Business Benefits
Strongly engage potential clients and keep prospects warm during long sales cycles.
Customize content topics for specific targets and channels which you can later use for ABM-focused paid campaigns.
This task can quickly become expensive. To make content creation more sustainable:
- Think of content production in terms of topics like Trends in Industry X, not outcomes like a blog post. You can repackage variants of the same information for multiple channels like a blog, whitepaper, and video.
- Create industry-specific, rather than company-specific, downloadables that can be lightly redesigned for multiple targets.
- Translate company research into competitive research; research on four prospects’ PPC campaigns, for example, can be offered to each as competitive research on the other three.
Use Customer Match in Google Ads to target users based on their Google accounts, given that you have their information, so only your ideal account-based marketing prospects see your ads.
Offline data like prospect/lead information can help you customize your ABM ads. Use some lead management tools to keep track of how far your prospects have moved through your ABM funnel.
To set up Customer Match in Google Ads:
- Create a list in Google Ads of your ABM prospect list.
- Upload the data file containing user contact info.
- Create or update your new custom ABM ad campaign.
- Now, when these users are signed into their Google account, they see your ads.
Use Similar Audiences in Google Ads to scale your Customer Match audiences by assigning Google to identify similar users to add to your list.
Similar Audiences let you gently expand your audience while ensuring it’s visible only to relevant eyes. If you’re targeting a narrow vertical rather than a specific company, or don’t have the data for a true company or target-specific ABM campaign, Similar Audiences can be useful. Just like Lookalike Audiences, you need at least 1,000 users in your Customer Match Audience to start scaling.
Google the address of your target company’s office and isolate the geolocation of your ads to the radius of that company’s property using Radius Targeting in Google Ads to get your ABM prospects to engage with your ads during work hours, when business decisions tend to be made.
This eliminates wasteful spend in siloed ABM campaigns and also enables you to focus your ad copy on the exact audience you’re targeting. If your highest value prospect company has one location, there’s no need to target an ABM Google Ads campaign to the entire city.
Create and promote personalized account-based content on your branded social media channels.
Create a list of software companies that you think are a good fit as your ideal prospects, and prepare content just for them. For example, create a series of hyper-personalized videos with valuable information prospects can immediately use, and which is relevant for their brand.
Consider including:
- Overall SERP analysis for your prospect’s primary keywords.
- Overview of their competitor ads.
- Analysis of their ad copy.
- Analysis of their landing pages and forms.
- Prescriptive suggestions based on your findings.
- Potential competitor analysis, 1–3 examples per video.
When your videos are ready, cut the material into smaller, bite-sized snippets and upload them on YouTube. Use the YouTube links to promote the original videos across your branded social channels.
Use LinkedIn as your primary channel as this is the social media platform where it best pays to do ABM and build your authoritative presence. Use Facebook and Twitter as secondary channels, where you can also tag your target prospect with direct social shoutouts.
Follow how your videos perform organically to decide when and where to boost them. For starters, boosting your videos is recommended. LinkedIn Pulse rewards a spike in engagement by raising the placement of your content in the feeds of LinkedIn channels you tag.
Customize your LinkedIn social promotions by tagging decision-makers at the companies you target, so you can track actual individuals based on which companies they work for. Start a conversation with the person who will sign on the dotted line, with content made specifically for them.
During long sales cycles, use scheduled content promotions on LinkedIn to keep your brand top-of-mind. Integrate LinkedIn posts with automated social management tools like Buffer. By the time your scheduled Sponsored Content ads re-engage your LinkedIn audience, your content will have earned plenty of social proof.
Spend some time building your LinkedIn profile if you are going to use it for ABM campaigns: optimize your company page and ask individual reps to optimize their personal LinkedIn profiles.
Before you start spending thousands on LinkedIn Ads, make sure that your presence on LinkedIn reflects well on your brand. Many interactions with ABM prospects may take place organically as comments on promoted content, for example. That is why you need both your company profile and the profiles of those people on your team who will engage in this campaign to have their profiles optimized.
- Consistently sharing branded content.
- Sharing and tagging external content to boost authority.
- Tagging prospects in relevant, helpful posts.
- Posting about locations and events.
- Not salesy at all.
- Participating in conversations via comments.
- Direct Messaging prospects while approaching conversion.
Invest in LinkedIn Sales Navigator to save time and make prospects management easier.
Once you’ve developed a LinkedIn reputation that your prospects can trust as an authoritative voice, as opposed to obnoxious sales rep, your LinkedIn Ads campaigns will be much more likely to generate a strong ROI.
Below is an example of an optimized personal LinkedIn profile:
Research the exact words your prospects used to find you and use them in the copy of your ad, landing page, and thank-you page to strengthen your brand presence and support ABM campaigns.
This is called Dynamic Text Insertion and functions as a way to offer more tailored messaging to prospects at scale, somewhere between a traditional blanket approach and hyper-targeted ABM effort. Dynamic text messaging helps maintain a consistent message after a prospect clicks on an ad or joins your email list.
Depending on where prospects are in the funnel, you can customize your CTAs as well. Dynamic Text Insertion can generate more relevant landing pages, which, in turn, can lead to more relevant calls-to-action and content offers.
If you’re a company or agency that offers multiple services like PPC and CRO, then you may want to segment your prospects based on the type of account-based content your traffic comes from. If this is the case, Dynamic Text Insertion is the perfect solution to continue message matching from externally-facing content, to the internal customized user experience.
Perform reverse IP lookups and reveal the company that site visitors work for, refine the list of companies you obtain with CRM data and lead-scoring software, and then serve ads to the best prospects within the best-fit companies to enrich prospect information and create dynamic ad audiences.
Use a tool like Clearbit to perform reverse IP lookups.
ABM retargeting is similar to ordinary retargeting, with a difference it offers greater precision of targeting and customization for the audience and the specific point in the funnel. As you perform the step, avoid re-uploading lists when you approach to target the best prospects.
According to expert Ed Fry, such well-targeted PPC campaigns for ABM, have two benefits:
- First, it disengages ads after paid conversion and prevents wasted ad spend and confusing offers. Not every prospect at an account will hit a burn pixel. Dynamic audiences ensure you’re only retargeting individuals before the conversion.
- Second, it saturates ads to stakeholders who are close to paid conversion, it pays to accelerate the pipeline, and further down the funnel with a small, high-value audience, it can make sense to outbid everyone else for the inventory amongst your target.
Use Facebook dark posts and retargeting, to re-engage users about an offer in which they previously showed interest.
Facebook retargeting layers customer contact information over already highly custom-built audiences. This makes it the perfect ABM weapon for prospects who may be interested but are currently unavailable. This can be for a few reasons:
- Currently with another vendor.
- Don’t have the budget.
- Are going through internal changes at the company.
Facebook Dark Posts are posts that are not publicly visible. They can help you to identify the most compelling offers, stay engaged with unavailable prospects, and gauge where they are in the ABM funnel.
Here are a few more ways to make sure your ABM retargeting doesn’t go to waste:
- Keep your brand and messaging ever-present in the eyes of your prospects with display ads on competitive keywords.
- Improve your organic and paid presence on branded keywords as your prospects move down funnel from research to consideration.
- Use Facebook Dark Posts and Smoke Tests to identify new ABM offers to increase click-through and conversion rates.
Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T11:50:33Z