LinkedIn is popular among marketing and salespeople. The platform brings like-minded professionals together and helps with job sourcing. In addition, LinkedIn is an effective content delivery tool. You are more likely to connect with an ideal prospect on LinkedIn when you use personalized and targeted content and messaging that resonates with them.
Understanding how to navigate LinkedIn ads is crucial to the success of your marketing strategy. Therefore, our guide about ABM using LinkedIn advertising comprises five effective practices to help you maximize LinkedIn for your Account-Based Marketing plans.
1. Leveraging Functions Specific To LinkedIn
LinkedIn has unique functionalities that set it apart from other advertising platforms. Therefore, targeting on this platform is quite different, even for experienced digital marketers. Knowing what these unique functionalities can offer your program is key. Let's take location, for instance. This targeting field is mandatory and specific. When using the location field, you have to specify a city, state, or country.
Furthermore, always factor LinkedIn into your ABM strategy when segmenting your audiences. When setting up a campaign, it is best to combine specific targeting criteria like company, LinkedIn specific job experience, and demographics when building the ideal persona. You can then target these personas through LinkedIn.
In addition, LinkedIn identifies action-inspiring words in its marketing solution. Consequently, understanding what resonates with your LinkedIn audience is critical in influencing such an audience to take action.
2. Optimizing Ad Frequency
Understanding how to cap and navigate ad frequency on LinkedIn is essential. Because frequently serving ads to your target persona means your ads are getting to their front at regular intervals, it offers a massive advantage to your marketing program. Whenever your audience needs a similar product, yours come to mind.
Although you can cap ad frequency across several advertising forms, including display advertising, this is not so with LinkedIn. LinkedIn's ad frequency limit is one ad every 48 hours per individual persona. Although that is quite limited, you can navigate your way around it. Creating five separate ad sets increases ad frequency because each ad shows to an individual persona five different times. With more targeted spending, you can increase ad sets for your niche audience.
Another way to increase ad frequency on LinkedIn is to spread out content types, including carousel and across sponsored content. Consequently, you can add users to multiple ad campaigns with different types of content and eventually target them at a higher frequency.
3. Keeping Your Content Useful And Consistent
Without any doubt, frequency across LinkedIn campaigns is essential. However, it is futile if you don't tie it to your ABM strategy through messaging. Before sharing any content, think about an account's position in the buyer journey. For instance, are they at the awareness stage, top of the funnel, bottom, or middle?
Top-of-the-funnel accounts require consistent messaging across your ABM platforms. The messaging should focus on content, including industry trends and insights. In addition, you can share eBooks as the top of the funnel content. Mid-funnel requires more tactical content like tools and templates your target audience is most likely to use daily. On the other hand, the bottom of the funnel requires granular content, including use cases and customer case studies. Ultimately, ensure any content or messaging you share is relevant and corresponds to the audience's position in the buyer journey.
With consistent messaging across your channels, you create an alignment that impacts your native channels, showing you a true picture of how your brand resonates.
4. Generating Straightforward And Purposeful Calls To Action
After deploying relevant content corresponding to the stage of your personas in the buyer funnel, using a clear and purposeful CTA is best. Otherwise, it will be a waste of your advertising efforts so far. When creating CTAs, you need to first think about the action you require of your target audience. For example, the audience at the top of the funnel requires informative CTAs, while mid-funnel CTAs may request demo participation or webinar signups. Finally, at the funnel's bottom, your CTA should send the audience to your sales team.
It is important to note that an audience can only download your eBook if they know your brand. Therefore, you must continually evaluate the accounts, especially those you consider at the top of the funnel. Then, ask yourself if they are aware of your brand. Then, it would be best if you made decisions based on your conclusion.
5. Having A Handy Testing Strategy
Although testing is the final tip in this guide, it is not the least. A/B testing is especially essential in LinkedIn ads. Testing is integral to your marketing strategy because it helps you understand what works and what doesn't in your advertising and targeting practices. In addition, with testing, you can monitor the ads specific audiences see, then make necessary adjustments.
If you want to evaluate the messaging and creative performance, look at the click-through rates and not the channel's overall efficacy. For efficacy, you can measure your ABM platform's overall success by looking at revenue and pipeline more holistically.