Market Expansion and Targeted Prospecting with LinkedIn Account Based Marketing Approach
LinkedIn account based marketing uses highly-targeted content to attract a very particular audience on the platform. It facilitates focusing on a wide audience and hoping to lure in new customers like traditional lead generation methods. Moreover, ABM focuses on engaging a distinct committee of buyers or influencers within target business accounts, as shown in this case study.
This is the case study of a SaaS business for customer contact platforms that targeted businesses in the US, EMEA, and APAC markets. The business shifted strategy to an account based marketing (ABM) approach for prospective enterprise accounts. In collaboration with 3Q Digital, they achieved great results.
LinkedIn proved to be effective in account based marketing, with strong matching abilities for both brands and employee profiles. Moreover, 1st party data layers increase the probability of reaching decision makers. In this instance, LinkedIn was able to achieve a higher match rate for ABM targets along with additional targeting capabilities. The new strategy enabled 3Q Digital to reach decision makers with a tailored messaging strategy.
PROBLEM
The business wanted to target a select group of predetermined enterprise companies in their respective markets, along with medium-sized prospects identified by their sales team and third party data sources. The client also wanted to further expand in country targets in EMEA, and launch in APAC. 3Q Digital was able to identify channels that enabled targeting of these accounts in each market, while driving performance efficiencies.
Prior to establishing a new focus on enterprise and medium-sized accounts, 3Q Digital had run upper-funnel prospecting initiatives for the client on Facebook. The prospecting efforts were executed mainly across Facebook campaigns, in conjunction with search advertising support, with the focus going toward non-brand search.
With the client’s new focus, it was imperative to identify existing channels that offer customer match targeting and ABM targeting capabilities, so they could layer on relevant business targeting layers (such as business size, seniority, job title, etc.) and ensure targeting of decision makers.
SOLUTION
3Q Digital had previously tested display advertising to target ABM audiences, but wanted to shift focus to social channels as they were a better fit for campaign goals going forward. Facebook and LinkedIn allowed targeting of customer match lists, based on email list data, in North American, Europe, and Asia/Pacific markets. Linkedin also matched target accounts/company lists to all employees at those companies; and applied an additional filter layer to ensure only targeting relevant decision makers.
Prior to uploading any lists, they segmented company/email targets by the service feature they would be most interested in. These audiences were isolated from another at the campaign level in LinkedIn, and the Campaign/Ad Set level in Facebook. This allowed to identify performance, allocate budget, and provide a tailored messaging approach that was consistent from ad to landing page.
They identified content pieces on the client’s website that would be relevant to the new campaigns and audiences. Given that they were launching on channels to new audiences that were mostly unaware of the business’ brand, and decided to direct the users to the content, unique to each audience segment, rather than to a “contact us” page.
Different content types and pieces, such as whitepapers and demo videos, were tested throughout the process to identify the best performer for each audience, while ensuring that they drove relevant qualified leads.
Finally, they established Salesforce as a point of truth for attribution, only comparing results that Salesforce’s backend confirmed.
RESULT
3Q Digital acted under the assumption that while it may frequently be costlier to serve on LinkedIn rather than Facebook, the level of intent of the platform’s typical B2B user is higher than that of one on Facebook.
This premise held true. Even though ads were served to the same ABM targets across both platforms, stronger performance results on LinkedIn than Facebook were evident, when judging by CVR and lead acquisition costs across all target markets.
Given LinkedIn’s ability to match to more companies, and subsequently to more employees of those companies, it was easier to scale target audience. While CPCs and CPMs were nearly three-times higher on LinkedIn than Facebook, the CVR from LinkedIn audiences far outperformed Facebook.
