Imagine you were lost in a strange city and wanted to get to the nearest metro station. Fifteen years ago, you had to inquire every passerby to get information and had to keep on moving until you finally come to the destination. However, it is an alien concept today. If you want to know any destination, just tell your smartphone and it will pull up locations, distance, time, traffic to even climatic conditions in a moment.
This change illustrates the importance of account-based marketing (ABM), which is now growing largely in popularity. Even the B2B marketers currently do not have the patience to take a scattershot approach lie the olden times. Digital channels now make it easier to research to any degree on specific targets by allowing the users to identify the exact people/business you have to reach to and hit them with a customized customer engagement strategy.
Account-Based Marketing
For B2B marketers of high-value products and services, ABM makes real sense. Compared to B2C, the B2B conversion cycle is long and ideally involve multiple stakeholders. It makes it necessary for the sellers to have enough resources to take it up to the point of a sale. Focusing on a list of relevant high-value leads is much sensible than generating a higher quantity of leads. That is where ABM through LinkedIn becomes valuable as per expert opinions.
Linked ABM
The sales and marketing team practices ABM uses personalized online campaign strategies to get engaged with high-profile target audience at an individual level. For example, a company focusing on selling software products may want to focus on the decision makers as the CEO, CMO, CTO, and CIO.
Once if the target individuals are identified, the ABM team may next reach to them using a personalized strategy, which will be found sensible by the contact based on their requirements. One needs to know that relationships act as the base of any ABM strategy and this is why the prospect outreach is determined more appropriately by the social proximity to traditional sales territories. The primary focus of any ABM strategy is to engage your most exceptional resources on highest-value prospects. Once if you establish it, then you naturally get more time to slow down and invest time to engage in thoughtful dialogues.
Laying LinkedIn ABM Program Foundation
By focusing on specific key accounts instead of beating around the bush, ABM helps the marketers to align their effort with sales better. On the other hand, ABM aligns better with the natural journey of the buyers with personalized and customized messaging.
To build a list of prospective companies and decision makers, LinkedIn can help you get the details of already listed companies and then establish a connection between similar businesses. You can get any information about a company like:
- Registered name
- Location
- Industry
- Number of employees
- More specific industrial specialties
- Website or Blog
- Job opportunities
- News feeds and updated on the LinkedIn platform to get an overview of what and how they do.
You can also view the connected employees once you establish a relationship with links available to be employees. With above 8 million companies and 500 million members sharing their accurate data, LinkedIn serves as the ideal professional platform to deploy and establish your ABM strategy.
This article is written by Karen Anthony, who is a B2B marketing expert who used to explore and write about new and upcoming strategic approach to business marketing on the leading blogs.
