LinkedIn advertising and account based marketing 2023

Advertising on LinkedIn is an option full of possibilities to make yourself known in this professional network and meet different online marketing objectives.

Yes, you read correctly, LinkedIn, in addition to being a professional social network with more than 650 million users, allows you to manage paid advertising campaigns with LinkedIn Ads . Among some of its advantages, it stands out for its ability to target a very specific audience, which makes it the ideal tool for developing the marketing strategy of B2B (Business to Business) companies.

What is advertising on Linkedin? “> What is advertising on Linkedin?
Advantages and disadvantages of LinkedIn Ads “> Advantages and disadvantages of LinkedIn Ads
Types of LinkedIn Ads
What is an ABM strategy?
How to complement ABM with LinkedIn advertising?

Still don’t know how LinkedIn Ads and account-based marketing complement each other ? We give you a little clue: depending on the stage of the funnel or how close a user is to the purchase decision, we will impact them with one strategy or another. That is, the main idea is to take advantage of the synergies that can arise when combining the two strategies.

What is advertising on Linkedin?

LinkedIn Ads is LinkedIn’s advertising tool that allows paid ads to be displayed based on the professional attributes of users, so that advertisers can position the visibility of the business and help generate leads.

It is an ideal tool to work on brand image, encourage user interaction, get more web traffic and, in general, meet commercial and marketing objectives within the professional market .

As LinkedIn is a social networking network and a network of professional contacts, its advertising window is perfect for finding new business opportunities and finding the professional profiles we are exactly looking for.

Therefore, we can say that advertising on LinkedIn is highly effective due to its great segmentation capacity , since it allows users to filter ads based on keywords, the university where they studied, the company where they work, level of experience, location, etc.

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We summarize the most notable points for and against the LinkedIn advertising tool so that you are aware of all the aspects it includes. This way you can decide whether or not to use it for the benefit of your company.

Advantages

These are the main reasons to use LinkedIn advertising to reach your potential clients:

It has many segmentation possibilities . Unlike other social networks, LinkedIn users complete the personal data in their profile conscientiously to make them known to other professional profiles and to make them interested in them. This is something that advertisers know very well, because this way they can segment their ads by:
- Sex
- Age
- Geographic location (country, region or province)
- Professional sector
- Position held
- Studies
- Years of experience or seniority in a sector
- Aptitudes
- Achievements
- Groups created within LinkedIn
- Etc.

LinkedIn Ads offers good results measurement tools: we can accurately measure the result of our advertising campaigns: CPC (cost per click), CTR (click rate versus impressions), CPA (cost per acquisition), conversion rate, ROI (return on investment), form submission or form open rate, etc. This way you can make better decisions in the future and improve campaigns based on how they develop.
Allows you to apply retargeting : just like on Facebook or Twitter, on LinkedIn, thanks to the section called “Matched Audiences” we can show our ads to users who have interacted with the company previously, for example, who have visited a specific page (such as Social Media Marketing services). To do this, you will have to add the Insight Tag and start creating audience lists.
Your ads can have a great reach : thanks to the 650 million users who are registered on LinkedIn, we can reach a wide audience; The important thing is that we know how to reach the specific audience we need.
We can develop different campaigns based on different objectives, as well as different types of ads : like the Ads of other social networks, on LinkedIn we can direct the ads to the objectives of knowledge (to practice branding and online recognition), perception ( In this objective we can choose between directing visits to the website, promoting interaction or video views) and conversion objectives (understanding conversions both on the web and within LinkedIn itself). Likewise, we will see that there are different ads that we can use in LinkedIn Ads.
Create a list of prospects in Sales Navigator . The main advantage is the possibility of developing an ABM strategy on LinkedIn, which is what we will focus on in the article below. With this list we will have control of the most relevant prospects and a breakdown of target accounts with which to identify the main decision makers.

Disadvantages of advertising on LinkedIn

After all the advantages of LinkedIn Ads that we have mentioned, these are the cons that you should take into account:

Advertising on LinkedIn has a higher cost than other social networks, especially if we are used to advertising on Facebook and Instagram.
There are still not many users who click on the ads, since the level of interest that ads on LinkedIn usually require is somewhat higher: they almost always talk about selling products and/or services, and they may perceive the advertising content as spam. However, if an appropriate content strategy is applied to each stage of the marketing funnel, we can get much more out of it than in other social networks or advertising tools. Additionally, you can enable LinkedIn Audience Network and advertise outside of this social network.

Types of LinkedIn Ads

As we have told you before, LinkedIn has different types of ads to promote our company. Do you know in which cases it is most convenient to use each of them and what their main characteristics are? We explain everything to you!

Ads with lead generation forms

Lead Gen Forms are one of the incentives for marketing professionals to advertise on LinkedIn, since it is the type of advertising especially intended for lead generation. With these ads, the user does not have to leave LinkedIn to fill out a form. It allows you to use up to 3 personalized fields, but the truth is that the information fields that can be requested are even more numerous: name, surname, email, LinkedIn profile URL, telephone number, city, postal code, position, company…

Text Ads and Dynamic Ads

Dynamic ads appear in the right column of LinkedIn and can be text ads, Spotlight ads (ads to publicize products, services or events while directing you to a landing page) or ads to gain followers.

LinkedIn Ads dynamic ads are ads adapted to each user based on the attributes of their profile (company name, position, professional sector…). As they are personalized ads, this ad format is very effective in meeting different objectives: visits to the website, promoting job offers, attracting followers to the company page, etc.

Text ads

They are the most discreet LinkedIn ads of all and generate the least visual impact. They can appear in a square, horizontal or “large” shape (which is when they are shown at the top). These ads consist of title + description + image + URL. They barely allow the images to be seen, so the company logo is usually used (it only supports images of approximately 50 pixels). Although its discretion increases impressions, the CTR is usually lower than other promoted content. For this reason, they are especially effective at generating brand awareness .

What is an ABM strategy?

Before talking to you about how to apply an ABM strategy in LinkedIn Ads, you should know exactly what an ABM (Account-based Marketing) strategy is .

What is ABM

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a marketing concept based on managing campaigns focused on predefined accounts that normally have difficulty advancing in the purchasing process or are simply difficult to identify.

A strategy that works in parallel with the inbound marketing methodology and with which, based on certain commercial goals, we can reach exactly the type of clients or accounts we want to target . To achieve this, ABM combines the use of appropriate tools, content marketing and commercial actions.

The ABM proposes different phases to which special attention must be paid : first we select who the potential clients are. Then, before impacting them with a campaign without being qualified, we managed a campaign to attract only them and, later, we would generate the interaction that, in the long term, would lead us to new business opportunities.

Have you already understood it?

Surely you think that it is just the opposite of what you have been doing, that first you carry out lead capture, then a process of “educating” the leads to be able to segment them and, finally, you identify interesting accounts. With ABM, the first thing that is done is this identification process.

In short, with Account-Based Marketing we would make a prospecting list based on the buyer persona and then apply inbound marketing.

Why are we interested in an ABM strategy?

Thanks to this methodology we focus on those accounts/profiles that are relevant to our company and, therefore, we consider them potential clients. If we develop a campaign with a highly personalized message at the right time, we will increase engagement and we will be able to consolidate our relationship with them until they become customers and increase ROI.

In this way, we can achieve a sale or meet a commercial objective in very niche business sectors, whose range of potential clients is small, or in B2B environments where it is not useful to apply traditional marketing techniques.

The best tool to carry out an ABM strategy is LinkedIn . As we have seen, this social network is perfect for good audience segmentation and, in addition, we are interested in its ad formats to obtain leads. Later we explain how to complement advertising on LinkedIn with ABM.

When to develop an ABM campaign

When we have a list of potential customer accounts that we would like to approach with our content or offers.
To advance colder contacts through the marketing funnel until we meet our commercial objectives.

Who does it serve?

To B2B companies whose audience is on LinkedIn.
Companies with long purchasing processes.
To those who have very niche markets, where it is difficult to identify those who are likely to buy our products or services.
In environments where there is more than one decision maker or purchasing manager.

Advantages of ABM

Given our experience with the ABM technique, we can highlight the following advantages:

It is a more efficient strategy to identify potential clients and generate qualified leads.
It improves the customer experience, since personalized information is only sent to those who are interested and, therefore, the communications are not perceived as spam.
It allows you to automate many of its phases while the marketing and sales teams work together, making both departments more productive.
Its metrics are more positive than other strategies, especially when it comes to return on investment.

How to complement ABM with LinkedIn advertising?

Receiving an ad from LinkedIn Ads can be less intrusive than a direct message via InMail, as this message is often the first contact created between the company and the target account. So you have to know how to implement an ABM technique by advertising on LinkedIn, following the appropriate phases and displaying personalized messages.

In an ABM technique, potential clients must be avoided as much as possible, so if we use very aggressive advertising techniques we could achieve unwanted results. Even in cases where we make an impact with a campaign that offers a demo or free trial of our product, the message could be too intrusive or ineffective, especially if the customer still knows us.

To avoid this, even if we have done a very good segmentation and know exactly who to target, we need to develop a nurturing process before the potential client or potential account comes into contact with the sales department.

With LinkedIn Ads we can apply an advertising strategy that follows the different phases of the funnel and perfectly complements the ABM approach. By segmenting your audience based on their stage of the sales cycle (awareness, consideration, and conversion stage), you can use specific ad sequences to attract new prospects and nurture them until they become customers.

How to apply ABM to LinkedIn Ads?

Once we have identified the potential accounts or clients, we must reach them through an awareness stage. To do this, the ideal would be to create a LinkedIn Ads campaign specifically designed to generate Brand Awareness, for example, through a sponsored content ad with an article.

Next, to advance through the consideration stage we would create a campaign that encourages engagement until we capture leads, for example, with ads whose objective is to attract visits to the website, that promote free downloadable content or attendance at a webinar. We could do this through ads with carousel images that contain Lead Gen Forms.

Thus, if we follow the appropriate ABM steps, we can impact contacts with LinkedIn advertising ads who:

They belong to our prospecting list
Have previously interacted with our ads
They have visited our pages

Once this is done, potential accounts will already know us, since they will have previously interacted with our content. So it would be the right time to impact those prospects who were closest to the purchase decision. Since we already have a connection point, it would be more appropriate to communicate a personalized offer without being intrusive. For example: offering a demo, a first consultation, a sales visit, creating upselling processes, etc. This way we would advance in the conversion stage.

As you can see, LinkedIn Ads is a good tool due to its infinite possibilities for segmenting the audience in the professional environment. With the personalization capacity that LinkedIn ads allow, such as InMails, once we have qualified potential clients, we can increase ROI and generate interesting business opportunities.

In short, advertising on LinkedIn and an ABM campaign present great synergies that we can take advantage of in marketing to advance through the purchasing process in B2B companies or in those in which it is difficult to identify who is likely to generate sales conversions.