how you would want to use and augment your CRM data on top of that. And then finally we went over some case studies and talked about some real world examples of companies that might just focus just on an ABM approach or who might want to segment by funnel stage. And then we did go, we did do a quick walkthrough of a few tools out there that you can use to build company lists such as Snow and Apollo and six Sense, but there's lots of tools out there to go to go use. So that's, that's our quick recap for today. Other episode in number three as customer remarketing and exclusions, we talked about how you might craft your different ad campaigns to talk to those different companies either by industry that they're in so you can have your ad creative reflect that industry and speak directly to that industry, or so that you can pick and choose the messages that you're delivering at each stage of the funnel journey for those companies. For example, you'd want to save your awards and testimonials ads for people who are later in the buying journey who already know who you are and what you do after that. We talked about how to measure performance of ABMTode that have either come out recently or coming up soon. We'll talk about LinkedIn's sunsetting. We'll go even further into LinkedIn sunsetting lookalikes and then predictive audiences and how to use those most effectively. We'll talk about some new features that are coming up on LinkedIn and then we're also going to do some deep dives on ad formats. Recently we did a deep dive on document ads and I got a lot of good questions and follow ups about document ad best practices and people said that that was really useful. So we're going to do more deep dives on other ad formats and really break down the best practices of these other ad formats on campaigns. We talked about and went over what it looks like inside of LinkedIn and then how you would want to use and augment your CRM data on LinkedIn. All right, well that's what we got for you today. If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe so you can get notifications about future of that and Then finally we went over some case studies and talked about some real world examples of companies that might just focus just on an ABM approach or who might want to segment by funnel stage. And then we did go, we did do a quick walkthrough of a few tools out there that you can use to build company lists such as Snow and Apollo and 6Sense. But there's lots of tools out there to go to go use. So that's that's our quick recap for today. Other episodes episodes, when those come out. And then always feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or you can email podcastpeedworksocial.com with any questions and stuff like that.