Social media is a powerful tool for reaching your target audience, and for B2B marketers, LinkedIn is the go-to platform.
Hosting over one billion professionals, LinkedIn is a goldmine for building connections and engaging key decision-makers. It’s no surprise that 97% of B2B marketers leverage this network to elevate their brands and reach buyers.
LinkedIn is not only a B2B marketing powerhouse—it’s also a core pillar in a more effective account-based marketing (ABM) strategy. When used in full-funnel, multi-channel efforts, marketing teams drive higher campaign conversions and gain more clarity to understand pipeline impact and return on investment (ROI). Here’s why incorporating LinkedIn into your full-funnel ABM efforts is essential for achieving campaign success.
Why Activating Multi-Channel, Full-Funnel ABM with LinkedIn Ads Is Important to Your Campaigns
To succeed, marketers must deliver messaging where their target accounts are most active. As the largest B2B social network, LinkedIn is the perfect channel for this, offering:
- Over one billion members worldwide
- Members across 200+ countries and territories
- Availability in 26 languages
With such a large active B2B audience, LinkedIn provides the ideal social platform for reaching key decision-makers and driving campaign success. However, to maximize impact, it’s essential to integrate your LinkedIn Ad efforts into a multi-channel, full-funnel ABM strategy.
While traditional marketing strategies target buyers with disjointed information and content, full-funnel, multi-channel ABM helps you meet, surround, and influence buying committee members where they are with a persistent, cohesive, and personalized experience. This comprehensive, unified, data-driven approach accelerates the sales pipeline and helps convert your best accounts faster.
But before diving into your multi-channel ABM strategy, you need to align your tactics and channels instead of treating them as separate efforts. This alignment is crucial to ensuring your full-funnel ABM with LinkedIn approach is both cohesive and impactful. Aligned tactics and channels lead to:
- Consistent Messaging: Deliver a unified message across all channels, reinforcing your brand and resonating with decision-makers.
- Tailored Engagement: Target and engage specific accounts with B2B buyer personalization that speaks to their needs, challenges, and industry trends.
- Stronger Relationships: Build trust through cohesive messaging and relevant content, fostering stronger relationships with target accounts.
Here’s one way we recommend aligning your social and ABM objectives:
The Benefits of LinkedIn in Multi-Channel ABM
Most B2B professionals are already leveraging LinkedIn for networking, knowledge sharing, and inspiration. However, the benefits of using LinkedIn become even more evident when applied to multi-channel ABM.
Activating full-funnel, multi-channel ABM campaigns on LinkedIn, alongside other key media channels like content syndication, display advertising, and connected TV (CTV), can significantly enhance your campaign effectiveness. Let’s dive into four key benefits of leveraging LinkedIn in your strategy.
Maximize Your Marketing Dollars
Being asked to do more with less means that every dollar spent on your marketing efforts must yield measurable results. ABM campaigns often fail to meet goals because you’re going after the wrong audience. After all, ABM is all about targeting specific buying committee members with relevant, personalized content. But you need data to understand who these buyers are.
By integrating LinkedIn Ads with the ML Platform, you can use your first-party data and the comprehensive and proprietary ML Insights dataset to identify and prioritize the accounts most likely to purchase from you, create an informed target account list, and push it into Matched Audiences in LinkedIn Ads.
LinkedIn provides the greatest accuracy in demographic data like industries, company sizes, job functions, and job titles so you can target the right contacts at the right accounts. Furthermore, using the same target account list created with ML Insights across channels maintains a consistent cohesive strategy to influence buying groups. This ensures that your LinkedIn Ads budget is maximized by staying in front of the accounts that matter.
Drive Higher Engagement
Tasked with large purchase decisions, B2B buyers require a personalized and persistent experience across the buying journey. Achieving this yields accelerated purchase decisions and higher conversion rates across the sales cycle. Creating that long-term persistent presence works through an always-on, multi-channel ABM strategy. Including LinkedIn in your full-funnel, always-on strategy helps you own the experience on the largest B2B social network and deliver more dynamic ads directly where your target accounts will see them.
Sequential ABM content and messaging through the buying journey brings higher engagement and a persistent experience buyers need in a multi-channel approach. The key is to bring all your channels together based on a full-funnel strategy, which looks something like this:
Use several types of LinkedIn ads that complement your other campaign activities and dynamically serve the most relevant content and advertising to target accounts across channels. Additionally, through the ML Platform integration with LinkedIn, you can also monitor account engagement to identify cold accounts, then reengage them using LinkedIn Ads. This not only enables you to stay top of mind, but LinkedIn’s accurate user profiles help guarantee that you reach the right contacts within those accounts.
Validate Pipeline Impact and Marketing ROI
Measuring multi-channel helps you learn exactly how your accounts move through the sales team cycle and how your content and messaging perform against defined goals. By actively tracking metrics and using data to inform decision-making, you can more easily identify optimization opportunities in real-time. Always optimizing and staying agile with ABM yields better campaign results and revenue growth from your target accounts.
An important but often overlooked benefit of leveraging LinkedIn in your multi-channel ABM strategy is the visibility and data derived from the platform. Measuring the impact of your LinkedIn advertising is essential not only for your LinkedIn ABM campaigns, but also for your entire ABM strategy. With proper measurement and tracking, you can better understand where LinkedIn fits into your larger ABM campaign. By measuring LinkedIn’s impact alongside other channels, you gain insight into how your target accounts engage at each touchpoint across the buyer’s journey. This helps you better understand LinkedIn’s specific impact on your pipeline and ROI. For example, if you notice that your LinkedIn ads are driving engagement during the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey, you can analyze what content and messaging resonates most with your audience. This insight allows you to adjust your strategy and prioritize the content that’s driving the strongest engagement. From there, then you can follow up by running content syndication or display ads to push those accounts to take action.
The ML Platform integration with LinkedIn provides you with multi-channel ABM engagement metrics and the impact of an account’s experience on your pipeline in one spot. Connecting your target account list with LinkedIn and the ML Platform provides visibility into how up to 10,000 accounts engage with your LinkedIn ads. Analyzing your engagement and pipeline metrics allow you to spot consumption trends, pinpoint those highly engaged buyer personas, and measure the activity of multiple touch points. This visibility ensures that social advertising spending can be optimized for maximum impact.
Reach Buyers Earlier in Their B2B Journey
According to LinkedIn’s 95/5 rule, only 5% of your target accounts are in-market, which means that 95% of accounts aren’t ready to buy just yet. While it’s important to invest in efforts that target the 5% of people who are “in-market” today, you need a full-funnel strategy that delivers persistent messaging with the other 95% as well.
Creating awareness and trust with the 95% of buyers not ready to buy requires a long-term approach that focuses on building relationships and establishing trust for your brand. By activating full-funnel, multi-channel ABM campaigns on social media, you can deliver consistent content and messaging across the channels where your target audience spends their time on most. This ensures your brand stays top of mind when those accounts are ready to make a purchase.
Regarding the power of LinkedIn for marketers, Vin Turk, Co-Founder and COO of Madison Logic says:
B2B marketers face a changing buying landscape, with longer sales cycles and larger buying committees made up of increasingly independent decision-makers. Gartner research finds that 70% of the buying journey is completed before a buying group contacts a provider, making reaching buying committee members in the early phase of the decision-making process key to long-term success. LinkedIn’s algorithm emphasizes posts and ads that add value to user’s networks, which means that you need to ensure that your content and messaging clearly drives value wherever your target accounts are in the buyer’s journey. Focus on building a unified brand to demand strategy, and you’ll be more likely to stay top of mind for those out-of-market or just newly in-market accounts when they’re ready to make a purchase.
Best Practices for ABM LinkedIn Ads
Now that we’ve highlighted the benefits of integrating your LinkedIn Ad efforts into a multi-channel, full-funnel account-based marketing strategy, it’s time to take action.
Below are some proven best practices to help you maximize the impact of your ABM ad campaigns with LinkedIn.
Leverage Intent Data for Account Targeting
Marketing isn’t magic, it’s logic. So, how do you know if your LinkedIn Ads are reaching the right buyers?
Buyer intent data is a collection of signals that reveal when a prospective customer is looking for or interested in learning about a solution. By harnessing this data, you can identify and prioritize accounts actively researching your offerings, gaining a clearer understanding of exactly which buyer groups to target with your LinkedIn Ads. This approach allows you to narrow your efforts on those accounts with the highest propensity to purchase.
To further refine your targeting, you can also layer intent data across these key elements of your strategy:
- Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): The types of companies—not the individual buyer or end user—that would gain the most value from your solution.
- Target Accounts List (TAL): A list of prioritized accounts you want as customers that helps you avoid going after potential customers who are not the best fit.
By understanding who is actively in the market and further refining your ICP and TAL, you can more effectively guide your multi-channel ABM strategy with LinkedIn Ads. This will not only help you narrow your efforts but also indicates how the accounts you’re actively engaging with are moving through the purchasing process based on buying committee behaviors.
Use Consistent Messaging Across Channels
When using LinkedIn Ads as part of a multi-channel campaign, it’s key to ensure that your messaging and content aligns across all channels.
By targeting the same accounts with uniform content and messaging, you reinforce your brand identity and keep it top of mind when those accounts are ready to purchase. Creating and maintaining a persistent and personalized customer experience means being where key decision-makers are and delivering content and messaging relative to their buying stage to win their trust and loyalty.
It’s equally important to tailor your messaging and content to align with each buyer’s specific values, as not everyone in an account will prioritize the same information. For example, technical buyers, who care about product specifications and technical performance, may want detailed whitepapers about product features, while decision-makers, who care about cost and business impact, might prefer ROI case studies demonstrating how your solution has helped other businesses.
To effectively reach these buyers, you need to engage them with consistent content and messaging on the channels they use. For example, Forrester insights reveal that CEOs frequently use social media to research solutions throughout their buying journey. By tailoring your messaging to address their specific concerns through LinkedIn Ads, you can speak to their specific concerns.
A/B Test Ad Creatives
There are multiple ad formats you can leverage on the LinkedIn platform. To understand which works best with your multi-channel strategy, you must A/B test various ad formats to see which ads resonate best with your target accounts. Ads you can run on LinkedIn include:
- Sponsored Content: The most common LinkedIn Ad promotes your content directly in account’s LinkedIn feed.
- InMail: Send personalized messages directly to the inbox of your target accounts for direct engagement and personal conversations.
- Video Ads: Promote your video content on your audience’s LinkedIn feed to capture attention with engaging visual content.
- Influencer Ads: B2B influencer marketing leverages trusted industry voices to promote your message, enhancing credibility with your targeted accounts.
Each format has its unique strengths, and testing different approaches can help you identify the most effective ways to engage your target accounts. For instance, if you are a cloud solution provider using ABM content syndication to promote a white paper on cloud tech solutions, on LinkedIn you might use a video ad featuring a customer sharing their case studies with your cloud solution.
Measure and Optimize
It’s essential to measure campaign performance to make informed decisions about your strategy and optimize where necessary. This process enables you to refine ABM targeting, adjust messaging, and enhance overall ABM effectiveness.
We recommend using the following ABM KPIs and metrics to measure and benchmark your LinkedIn efforts:
- Impressions: Number of impressions by account.
- Website visits: Number of website visits by account.
- Engagement by Campaign: Breakdown of an account’s engagement by campaign.
- Account Level Creative Performance: Impressions, clicks, likes, comments & shares by creative and account. Understand how an account is engaging with content on LinkedIn.
- Multi-Channel Account Engagement: Holistic view of account engagement across LinkedIn, content syndication, and display advertising.
By measuring these metrics alongside other channels, you can adopt a holistic approach to ABM measurement. This approach ensures that you’re not only optimizing your LinkedIn ads, but also aligning your broader ABM efforts for maximum impact.
Experience the Full Potential of ABM LinkedIn Ads with Madison Logic
Brands need to be more visible than ever to stand out from the competition and reach buying committee members. Being persistent and present is key to not only influencing in-market accounts but increasing awareness among accounts not ready to buy just yet. As the world’s largest professional network, leveraging LinkedIn in a multi-channel ABM strategy is not just an option—it’s a strategic imperative for ABM success.
The LinkedIn Ads integration with Madison Logic allows you to optimize your budget by targeting accounts most likely to convert not only on LinkedIn, but across all your key channels. This multi-channel strategy delivers a personalized and consistent buyer experience across touch points, enhancing engagement and providing clear visibility into account progression within each campaign.
The ML Platform is the most efficient way to show you exactly how cross-channel campaigns impact your sales pipeline and revenue. For marketers, it’s a single source of truth that demonstrates how accounts move through each stage of the buying journey and how that journey impacts ROI.
Looking to connect with B2B buyers on the platform where they spend the most time? Learn more about the power of ABM Social Advertising with LinkedIn, or request a demo to chat with our ML team to learn how LinkedIn ads can enhance your ABM strategy.
