A client recently gave us a $100,000 budget for a month long pilot to advertise on their behalf on LinkedIn. I laughed and told them that I would be surprised if we could even hit $5,000. Turns out I was wrong… we hit 6.
So did we save this client $94,000? Well, not exactly.
Many marketers immersed in or exploring account-based marketing (ABM) will likely be utilizing their ‘spears and nets’ to land new clients. The spear (often the associated analogy of ABM) is used to go after the larger, more significant accounts, one at a time, and the net (commonly referring to demand generation) is deployed to capture any account that ‘swims’ on by.
Both of the strategies can extend to advertising on LinkedIn yet most marketers are only using their nets. Why not spears?
With LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities being so granular and specific (regions, titles, functions, etc.), most marketers are satisfied setting up generic ads because they know they will reach the right audience. They get excited when their audience sizes are large because they know that any click that they’re fortunate enough to earn, is a click from someone fitting their ideal customer profile (even if they don’t know which account the click is coming from).
On the other hand, account-based ads on LinkedIn can be your spears. Creating an ad specifically for a single account (mentioning their brand directly in the ad itself), and then displaying this ad exclusively to the appropriate functions who work at that single account is a much more powerful way to get the attention of your prospects (plus you gain visibility into which accounts are clicking the most).
So why not do both?
Your account-based ads will get you significantly higher click-through rates (typically >3%), and as an added bonus, these ads will cost you roughly half the cost per click compared to your broadcast ads. In the client example above, they targeted their top 50 accounts and by the end of the month, had spent $6,000 (or an average of $120 per account). Because they knew which accounts were clicking the most, their sales team knew exactly which accounts to focus their efforts on.
Your more generic ads will likely get you typical results (0.5-0.8% CTR) but they are equally as important as your account-based ads because you don’t want to overlook your smaller deals. With $94,000 left over from the month’s budget, it’s not necessary to put it all towards generic ads. If you used only $50,000, you’d have $44,000 left to put towards other initiatives and still hit your “air cover” KPIs.
Obviously not every brand is spending $100,000 each month on LinkedIn, but many are spending more than 6. As you look to gain an edge in your advertising efforts, consider a redistribution of funds for your ad strategy. Put $5,000-6,000 towards account-based, some of the remainder on generic ads, and use the balance to try new things (or maybe use it throw your marketing team a party on account of the new deals they’re influencing).
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