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SHOW TRANSCRIPT

Account Based Marketing with LinkedIn ads. Exactly what to do for the best results. Coming right up on this week’s episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here’s your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So Account Based Marketing is hot in the B2B sphere. There are so many different companies with ABM offerings, and it’s literally become a buzzword in the B2B community. It’s really interesting to me because LinkedIn Ads has had the ability to target specific companies with ads since it debuted in 2008. It continues to be, in my opinion, by far the best way to do Account Based Marketing. So on this episode, we’re going to go over exactly what ABM is, and how to do it effectively with LinkedIn. We’ll also cover what sort of content and offers work well, and the basics of how to segment your campaigns. Make sure to listen all the way to the end, as I’m going to be sharing my top five favorite ABM tactics. Okay, jumping into the news here, you may have noticed that banner at the top of account manager letting you know that there’s going to be a new left hand navigation for campaign manager. Well, we got it on some of our accounts and I was pleased to report, since we talked about this in last week’s news, that is actually pretty cool. A new addition here is under assets, there’s asset history. And that’s kind of cool. We haven’t had any sort of historical record keeping of anything in the accounts up to this point. So I’m excited to see that. Something else that I really liked about it is it removed the extra step of switching between accounts, which we obviously as an ad agency, who is running LinkedIn Ads, and we’re running a lot of them, it’s quite a pain to back out of an account and then go back into another one. Well, now it’s a very quick click to stay right within campaign manager and just switch accounts. Alright, let’s jump into ABM. Let’s hit it.

2:00
So first off, I think we have to define what ABM or Account Based Marketing is, because it really has become a buzzword and it’s something that CMOs and other marketing professionals throw around, and may not actually know what it means or how it applies to their own marketing efforts. So by my own definition, Account Based Marketing, or Account Based Targeting, or Account Based Sales, it all revolves around the same idea that we are targeting specific companies by name. The way you can think about this is a company can go out and try to acquire as many customers as they want., but Account Based Marketing is all about saying, well, actually, we know a handful or more than a handful of the companies who would be perfect for us, they would be our ideal customers. In that case, you could have a separate effort where you’re going after those handful of excellent ideal customers, while still trying to attract the majority of the other accounts, while still trying to attract other business from the rest of the industry. In our case, we specialize in the largest and most involved in highest spending accounts on the LinkedIn Ads platform. And so we know who a handful of those larger players are that we would love to get to work on their accounts. So of course, we want to show ads specifically to them, because any one of those would be a fantastic partnership for us. So my question to you is, who should be doing Account Based Marketing? For me, for a long time I’ve been telling people, not everyone should advertise on LinkedIn. For some companies, the costs are just too high to make it profitable for them. For instance, if you’re a SaaS software that selling for, you know, $100 a month and you don’t have contracts, it’s likely going to take a long time to recoup any sort of investment. And it may not be possible to show a return on your investment on LinkedIn. But as Account Based Marketing is concerned, I actually do think that every B2B company should be doing it. Because no matter what you do, chances are there are a handful or, like I said more than a handful of companies who would make perfect customers for you. And even if everyone is paying exactly the same amount for your software, you can imagine that there are some brands that would be so worthwhile to have as customers. You could show their logo, you could do case studies about them and leverage their logo, their brand presence, to help elevate your own brand. So you might be willing to take a loss on your advertising, just to bring a brand like that in because it brings all of that credibility, and additional social proof that will help you get a lot more deals in the future. Chances are though, if you’re listening, you’ve already been using LinkedIn Ads and so adding on an ABM element to your campaigns isn’t going to be that huge of an addition. And in fact, you’re probably already doing it. So let’s dive in a little bit deeper. So like I mentioned, back in 2008, LinkedIn let us target specific companies by name. This is back when they had 1000 audience minimum for any sort of advertising. Thank goodness since been lowered down to 300. But even then, as we’re talking about ABM, you’ll see this is still pretty restrictive. And the way this has always worked is when you go down to select your different audience attributes, you’ll see company name is one of the ways that you can target and it’s always been this way. In fact, it still is, if you go look for it. And this is great. We still use this quite regularly. The challenge, though, is that, when you use this targeting feature, you’re only able to target up to 200 accounts at a time. So let’s say that you had an account list of maybe it’s the fortune 500. Well, because you can only target 200 companies at a time through this, you’d have to have three separate campaigns. Campaign one targeting the fortune 200, campaign two targeting 201 through 400, and then the third campaign that’s targeting just the last 100. You could see how this would be a little bit of a pain to manage and in fact, we’ve done this for a long time. But luckily for us, back in 2017 LinkedIn released what they called matched audiences. What this allowed us to do is actually upload a list of either individuals that we want to be able to target on LinkedIn or we can upload company names as a list. With this list upload, now we can upload up to 300,000 rows. So you might ask me, AJ, why would you ever want to manually input those company names into a campaign? Well, there are a couple benefits. And this is, of course, if you want to target fewer than 200 companies at a time, then I would still recommend this. And there are two reasons for this. The first is when you manually input them, any suggestion that LinkedIn gives you, it already has a 100% match rate. So if you start typing the name of a company, and it pops up, you are targeting that company, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Whereas with the list upload, you always have to worry a little bit about your match rate and did you put it in the way that LinkedIn wanted to see it, and you won’t know until you upload it. The second benefit here is that you’ll be able to start targeting that company immediately. Whereas if you upload a list, chances are you won’t be able to start using that for about 72 hours. And trust me, I know LinkedIn says it will take a maximum of 48 hours. But in our experience, it is 72 hours. Please fix that. So if I’m ever targeting a list of fewer than 200 companies, I’m probably going to want to input them manually and that’s a huge pain. So you might be thinking, AJ, you’re crazy, don’t do that. Well, I really only have to do it once. Because once you’ve ever entered 200 of anything, you can always save that audience for later. And then you can go and apply that in any other campaign that you want to. So yeah, it’s a pain to put it in once, but once it’s in there, you can reuse it again in the future. The other thing is, once you’ve uploaded a list, you have like 30 to 90 days basically to use that list in your advertising, otherwise, LinkedIn forgets the list. It’s a bit of a pain, you have to go back and reupload the list, wait another 72 hours for it to finish processing, and only then can you use it. So working with lists on LinkedIn is really frustrating. But of course, if you’re doing a lot of Account Based Marketing, it really is nice to have these lists uploaded and ready to go.

8:29
So if you want to upload your first list, what you do is if you’re on the old UI, you’ll go to Account Assets, and then Matched Audiences. If you’re under the new UI, the new left hand navigation, it’ll be under Plan Matched Audiences, you then select Create Audience and then you decide whether you want to do a Company List or a Contact List. Both of them will have a template that you can download into Excel. So because we’re talking about ABM here, we’re going to talk just about company lists. But of course, contact lists are also great, very much deserving of their own episode. After you download that template, open it in Excel and you’ll get to see all of the different headings of the columns that LinkedIn will accept. And so right now, at the time of recording, we have company name, we have domain name like the website URL, we have the email domain, we have company page URL – the URL for how to find this company on LinkedIn, we have stock symbol if they’re a public company, industry, city, state, country and zip code. And of course, if you have company page URL, that’s probably going to match it 100%. I can’t imagine how LinkedIn would not match that, but if you don’t just magically have that information from your data source, we found that company name and domain tends to work pretty well here. Then you can upload that CSV file and then wait for like I said, 72 hours until it finishes processing, and then all of a sudden, it will be ready to use in your account and you can start actually advertising to these people. So now that you have this list, you have to go in and create a campaign, or edit a campaign to start using this list. So what you do is when you’re in the campaign settings, you scroll down to the targeting criteria. And you’ll notice that the first one says, audiences. When you click audiences, there will be list upload and then you’ll see company or contact list. Click on the one of your choice and you should see the list that you’ve uploaded in this list. Alright, so a quick pro tip, you actually don’t have to wait until your audience is totally done processing to associate it to a campaign. We know until that list has finished processing, the campaign won’t run. But you could still build the campaign and get it associated here so that as soon as it finishes processing, like the second, all of a sudden the campaign will be running. It could save you some time. I will mention here that it’s really important to understand that there are two different things you can do with these lists. You can associate a list as either an inclusion or an exclusion on a campaign. And we’ll talk a little bit later about why this is important, but it is my firm belief that because of LinkedIns great targeting capabilities, Account Based Marketing is just as much about exclusion as it is about inclusion. Okay, so you’ve uploaded this company list into your match audiences section. If you go back to your matched audiences section, and you click on the name of that list, once it’s done processing, you now have a very powerful dashboard. But we’ll get into that a little bit later. What I want to call your attention to is right there at the top, you will see two tabs, one says Matched and it will show a number, the other ones will say Unmatched and show you a number. So I’m looking at a list right now in my account where it says Matched 274, Unmatched 1. So if I click that unmatched tab, it’ll now show me the companies that I uploaded as a row in my list that LinkedIn didn’t know who they were. So if that’s a really important company to me, I can go and recreate a new list and make sure I get it right this time. I could even go to LinkedIn search for that company, get the URL for the company page, and then upload it again. I’m sure that’s going to clear and get me 100% match rate. Okay, so now that you know how to do this, we get to start talking about the actual theory here, that strategy about what you’re going to do with these lists and how to structure your Account Based Marketing effort or campaigns. First off, you really need to decide how you’re going to segment these companies. I mentioned before that you have to have at least 300 people in an audience for LinkedIn to let you run that campaign. So let’s say that there’s one company that you want to specify, you may even want to call out to that company in the ads, like, hey, IBM, we have a solution for you. Well, as long as there are at least 300 people at that company that you want to see your ads, then you’re good to go. You could create an entire campaign focused just on the company IBM and layer your targeting on top. But let’s say you’re just targeting marketers who are VP and above, well, I know IBM, and this example is a large company, but I don’t think that they have more than 300 VPS or above of marketing and so you may have to combine this campaign with other company names. Maybe it’s a handful, maybe it’s a 1000 other companies, who knows, but you do need to make sure that you get at least 300 people in an audience in order to advertise. So depending on the size of the company, and the number of potential prospects at each of those companies, you can do the math and figure out if you can do this one to one where it’s a whole company per campaign, or if you have to include multiple companies in your campaign. If you can do that one to one, it is amazing, because like I mentioned, you could call out to that company in the ad copy and we know that if you call out to accompany in the ad copy, it’s going to perform well. Everyone likes to see their company mentioned in their newsfeed. And of course, you’ll want to segment your audiences, usually by something. I mean, if you have to combine multiple company names per campaign, you’ll probably want to have some sort of a logical grouping there. So for instance, you might have a group of large companies versus full enterprise size, or you might have a list of local companies, you might have a list of companies that are warm, versus a list of companies that are cold. However you decide to organize your lists. You’ll want to upload those lists separately and keep track of and because you’re likely already advertising on LinkedIn, you have a bunch of other campaigns. What I would do is I would put the term ABM or list or something like that, in all of the campaign names here. And what this does is if you ever want to check the performance of your Account Based Marketing campaigns, you can just go into the search box inside of campaign manager, and type ABM, or type list. And immediately, it’ll show you all of your results. Pretty cool. I get asked a lot about, hey, how large should my audiences be when I’m using ABM. You know, if I’m telling you how to run an evergreen campaign on LinkedIn, I’m going to tell you that my preferred audience sizes are between about 20,000 – 80,000. And really, the only risk to having a small audience is it’s probably just not going to spend very much. But if it’s worth your effort to create it, it’s probably worth running. This definitely applies to ABM campaigns. If I have a whole bunch of campaigns that are targeting 300 people, I’m okay with that. I know it’s a lot to manage., if you had an account with like 1,000 campaigns, all targeting, let’s say the fortune 1,000, that would be a lot to manage. That’s a lot of campaigns for sure. But of course, we’re talking about small audiences, which aren’t going to spend very much, and it’s probably never going to get out of control and be impossible to manage. So the moral of the story here is don’t worry too much about having too small of an audience size. When you’re doing Account Based Marketing, it’s kind of the point to have a very focused audience that you can show to. I’ve noticed a lot of advertisers will go and upload a list and then they’ll try to target job titles at that list of companies. And what you need to understand is that job titles are way, way too exclusive to use for ABM, usually. And that’s because LinkedIn only understands about 30% of job titles out there. So it means you’re probably going to be ignoring the 70% of your audience that’s at each one of those companies, which is not in your favor. I mentioned, don’t worry about your audiences being too small, well, it’s still a good thing to make sure you’re hitting as many people at your target company that are a good fit for your message as possible. So my favorite way to do this, if I can, if this makes sense, is on top of the company list, I’m going to layer on job function and seniority. And this is the most broad way of targeting a persona. But of course, if job function is too broad, you can always narrow in by skill. Skill is the next most broad, and I found that to work quite well. So you could do skill with seniority to get the highest number of your target audience at that company to be included in your targeting. I also get asked a lot about, hey, I’m doing Account Based Marketing, but it doesn’t seem to be working, what could be going on? And what I want you to understand is that just because you’re doing Account Based Marketing and going after specific accounts, doesn’t mean that your performance is actually going to improve. In fact, if your ABM audience is a cold audience to begin with, they don’t know you exist, they’ve never heard of your tool or your company or anything like that, they’re still going to be a cold audience, which means they’re going to act cold. And on top of that, usually an ABM list is full of larger companies, these big fish or whales, and I know many of our listeners represent these companies. When you’re at a giant company, you just have people trying to solicit you trying to sell you all the time. It’s so so annoying when I’ve been in that position. So that means that when you’re going after these large companies specifically, you might see your performance drop just because a) they’re cold and b) they’re tired of being sold to. But this could work in your favor, because it would be exactly the same thing for your competitor. So it leaves a wide opening for you to go in being creative and being strategic. So once you’ve segmented your companies by list, let’s say we’re doing something like public companies versus non public, or early stage startups versus medium to large, however you’re doing this, you need to decide what sort of offers and what sort of ads you want to show to them. You could decide to do like, hey, we don’t have a contact at this company yet so we’re gonna show gated content to them and try to find at least one contact per one of these companies to then be able to reach out to. Or you might say, this list of accounts that we’re going after, our sales team is actively trying to get in with them, so maybe we’re going to show them ungated content, maybe it’s a blog post, maybe it’s a case study, maybe it’s a guide or something that’s just purely ungated because you want as many people from that company to consume your content and keep your company top of mind. You get to decide what your priority is there. One way that we’ve done this in the past is you have different lists for different stages of the funnel. So for instance, you might have a list of company names, who were leads, let’s say last quarter, and never closed. You might have a different list who were leads that were generated from this quarter who haven’t closed yet. So you could upload these lists into two different campaigns, and give them nurture in whichever way that you would find most beneficial. Of course, that can be a lot of work to manage the lists you have by what stage of the funnel they’re in. Then you end up having to compare these Excel sheets between quarters and figure out who dropped off of that list or who’s been added to it so that you can re upload those lists to LinkedIn and start using them again.

20:33
So if that sounds like way too much work for you, what I would suggest doing is using a flighting strategy. And the way flighting works is you have an entire audience that you’re going to show a specific offer or specific ads for a certain amount of time. And then once you feel like you’ve probably saturated that audience enough, you can turn those ads and offers off and launch something new. So this is kind of like time based retargeting. But we’re not relying on LinkedIn to put people into an audience to target them with ads later, we’re showing a unified message to our prospects for a certain amount of time and then we move on and tell them a different story, or update them, take them a little bit further down the funnel. But of course, this isn’t nearly as precise. And the reason why is because you could theoretically flight ads for let’s say three weeks and maybe there’s a big chunk of your audience, let’s say 10%, who never even logged in during those three weeks. And so chances are some will come in and log in for the first time during your flighting on your second or your third flight. Flighting is the strategy that TV advertisers and radio advertisers have been using for years and years. It definitely works. It’s less precise. But hey, maybe that’s okay.

21:52
Your other option is actually to create an automated funnel by using LinkedIn retargeting. Well, we know that your minimum audience size is 300, to even start showing a campaign and so that means in order to even have a second step to your funnel, you’ve got to get at least 300 people to take an action. With an ABM campaign where your audience sizes are small to begin with, it could take a lot of time to actually build out that audience. I like the idea of using flighting strategy to begin with while you’re building those retargeting audiences, and then once those are built significantly, then you could switch your strategy over and use an automated funnel, where you’re targeting the group of your audience and then any of those who have taken some sort of an action, then they’re removed from that audience and instead, they’re targeted in a separate campaign where you’re just targeting people who have taken that action. I hope that’s clear. Alright, here’s a quick sponsor break. And then we’ll actually dive into the bidding the budgeting and limitations of Account Based Marketing on LinkedIn.

22:55
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Aads experts.

23:05
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23:32
Alright, let’s jump into the nitty gritty here. So first off with bidding and budgeting on ABM campaigns, you don’t really have to worry too much about a budget, assuming that these are a small audience size. Remember any audience on LinkedIn that you choose, let’s say the number looks big, let’s say has 20,000 people in it. Well, we know that not every one of those people is going to be logged on to LinkedIn on any given day. And then if you’re running sponsored content, you’d be lucky if 1% of those people clicked on your ad. So most of your ABM campaigns, assuming a small audience size, probably aren’t going to spend very much, but it’s probably a good idea to give them a little bit of wiggle room, set your budgets kind of high just in case. So that’s your budgeting, and you just kind of want it out of the way so it doesn’t stop your efforts in the midday. But with bidding, you have two different options here. You can either use LinkedIn automated bidding, or maximum delivery, or you can do manual CPC bidding. Both of them can work well. I would just suggest if you are doing manual bidding, you’ll want to bid pretty high, like pretty aggressively, because if you can imagine you’ve got a list of very high value companies here. But of course, the people at those companies are also part of a whole bunch of other marketers lists. Some of them probably have really high performing ads, really good offers. And so in order to win out and have your select few people get shown the ad over one of your competitors. you’ll need to make it worth LinkedIn’s while. And if you’ve been listening to me for a while, you probably know that I usually recommend bidding either at the low end of the recommended range, or even significantly below it. But with ABM campaigns, I kind of flip the script and I’ll start out by bidding on the high end of the suggested range. Like I mentioned, with the limitations of building any audience on LinkedIn, you have to have at least 300 audience members in order for the campaign to run. So that does make it pretty hard to customize messaging right to an individual company. But if you do want to do that, sponsored messaging ads will let you insert what LinkedIn calls macros. It’s dynamic messaging, where you can insert the person’s company name, right into the content of the ad. So if sponsored messaging is a good ad format for you, then it can work really well for ABM because you could have a list that you’re targeting of 1,000 different companies, but the ad will still show up and say, Hey, we love marketers at IBM, and whatever company they represent, they’ll see it in the ad, could be very cool. One of the biggest limitations, though, to using LinkedIn for your ABM efforts, is of course, that you’re probably not going to reach these folks outside of when they’re on LinkedIn. So if you want to get in front of them around the whole web, yeah, you’ll probably have to use one of the many ABM vendors out there, and they can work well. But if you’re okay, just hitting them while they’re on LinkedIn, you’re in luck. Because of that, I also do recommend using LinkedIn Audience Network on any of your ABM campaigns because at least then you’ll have a chance at showing them on other sites other than just LinkedIn. You’ll reach them a little bit more often, which is cool. And I mentioned that there are quite a few ABM specific vendors out there. And they have a lot of limitations compared to LinkedIn. Of course, the cool part is that they can reach your audience on other ad inventory outside of just waiting for them to come to LinkedIn, which obviously people don’t spend a ton of time on LinkedIn on average, but they do have quite a few limitations. Like for instance, they’re trying to identify companies by the IP address that they’re visiting from. So you could imagine, yeah, for large companies, where if an IP address is communicating, it’s coming from one building on a Microsoft campus somewhere. And yeah, you could say, chances are that’s coming from Microsoft. But what about all those users who still work for the company, but they’re using their mobile phone on the subway, or walking around the city, and they’re not on Wi Fi, you lose them there. And then quite a few of these companies also rely on cookies. And we’ve had this conversation before in previous episodes, where cookies are just really scary right now, because they’re going away. So if you’re relying on a cookie, tying someone’s identity together, you’re going to lose that data eventually. I’m going to read off a few of these Account Based Marketing Tools, or platforms. I’m sure these will sound familiar to a lot of you. Across all of our accounts, we’ve managed, we’ve gotten a chance to use the vast majority of these platforms. We’ve used Terminus, we’ve used Metadata, we’ve used 6sense, Demandbase, Engagio and they all have their own technology, their own pros and cons so it’s definitely worth checking them out. And obviously, I’m a little bit of a LinkedIn nut. So you can take anything I say with a grain of salt here, but I just haven’t found any of these ABM vendors that can beat native LinkedIn advertising. Of course, the downside is you’re always waiting for them to come back to the platform. If they’re not spending a whole lot of time there, you may need to reach them on other platforms. So more often than not, this is a combined strategy of run this on LinkedIn, as well as on one of these other ABM vendors. When you’re using one of these ABM vendors, though, you probably want to make sure you have a pretty significant size of lists of companies in order to really make it make sense because they’re going to charge you a minimum fee just to work with them. Then of course, the ad inventory itself, because they’re showing across like the Google Display Network, for instance, it’s not all that expensive. In order to make it worthwhile, you do want to a pretty large list. So before I mentioned that when you click on the name of the company upload list, that there’s a dashboard, and this dashboard, I don’t know what to call it other than I call it like an ABM Performance Dashboard. What it does is it shows you all of the companies that you’ve uploaded, along with their performance from your ads, and it’s going to always show this to you for your last 90 days combined. There are two different ways that you can break this down. The first is Engagement and the second is Details. So if you click on the Details break down, it’s just going to show you all of the details about that company that you uploaded. It’ll show you things like company name, industry, company size date added, domain, etc. This isn’t a source of information where LinkedIn gives you a readout. They’re only going to give you something here if that’s what you uploaded. So if you didn’t upload stock symbols or the company’s domains, it’s not going to give it to you back. Probably, what you’re going to find the most interesting here is engagement. Under the engagement drop down, it’s going to show you the company name, it’s going to show you an engagement level by how engaged LinkedIn thinks this company is with your ads, the number of members from that company targeted, the number of campaigns they’re targeting that company, the number of impressions that that company was served, and ad engagement, like a click through rate combined from that company. There’s even organic engagement, because LinkedIn obviously knows how many people from that company are engaging with your company page, or even your ads, because they’ve been shared by one of their coworkers. And finally, there’s website visits, which website visits is only going to show if you have the insight tag installed on your website. And of course, your users have a cookie on their browser that’s identifying them as who they are on LinkedIn, to LinkedIn. That’s obviously going away with cookies, going to death. So this is a very cool dashboard. It’s something that LinkedIn hasn’t made a whole lot of noise about, but I absolutely love this. If you’re using company name lists in your match audiences, go check this out now and take a look. See if you can see which companies are really loving your ads, which just haven’t been reached by them, and you’ve got to find them a different way.

31:36
Okay, I mentioned at the beginning that I was going to share with you my five favorite strategies for running ABM campaigns. I’m actually going to throw in a sixth, a little bonus strategy here. So number one, I love to go to the sales teams of our clients, and ask them to give us a list of their sales dream accounts. The companies that they would absolutely love to work with. And of course, it’s really not hard to combine all of these lists from a whole bunch of different sales reps, combine them into one list and then you can upload that. Now all of a sudden, sales feels like, hey, marketing is trying to get us what we’re asking for. And now sales and marketing, they used to butt heads, but now they’re holding hands and singing Kumbaya. It’s a great thing. Strategy number two, I actually like to upload a list of competitors names, and then exclude that across all of my campaigns. And what that does, is even if I’m not specifically doing ABM targeting, I’m taking my competitors out of the running here using the company name exclusions. And now my competitors have no idea what it is I’m doing. They’re not being shown my ads, they can’t click on them to charge me money, etc. My third strategy here is actually along the same vein, instead of your competitors, it’s taking your list of customers, and excluding them because your customers are already paying you money. You don’t need to pay to show them ads anymore. That’ll save you some money, because your customers probably will click. Strategy number four is actually taking that same customer list and showing ads to them intentionally. Here’s an idea of when that would be appropriate. So let’s say you have a list of customers who their contract is going to be up in the next three months and they’re going to be reevaluating if they want to be still signed up, still subscribing to whatever your SaaS software is. Well, now you can target them with product updates and information about the roadmap, what’s coming out for your tool, what it’s going to be able to do, what new functionality you’ll have, all of that. Because they’re seeing that, chances are they’re going to get excited, or at least a lot more energized about being a customer of yours and when it comes time for renewal, you should see a much lower churn rate. Strategy number five, we actually touched a little bit on, you take a list of all of your leads for a certain amount of time who have been generated as a lead, but haven’t yet moved to the next stage in the funnel, or haven’t yet closed as a deal. So you could take that list of companies and show ads to them. What I like about this is you don’t have to just show ads to the people who were leads of yours, you know that that person is part of a larger buyer committee usually. So now you can broaden your targeting quite a bit and you can try to reach everyone in that company who could be part of that buyers committee. So for instance, if you’re trying to sell a tool to a marketer, well, you know, they probably have other coworkers who might be lending a hand or helping in that decision. You might have someone in finance, this deal is going to cross their desk and they’ve got to sign off on it. If it’s small companies, the CEO probably needs to sign off on it or be convinced. So if you can show ads and keep top of mind for everyone in the buyers committee, when it comes time to actually sign you’ll get a lot more oh, I’ve heard of these guys before, they must be legit and signing off versus “Wait, what tool are you trying to buy?” and getting added scrutiny. You don’t want that. And here’s my bonus strategy, strategy number six. You probably have a list of leads that you’ve generated. And let’s say that you have all of their company email addresses. Well, you want to take my advice here, like when I talked about how you want to target the whole set of decision makers. But if these are a list of individuals, you’re not going to be able to do that very well. Well, what we do is we’ll take that contact list, and inside of Excel will extract a column for just their company email domain and then we can go and upload that to LinkedIn as a company matched audience list, Voila!, you just took a contact list and turned it into a company list and now you can apply all of those targeting filters on top to make sure you’re hitting the rest of the buyers committee, or at least their co workers, other people who could help make this decision. All right, I’ve got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around.

36:07
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

36:18
All right, here are the resources from this episode. So if you are looking to advertise better on LinkedIn, or you have, let’s say, a coworker, or someone else who’s trying to learn and get up to speed, make sure you refer them to the LinkedIn Learning course that I did with LinkedIn on LinkedIn Ads. The link is right down below in the show notes. It’s really easy. It is by far the least expensive and the best course out there. Also, if this is your first time listening, look down at your podcast player and hit that subscribe button on whatever player you’re listening on. And please do rate and review the podcast. If you rate, of course, we love to see five stars. It helps other people who are also ad managers on LinkedIn get to hear about the podcast. Anything you have to say please leave it in a review and we’d love to shout you out here on air as well. With any questions you have or topic suggestions, anything like that, you can reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we’ll see you back here next week, cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

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