How to Take Your LinkedIn Campaigns Beyond ABM

If you’re in the B2B space, you know just how valuable LinkedIn advertising can be. 

It’s been ahead of the game when it comes to lead gen campaigns and its ability to target individuals and companies was leaps and bounds better than Google and Meta. 

For many, Linkedin became the defacto ABM platform. 

However…

If you’ve been paying attention to what’s happening in the digital ads space, you know privacy changes are really putting a damper on things.

Targeting capabilities have decreased, costs have skyrocketed, and with the removal of cookies, it’s going to get worse. 

Source: Kevin Indig

Much like we’ve talked about with Facebook ads, these changes are making things hard. 

The good news is these advertising platforms still can do some amazing things when used properly. 

Including LinkedIn.

Let’s get into it.

Moving Your LinkedIn Campaigns Beyond ABM 

For years, ABM has been the hot buzzword. When I was working at the B2B agency, I can’t tell you how many clients I had who wanted to shift budgets away from Google ads and focus on LinkedIn ABM campaigns.

And look, I got it. As Google costs kept rising and privacy changes started to impact retargeting performance, ABM became the better option.

The thing is, it’s not the BEST option. 

ABM allows you to target accounts, not individuals. Accounts don’t buy things.

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AJ Wilcox, Host of the LinkedIn Ads Show & Founder of B2Linked

“By being able to use the identity of site visitors to create Contact Lists to target in LinkedIn, you give yourself more valuable warm audiences to target. One of the biggest challenges our clients see is they want more demos/sales calls, and we know that warm audiences are most receptive to these. The more warm audiences, the more bottom-of-funnel results you’re going to see!”

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Now, you might be thinking – LinkedIn lets you target by title and company, essentially giving you the individual you want to reach at a particular organization. 

The problem is, that audience size requirements make that almost impossible. Unless you are targeting a significant number of titles at large organizations, you can’t do it.

It’s time for LinkedIn advertisers to stop thinking about account-based marketing and start thinking about contact-based marketing.

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Andrea Cruz Lopez, Sr Director, Client Strategy at Tinuiti

“B2B is all about creating mental availability so when buyers become in-market, they keep your brand top of mind. In order to do this you must target the whole buying committee plus those who are influencing it. Basic job title targeting is not good enough.”

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How to Create Contact-Based Marketing Campaigns

One of the great things about LinkedIn is its Matched Audience capabilities. 

Matched audiences essentially allow you to target a list of companies, a list of contacts, or create predictive audiences.

Now, here’s where it gets fun. 

With the Customers.ai Website Visitor ID X-Ray pixel, you can capture the names and emails of your website visitors (you can also capture domain, company, LinkedIn profile, etc). 

We can then take that data and create really targeted LinkedIn campaigns that maximize budget. 

Let’s look at an example: 

Let’s say you are a digital marketing agency and you have several service lines – SEO, Content, Paid Media, and Web Design. 

You also have a resources section with a blog, whitepapers, videos, tutorials, etc, where you touch on each of these topics.

With Customers.ai, you can create segments for each topic. 

In this case, you’d have a segment for anyone who went to a page about SEO, a segment for anyone who went to a page about PPC, etc., etc. 

You can then take those segments, create matched audiences in LinkedIn, and build very specific campaigns for each audience.

There are two keys here:

1. You are showing people what they are interested in. 
2. You are targeting individuals who have already been on your site.

Let’s look at that again.

You are targeting individuals who have already been on your site!

I mentioned earlier I had clients asking to transition budget to LinkedIn. At the same time, they were also asking “How do I know we are reaching the right people?”. 

THIS is how you know. 

Training Your LinkedIn Predictive Audiences

Along with creating contact-based marketing campaigns, we can also help train predictive audiences.

If you aren’t familiar with predictive audiences, they are similar to Facebook’s Advantage+ audience. 

Essentially, predictive audiences use LinkedIn’s AI to build custom audiences they deem most likely to convert. This is based on existing conversion data, lead gen forms, or contact lists.

And that’s where Customers.ai comes in.

With lookalike audiences going away March 1, 2024, predictive audiences provide an opportunity to reach others that fit your target demographic.

The challenge with predictive audiences, and really anything AI-related, is that they perform better with more information. The more data you can provide and “train” them with, the more accurate they’ll be.

Now, let’s go back to the segments we mentioned above. These are people who have been to your site. They’ve interacted with your content, maybe they’ve filled out forms, maybe they’ve even become a customer.

These are the types of people you want to train your predictive audiences with. 

Want to go even deeper? 

Train your predictive audiences with super high-intent visitors. Think those who have visited pricing pages, requested a demo, or filled out a form to watch a webinar or download an asset. 

These are definitely the types of people you want to be targeting!

Amping Up Your LinkedIn Performance with Website Visitor Identification

LinkedIn is still one of my favorite ad platforms and while the targeting capabilities they’ve historically been known for may be fading, there is still a HUGE opportunity for advertisers.

With website visitor identification, you can not only find who is coming to your site, but you can build amazing campaigns targeted to those people.

Want to give it a shot?

Customers.ai is free to try and super easy to set up. 

To install the Website Visitor ID X-Ray Pixel, sign up (again…FREE!), go to your dashboard, and navigate to My Automations. 

Select + New Automation and get your pixel. We have easy install options for Google Tag Manager, WordPress, and Shopify, or you can install the pixel manually.

Start collecting data, start building segments, and try adding it to your LinkedIn campaigns. We know you’ll be pleased with what you find. 

LinkedIn is a great tool and it can be even better for advertisers who move beyond ABM and start thinking about how they reach individuals. Get going!

Important Next Steps

• See what targeted outbound marketing is all about. Capture and engage your first 500 website visitor leads with Customers.ai X-Ray website visitor identification for free.
• Talk and learn about sales outreach automation with other growth enthusiasts. Join Customers.ai Island, our Facebook group of 40K marketers and entrepreneurs who are ready to support you.
• Advance your marketing performance with Sales Outreach School, a free tutorial and training area for sales pros and marketers.