Crafting an effective digital marketing strategy means keeping up with an ever-growing social media market that is constantly flooded with new entries and new avenues for advertising. Consumers are overwhelmed by choice and differentiate based on eye-catching, personalized, and convenient shopping experiences.
Your marketing mission grows more complex by the day and investing in the latest platforms can be costly and still fail to deliver conversions. Bain & Company estimates that some 40-60% of marketing budgets are spent ineffectively, with companies failing to maximize their visibility and use social media to its full potential.
So, how do you stop wasting resources on disinterested customers and craft a strategy that delivers the personalization and precision required in today’s digital landscape? Account-based marketing (ABM), more specifically LinkedIn ABM, could be the answer. With ABM you’ll craft tailored content, target specific customer bases, and focus on quality not quantity.
Read on to learn more about LinkedIn ABM tactics and how you can leverage these for your social media marketing.
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What is LinkedIn ABM?
LinkedIn account-based management (ABM) describes a sales-led marketing approach that prioritizes high-value accounts or a specific customer base instead of targeting a general audience with broader one-size-fits-all marketing strategies.
The intention is to pursue quality over quantity, communicating with individual prospects in the hope that these are more likely to result in conversions. Your marketing and sales teams will collaborate to determine which leads to pursue and create a list of targeted accounts/customers.
ABM flips the traditional marketing funnel, avoiding all unqualified leads and instead engaging with targeted consumers via personalized messaging.
LinkedIn provides fertile soil to find and nurture ideal customers. Here, you can search the platform’s company directory for prospects and learn more about these accounts and how to adapt your B2B marketing to create the kind of content that most appeals.
Some good ABM examples might be creating personalized invitations, exclusive webinar events, or tailored white papers that solve specific business issues.
Why Should You Apply LinkedIn ABM Tactics for Social Media Marketing?
ABM is all about making data and research-driven decisions in order to generate profitable engagement from a specific clientele. You can use LinkedIn to explore B2B sales leads and find accounts that match your ideal customer profile. Likewise, other social media platforms are excellent explorative tools for both identifying customers and discovering their wants, needs, pain points, and how to appeal to their specific interests.
ABM can therefore be a standalone marketing strategy, be LinkedIn-based, or can be part of a multichannel approach incorporating various social media platforms in order to find, connect with, and gain an understanding of your most high-value prospects.
What’s more, you can use these channels to build trust, increase brand awareness, and improve your overall company credibility. Engaging on the right platforms can really showcase your expertise and allow you to interact with interested parties in real time.
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What Are the Essential Elements of a LinkedIn ABM Strategy?
A strategic approach like ABM requires a specific strategy. Whether you have only LinkedIn in mind or intend to use other social media platforms in your marketing, you should consider the below elements as essential for any promotional campaign.
Account Targeting
The first step in any ABM strategy is to identify those accounts that present the highest current and potential value for your business. These clients should suit your products/services and also be worth your time and resource investment.
You should use LinkedIn, Facebook, X, and others to get to know how your target accounts work and who should be your point of contact within each organization. These channels can tell you a lot about how a business works, if they are currently investing in similar products/services or have a current need for your goods.
Personalized Messaging and Campaigns
A core benefit of ABM is that it allows your marketing team to create a personalized approach for each of your prospective customers. You should vary the social media channels you use according to the taste of your clientele.
For example, you might find that one account values long-form content like informational videos on YouTube while another prefers short-form videos typically found on TikTok or Instagram Reels.
Account Profiling
Unlike typical lead generation tactics that ask users to enter personal details to sign up for newsletters, subscribe for webinars, or complete a contact form for more information, ABM targets leads with a bottom-up sales funnel approach.
When you’ve created your target lists, the next step will be gathering as much data and intel about your potential clients as possible. Create detailed documents establishing the size, industry, challenges, and key people for each account.
Use social media to monitor how interests change and if any new information needs to be added to each of your account profiles. You should track changes in social media behavior, feedback, and sentiment when they interact with your posts.
Monitoring and Analysis
Finally, your ABM strategy needs constant monitoring and analysis. Keep track of metrics across your platforms and how your clients engage with each of your posts. This will tell you what appeals and is working, and what to drop. Not only does this help you to appeal to your clientele, but it cuts down on the valuable resources you’re spending on strategies that just don’t work.
Monitoring campaigns over time, you’ll be able to craft personalized and effective strategies that adapt to changes in demand.
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Benefits of LinkedIn ABM Tactics
Alongside being able to win high-value clients through highly personalized messaging, LinkedIn ABM has the following benefits:
Improved Efficiency and Reduced Waste
With ABM, you’ll no longer have to spread your marketing resources so thin. Instead, you can focus your efforts and materials on just a small number of accounts. This means your team has more time to focus on those prospects that have the most potential and can create more effective campaigns as a result.
Businesses are able to allocate resources more efficiently and also show clients that they understand their problems with customized campaigns. Teams will also have more time to execute their plans across various channels so that branding and messaging are high-quality and consistent.
Better Customer Experience
The personalization of ABM improves the overall customer experience. Marketing teams can craft customized messaging that resonates directly with their target audience.
It also works to build and nurture ongoing customer relationships. By providing continuous support and constant engagement, you ensure that accounts feel like a priority at every stage of the customer journey.
Recognizing and rewarding customer loyalty ensures higher growth rates, as valued consumers recommend your goods/services. With ABM, you’ll have adequate time and resources to nurture leads in this way and act on their feedback to make positive changes.
High Conversions and ROI
Put simply, tailored messaging and personalized content are more likely to result in conversions than a scattergun approach.
It also results in positive ROIs like lower acquisition costs, thanks to fewer wasted resources. You’ll also be able to track these more accurately, given your teams will be working on a smaller group of accounts.
Accelerated Sales Cycles
Finally, sales cycles are accelerated as purchasing decisions will likely involve fewer people. Given the reverse funnel, your ABM strategies will target the decision-makers within their organizations, rather than having to wait for information to move from low-level employees up.
By bringing sales and marketing together, you’ll also be able to generate strategies and make key decisions more quickly, without having to liaise between departments. This shortens sales cycles and means goals are achieved in record time.
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How to Set up ABM on Social Media
Before setting out your ABM and social media marketing, make sure your goals and KPIs align with your sales team. Discuss how you’ll be targeting accounts and take steps to ensure that data is being collected ready for future analysis.
Instagram Ad Manager lets you target core audiences based on criteria like demographics, behavior on the app, locations, and interests. For example, you can create ads that’ll appear in the news feeds of businesses that operate in New York, that work in a specific industry like fashion, or that have been looking for goods/services similar to those you supply.
The app will also let you target a “lookalike audience”, which are accounts that are similar to those already interested in your posts. Instagram’s algorithm can narrow down ideal customers based on characteristics and preferences and apply ads to the feeds of your best prospects.
Facebook can assist in ABM outreach thanks to its large user base, as well as custom audience features that import contact lists within targeted segments. This includes phone numbers, email addresses, and names – so identifying clients is made easy.
You can also run targeted dynamic ads on Facebook so you can promote your entire product catalog in a single campaign. Thanks to Meta’s seamless integrations between Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, it’s also easy to create consistency across the platforms. You can roll out a single ad in multiple places.
X (formerly Twitter)
X is a particularly good platform to identify the pain points your potential customers face. You’ll find discussion threads and conversations between colleagues that’ll paint a detailed picture of organizations and their needs.
Here, you can also reach out via DM and foster relationships. Get involved with discussions and show how your organization adds value.
It goes without saying that LinkedIn is an essential tool for any ABM social media strategy. On the platform, you can find a range of native tools to aid your marketing strategies.
Among the most essential tools are Account Targeting, which matches a target account against a list of accounts and finds new prospects, and Segment Breakdowns, which help you understand key audience attributes.
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New Tactics to Boost Your ABM Strategy on Social Media
Although ABM has been around as a B2B strategy for some time, it has only recently been leveraged across social media. Take a look at the strategies below to make the most of social media and achieve your ABM goals.
Consistent Content
To keep your brand at the forefront of your customers’ minds you should aim to post consistently and frequently across the relevant platforms. Use AI tools for social media like content planners and management systems to make sure you’re hitting goals and remember to track those engagement metrics.
Influencer Partnerships and Collaborations
Influencer partnerships and collaborations are an invaluable resource that is unique to social media. You’ll improve brand awareness and credibility by aligning your company with leading content creators in your field of interest.
Look at who your target accounts engage with and listen to. These can range from experts to analysts, employees with social influence, and even YouTubers or TikTok stars. A partnership with any of these people will ensure your brand name is heard by the right audience.
Consider events like co-hosted webinars, sponsored social media content, product endorsements, and more.
Social listening
Social media measurement, or social listening, is the process of locating, listening to, and assessing what is being said about your company online. You don’t need to make international calls to prospective customers to get their opinions – you’ll find them on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.
You’ll gather real and useful insights that you can leverage in your outreach – taking the guesswork out of marketing.
Consider investing in some automated social listening tools rather than having to allocate resources for manual monitoring. There is a plethora of software available that will collect, categorize, and analyze your brand mentions in one place. In fact, many will let you set alerts for instant notifications when you’ve been mentioned online.
Paid ads and Sponsorships
Paid adverts and sponsorships can give you that extra boost when organic messaging is failing to make an impact. Social media platforms will use their algorithms to ensure that your ads are getting in front of the right people.
Craft a tailored message like an infographic, educational resource, or even a sales pitch, and let social media do the rest of the work. Again, monitor those metrics and make sure your campaigns are having their desired results. You can change up your strategy based on engagement levels.
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Leverage LinkedIn ABM Tactics to Convert Prospects and Generate Sales
LinkedIn ABM tactics take much of the guesswork and inefficiency out of digital advertising. As a strategy, it drives growth and boosts ROIs by allowing marketers to pool their resources towards the best and highest-value prospects and create impactful highly personalized campaigns.
If your business doesn’t have a robust LinkedIn presence, you can still leverage ABM tactics to your advantage with various other social media platforms. Facebook, Instagram, X, and others are still hugely valuable channels through which to identify prospects and understand their niche interests, pain points, and business needs.
You can also use social media to build your brand reputation, foster a sense of community, and establish credibility in your industry. This will all result in higher conversion rates and improved customer loyalty.