Anyone who wants to land the biggest fish of the pond as customers can increase their chances with the career network LinkedIn. After all, not only do more than 13 million companies have official accounts, but also their decision-makers.
Figuratively speaking, marketers fished in muddy waters not so long ago: marketing messages were sent to a relatively broad audience they knew very little about. This has changed with digitization and increasing data availability. Target groups can now be identified more efficiently and characterized in more detail. Account-Based Marketing exemplifies this development. This marketing strategy uses the available channels to identify the most promising accounts and to develop targeted measures to meet the needs of these potential customers.
It is relatively easy to identify companies that might have a use for the products offered with some research. However, companies do not receive marketing messages – their employees do. And this is exactly where the career network LinkedIn comes into play
The careers network's numerous users make sure that their profiles are always up to date. If marketers are looking at a business as their target account, they can use LinkedIn to identify the contacts who have the right role and level in the target account.
LinkedIn provides marketers with tools to makes this a rather easy exercise. The most important of these is without a doubt LinkedIn Account Targeting. This tool allows marketers to upload a CSV file with up to 300,000 companies. The tool then identifies those companies that are registered with LinkedIn. In the following step, the targeting can be refined: Further criteria such as career level or job title help to limit the target group for advertising measures. Here, marketers then have the choice between two campaign types: Sponsored Content and Sponsored InMail.
Sponsored content campaigns can be compared to sponsored posts that show up on Facebook's news feed. The campaign can, for example, link to landing pages that are tailored exactly to the target accounts. Sponsored InMail uses the LinkedIn messenger: marketers send their messages directly to the targeted accounts' inboxes.
In short, account-based marketing is about focusing marketing resources on specific accounts. The decision makers of these accounts can be efficiently identified and reached via LinkedIn.
