LinkedIn has recently released two hugely useful, albeit easy to miss, updates. These updates will help us to plan and optimise campaign strategy on the platform, and to simultaneously align with sales teams. When it comes to running ABM on LinkedIn, it is important to review your data and content regularly to push your target lists through your marketing funnel.
It requires far more than simply placing an ad in front of someone you want to work with and hoping that’ll do the trick.
Enhanced Company Engagement Data
The first update LinkedIn have introduced is a detailed breakdown of company engagement on your ads and organic profile based on your uploaded company lists. The report below highlights the ad delivery against certain companies, their level of engagement, and exactly which lists they belong to – making for easy filtering and organisation.
LinkedIn Companies Report
There are a few benefits to this update that we want to use to our advantage here at ROAST: Firstly, companies showing high engagement can be priority targets for the sales team. With this new update, new targeted content can be created in the next stage of a campaign to drive a lead to take the next step. We can exclude companies which show high delivery but low engagement, or those that may not have been matched correctly in the first place – a potential issue when relying just on company names for matching.
Another great aspect of the update is that these reports are highly filterable, allowing you to home in on specific campaigns, audience lists, or objectives.
While this exportable to be manipulated further, LinkedIn does strip out lots of information relating to Organic engagement as well as the company information. It is still possible however to retrieve the data on a regular basis to view engagement against target account engagement over time. After all, this is fundamental to measuring the success of a long-term ABM strategy. For example, in a niche B2B industry, your targets aren’t realistically going to become customers off of the very first ad they see – especially when whole buying committees are involved.
Understanding Audience Depth Reached
The second update from LinkedIn is also a massive help in understanding your audience penetration.
The aptly named metric will show you what percentage of unique users in your audience have been reached by your campaign. You’ll naturally expect this to start low and grow over time, as hopefully more of your target audience are exposed to your campaign. While you shouldn’t expect it to ever reach to 100%, if you spot a high audience penetration – alongside a strong frequency – it is a clear indicator that this is the audience you should be targeting with your next stage of ad content or targeting them with a lower funnel optimisation objective.
LinkedIn Audience Penetration Metrics
Another consideration when it comes to this, is the audience size you’re aiming for in the first place. Before now, LinkedIn have typically recommended an audience size of 50,000 as a minimum, but this new update can indicate whether your audience size is too big or too small. If you’ve been running your campaign for a month and your penetration is still low, you could look at a higher budget to expand your reach or reduce your audience size if it is too large to make an impact on the audience you want.
A combination of these new tools will be powerful for ensuring your target customers are being nurtured effectively and are seeing the right content at the right time. When you consider the other options already existing in LinkedIn, including the demographic reports to view who is seeing your ads based on seniority or job function, you can start to get a detailed view of exactly who you are reaching and what the next stage of your strategy should be.
