As the B2B workforce shifts to fit in the current remote-friendly landscape, professional lives have become more ingrained within the digital space. Our homes now function as our offices. Conferences and meetings are via Zoom. Networking is strictly digital. This means a full-funnel approach to account-based marketing requires a presence on nearly every single digital marketing channel—social media included.
When it comes to B2B marketing, our digital agency focuses on paid social media, as it’s the most efficient way of reaching a handful of specific targets or marketing-qualified leads.
At The ABM Agency, we believe paid social advertising and account-based marketing for B2B companies revolve around one particular, highly effective platform: LinkedIn.
What is LinkedIn Advertising?
LinkedIn advertising is a highly effective form of digital marketing that serves ads to target audiences, similar to the Facebook and Instagram ads consumers are well-accustomed to. Where LinkedIn differs, though, is in its ability to refine target audiences with more business-related filters such as company, company size, job title, and industry—filters not available on any other social media platform.
The use of these filters is instrumental in creating successful demand generation and account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns. There’s no guesswork surrounding your B2B buyer persona—it’s all found on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn offers three types of ads:
Sponsored content ads promote content to a target audience; this would include blog posts or white papers.
Text ads are similar to Google Ads and allow marketers to create engaging text advertisements in order to increase campaign reach and drive conversions.
Sponsored InMail ads are a way to deliver personalized content directly to a target audience’s inbox.
Why B2B Companies Should Focus on LinkedIn
If account-based marketing and demand generation are the ultimate marketing techniques for building profitable relationships and nurturing leads, LinkedIn is the social media equivalent. In Q3 of 2020, LinkedIn saw “record levels of engagement.” Not only are people looking for jobs, but this is the platform where networking and finding new business opportunities is paramount. As a B2B company, you can share relevant content, use social listening techniques, follow industry trends and leaders, and, of course, target with social advertising.
It’s here that you’ll have access to a wealth of information that aligns with B2B marketing strategies: industries, companies, job titles, interests, hobbies. There’s no guesswork surrounding your B2B buyer persona—it’s all found
on LinkedIn. Knowing exactly whom you want to consume your paid social ads within your campaign leads us to targeting.
Targeting B2B Accounts on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the perfect channel for targeted marketing because the platform itself was created to nurture conversations and engagement—two factors that serve to increase your brand recognition and revenue.
Think of targeting audiences and executing paid social ads within LinkedIn as a mini marketing campaign. It starts with choosing your objective (awareness, consideration, or conversions), then selecting your target criteria (company size, company name, job title, etc), picking your ad format, confirming your budget and schedule, then measuring and optimizing your campaign. If you truly want campaign success, research and knowledge around the ideal target audience will be extremely beneficial. This means knowing who they are, where they are in the sales funnel, what type of content they’re most likely to engage with, and what your ROI would be if and when you close a sale or land a new client.
LinkedIn’s refined targeting features are some of the biggest advantages to advertising on LinkedIn, so it is important to understand how targeting with LinkedIn works. LinkedIn provides a wide range of options for narrowing down your target audience. The audience can be refined by the following criteria:
- Location
- Company
- Demographics
- Education
- Job Experience
- Interests
There are many other benefits of LinkedIn targeting. With LinkedIn targeting, marketers have a greater ability to perform A/B testing enabling marketers to test their campaigns prior to launch to test for engagement and interaction. Outside of testing, marketers can also use LinkedIn to either expand their audience or create a lookalike audience. According to LinkedIn, “When using either option, LinkedIn’s algorithms will identify additional audience members similar to your target audience. As you’re beginning to test and refine, these options will help you reach a broader (but still relevant) audience and generate more data to help you optimize your campaigns.”
Tracking Paid Social Performance in B2B Marketing Campaigns
As B2B accounts move through the sales funnel, you’ll want to serve messaging and content in line with their particular positions and track their engagement with your ads. But here’s the thing: LinkedIn analytics will only give you the bare minimum, a crucial difference to how it worked in the past. The ABM Agency analysts, however, know the secret to revealing better data: If you have your own website set up and properly tagged, you can see all of the information about your target as they visit your site via paid LinkedIn ads. You’ll just need to pull reporting stats from an API provider, which will give you more insight than LinkedIn provides.Interested in all things ABM?
Interested in how The ABM Agency can help you achieve your goals and KPIs?
