We all know the marketing funnel, and traditionally when a business is planning for the next Quarter, Half or Year, marketers lean on the principals of the funnel.
While as marketers we often speak in the language of Awareness, Consideration and Conversion stages, it is rarely the case that’s the language spoken by our business partners, whether they be in Sales, HR or Finance.
More and more the business objectives that marketing are asked to help solve sound like:
We need to increase our market share by 10%
We need to reduce churn by 40% in the next half
We need to increase our opportunity target by 25%
We will be increasing the price of our product by 10% next year
This being the case, in the next couple of slides we’ve tried to align the wealth of metrics that LinkedIn can unlocks to objectives that we need to solve.
Your goals will determine where in the funnel your content and marketing strategy should fall. For example, if your goal is brand awareness you’ll be looking at promoting top of funnel content to help make your business known to the right target audience. Typically ungated content, blog posts, thought leadership.
If your goal is more consideration-oriented, this is where you’ll want to put out content that helps your audience stay in the know and also stay on their short-list by nurturing them with middle-funnel content that can be gated at this point.
Finally moving into the conversion phase of the funnel is where we’re now trying to convert our leads and prospects into customers. It’s important at this stage where you’re gathering leads to make sure you have a solid follow-up process in place so that you are reaching these leads when they’re ready to convert and become customers. You wouldn’t want to capture someone’s information and then wait a month to follow up - they will likely be confused and may have even forgotten that they gave you their information.
Make my business known to the right target audience
Stay in the audience's consideration short-list by nurturing them
Convert prospects into customers
How many of you are funding ABM initiatives with your partners? When you set up an ad campaign on LinkedIn, not only can you use our demographic profile data, but you can also take your own first-party data and match it against the 690MM+ members in the LinkedIn global member base to engage people even more likely to convert into qualified leads.
Combining LinkedIn and first-party data helps you target people who’ve already displayed an affinity for your brand. Thousands of advertisers have already found that leveraging their own first-party data in their LinkedIn targeting, can significantly improve cost per lead by up to 14%.
*Target the prospects you care about more by retargeting your website visitors, or matching your email contacts, account lists, marketing automation segments, against the LinkedIn audience
The first is website retargeting. Leverage our insight tag to build an audience of members who have previously visited your site. Email contact targeting - upload a list of emails from your marketing automation database to target high-value prospects or current customers. Account targeting - Upload a large list of companies to target key organizations Lookalike audiences - allow us to target individuals that have similar characteristics to your target audience. Now let's take a deeper look at each of these.
Retarget visitors to your pricing pages with a 30-day free trial
Retarget visitors to your product page with a case study of a client who saw success with that product
Upload a csv list of emails in your marketing automation database who have not engaged in the last 18 months
Upload a list of your current customers to exclude from your lead gen campaigns
Target specific companies that your sales team is focused on with a personalized Message Ad from a company exec
Target a list of your customers at renewal time
Target people who model after your current customers with LinkedIn ads by uploading a list of people that hit your customer login page
Doing discovery prior to planning media will allow marketing and sales to align on the right approach to ABM.
There will be scenarios where more than one of these is the right fit for a business, and from there, it's about deciding how to create balance and ensure each is properly looked after (adequate budget, clear KPIs, etc.).
91% of marketers who use ABM indicated a larger deal size
66% of companies reported that the key benefit of ABM is an increase in pipeline opportunities
Aligning sales and marketing, companies experience a 36% higher customer retention rate
1) SiriusDecisions 2) Act-on 3) Marketing Profs
These are the types of questions sales & marketing should align on together prior to any dollars going into market. Ensuring clarity on target accounts, as well as goals and KPIs, will prevent pushback from one group to the other and mitigate frustration down the road.
Know which accounts are ready for a more personal outreach from sales based on their engagement across LinkedIn and your website.
There are two key tools that you have access to now on LinkedIn and that are beneficial when thinking through the marketing and sales alignment piece. First is our Company Engagement Report, a dashboard within LinkedIn that allows you to see an engagement score for your target accounts.
So based on a variety of factors such as website views, content engagement, etc. you know which accounts are primed to talk to sales or which need more nurturing.
The 4th step is aligning content to the buyer. This is a different conversation we need to have. This piece can sometimes take up some time from your content team, so we want to make sure we really get it right, create a scalable solution, and try not to reinvent the wheel if we don’t have to.
I’m your target customer, but I am not yet in need of your product or ready to evaluate alternatives to what we use today.
I’m researching potential solutions, but I need to understand why I should trust you.
I’ve decided to purchase. Demonstrate to me how you are going to solve my needs.
I’ve decided to purchase your product. Help me navigate the contract process.
Thought leadership content – including reports from industry experts
Deep dives into products through webinars, guides or e-books
Best practices or customer case studies
Bring your brand to life in the feed with Single Image and Video Ads, giving mobile and desktop users multiple entry points to your story.
Drive engagement from top-middle parts of the funnel with feed + inbox approach, using Carousel and Conversation Ads.
Using Retargeting and Matched Audiences, bring your most highly engaged audiences to the bottom of the funnel to convert on a Lead Gen Form in messaging or feed.
There are plenty of other people who play a role in deciding when to invest, how much to invest and with who. Additionally, many people who sit on the buyer committee may be ultimate decision makers by the time a sales cycle is complete (B2B sales cycles can take years).
Narrowing targeting to only focus on ultimate decision makers means you're missing out on the chance to impact the broader buying committee. This means that you should consider functions in IT, Finance, and Marketing as your audience for massive business decisions.
Upload a list of contacts associated to a closed-won deal. Create a lookalike audience from that list to find new audiences who are like buyers and stakeholders you’ve identified.