“Our biggest challenge was figuring out the fastest, most effective means of making a human connection between our buyers and our sales organization. How do we create a meaningful dialogue without being able to meet face-to-face?" — Dan Dowling, Senior Director of Demand Generation at Introhive
Finding a Way to Generate High-Quality Leads at Scale
When the pandemic struck and shutdown orders took hold in 2020, Introhive faced a challenge similar to many other companies: how do we adapt our sales and marketing practices to connect with our customer base in a world that’s suddenly gone all-digital?
Given the nature of its business, Introhive has a high standard for targeted, personalized, value-driven interactions. Their solution leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) to power B2B organizations with actionable relationship intelligence that fuels revenue acceleration.
With a sophisticated account-based marketing strategy already in place, Introhive knew its ideal customer profile but needed to educate the market on their innovative SaaS product. To spark meaningful conversations and generate higher lead volume, they turned to LinkedIn.
“We have such great prospect lists and accurate data within our CRM, Salesforce, thanks to our own Introhive enrichment engine. We've identified our ideal customer profile, and we just had it all there ready to go… Now that we have all this great data, where do we apply it to make sure that we're generating five times the amount of leads that we would with our previous strategy, which was heavily field based marketing and sales?" — Irene Hart, Digital Marketing Manager at Introhive
Finding Focus with LinkedIn’s Tools
In pivoting to a fully digital approach, Introhive relied on LinkedIn to help them navigate a complex buyer’s landscape and zero in on their key audiences.
Here’s a look into the process they used:
- Identify an ideal customer profile based on available market data. Introhive leaned on enterprise technology, including its own solution, to refine a practical ideal customer profile (ICP) model. They leveraged LinkedIn tools to get granular with the details and find prospective accounts that aligned. “LinkedIn Sales Navigator was a great resource for us to further map our circle of influence and widen the scope of buyers that we wanted to engage,” Dan says.
- Map account and prospect relationships directly in CRM. Introhive’s, AI technology helped identify connection points at key accounts, who knows who insights and the strength of those relationships, all natively in their CRM, Salesforce. This data was used to prioritize which prospects should be targeted first to leverage existing relationships. With visibility into who they already have familiarity with, in a GDPR-compliant way, they could zero in on the fastest path to engage prospects.
- Segment and start driving engagement. Through the above process, Introhive had an account map that it could divide and segment dynamically. For example, they looked at a list of CMOs in technology that they’ve engaged in the past 12 months, and invited them to an upcoming event. Or, they created lookalike audiences on LinkedIn and ran advertising campaigns promoting an asset to people who’ve had multi-touch engagements with their marketing tech stack. It’s a smart way to direct their efforts toward more action-ready prospects that are already friendly with the organization.
Using this methodology, Introhive increased marketing-sourced qualified leads (MQLs) by more than 300% in Q1 2021, compared to Q1 2020. On LinkedIn, their clickthrough rates outperformed competitors by 36%, and was well above the benchmark for tech companies.
“What’s key for us is the ability to surface relevant and timely advertising to a hyper-targeted audience. This approach enabled us to connect with the exact people that we want to reach without wasting marketing spend. Our ABM strategy is like fly fishing. We have a target buyer - CMO, head of Business Development, CRO - who's swimming in the stream, and we have to artfully cast our story right in front of them so that they bite — that's how we want to strategically spend our budget. ” — Dan Dowling, Senior Director of Demand Generation at Introhive
Quick to Adapt and Optimize
An integral part of Introhive’s successful LinkedIn strategy was their team’s vigilance in reacting to campaign performance and adjusting accordingly.
“We were really quick, when we saw something wasn't working, to go back to the drawing board,” says Ashley MacInnis, Communications Manager at Introhive. “When we saw something was working, it was immediately, ‘How can we riff off and duplicate that effort,’ whether it was with a new vertical, or even just making small tweaks to the copy or the visual that was accompanying it.”
This tactic can help create more effective and efficient LinkedIn campaigns. In the past we highlighted how Akima refined its ad strategy on LinkedIn with a similarly agile process.
Invest in Strategies and Platforms Built for the New Era
Attention scarcity has grown to be one of the modern marketer’s chief adversaries. “I've received three robo-calls since this conversation started,” Dan mused while chatting with us. “I barely look at my phone anymore.” Email? Same deal.
So the (often literally) million-dollar question is: How do you reach and engage those most valuable but most elusive decision makers and executives? The ones who hold real sway on purchasing an advanced revenue acceleration platform like Introhive?
The Introhive team shared three critical factors necessary to unlock these meaningful dialogues:
- Marketing technologies such as AI, automation, and data enrichment tools that help them understand exactly who they want to go after, and where opportunities should be prioritized.
- A talented team that understands how to turn insight into action, and build personalized campaigns capable of cutting through the clutter.
- An ideal platform in LinkedIn, where the combination of dependable professional data, extensive advertising and targeting tools, and a ready-to-do-business environment come together to unleash the above qualities.
“LinkedIn was an important channel for us in 2020, when in-person events and the way that we were used to selling dissolved practically overnight. Introhive technology is uniquely positioned to help businesses accelerate their revenue growth strategies in a virtual world. We just needed more ways to evangelize that story. LinkedIn was a very efficient and effective way for us to have value-based conversations with our customers and our prospects.” — Irene Hart, Digital Marketing Manager, at Introhive
Ready to take your ABM strategy to the next level on LinkedIn? Click into Campaign Manager and connect with your professional audience.
Topics: Account-based marketing
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