(00:05) I have been in digital marketing industry for 10 years and most of my time was spent in ad agencies and marketing agencies and I have done a fair bit of Consulting as well one of the sources of anxiety for a performance marketer is the B2B clients but over the years I have experimented a lot what works for these kind of clients and what doesn’t and one of the things that works for most of the B2B clients is ABM which is account-based marketing and if you’re wondering and you have never heard about this ABM thing before let me tell you
(00:34) this there was $6 billion US spent on ABM strategies in 2022 and 67% of the B2B companies reported that they use ABM as their main marketing initiative and a survey was rolled out in 2021 where 59% of the companies who used ABM reported that they saw positive Roi so if you want to master the B2B clients do watch this video because I will be covering everything about account-based marketing you should know how you can use LinkedIn ads as a paid media channel to deploy your ABM strategy and towards the end of
(01:04) the video in the third section I will explain to you why I think LinkedIn is the best Channel when it comes to ABM strategy and it’ll help you to sell it to your bosses or your clients so let’s first discuss what is ABM so simply put ABM stands for account-based marketing where you identify key accounts or companies which you want to be your clients because anyways B2B clients only work with other businesses or companies or accounts identify them and all your marketing efforts and advertising is directed to only them audience size is
(01:37) always very small and that’s what makes it different but it comes with its own pros and cons to make it clear for you most of the SAS companies who work for other businesses can deploy ABM strategy for example is about a company called funnel.io what they do is let’s say an agency works on a Google ads they work on Twitter ads they work on Snapchat ads they work on Facebook ads and for a client they want to put a dashboard together where show they show reports from all these media platforms to pull this data from all these media platforms
(02:07) into one place which is Google data Studio you need connectors and funnel is what helps you to do that now generally when funnel goes to the market their ideal customer is agencies let’s say they have to do a marketing strategy in UAE what they will do is they will create a list of all the ad agencies in UAE and then do their advertising and marketing only for the employees working for these agencies and this this kind of marketing strategy is called ABM or account-based marketing it’s very very strong when it comes to B2B clients if
(02:36) you think about it logically it’s a very clever thing to do so this leads us to our second section of the video where I explain to you what are the four steps to deploy your ABM strategy using LinkedIn ads but you can use the same strategy across any other channel but I believe that LinkedIn is the hero Channel when it comes to deploying your ABM strategy now to understand these steps completely you should have already run some campaigns on LinkedIn and know about the native filters or if you haven’t run at least know the basics of
(03:03) LinkedIn ads and whether you’re a beginner or you want to upskill your LinkedIn ads game I highly recommend to check this ebook called how to run successful LinkedIn ads you can download this ebook for free and I’ll put the link in the description below it’s a highly structured ebook and covers the basics like how to set up a powerful LinkedIn page and then it dives into how to prepare and launch your first LinkedIn ads campaign it also covers the important topics like how to create a campaign manager account how to choose
(03:30) your campaign objective how to develop a targeting strategy how to manage your bids and budgets and then even how to optimize your LinkedIn campaigns my favorite part in this ebook is the section which is like a complete guide on all the art formats possible on LinkedIn ads and the best practices for each of these formats if you use any of these formats what are the best practices what should you consider while you create that you build that ad and this ebook is made by HubSpot who is also a sponsor of this video so jumping
(03:57) back to the four steps of deploying an ABM strategy so the first step is to create a list of companies or accounts you want to Target with your marketing which you want as your potential client just keep in mind if you want your ABM strategy to be effective this step needs a very strong collaboration between the sales team and the marketing team because sales team actually knows a lot more about the accounts they want to Target in most of the cases if you go to the sales team of a company they already have these kind of list they already
(04:25) know the list of the companies or accounts they want to Target or they are chasing to make them the paying customers and this list can be let’s say in hundreds can be 200 400 500 but ideally it has to be within, because otherwise it’ll be too hectic to Target all of these companies in one campaign and the companies obviously when there’s such a huge list there’ll be some small companies big companies and the how you provide the solutions for them may differ so in such cases when you have a huge list of companies you can Target
(04:53) let’s say 2,000 then you again segregate that putting together similar companies in terms of size or revenue and then you have different APM strategies for each of them because you might want to have different messaging for each of them now I’ll give you some additional tips here for example when you meet your sales team and as performance marketers you can help them to kind of expand this list there are multiple tools you can use for example one of the tools is lead feeder you can integrate it with your website it’s a paid tool and you will
(05:19) know that all the people who visit your website which companies are they from because if you’re a B2B company some of your potential clients might be visiting your website lead Feer helps you to tap in there the other one is is our Google for example in case of funnel.io they can simply go to Google and search for advertising agencies in Dubai and they can make a list from there I know it’s a lot of manual work but the good thing is it has to be done only once so this is step one you collate and you collect the
(05:46) list of the companies you want to Target now this leads us to the second step of deploying ABM strategy this once you have the list of the companies then you have to identify what kind of people or job roles you want to Target for example if I’m doing ABM strategy for funnel I will not Target all the people who work for advertising agency there are certain people in these agencies who work for accounting there are certain people in these agencies who are admin staff and some people work in HR departments and I
(06:12) will not Target all of them because they are not my audience though they work for these advertising agencies so you have to in Second Step you have to filter and create personas okay who are the people we should Target in these companies in terms of their job roles and while doing this list you have to understand the concept of decision maker ERS and decision influencers for example the CEO or the procurement team in an agency are responsible to basically decide which tool we will use uh as a connector from
(06:41) our data sources to our dashboard they look at prices they look at different parameters but at the same time there are some people who are considered to be decision influencers for example the people who work in media team the people who work in account management now what happens is in certain cases the CEO someday might ask so we want to change our uh data pipeline Partners so we were let’s say working with another partner do you know anyone obviously he will ask the people working in media team the people who working on data team the
(07:09) people who working in account management and if somebody speaks up and says yes I have heard about funnel they are good this is their pricing I have and the someone else in the team says yes I have heard about funnel to so they are basically decision influencers and in certain cases these decision makers do not want to make this decision they let these decision influencers research and tell them what is the best solution which used to happen in a lot of cases when I used to work for agencies our CEO or general manager would ask us do you
(07:36) know about any reporting platform or any kind of software we needed whether it’s for moderation content creation planning anything an agency use a lot of tools so you have to basically while you decide on job roles you have to decide on who are the decision makers and what kind of job roles are decision influencers which kind of already puts us in the third step which is how to decide on your ads or how to decide the message messaging what kind of ads to create what I have seen is in uh B2B businesses there are
(08:05) three content pillars that work the best the first one is the testimonials if you look at monday.com most of their advertising is about testimonials some company some brand manager from the company some project manager from a company telling how they use monday.com and how it solved their problem and it actually works for a lot of B2B clients the second one of course is you highlight your USPS you highlight the f ability if your prices are competitive and any kind of basically any kind of Reason what makes you different from
(08:35) other companies and the third one which works for B2B clients and specifically for SAS platforms is how easy you highlight how easy it is to migrate and what kind of support you will provide and the fourth step is uh reporting reporting is very important when it comes to uh B2B and ABM strategy because uh unlike your traditional b2c uh campaigns where you can literally report in real time how many conversions we got how many sales we got how much sales did we get from this campaign but in terms of B2B uh and ABM strategy the sales
(09:05) cycle is too long uh because the companies you want to on board as your clients they already have contracts with other solution providers or product companies and you start marketing to them it’s a it’s it’s a long time even if you kind of start creating top of Mind awareness even if they check your website and they’ say okay yeah this is a better company actually this is a better solution for us it still takes some time for them to decide and basically on board you with strong collaboration between the marketing and
(09:34) sales team and tracking that how many accounts have reached out to us how many we gave the product demos how many of them in contract signing and how many have already paid and in terms of media metrics you should not focus only on how many of them filled the lead forms but you should check how much of traffic we generated what was the session rate how many average pages did they check on our website and engagement rates how much of video percentages uh and vvrs vtrs all these engagement metrics that’s where
(10:00) you look in terms of media now this leads us to our third section where I’ll tell you how important ABM strategy is if you’re a starter if you just want to test ABM strategy LinkedIn is the first channel you should check and I’ll tell you why in terms of ABM strategy traditionally apart from LinkedIn the options you have is there are certain companies who sell the data let’s say for example I’m a B2B client I go to an agency I tell them can you give me email addresses of all the people who work in media agencies in Dubai some companies
(10:27) do that this is one way to do ABM strategy and some companies still do this and you reach out to them they give you email addresses and phone numbers in certain cases of all the people who work in media agencies because they have collected this data from webinars and other kind of events but the problem with this kind of data is they have this data let’s say 2 years ago from 3 years ago and we know that people change companies and most of the data is not valid most of the email addresses are not valid anymore and in terms of phone
(10:54) numbers as well they either work for different companies they have moved out of the city Country and basically a lot of data is obsolete but if you look at this step when you go to LinkedIn the first thing you can Target people working for certain companies you can Target people working in certain job roles in that that company and the data is real time and most of it is accurate because anyone who changes the company they update it on the LinkedIn and the list is dynamic because if I Target people who work for these 10 companies
(11:21) on LinkedIn anyone who joins that company they will be included in my Target and the good thing is it’s all free to show you how easy it is if I go go to my LinkedIn ads platform let’s say I’m creating a campaign I click on campaign I name it anything let’s say test ABM and I select let’s say anything brand awareness and uh set a start date U set whatever and after you choose the name of the campaign you choose the objective you go to the audience section you target which country you want to do then you go to audience attributes you
(11:50) can literally go here and search for company names let’s say I’ll search for bin it’s one of the advertising agencies in Dubai and it will give me the good thing is it’ll give you suggested company names based on because it’s an advertising agency it basically pulled all the agencies in Dubai fp7 mechan V are social Nami tonic shell they are all advertising agencies in Dubai so you can literally go here and talk to your sales team okay which one do you think is our potential client and it’s that easy and not just this you can further go ahead
(12:19) to audience attributes and add let’s say if I go to job experience and I can literally uh choose what job functions or job titles in that company should be targeted for example in this case I choose bin and I go here and I let’s say choose job titles and I say digital media specialist all the digital media Specialists only in bin will be targeted so that’s how it works it’s that simple another reason why LinkedIn I think LinkedIn is the hero channel for ABM strategy is because unlike any other media platform whether you go to YouTube
(12:49) or social media platforms Facebook and Instagram the way user thinks while they are on these platforms is different than LinkedIn I personally go to LinkedIn to check what’s happening in my industry if there are any new trends if there’s something new coming up in the industry what are my peers doing are somebody posting any case studies I want to learn about what’s happening in media that’s the mindset I go to LinkedIn 4 and if you are there with your ads how you can provide solution to their work that’s what people try to consume on uh
(13:17) LinkedIn and though it’s an ad but it’s still relevant for the type of information and media they want to seek on the platform and in terms of budgets and media planning I would say in my experience when I see any any B2B client when they asked me to do a strategy for them I would at least take 25% of their media mix and use it for ABM strategy however there’s one thing you need to remember there are certain B2B businesses whose ticket value is very small let’s say $2 $10 a month ABM strategy might not be the best solution
(13:48) for them so the higher the ticket value of the B2B client the better it is to use ABM strategy for them and if you want me to show you some case studies or use cases or strategies for a hypoth critical B2B client how we can deploy ABM strategy for them let me know in the comments and I can do a video on that thank you so much and I will see you in the next one