How To Create the Best LinkedIn Account-Based Marketing Strategy?

What is LinkedIn Account-Based Marketing?

With B2B, LinkedIn Account-Based Marketing is the process of driving prospecting strategies that aim to target companies rather than a lead, to get better chances of success.

This is the way for salespeople who use LinkedIn to find customers. It’s way too good to pass up, especially with the targeting capabilities provided by LinkedIn!

“Get better chances of success”, here, means a better conversion rate and sales increase – which remain the main goal with ABM and every growth strategy, whether it happens on LinkedIn or not.

LinkedIn Account-Based Marketing stands out in its ability to tap into LinkedIn, the world’s greatest source of B2B leads.

Where classical ABM strategies can be complex, time-consuming, and not so accurate, LinkedIn ABM allows you to reach out to a larger audience with a very wide range of filters – especially if you’re prospecting using Sales Navigator. In the results, you can get a very accurate pool of leads to reach out to.

Below, you’ll get a short example of an ABM strategy made up with LinkedIn.

You’ll notice that the ABM strategy is much more accurate. And you can do much, much better than this quick example.

Thanks to this huge amount of data, there are many opportunities to create successful ABM strategies with LinkedIn!

That’s what we want to show you with this post. But first, let’s talk about the benefits you could get from applying an ABM strategy with LinkedIn.

What are the main benefits of LinkedIn ABM?

As written above, the main goal of LinkedIn ABM is to generate more leads = to get more business.

Indeed, the whole LinkedIn ABM process can drive many advantages, such as:

• Increase the knowledge you have of your prospects/clients: using LinkedIn for your ABM strategies means playing with a lot of data and building very fin targeting processes. All of this work can contribute to a finer and more accurate perspective of your market.
• Improve your relationship with your clients: the customer relationship starts with the first interaction he has with your brand. If market knowledge increase, you’ll get to improve your communication skills and sales approach for these personas, which leads to more qualitative exchanges and relationships.
• Increase your customer lifetime value: of course, a better relationship with your client means that he’ll get to stay longer and the more he stays, the more money you make from him. Everybody wins.
• Increase the value per client: if your client is satisfied with their experience, not only will they be eager to stay on board but also open up the likelihood of additional income opportunities through added upsells.

At LaGrowthMachine, we strongly believe that client relationship is as important as generating leads. Actually, it’s cheaper to capitalize on existing clients than to get new ones. And ABM is something that works in that way, especially if you use software specifically designed for ABM..

Now, let’s get to the technical part of this post – but also the most interesting one!

How to build a successful LinkedIn ABM strategy?

As said earlier, there are many different ways to build ABM strategies using LinkedIn.

But in this post, we’ll give you our best one. Right after reading this, you’ll be able to test it and see the results – feel free to tell us what you thought about it in the comments below, we’re always thrilled to get new stories from our community!

At LaGrowthMachine, we aim to drive LinkedIn Account-Based Marketing using a 4 step process. Careful! With this method, you will need to utilize a Sales Navigator formula that requires payment for usage:

1. Define your persona
2. Find your accounts (=companies)
3. Find leads from these accounts
4. Export your list of leads

Bonus step: for the outreach part of the process, we’ll give you the traditional way of doing it but in the last paragraph of this post, we’ll explain to you how – and why – you can do it using LaGrowthMachine!

Step 1: Define your persona

To have success with ABM, you must already possess a fundamental understanding of the topic; however, engaging in this practice will provide you with further insight and knowledge.

We’re not going to explain how to build a persona as it should be part of the whole post, so we’re going to assume that your colleagues from marketing have already built your personas.

However, as a reminder: A persona is someone who represents a customer, based on a clear and precise description of his/her habits, needs, and goals.

Your persona is the ideal customer you want to target with your ABM strategy. It’s essential that you know who your personas are so you can target them properly with LinkedIn.

And that’s the targeting part that we’re going to focus on, here.

Step 2: Define the “Accounts” you want to target

To do ABM targeting on LinkedIn, you must:

• Have a look at your personas. If your personas are “CMO in small/medium vineyards that are growing up”, you’re going to focus on small/medium vineyards accounts;

• Go to LinkedIn Sales Navigator, in the “+ Account Filters” tab;

• Open the filters, and go to the “Department headcount growth“. Set up your field to “Marketing” and put values of a minimum of 20%;
• Go to the “Industry” filter and include “Wineries”;
• Go to the “Headquarters location” and include “United States”;
• Go to the “Company headcount” filter and include “1-10”, “11-50” and “51-200”. You could do the same with the annual revenue filter, to get all the wineries that generated between 1 and 10 million turnover a year, which remain small ones.

And that’s it. You’ll get a list of small/medium wineries in the USA that are doing great and are trying to expand, getting more budget, and/or recruiting new talent in marketing.

That’s only the second stage with ABM.

Now, let’s find leads inside those companies.

Step 3: Find your Leads in your Accounts

Ok, so if you’ve followed the first steps regarding our examples, you should now have a list of accounts (here, wineries).

The next step with our LinkedIn ABM strategy is to get the CMO working in those specific companies.

To do so:

• Go back to your account list in LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Note that you can save your lead/account lists if you need to go back to them later.

• Click on the “Select All” button.
• Click on the “View current employees” button. When you hit the button, LinkedIn is going to switch to the leads tab and filters. You can notice that you’ll get the “Current Company” filters already filled in with the companies you’ve selected!

• You can add additional filters such as “Job Title” or “Seniority Level“, including “CMO”, or “Marketing” with at least 2 years of examples for example.

• Once again, you can hit “Select All” and export and then “Save your list“.

And that’s it, you’ve extracted all the people working in marketing in the accounts you’ve targeted in the step before. The more you’re adding filters, the finer your request, and the shorter your list of leads… but also the more accurate – and the best conversion rate!

Step 4: Export your leads from Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator doesn’t allow you to export leads or accounts. To do so, you can do it with a Chrome extension such as Evaboot, or scrape it directly using the methods we explained above (scraping script or using a web scraper).

However, if you plan to use LaGrowthMachine, you can import your leads directly from LinkedIn Sales Navigator to our sales automation tool!

Why doing this?

That’s what we’re going to see now!

After LinkedIn ABM, outreach to your leads with LaGrowthMachine!

The ABM process described above can be sufficient in itself. Some of you won’t go further than this.

However, if you’re reading this, that means that you’re interested in technical sales & growth methods and tools to generate more B2B leads.

If it’s your case, what’s going next may be interesting for you.

Now that you have your list of leads on LinkedIn Sales Navigator or a CSV, how to outreach to them?

You can do this in two ways:

• The traditional one: create a sales message, copy it in your Gmail, replace the name and the company in your text for each different lead, and send it. Do this 30 times a day, for 1h per day. To learn how to craft the best sales messages, you can check our AIDA copywriting guide!
• The modern one: using a sales automation like LaGrowthMachine, you can send emails, connection request messages on LinkedIn, Twitter DMs, etc. with no limit, and personalize each one of your messages with our variable features.

So why use LaGrowthMachine to outreach with your leads?

Well, because:

• It will take no time (1h to set it up once, then wait for the leads to come at you);
• You’ll make no mistakes (copy/past method can be done quickly and include some mistakes due to human work);
• We can enrich your database to get additional data (such as phone numbers, email addresses, etc…)
• You can send much more messages than manually;
• You can plan every follow-up message in advance;
• You can use up to 3 channels, so if you’re lead doesn’t visit his email inbox, maybe he’ll get your LinkedIn message;
• You get personalized services and reviews from our sales team experts for your global outreach strategy (copywriting/targeting/technical sequence).

And moreover:

• You can have access to our sales inbox feature, synchronized with your email and LinkedIn accounts, to receive messages and answer directly from LaGrowthMachine (a huge help for clarity and vision);

• You can have access to detailed live reports of your campaigns;
• You can craft unlimited creative campaigns, using Zapier to connect with other tools (such as cold calling, CRM…), onboarding your whole sales team on it to do cross-profile strategies, etc…

Conclusion

This is the end of our LinkedIn ABM guide. To sum up, remember that:

• LinkedIn has become an essential platform for businesses and sales teams. Using ABM with Sales Navigator will make you able to craft your B2B lead lists with great precision.
• You can import your leads directly into LaGrowthMachine, from LinkedIn or CSV.
• Then, you can use our sales automation tool to outreach with your leads through emails and/or LinkedIn, making sure you reach the right contacts & get more B2B leads.

With LaGrowthMachine, you’ll have access to great features such as Sales Inbox, Live Reports & Campaigns, and get a personalized review from our sales team experts. This is the more powerful and flexible tool on the market at the moment.

Ready to take your outreach & lead generation process to the next level?