3 Keys to Successful Intent-Based Marketing on LinkedIn
The behaviors that motivate B2B buying have changed dramatically.
The marketing funnel is out. Extended buying committees are in. Data analytics have taken center stage. Let’s not forget all of the changes in workplace culture and location.
With these variables to consider, planning a targeted marketing strategy that hits the mark can feel a bit overwhelming.
How do you even begin to find your audience in an already oversaturated market, and create messages that resonate?
Now is the time to lean into intent-based marketing. Improve the user experience and maximize your spend by placing relevant content in front of buyers who are actively searching for what you are selling.
We’ll walk you through what intent-based marketing is and how LinkedIn partners can help you deliver your marketing content to interested buyers, shorten the sales cycle, and reduce churn.
What Is Intent-Based Marketing?
Intent-based marketing uses individual online behavior data to deliver targeted advertising at the time when buyers are most likely to purchase, within the right context.
The purposeful delivery of marketing content to a purchase-ready audience aligns your messaging to the uncanny answer to their problem, eliminating untimely or distracting ads.
3 Keys to Successful Intent-Based Marketing
While most advertising platforms utilize targeting to a certain degree, there are three features of intent-based marketing that set it apart: context, targeting, and behavioral insights.
Context
Context is delivering your ads in a place where they’ll be noticed, appreciated, and acted upon.
Advertising that is delivered at the wrong time or in the wrong context can feel like an interruption, especially as people are more intentionally building space between their personal time and work time.
As the platform of choice for business, LinkedIn is uniquely suited to B2B advertising. People come to LinkedIn with a business mindset, ready to engage with other business and thought leaders as they explore solutions to improve business outcomes.
LinkedIn and its partners provide the tools to place your ads in the professional context that makes them an inspiration rather than an interruption.
Targeting
Targeting is the practice of using data and demographics to get your ads in front of the right users or personas. Analytics deliver a clear picture of your market, and from there you set criteria such as location, job title, company size, or interest to find users who fall within that market.
The robust analytics that power LinkedIn Ad Targeting can help you reach decision-makers and identify buying committee stakeholders, from IT to C-suite executives.
Behavioral insights
Behavior insights are what allow you to deliver advertising at the right moment in time. These analytics offer incredible insight into where users are on their buying journey. Behaviors like content interaction, channel, referral source, and volume of interaction per campaign can tell you a lot about what users are looking for in your advertising.
LinkedIn has in-depth reporting on everything from ad engagement to website demographics which can be used to understand what ads are working and which pages are getting the most engagement, so you can optimize your campaigns.
How LinkedIn Partners Help You ID & Act Upon Intent
LinkedIn has partnered with several services that provide top-tier intent analytics and data integrity. Here’s a quick look at a couple of the leading intent data services.
Retarget with buyer intent
Understanding your market is key to your intent-based marketing strategy. LinkedIn marketing partner G2 offers high-value insights into what is happening in the world of software sales.
As a trusted software marketplace, G2 has helped 60 million people connect with the right software solution based on peer reviews. The G2 integration for LinkedIn helps you build LinkedIn Matched Audiences that target professionals at accounts showing interest in a product, company, and category on G2.
G2 also keeps you informed about when potential or existing customers are exploring other software solutions, so you can take proactive steps to draw them back to your solution.
Activate data you can trust
User data is one of the greatest tools of the digital age – when used correctly. In the wrong hands, this data can be destructive. LinkedIn values the integrity of the data used in conjunction with our marketing solutions.
Bombora offers that integrity. They provide comprehensive, ethically-gathered B2B data derived from a co-operative of more than 4,000 privacy-compliant members. With this data coming directly from the source, you know it is timely and relevant, so you aren’t planning your intent targeting around outdated information
Get Intentional with Your Marketing
Intent-based marketing is the most effective way to get noticed in today’s digital marketplace. Learn more about how LinkedIn’s marketing partners can help your ads reach the right customers at the right time.
