The Account-Based Alternative
The One-Size-Fits-All Trap
Many marketing teams add a target-account list (TAL), launch a single campaign, and treat every prospect alike. It seems logical, precision targeting should be enough, right?
What that means is, “You cannot influence RFP by running ads for prospects who are already in-market.”
Also it is not a linear process that you can start showing ads to your strategic accounts in a manual setup of moving from awareness to consideration to conversion. Prospects enter LinkedIn at very different stages:
Running the same creative and offer across all three stages dilutes relevance and spends budget on audiences that simply aren’t ready.
Segmenting campaigns by funnel stage and personalizing the message to each group consistently lifts engagement and cuts cost per opportunity.
When LinkedIn activity is connected to external intent data, mapped to journey stages, and paired with orchestrated follow-ups, teams can:
- Focus their spending on the segment that is showing purchase intent right now.
- Match messaging to the journey stage where the account is; i.e. show ads specific to the buyer stage
- Report on pipeline instead of media metrics, aligning Marketing, Sales, and Finance around revenue rather than clicks
What does the ad campaign look like in terms of funnel stage and media mapping:
LinkedIn remains a core channel in this framework; it performs best as part of a broader, journey-aware, intent-led engine rather than as a stand-alone solution.
Checklist for shifting to LinkedIn Account-Based Marketing Approach:
Step-by-Step Playbook
Build Your Target Account List (TAL)
Export your ICP from CRM, filter for revenue potential, and remove accounts already in late-stage deals.
- Upload each company list to LinkedIn as a Matched Audience.
- Ensure each list meets the 300-member minimum for reliable delivery.
You can use popular tools like Apollo, ZoomInfo etc but manually removing accounts is tedious. Plus, you also have to continuously update this list every day according to when prospects book demos.
Alternatively you can simply integrate all your 1st and 3rd party data sources including CRM with Recotap and all of the manual tasks are done automatically.
Pro Tip
Why should you care to connect your 1st party or website data to your campaign?
If a target account visits key pages like pricing, product, or case studies, that's a strong buying signal. You can flag that account as high-priority in your CRM or route it to sales for immediate follow-up. It's a key feature for personalization.
- Personalize future messaging, email nurtures, and ads based on what they're reading. Basically, cluster accounts by the type of content they're consuming.
- Launch account-based retargeting campaigns based on page visits by mapping which accounts are visiting specific pages
Plug in Intent and Prioritize Accounts
Now bring the intent data and 3rd party signals that LinkedIn cannot provide to your campaign.
Why should you care?
It helps you identify and engage accounts actively researching relevant products, competitors, or industry categories. Also continue to nurture the ones who have not reached the conversion stage
Combine 3rd party intent data to score your accounts.
- Intent intensity (Bombora, Trust Radius, G2, etc.)
- Engagement (website visits, event attendance)
Easy on paper, messy to implement?
This is automated on Recotap
You do a one-time integration of your favurite intent tools including G2 while we plug in Bombora’s signals and voila you have:
- ICP Fit Scoring & Prioritization - Recotap will match incoming G2 intent signals with your ICP definitions, assigning an ICP Fit%.
- Automated Targeting & Engagement - Accounts showing intent can be added to ABM campaigns, retargeted via LinkedIn ads, or passed to sales for outreach.
- Improved Conversion Rate - By engaging accounts at the right moment, sales teams can increase demo bookings and conversions.
TL DR
- LinkedIn engagement plus external intent data surfaces the “dark-funnel” accounts actively researching your category.
- Marketers can auto-segment, refresh creative by journey stage, and pause spend on low-intent audiences.
- Sales gets account scores and topic insights in CRM/Slack, enabling timely, relevant outreach.
- Recotap’s Signal Hub stitches these signals together so both teams work from one, revenue-ready view.
Want a best practice playbook for making the most of Bombora?
Segment Accounts into Action-Ready Cohorts
Once the TAL is built and every account carries a score, carve the list into smaller, purpose-built groups. This turns a single, monolithic campaign into a set of precision plays.
Why segmentation matters
- Message-to-market fit: Creative mirrors where the account is in its research, lifting CTR and post-click engagement.
- Budget discipline: High-cost personalisation is reserved for high-propensity buyers.
- Clear sales signals: SDRs know exactly which cohort dictates the follow-up tone—educational, consultative, or closing.
How to put it in motion
- Create LinkedIn Matched Audiences for each cohort.
- Layer persona filters (job function, seniority) to hit buying-committee roles.
- Refresh cohorts weekly: warmed-up accounts move up the ladder; cooled-off accounts drop back to nurture.
Manual CSV shuffles get old fast.
- Recotap’s Journey-Stage Modeling auto-updates these cohorts in real time, so campaigns always reflect the latest intent and engagement data—no spreadsheets required.
- Instead of manually segmenting and setting them into motion, consider using Recotap’s smart segmentation.
Dynamic Segments: Auto-refresh based on real-time filters like job title, industry, account score, or intent activity. Ideal for always-on targeting.
Static Segments: Manually controlled lists that don’t auto-update. You can also upload CSV files here to define your target accounts explicitly.
Both types use powerful filters, but file uploads are exclusive to static segments, giving you precise control when needed.
You can build your dynamic or static audience segment using one or more of the following filter categories:
Example: Creating an Advertising Based Segment
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If you want to target accounts that are actively engaging with your ads, you might use:
- Recotap Ad Activity → Ad Impressions → > 5
- Within Last → 7 Days
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You can filter further:
- By Campaign (e.g., "Product Demo Campaign")
- By Creative (e.g., "Top-performing Static Ad")
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And chain additional logic:
- AND / OR: Ad Clicks > 2 within 7 days
Craft Personalised Ad Creative
Goal Make target-company employees feel the ad was written for them.
- Insert the company logo and name in the visual.
- Reference a known initiative or pain point in the headline.
- Keep a modular design template so your designer can swap logos, numbers, and copy in minutes
Below are plug-and-play copy templates for each cohort
Here’s a cheatsheet to get your started:
Need more examples of actual ads that worked on LinkedIn for 1:Many, 1:Few and 1:1?
Practical Tips
- 1:Many = bold stat on a clean background.
- 1:Few = customer logo + KPI on first carousel card.
- 1:1 = Dynamic Ad that pulls {{Company Logo}} automatically.
- Professional, data-driven, with one conversational phrase per ad (“pays for itself,” “watch how,” etc.) to keep it human.
Ad Frequency per Campaign
- 1:Many: 100-250 impressions per account
- 1:Few: 250-400 impressions per account
- 1:One: 400+ impressions per account/month plus SDR follow-up within 24 h of a click.
There’s no hard and fast rule about impression capping benchmarks. Based on the size of the TAL and your budget availability you can vary the frequency of impressions cap.
But here’s the catch, manually swapping logos, headlines, and metrics for dozens of accounts is tedious, drains creative energy, and most importantly delays campaigns just when a high-intent account is leaning in.
Imagine if you get 100 accounts in the consideration stage; how will you prioritise the accounts which need to be shown personalised ads first?
Recotap’s Personalised ads designer has:
- 100s of Template designs which are proven to work, to get you started.
- You can also build you own custom library
- Just upload all the variables and your ad gets tailored by the second.
Build a personalised Landing page experience
Give the red-carpet feeling to every target account, so that they get the feeling that the page was built for them.
Why 1-on-1 Landing Pages Out-perform Generic Ones
- 1.Message-match removes friction
The headline, hero image and company logo mirror the ad the visitor just clicked, so there’s no cognitive reset, improving time spent on landing page and reduces bounce rates.
- 2.Trust rises instantly
Seeing their own brand confirms you understand their world, making it easier to share an email or book a call.
- 3.CTAs hit harder
HubSpot’s study of 330,000 calls-to-action showed personalised CTAs convert 202% better than generic ones. HubSpot Blog
- 4.Attribution becomes crystal-clear
Each URL is unique to one account, so when a form is completed you know exactly which cohort and buying stage drove the opportunity.
The bottom line: curiosity from the ad turns into booked meetings at 2–4× the rate of one-size-fits-all pages.
Now, personalisation manually equals multiple designers, dev team dependency and coordination between all visual and copy writing resources.
Recotap eases out all of this by pulling up information from your url to create a landing page that speaks to your customers directly, without compromising on brand design. Just a simple csv upload eliminates hours and hours of effort, energy and budget spent on designing Personalised landing pages.
Campaign Setup & Budgeting
One campaign per cohort, with at least three ad variations to start the campaign. Wait for at least 48-72 hours to start analysing which of the ad sets are working.
Best practices to start a campaign
- Ensure that your target audience aligns with your campaign goals.
- Regularly monitor campaign performance through the Campaign Dashboard.
- Use advanced settings like Campaign Group Budget Control for cost efficiency.
Recotap automates LinkedIn ABM, continuously optimizing targeting, budget, and personalization in real time. Campaign management is easy with the automated orchestration feature of Recotap. Set up once, and Recotap dynamically turns campaigns on or off as accounts move through the buying journey, ensuring every ad always reaches the right audience at the right time.
Set up an ABM framework that suits your organisation
LinkedIn ABM works best when its processes and metrics are easily scalable across teams and geographies, not just limited to ads.
The Buyer Journey Stage is at the heart of this framework. Messaging, rest of GTM and the sales teams’ KPIs all need to align to crack high value accounts and a consistent pipeline.
Best practices to start a campaign:
- Centralise account-engagement data; refresh the TAL weekly.
- Run recurring KPI reviews; iterate on creative every 21 days.
- Use statistical pacing or rule-based bid management to keep spend aligned with intent surges.
A repeatable system that adapts to new markets without bloating costs
