There is no denying that LinkedIn has become a priority channel for account based marketing (ABM).

It was almost inevitable that this would be the case.

After all, ABM is all about understanding your audience and identifying high value accounts for your business. The LinkedIn platform helps you accomplish this more effectively. In addition to access to a global audience of professionals, it offers many tools for targeting and cultivating a relationship with your ideal customer.

Two such tools are Campaign Manager and Sales Navigator.

B2B marketers can use LinkedIn Campaign Manager and Sales Navigator to support account based marketing activities. These two tools are especially helpful for ABM prospecting and lead generation.

LinkedIn Campaign Manager

Campaign Manager is the platform you use to manage your LinkedIn advertising campaigns. It is a powerful lead generation tool that helps refine your audience targeting for reaching, nurturing, and acquiring new opportunities.

There are several different ways you can use LinkedIn advertising to support your account based marketing strategy. For instance, you can use onsite display ads to increase brand visibility among your target audience. You can also use paid content marketing campaigns to promote high value blog posts and videos to build a stronger connection.

Once you have established a relationship, you can use ads to continue the lead generation process by filtering for marketing qualified leads. For example, using lead gen ads with a relevant call to action and specialised content to engage audience members with strong buyer intent. When someone visits a landing page to download a white paper about product specifications, they are likely ready to talk with a sales rep.

However, all of these advertising strategies are dependent on identifying and targeting the right audience. After all, ABM is not about appealing to a general audience. Rather, you are trying to build a rapport with specific accounts that you want to become customers.

Fortunately, targeting is an area where LinkedIn truly excels...

Behold the Power of Matched Audiences

LinkedIn is fully aware of its value as a B2B marketing channel. As such, they have made an effort to develop features that support B2B-specific marketing strategies like ABM. One such feature is Matched Audiences.

Matched Audiences combines the power of LinkedIn’s demographic targeting with your own audience/business data. This provides exactly the sort of targeted advertising approach you need to support ABM. For instance, you can run campaigns based on job role, behaviour, and where prospects are in the B2B customer journey.

Currently, there are four types of LinkedIn Matched Audiences: Retargeting, Contact Targeting, Account Targeting, and Lookalike Audiences.

Retargeting

Retargeting helps you reengage LinkedIn members who have interacted with your brand in some form in the past. You can currently retarget people who:

• Have shown interest by visiting key pages on your company's website.

• Have engaged with your ads on LinkedIn.

• Have interacted with your video content.

• Have submitted a lead gen form.

• Have attended one of your LinkedIn Live events.

• Have interacted with your LinkedIn Company Page.

Contact Targeting

Contact targeting allows you to run ads to LinkedIn members who are part of your existing contact lists. You can target specific groups, such as churned customers or prospects who never open emails. Importantly, you are also able to exclude contacts from campaigns. For instance, you can create a better user experience by excluding your existing customers from prospecting campaigns. Contact targeting is also a great option for reengaging users who have provided their contact information outside of LinkedIn. For example, people you exchanged business cards with at conferences and industry events.

Company Targeting

Company targeting is very similar to contact targeting in function. However, instead of individual contacts, you upload a list of company names and domains that you want to match against LinkedIn Pages. By combining company targeting with other criteria (i.e. job title or seniority), you can reach decision-makers at your target accounts.

Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike Audiences allows you to create a new target audience segment similar to your existing customers, website visitors and target accounts. You can use this option for ABM prospecting to find other LinkedIn members likely to become sales qualified leads.

We have already written extensively on various aspects of LinkedIn Advertising, so there is a lot we are not covering here. If you want to learn more about using the platform, we recommend reading our guide How to Set Up LinkedIn Advertising for B2B Marketing Success.

Now, let us turn our attention to the second featured tool of this article: Sales Navigator.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

You can think of Sales Navigator as a specialised version of LinkedIn for B2B sales management. Using Sales Navigator, sales reps can search through prospects, score them, and monitor their activities. It also offers other unique features such as customised lead recommendations, smart presentations, CRM integration, and more. These features enable sales teams to optimise their sales processes and build more effective pipelines.

Like other LinkedIn premium services, different configurations of Sales Navigator are available, depending on the size and needs of your team. However, do note that not every feature is available at each subscription level. You can find a complete breakdown of what is available across different plans and scopes on the LinkedIn website.

Using Sales Navigator for ABM

Sales Navigator has several tools and features you can put to great use for ABM activities.

Finding Leads and Prospects

To start, when you first set up a Sales Navigator account, you have the option to save your existing LinkedIn connections as leads. Sales Navigator can also integrate directly with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. This ability means you can easily sync all your existing contacts and accounts (and automatically log Sales Navigator activity to your CRM). You also have the option to upload your contact lists as secure CSV files. 

On the settings page of your Sales Navigator profile, you can personalise your account by filling out the Sales Preferences section. Here, you can narrow down your ideal client profile based on geography, industry, verticals, company size, and job function. These preferences will show up whenever you visit someone's profile, helping you quickly determine if they are a good fit. Sales Navigator also uses your sales preferences to provide lead recommendations to help you find fresh prospects within the network.

However, one of the most valuable prospecting features on Sales Navigator is the Lead Builder tool.

Lead Builder allows you to run advanced searches for either individual leads or companies. You can use over 20 different filters to quickly sort through LinkedIn’s 830 million members according to your specialised criteria. Even better, Lead Builder supports Boolean logic (which is a lovely little perk that can significantly speed up a search).

During a search, you can save interesting leads to a private lead list (the person does not know they are included). Updates from these people then show on your Leads page, helping you learn more about them before reaching out (more on this shortly).

Additionally, Sales Navigator has a feature called TeamLink, which allows you to leverage the combined LinkedIn network of your entire team. If Sales Navigator notices a personal connection between a lead and one of your team members, you can ask that member to make an introduction.

Relationship Building

In addition to prospecting, Sales Navigator also has several features that support the relationship-building activities of ABM.

With the help of Sales Navigator, you can track recent updates and news relevant to your saved leads. This includes updates from leads who are not (yet) connections. You can also apply filters to zoom in on a specific prospect, so you can construct a timeline of their activities, interests, etc.

This information can provide valuable insights into the lives of your prospects. By analyzing their profiles and behaviours, you can get a better understanding of their personalities, interests, and priorities. It helps you centre your conversation on how your product or service can provide them with the value they are looking for. Moreover, it helps you know when the time is right to reach out with an invitation for extended dialogue.

In addition to following updates for individual contacts, you can go to the Accounts tab to view lead activity on a company level. There you can see a list of all the companies you have saved. By clicking ‘View Account’ you can see the latest information about a company and all the contacts associated with that account. And by clicking on ‘All Employees’ you can see everyone who works for that company. Sales Navigator will also show you a ‘Recommended leads at’ panel for the company based on your sales preferences. These options enable you to quickly find and connect with all the members of the buying committee your ABM campaign is targeting.

Another useful feature is the ability to leverage tags. This tool helps you organise your saved accounts and leads in a way that works best for your workflow. You can also add notes with important information to your lead and account pages. For example, you can add a note to an account containing takeaways and next steps after meeting with a particular decision-maker. Tags and notes are particularly valuable when dealing with promising but high-maintenance leads. You can see which contacts on your list need extra attention and document how to best approach them to help ensure a fruitful conversation.

These are the kinds of relationship-building tactics that pave the way toward ABM success.

An Integrated Sales and Marketing Platform for ABM

Effective ABM campaigns depend on targeting, retargeting and engaging your prospects to nurture them throughout the customer journey. However, this requires that your sales and marketing teams can seamlessly work together without any data silos.

Recognising this fact, LinkedIn made the brilliant decision to integrate Sales Navigator and Campaign Manager. And this cross-functionality is what makes LinkedIn one of the best platforms available for ABM. Your sales and marketing teams can operate as one across both tools.

Marketing can use the information from Sales Navigator to create campaigns that target the high value accounts and leads their counterparts in sales are pursuing. Meanwhile, sales reps can use Campaign Manager to assess account readiness by seeing how targets engage with marketing efforts.

Both teams can review in-depth analytics of customer activity on the platform, from ad clicks to content downloads to InMail open rates. By tracking which contacts have reached key milestones, they can better understand which members of a buying committee are receptive and who still need more information.

Looking Beyond LinkedIn

By leveraging Campaign Manager and Sales Navigator, you can quickly build a large contact database for relationship building with minimal effort.

However, while it is an undeniably powerful tool for account based marketing, remember that LinkedIn is just one social platform. It still provides only a partial view of your entire customer journey.

Using LinkedIn in conjunction with a full-funnel marketing and sales automation platform helps you make the most of your ABM strategy. Doing so allows you to gain a true 360º view of your interactions with target accounts across all channels – not just LinkedIn.

Contact the experts at 1827 Marketing today to learn more about using LinkedIn for effective B2B marketing. We can help you understand the opportunities presented by LinkedIn and how to best incorporate them into your overall marketing and sales strategy.