If you are a B2B business who has the following characteristic with their ICP:

  1. Long-ish Sales cycles - Personas will be making a deliberate decision, and so buying cycle may be as long as 18-24 months
  2. High Contract value - Given the contract value is high, the buying committee will also be bigger.

Now, when the buying commitee comes together to make a decision, brand familiarity may become the key factor.

Scenario - Selling a RevOps platform to Acme Corp

Let’s say you are selling a RevOps platform that combines list building, enrichment and sales engagement.

For potential customer Acme Corp, the buying committee includes the CEO, VP of Revenue, the Head of Marketing, and Marketing Operations Manager.

In this scenario, the decision is likely to be made by the leadership team. However the Head of Marketing and Marketing Operations Manager will be the ones who will have to come up with the shortlist and their own recommendations.

They visit your website, and your competitor’s websites. Let’s see what the Marketing Head & Marketing Ops manager’s experience would be like, if you Up your LinkedIn Ads game.

  1. They see & engage with your LinkedIn Ads focusing on the Value prop
  2. They see your Top-of-the-funnel content on the importance of list-building for Marketing teams, and on personalization based on lead enrichment
  3. They also see Bottom-of-the-funnel recommendations from existing customers and how their GTM motion has been turbocharged by your RevOps platform

If these personas are seeing your content - content that is reinforcing credibility & trust in your platform - they are much more likely to recommend your platform to the leadership team.

Rich Company & Designation data make LinkedIn perfect for ABM

In principle, LinkedIn is the ideal platform. User profiles have rich Company & Designation data, meaning that the platform offers detailed personalization capabilities.

The price for this hyper-personalization is of course that LinkedIn is more costly. CPMs and CPCs are the highest compared to any other platform.

In this video discussion, Justin Rowe, CMO at Impactable discusses the first principles behind leveraging LinkedIn for ABM. Most of the content in this blog is a recap of the video. Do give the video a listen directly.

  1. ICP - Personas - list - upload them directly on LinkedIn ; main problem with this approach is that there is a degradation in list quality of the order of 20-30% per year - the primary reason being that people switch jobs
  2. ICPs - Companies - list - this is much more impactful, and for Impactable, this is the preferred approach.
  3. Using LinkedIn’s native filters - you create a lookalike audience of your target companies. You don’t get data about who exactly saw your ads, but you know that they fit the profile of your target companies.

Keep your daily spends low, and push the personas to your Owned platforms

If your buying cycles are long, you should target pushing the personas from paid to owned platforms.

For example, when they are seeing ads, try to push them to follow the founders profiles - for example, on the Ads, founders profiles can be linked, with their own thought leadership content.

Once the employees start following the thought leader, they start a chain effect - the more they view, the more likely they are to engage. And then the more likely it would be that their network would be seeing your content on their LinkedIn feed.

LinkedIn Ads for ABM - Key Takeaways

  1. LinkedIn is the ideal platform for ABM.
  2. Rich Company & Designation data make LinkedIn perfect for ABM
  3. Keep your daily spends low, and push the personas to your Owned platforms