LinkedIn ABM Targeting

Key Takeaways

account based marketing is not a new strategy by any means but i feel like it's not quite as commonly used in b2b advertising typically you would start off with either job titles or job function and reach any user across any company and whichever ones come to you go through your sales process those are the companies that you work with but sometimes you might want to start off with a list of specific companies to target because you have a limited field and you know everybody that you can work with so you want to focus on them or maybe your sales team or leadership team has a specific list of companies that they want to work with because they have a good reputation or they just think it would be a really good logo to have in the our customers section of your website no matter what the reasoning is linkedin is a great platform to get started with account based marketing because it's a pretty easy platform to get on we talk about it a lot on this channel and there are some great ways to get in front of specific companies so in this video i'm going to show you the two different ways that you can utilize linkedin ads to target companies on the platform and then close out by giving you a few best practices to get started with account based marketing i jumped into joe's just placeholder linkedin account so we can go through the two separate ways that you can target companies with your linkedin campaigns the first option is going to be the most manual and we're going to go through just a basic campaign setup to get there there's no extra steps so i'm going to come over and create a new campaign we'll just leave it in the default campaign group i'm going to pick an objective get rid of this warning and then scroll down into who is your target audience this is where we're going to be able to target specific companies linkedin always defaults you into audiences where you can use the list upload lookalike retargeting audiences but for this option we're going to use audience attributes based on our goal of targeting companies you probably guessed correctly that we're going to go into company there are a number of different ways that you can target companies whether it's the category their growth rate the industry but for account based marketing what we're going to use are the company names and once you click into this linkedin starts to give you some examples all you need to do is start searching for a company name and then they give you some examples down here walt disney microsoft google lots of different companies so let's say we wanted to target linkedin for example all we'd have to do is start typing in the name and then linkedin would come up but here you'll notice that there are a few different options it's not just one linkedin company odds are if you're typing in linkedin you probably do want this first option which looks very official on the internet it has 10 000 plus employees but there are a number of different options below that all contain linkedin in the company title so make sure that when you're searching for these you are being really specific about which linkedin you are trying to target and you are searching for the right keywords to bring up the companies that you're looking for once you've found the company that you want all you have to do is click the checkbox next to it and now it's added to your list linkedin will then select a number of additional suggested companies that you can easily add so let's say we were just going after the different ad platforms i could easily select twitter it's not going to then give me any other ones oh here we go facebook youtube google if these are the types of areas i'm trying to target it was a pretty easy way to start adding those companies to our account based marketing list one other takeaway that i want to point out is that you can adjust the company names based on whether this is somebody's current job a pass job or a current or past job if you're trying to target people based on their current roles make sure current jobs is selected that is the default so you might not need to change anything but if you do have some marketing tactics that want to target people based on their past jobs that is an option that you have or if it doesn't matter if it's their current or past job you can do that as well for now i'm going to close this editor so we've retained the companies that we have targeting and the only other thing i want to call out here is that you still have the ability to narrow the audience further by clicking this option it will open up the same builder that we had before where you still have the ability to adjust anything based on an audience the audience attributes whether it's somebody's job function job seniority their job title whatever it is and you still have the option to exclude any users with the same looking kind of builder that we have here and then we also still have the enable audience expansion if you are trying to utilize account based marketing tactics you probably are trying to target those specific companies so this would be a box that you would want to uncheck because audience expansion is going to go beyond the targeting settings that you have here so make sure if you need to stick very specifically to the companies that are on your list uncheck the enable audience expansion option to target only those specific companies that you've opted into the second way you can target companies on linkedin is actually through an audience upload so i'm gonna jump into another account and show you an example of how you can do that you're likely familiar with uploading lists of individual users to facebook google any of the additional platforms to match one-to-one the information you have in your crm to a user but one cool thing that linkedin has is that you can target companies in a very similar fashion to do that you need to go to the matched audiences section of the interface so that's going to be under account assets and matched audiences that's how i navigated here and then i'll drop you on a page that looks like this to create your company list go over to create audience and then this first option of upload a company or contact here you'll be opted into a very simple editor where you can upload your list you just give it a name up to 200 characters you can select your list from the computer browser and if you don't know what format you need you can download the company list template which looks like this here you can see that there are columns for company name company website company email domain linkedin company page url the stock symbol industry city state the country that the company is in and the zip code not all of these are required for you to target individual companies you can do something just as simple as the company name and the website but just like customer uploads where you're trying to match to an individual user the more information you have about the company the easier it'll be for linkedin to match to the right company remember when we typed in linkedin earlier there were a handful of different options that showed up if a lot of those are very similar each one of these additional columns that you have more information for will help you match to exactly the right linkedin listing that you want and you won't match to those additional companies that aren't the right fit linkedin does provide some best practices for your company list up here they recommend uploading at least a thousand companies with the maximum being 300 000 companies and then like i said just a minute ago they require at least one of the following to match your audience the company name the company website company email domain linkedin page url or the stock symbol again any of the additional fields will help increase the accuracy of the match to the specific company that you want there is an alert down here that says it can take up to 48 hours to process the list only rarely does it take longer but that has happened from time to time to my accounts so it's not out of the norm for it to take up to three or four days to process a list and then it can have an additional 24-hour delay before starting delivery just keep all of those things in mind when you're trying to target your abm list for right now i'm not going to upload a list in this account because we already have one so now i've gone through all of these steps to get to where we can apply this company list to our campaign so i already create a new campaign chose my objective so on and so forth so now i just need to scroll down and in the same builder that we used before rather than shifting into audience attributes we're going to stay in the audiences section we're going to use list upload since we're trying to target a company list we're then going to select company list and now the two company lists that we've uploaded in this specific account have shown up and to target them all you need to do is come over and check the box next to it and it'll add it to your list you'll see that the forecast results off to the side will show you how many are in your target audience for this company list just like with the company targeting options that we had before where we chose manually we can still narrow the audience further by adjusting for different audience attributes or different audience lists we can also exclude using the same builder and again we're going to want to uncheck the enable audience expansion to make sure that we're only targeting those users at the companies that we're trying to reach for this account based marketing campaign overall the interface setup is very easy for account based marketing tactics it's not difficult to create but there are some best practices to keep in mind when creating your first account based marketing campaigns the first thing to remember is that just because somebody works at a company that you want to work with does not mean that individual user is going to be the right fit for your offering whether it's somebody's job function or their job seniority make sure that you're only speaking to the people who are going to be some form of related to the service or product that you're trying to sell if we take an example with job function let's say you have accounting software so accounting would probably be a great job function to target but the folks in the arts and design department probably don't care at all about your accounting software so we want to make sure that we would be exclusively targeting or excluding the right users based on their job function the same sort of thing would go with job seniorities depending on what you're trying to offer it might make sense for you to target exclusively the unpaid training or entry-level workers maybe you're trying to sell educational content to get them more well-versed in their industry or on the flip side maybe you're trying to sell hot desk software so anybody can book different meeting rooms or different desks throughout the office that's probably not going to be something that the entry level or training level person needs to see ads for because they probably don't have a say if they want to have hot desk solutions in the office make sure that whether it's function seniority or some other targeting option on linkedin you're only reaching the users who actually have some sort of stake in the product or service that you're trying to sell whether it's the person who's going to use it the person is going to make the decision for it or the person who's going to sign the contract so that you actually get that solution in your company and that leads me to my next best practice which is to make sure you're developing different calls to action and messaging based on that person's area of concern or expertise let's go back to the accounting software example it might make sense for you to offer a demo or a one-on-one sales consultation with somebody who actually does the accounting in a firm but it might make sense for you instead to talk about the financial benefits of utilizing that accounting software to the cfo or leadership in the finance department because they might not need to be the people who utilize it on a daily basis they don't need to know how it works they just need to know how much money they would be saving and how much more efficient their team could be if they used your solution one thing to remember as i was going through both of those examples of showing you how to target your company lists in the platform you can create multiple different campaigns targeting the same list but with different job seniorities or job function and that's how you can make sure that you're matching the messaging and call to action specifically to the right users just by having the same companies but in multiple different campaigns targeting different users in that same organization aside from audience targeting and messaging there are also a couple of housekeeping best practices that i think are really important when it comes to account based marketing tactics first you've probably heard me talk about it on this channel before linkedin is expensive the cpcs that are here are at a premium because the targeting options are so specific and they're great for getting in front of people in a b2b fashion don't let those high cost per click go to waste make sure that you're building cross-channel audiences to target those users across other cheaper platforms later down the line the example i have here off to the right isn't perfect i'm just trying to show a couple different examples but this would be in facebook let's say we want to create audiences of users who have visited specific web pages in the past 180 days the very nice benefit of targeting url options is that they retain all the tracking parameters you put after the main webpage url so anything after that question mark is still part of the url that gets picked up for audience targeting so here let's say that in my naming convention i utilize linkedin as the utm source so i could either write out explicitly like i have off to the right utm underscore source equals linkedin or i could just use linkedin whichever one makes the most sense for you this is why i'm saying this example isn't perfect you wouldn't need both of these you probably just choose whichever one works but then also i want to contain abm because if my tagging naming convention contains abm then i know that it came specifically from that account based marketing list maybe in your example you name the company list itself a little bit more explicitly and you don't just use abm whatever suits you but this way i'm targeting everybody who came to my account from linkedin and also came from my account based marketing campaign not just all of the campaigns from linkedin you can do this across any platform like i said this is facebook but you could do it across google microsoft twitter any of those other platforms where the subsequent clicks on these audiences are going to be cheaper and now you have an account based list of all of the different companies that you want to target not just in linkedin but across all of the other ad platforms targeting those users who have engaged with your website lastly don't treat these lists as set it and forget it you want to make sure that you are uploading new lists based on the companies who have gone through your sales process and either have become customers or have opted out either way you can edit a company list in linkedin you'll see here i've got an image of going into the audience manager clicking on the three dots and then highlighting edit that'll take you back to that very simple audience upload option where you just have to upload a new list that either adds new companies or takes them away and it'll still be processed in the same list and applied to any campaign that that list is being used in given that linkedin does have such high cost per click and it is a much more premium platform it would be a waste to continue targeting companies that were already customers or targeting people who were already opted out of your marketing so whether you're brand new to account based marketing or you've been doing it for a while hopefully this has given you maybe some other ideas or reminded you of a couple of housekeeping things to make sure that your lists are up to date if you have any additional questions or any great use cases of account based marketing through linkedin we would love to hear about them in the comments thanks for watching our video if you thought it was useful give us a thumbs up below we release a new video at least once a week so if you want to get notified of when a new one comes out be sure to subscribe to the paid media pros channel you