Using LinkedIn for Account-Based Marketing: Insights from Reply.io

Most companies claim to champion account-based marketing, but few actually walk the talk. 

Reply.io is one of the few.

They help sales reps automate LinkedIn email search and personal email outreach, calls, and tasks so sales teams can spend less time obsessing over contact info, and more time closing deals. 

As account-based marketing advocates here at Leadfeeder, we’ve gleaned a few golden insights from Reply.io about smarter account-based selling on LinkedIn. 

Keep reading to find out what we’ve learned. 

Note: Try Leadfeeder's 14-day trial to know which businesses you have been marketing to have actually visited your site?

What’s the secret to using LinkedIn to supercharge my ABM the way Reply.io does? 

Optimize your LinkedIn profile to appeal to target accounts

Keeping your target accounts in mind, refine your photo, headline, and any company endorsements to immediately capture interest and establish trust. 

For example, if you’re a decision-maker who lands on the profile of sales manager, George Vitko, you’re immediately greeted with an eye-catching banner that acts as social proof:

Championing Reply.io’s recognition from G2 as a “Top 50 sales product”, George’s profile triggers instant familiarity and credibility. 

More importantly, it communicates to decision-makers that Reply.io is a brand they can trust. This is a big win. Especially when you consider that decision-makers on LinkedIn are being targeted by multiple competitors.  

Share valuable content that’s tailored to your accounts. 

If you’ve been on LinkedIn at all, you know that there’s no shortage of companies sharing generic guides or how-to blog posts. Reply.io stands out and attracts attention by posting personalized content that’s hyper-relevant to its audience.

This post by SDR, William Oleksiienko, is a perfect example:

Not only is he sharing his favorite outreach strategy, but he’s also offering email, LinkedIn, and Vidyard video templates that leads can use straight away.

Enrich personalized outreach with a tailored LinkedIn tech stack

LinkedIn sales navigator is a great ABM aid, but if you want to automate your sales process without sacrificing personalization, you’ll need more tools like:

• Leadfeeder - to see which LinkedIn leads visit your site and automatically add them to your LinkedIn Matched Audiences for accurate ad targeting.  

• Awario - to listen to what your target accounts are saying on social platforms.

• Reply.io - to personalize large-scale outreach on multiple platforms.

• Crystal - to adapt your tone and messaging to the personality of your leads. 

5 ways to use LinkedIn for ABM

Whether you’re a sales rep knee-deep in outreach, or a CMO publishing thought leadership content, there’s a lot you can do with LinkedIn for lead generation. But where should you begin if you’re using LinkedIn to empower ABM campaigns?  

1. Understand your accounts 

LinkedIn is a platform where professionals peacock their portfolios, promotions, and achievements. This means you don’t have to be connected with a decision-maker to gather data for better outreach. 

With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can take this further by creating custom account lists based on buyer personas and ideal client profiles. 

2. Identify qualified leads 

With accurate firmographic data on thousands of companies, LinkedIn Advanced Search is a great way to narrow your search for hard-to-find leads. 

You can browse companies and decision-makers by industry, revenue, employee count, keyword, location, tenure, and more.

3. Get content into the hands of decision-makers 

Great content is useless if it fails to reach the audience and accounts you’re targeting. 

Using sponsored content, you can boost reports, ebooks, and research to reach your target account lists. If you’ve got a popular piece of content, consider sponsoring it to attract more high-quality leads into your funnel. 

4. Use InMail to beat competitors

You’ll often need to reach multiple decision-makers under one account. This can kill productivity if:

• Decision-makers don’t interact with your content

• Leads don’t accept your connection requests. 

• Or you don’t have the right email address.  

With InMail, you can bypass typical outreach barriers and deliver your message to users outside of your network. 

Important note: Make InMail messages count. LinkedIn provides a limited number of InMails depending on the plan you choose, so reserve them for highly-qualified accounts. 

5. Personalized outreach at scale  

Personalized outreach and content are at the heart of ABM. 

From news mentions, job role changes, or status posts, LinkedIn Sales Navigator keeps you updated on account-related news that you can use to personalize your outreach. 

Consultant Bryan McWilliams, for example, shares an instance where he was notified that a director-level client was moving to a new decision-making role. 

Bryan quickly reached out with a congratulatory message. And thanks to his swift and personalized interaction, he closed the deal. 

The value of generating higher quality leads and aligning sales and marketing teams

Regardless of your approach to lead generation, misalignment between marketing and sales will kill your sales force productivity. Expanding on Rimma’s observation that: 

“personalization at the account level requires sales and marketing to be in sync on account-specific messaging”. 

99 percent of B2B marketers say account-based sales and marketing initiatives generate better ROI and above-average deal size. Account-based marketing works. 

It’s an effective strategy for lead generation because it forces marketing and sales teams to unite under a well-defined common goal. 

With sales and marketing agreeing on lead generation objectives, they’re better equipped to tailor account-specific messages, craft highly relevant content, and execute a go-to-market strategy that generates higher quality leads.

After observing from afar, we wanted to learn more about Reply.io’s approach to ABM on LinkedIn. So we sat down with their senior marketing manager, and sales dev team lead, Rimma Stynik, and fired off our most burning questions. 

Question 1:  Can you share a little bit about what Reply.io is and how it came about? And, about yourself?

Reply is a SaaS platform that helps businesses around the world automate their sales communication across different channels while keeping it personal. 

We’ve built our product with salespeople in mind, to help them close more deals, faster without a need to navigate dozens of different tools. With Reply, they get a unified platform that covers the most essential aspects of the sales process, from researching your prospects to building effective conversations using a mix of automated and manual touchpoints.

As for me, I’ve been with Reply for almost 3 years, leading our sales development team. This means I am directly responsible for any lead generation activity, from outbound sales prospecting to inbound tactics like account-based marketing.

Question 2:  How does Reply.io help account-based marketing? And, how important is data enrichment?

As mentioned above, Reply is a pretty universal sales engagement tool, meaning that it can help you with many tasks at different stages of the sales and marketing process. 

Here are some of the ways it can help you with ABM specifically:

• Connect with the key decision makers from your target accounts across several channels, including LinkedIn, with automated sequences.

• Create tailored customer journey for your target accounts, at scale, using advanced personalization capabilities.

• Keep track of all your interactions with the different contacts within the same account.

• Efficiently manage all your accounts and related contacts for seamless collaboration within your sales team.

• Enrich your prospect data using Reply Chrome extension, e.g. find anyone’s email address and instantly update your accounts, wherever you are on the web.

As for the latter, having access to the relevant and up to date information about your accounts, from additional contact details to their personal interests or the way they engage with your brand, is a vital part of any account-based marketing strategy. Otherwise, you won’t be able to create a tailored, and effective, customer journey. 

Question 3:  How can marketers and sales teams use buyer intent data to target users on LinkedIn?

Buyer intent is probably the most important data you should be paying attention to. All because tracking the prospect’s engagement can help you identify and prioritize the best opportunities and, as a result, significantly increase your sales success rate.

There are different types of buyer intent - from email opens to ad clicks and website visits. Similarly, there are dozens of ways you can put that data to use in your ABM strategy (and LinkedIn specifically).

Here are just two examples of how we’ve been using buyer intent data at Reply.

First, we are regularly sorting out the most engaged leads with Reply’s smart filters (e.g. the ones who have opened your emails more than 3 times but haven’t responded yet) and further engaging them on LinkedIn with profile visits, connection requests or interactions with their content. 

By the way, there’s also a “Triggered Call” option when the system automatically dials the prospect once they fulfill the pre-set condition.

Secondly, we’ve also been using LinkedIn pixel to identify the companies that visited our website. Once we have a list of accounts, we usually set up targeted advertizing campaigns (including ads on Linkedin directed at a specific company) or build a multichannel engagement sequence to connect with them.

Question 4: What are the steps you need to take to supercharge your LinkedIn for account-based marketing?

To get started with ABM on LinkedIn (or any marketing on LinkedIn for that matter), it is important to optimize your account first. There are two things you should pay attention when preparing your account:

• Your profile - photo, headline, experience, endorsements - everything should look professional and be trustworthy. I personally don’t even accept the connection requests from accounts that are half-empty - those look like bots to me. The same applies to the company profile.

• Your activity - e.g. join relevant groups, regularly share interesting and relevant content or interact with posts published by other experts in the industry. This is not just a good way to grow your network and catch the prospect’s attention but also establish thought leadership.

Once you have the foundation for your LinkedIn ABM strategy, make sure to pick the right tools for your stack. Here are just some of the tools we’ve been using:

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator - to research your accounts and enrich data.

• LinkedIn Ads Account toolset, and specifically Matched Audiences - for ad campaigns targeting accounts based on company name, role or function, etc.

• Reply - for personalized multichannel outreach at scale.

• Awario - for social listening. 

• Zapier - to build integrations within your stack, e.g. automatically add new leads from Leadfeeder to your LinkedIn Matched Audiences.

Question 5: What are the different ways to use ABM for LinkedIn marketing?

In my experience, it’s all about personalization. Here are just some examples of how we create tailored customer experience at scale.

First of all, we’re often using links with UTM tags to personalize the landing pages to the specific contact or account. As a result, when a prospect clicks such a link, they will be forwarded to the personalized landing page (see example below).

Our collaboration with Vidyard has been an amazing experience - the platform allows you to create personalized videos by weaving in individual viewer data, e.g. name or company, at scale.

Talking about LinkedIn, there’s a very handy ABM feature called Sponsored InMail messages. This is ad format allows for 100% personalization, helping you tailor your direct messages using 5 variables, i.e. First Name, Last Name, Company Name, Job Title, Industry.

Another important aspect is the alignment between sales and marketing teams – personalization at the account level requires sales and marketing to be in sync on account-specific messaging.

Alignment + Personalization = amazing ABM

The success of an account-based marketing campaign is based on its ability to reach and engage decision-makers. As we’ve seen from Reply.io, ABM is a company-wide mission. 

From sales reps to senior marketers, it requires a serious buy-in from all team members. 

This allows you to collaborate as one and scale and the basic principles of ABM—like hyper-personalized content and tailored outreach—to close high-ticket deals. 

Note: Try Leadfeeder's 14-day trial to know which businesses you have been marketing to have actually visited your site?