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How ABM Can Help You Reach Decision Makers on LinkedIn
Author: Sanam Dhanoa
It’s been proven over and over: winning B2B campaigns are the ones that market directly to individuals. While buying committees may make the decisions as a unit, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that these committees are made up of individuals, each at a different place on their buying journey.
To reach these individuals, more companies are embracing the power of account based marketing (ABM). As a bridge between your sales and marketing teams, this strategy places focused, personalized, and relevant content in front of key decision makers.
Here are a few tips and tools to identify and reach key decision makers at your target accounts.
1. Become a profiler
You’re already sitting on a gold mine of information: your current account list. Identify your top-performing accounts and pull data on the key decision makers you work with in those organizations. Remember to include all members of the buying committee.
The data you’ll want to gather includes:
- Job titles. There is no governing standard for job titles, so having a list of the variations will help you when it comes time to run searches with this data.
- Industry. While many of your accounts may come from the same industry, you could discover a top-performing outlier indicating an untapped potential market.
- Size of organization. Knowing the size of organizations you work with may inform the size of the buying committee you’re searching for.
With this data, you have a broad profile of what a top-performing contact looks like for your target account. Keep in mind that each data point can be used to help filter search results as you look for prospective accounts.
2. Level-up your ABM strategy
That gold mine of data mentioned earlier? There’s a lot more drilling down to do! By partnering with an ABM-focused data analytics platform, you can translate your raw data into names and contact information for creating targeted campaigns.
Below are a just few of the LinkedIn Marketing Partners who have powerful ABM tools in their platforms, which can help elevate the impact of your LinkedIn marketing efforts:
6sense
Rated a leader in a recent Forrester New Wave analysis of ABM platforms, 6sense links the anonymous user data that comes from online habits and site visits to the known user data in your CRM
Bottom line: 6sense turns anonymous data into behavior profiles of key decision makers.
Metadata
Target the profiles of key decision makers on LinkedIn and Facebook. Metadata has the largest database of B2B decision-makers, and integrates with your organization’s existing software solutions.
Bottom line: Metadata connects your data with the profiles of key decision makers on the platforms where your ads will reach them.
RollWorks
Gain a better understanding of needs, preferences, and behaviors to inform content creation and speak to buyer pain points and interests with RollWorks’ real time analytics and insights.
Bottom line: RollWorks helps marketers get the right message in front of the right audience at the right time.
TrustRadius
Leverage intent data to build audiences of buyers who are actively researching your products or solutions. TrustRadius allows marketers to target in-market B2B buyers and sync that data into LinkedIn Campaign Manager.
Bottom line: TrustRadius empowers highly targeted campaigns to nurture buyers down the funnel.
3. Target your content
Identifying key decision makers is only useful if your content reaches them. To get your ABM Strategy working, LinkedIn offers smart Ad Targeting technology through Matched Audiences. By using insights pulled from your website’s visitor data and your organization’s contact lists, Matched Audiences curates audiences so you can deliver targeted, personalized content to key decision makers. You can even customize the content to where each individual is on their buying journey.
4. Deliver content that breaks through
A global pandemic accelerated the shift to content marketing and virtual selling. As a result, there is a lot of noise in the B2B sales space. Still, 83% of typical B2B purchasing decisions happen before a buyer ever has direct contact with a provider, so getting your content noticed pays off.
According to decision makers themselves, the threshold for breaking through is rising as the market for thought leadership becomes saturated in an uncertain economic environment:
- 55% of decision-makers say that during an economic downturn, it is more important than ever to produce high-quality thought leadership.
- 38% of final decision-makers say there is more thought-leadership content than they can manage or keep up with.
Luckily, this research also uncovered a formula for rising above the noise and making an impact. Decision makers are looking for thought leadership content that’s:
Finely tuned to economic realities and a customer’s industry. (48% say the content should identify new opportunities or industry trends stemming from the economic downturn.)
- High-quality and shares a strong, data-backed POV. (49% say that thought-leadership content should reference robust research and strong supporting data.)
Read the full B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report from LinkedIn and Edelman to learn more and check out LinkedIn Marketing Partners who help brands create impactful content and creative advertising experiences.
Reach and engage the key players
Identifying and reaching decision makers is easier than you think. With the right tools, targeting, and approach to thought leadership content, you can connect with your most valuable audience and drive influence.
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