I’m a huge advocate of creating daily LinkedIn content to grow your business (if your target audience is on LinkedIn). Showing up everyday to help your prospects do their jobs better by teaching them about your craft is a textbook use of content marketing to foster relationships, drive inbound leads, and create sales opportunities. It also increases the likelihood that leads will convert because, when someone becomes a lead, they’re very familiar with your perspectives on what you do and trust you as an authority on your service (which they need — or they wouldn’t have been paying attention).

But even if you’re creating daily LinkedIn content and growing your audience, you may notice an inefficiency: How do you get the content in front of the people, or prospects, who most need to see it? What if a lot of people adjacent to but not in your target audience engage with your content? How do you target the prospects likeliest to become paying, and ideally high-paying, customers?

Enter organic account-based marketing on LinkedIn. This strategy complements an inbound marketing strategy premised on creating daily content that expands your audience. It allows you to connect directly with the people who matter most, providing them value, showing them how you can help, and building trust via the simple but powerful magic of comments. 

Here’s a rundown on an organic ABM LinkedIn strategy.

Purpose of organic ABM content on LinkedIn 

The purpose of this program is to create sales opportunities by nurturing three audiences with targeted content (LinkedIn comments):

1) Past sales opportunities
2) LinkedIn content leads
3) Dream 100 prospects

ABM content and the big picture of sales and marketing

• The ABM strategy reinforces the value of daily LinkedIn thought leadership content. It’s essentially a form of retargeting that allows you to stay in touch with prospects who show interest in your daily content.

• ABM content helps you follow up on leads that have gone cold. In your CRM, you’re likely recording conversations that freeze as well as missed sales opportunities to remind yourself to follow up. With this program, you can keep those leads warm instead of letting them go cold and just sending, say, a quarterly email. When you send that email or DM, how great would it be to have spoken to that lead once a week via comments?

• Dream 100: Proactively create new leads/sales opportunities by engaging with prospects at ideal companies who are active LinkedIn content creators. This is key: you can’t just find anyone on LinkedIn whose title and company match your sales criteria. You need to find people who post at least once per week on LinkedIn; this will require some prospecting time, as the vast majority of LinkedIn users don’t do this.

Procedure for making organic ABM on LinkedIn successful

Start by identifying 25 prospects (company, name, title) who are active on LinkedIn (posting their own content at least once per week) and fit your ideal customer profile and persona. Hit the bell on their profiles to get notified when they post. 

Divide the prospects into days of the week (5 per day). Go to each of their profiles. Comment thoughtfully on at least one post of theirs from the past 5 business days. A thoughtful comment should provide value to the prospect by helping them do their job better and enriching the conversation around the content of their posts.

After several engaged conversations, consider DM’ing them to offer more insight on your conversations via a call. You may want to qualify them during the DM conversation before agreeing to a call if you’re unsure that they’re a likely fit for your services. Once you get a call scheduled, you’re more in the territory of sales than LinkedIn content marketing. So, for now, this is where my advice ends.