Hey it’s Ryan Allis at SaasRise, the growth community for SaaS CEOs and founders. If you’re not a yet a member, join us here.

Today we have a brand new article on how to increase your demos and trials for your SaaS product by showing highly targeted display ads (on Meta, LinkedIn, Google, etc.) to your exact ABM prospects.

Let’s jump in…

ABM Advertising: How to Show Highly Targeted Ads to Your Exact Ideal Client Profile by Ryan Allis, Former CEO of iContact

The last year or so, I’ve been using the below strategy to blow up the number of demo requests for my B2B SaaS CEO coaching clients and our customer acquisition scaling agency.

One client has gone from 5 new demo requests per week to 40.

I call it “ABM Advertising.” And it’s the secret to showing highly targeted display ads across Facebook, Instagram, Google Display, and LinkedIn to your exact ideal client profile.

I’m going to share the exact step-by-step process for free so you can do it too. I’m sharing this with you because I want you to join our community of SaaS CEOs and founders, where we share articles like this weekly, have a weekly mastermind Zoom call, and discuss what works for scaling ARR past $5M.

The process involves using a sales prospecting tool like Apollo, Seamless, ZoomInfo, or Uplead to export an email list of everyone in your target market, and THEN uploading the list as a custom audience to Meta, LinkedIn, and Google, and THEN showing ads to these exact people.

Here’s the big picture of what to do…

1. Use your sales prospecting tool of choice to export an email list of everyone in your target market
   

2. Uploading this list as a custom audience to Meta, LinkedIn, Google Display (and Microsoft Ads and Adroll for fullest coverage) and wait 1-2 days for the list to process and match.

3. Set up an ad to show to these exact people (around 30-50% of them will usually match). I recommend starting with Meta and Google, and then go to LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Adroll.

Now, you’re showing ads to the exact people in your target market.

I call this strategy Account Based Marketing Advertising (ABM Ads). This ABM ads strategy combined with doing a 1% match customer Lookalike audience with retargeting ads (and search ads on Google and Bing) has been working very well for us recently to generate an expanding number of quality B2B leads.

Below is an in-depth guide to implementing ABM ads as well as turning on retargeting ads and lookalike ads for your company so you appear omnipresent within your target market.

If you like stuff like this, apply to join our SaaS CEO/Founder community here to get even more.

Step-by-Step Implementation of ABM Ads

So how exactly do you do this? And what are the tips and tricks to get it right.

My goal is to provide a detailed enough guide below that you can simply forward this along to your Head of Marketing or agency and make it happen. Or you can always hire the SaasRise agency to implement it for you (we’re expensive but very good).

Here’s a step-by-step in-depth playbook for how to implement ABM Ads.

1. First, go onto your sales prospecting tool of choice and export the leads for people who are in your Ideal Client Profile (ICP). I show Apollo below in the example, in part because my toddler son’s name is Apollo and in part because well, it’s a great tool!

   1. Filter by geography, job title, department, seniority level, company, employee count, keyword, etc. until you’ve identified your exact list of target market prospects.

   2. This can get a bit expensive if you do this on your own, with prices around $5000 per 100,000 email exports on Apollo, and even more on ZoomInfo. We have a bulk agency account that allows us to get pricing around $1000 per 100,000 email exports for our clients. Let us know if SaasRise can help you here.

   3. You could also use any Apollo alternative to do this including Seamless, Uplead, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Lusha, ZoomInfo, or specialty ABM marketing platforms 6Sense, and DemandBase.

   4. You could also use a speciality platform like Pitchbook or Crunchbase if your market is venture-backed companies or investors, or a platform like StoreLeads if your market is ecommerce firms.

   5. As covered in this recent article I wrote, You could also use Apollo, BuiltWith, StoreLeads to build a list of companies and email addresses of people that use your competitors products – and then create a competitor customer campaign that shows ads to the customers of your top competitors

2. Here’s a visual example, using Apollo.

   1. Let’s say you sell SaaS accounting software to CFOs, Controllers, and VPs of Finance at companies with 100-5000 employees in the United States. In the image below you can see that there are 144,500 people who fit this exact audience (of which Apollo has email addresses for 114,300). Boom. This is your exact target market you want to show ads to (and then later follow-up with outbound reachouts).

3. Now, export these leads to get them ready to upload them to the various ad networks so that your ads are seen by these people as they use Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin and go across many websites that are part of the Google Display and Adroll website network. You’ll need to format your CSV list slightly differently for each ad network, so follow the formatting templates.

   1. Once you have your list of everyone in your target market then upload this list as a custom audience list to Meta, matched audience list to LinkedIn, CRM audience on Adroll, and match list to Google 

   2. Note that on LinkedIn you can either upload a Company List or a Contact List. If you choose to upload a Company List your audience will be everyone who works at that company by default, so later when you’re creating your ad, choose just the people with job titles who fit your ICP.

   3. Note that Google only allows this for accounts that are 90 days old and have spent $50,000, so you may need to do some Google Search spending first before this becomes available. 

4. Wait 1-2 days for these lists to process and for the audiences to show up in your ad managers. 

5. Next, create ad campaigns to serve display ads to these audiences, sending the traffic to a landing page with no distractions or navigation where there is only one option: take the desired action (trial / demo, etc.) or leave the page. You can test both static ads and 15-30 second video ads. You can start with $10-20 per day of ad spend per ad network and then scale up once you see acceptable Cost Per Lead results. 

   1. Be sure to install the Meta Pixel, LinkedIn Pixel, and Google Pixel so you can track conversions as well as the cost per conversion.

   2. Set up any needed custom conversions (trial, demo, MQL, purchase etc.) so you can get a cost per action. 

   3. Then scale up the daily spend on ads that have the best cost per desired action. 

   4. You can use the native ad tracking or for better results, use a took like Cometly that tracks ad results and does marketing revenue attribution across Meta, LinkedIn, Google, and TikTok.

   5. Note that it usually takes 6-12 weeks of consistently running ads with conversion tracking on for the ad networks (Meta, LinkedIn, Google Display, Ad Roll) to optimize their algorithms to give you the best results. Every time a conversion happens that data is fed back to the platforms as a signal to show ads to people similar to them. So don’t be surprised if it takes 2-3 months for your Cost Per Lead and Cost Per Customer to get within acceptable ranges. Don’t give up and focus on ad copy optimization and landing page optimization.

   6. For maximum conversion, send your ad clicks to a landing page where signing up for a trial or demo (your desired initial sales action) is the only Call To Action button, with all navigational elements removed.

Now Turn on Retargeting

Once your ABM ads are up and running (or even before for that matter), for good measure and to maximize conversion rates turn on 180 day site visitor retargeting ads on Meta (Facebook + Instagram) LinkedIn, Google (Display and YouTube), Microsoft (Bing + Yahoo) and Adroll.

Retargeting will both increase your visitor to lead conversion rate, improve your close rates, AND speed up your sales cycle. People like to buy from companies that they can trust. And if they see your brand everywhere, they assume you’re a big firm that is worthy of their investment.

What’s the cost to run retargeting ads in B2B SaaS? Usually around $10-$40 CPMs, averaging around $20 for 1000 ad impressions.

So if you get 10,000 website visitors per month for example, you can show nearly all of them retargeting ads for around $200 per month (10x$20). A very inexpensive way to become omnipresent in your market and become the brand leader.

For our B2B SaaS clients, we’ve seen the best results in terms of Cost Per Lead (CPL) and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) on Meta and Google, so start there. Once you get Meta and Google going, then focus on the other networks.

Now Turn on Customer Lookalike Audience Ads

Once your ABM ads and retargeting ads are up and running, turn on a 1% Lookalike Audience (LAL) Ad using a list of your existing customers, if you have at least 1000 paying customers. Use SQLs if needed, as you have to have at least a 1000 person list size to build a LAL.

You can do Lookalike ads (also known as Similar Ads) on Meta, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Adroll, Taboola, TikTok, SnapChat, and Pinterest but not Google. For some reason Google got rid of their “similar audience” feature in November 2022.  

SnapChat, TikTok, and Pinterest are best utilized for B2C campaigns, however. Meta, LinkedIn, Adroll, Microsoft, and Taboola are best for B2B Lookalike Campaigns.

ABM Advertising + Retargeting is like providing air cover to your SDRs who are in the field working with your market all day long. Don’t leave your SDRs working a market without awareness of your brand and offer!

And if you don’t already have Google Search and Bing Search ads running, get those high intent ads up and running. Remember: ABM Ads + retargeting + Lookalikes + Search ads = B2B Success.

Lastly, Turn on Outbound Reachouts

Now that you’ve completed a 30-60 day pre-emptive ABM awareness campaign and provided brand awareness air cover to your SDRs, now is the time to go after these prospects with a 1:1 reachout campaign via email and LinkedIn InMail, assuming your ACV > $5,000 (ideally $10k+ to make it profitable). 

If your ACV is high enough ($5k+ ACV), this ABM ad strategy as an awareness building precursor to an outbound email and LinkedIn messaging campaign to the same people can wonders for increasing demo requests and trial requests. We’ve found that running an ABM Ads campaign for 30-60 days prior to (and also during) an outbound campaign targeting the same prospects can double response rates and action rates.

So if it makes sense, start an outbound email, LinkedIn InMail, and calling campaign after these prospects are already familiar with your brand and message. To them, it will seem like you’re everywhere, when in fact you’re only spending a couple thousand dollars per month on highly targeted ads. Becoming omnipresence among your target prospects is the goal.

If your ACV is higher than $25k, you can also add in telephone reachouts via your SDR team. And if your ACV is higher than $100k, it’s time to deploy your field sales team to hit the geographically focused opportunities you’ve been building awareness in the last couple months.

If you enjoyed this article, apply to join our SaaS CEO/Founder community here to get even more. Read my free guide to SaaS Omnipresence if you haven’t already for more background on this process of setting up ads.

See you next week with more killer SaaS scaling content!

Join Our Community for SaaS CEOs at $1M+ in ARR

If you like this type of content, please apply to join SaasRise our community for SaaS CEOs with $1M-$100M in ARR here. It’s a mastermind community of growth-focused SaaS CEOs. Membership is $200 per month – but might just be the difference between your firm making it across the chasm and getting to a successful nine figure outcome from a PE firm or strategic acquirer.

Thanks for reading! If you liked this article, join the SaasRise community at www.saasrise.com for even more helpful growth content and weekly SaaS CEO masterminds.

About the Author: Ryan Allis is the founder of SaasRise, a community for SaaS CEOs with $1M to $100M in ARR. Ryan previously led iContact as CEO and Co-Founder to $50M ARR and a $169M exit, raised $47M in equity capital and $6M in venture debt, and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. Today, Ryan advises B2B SaaS CEOs on scaling up and helping them prepare for nine figure exits.

P.S. - Below are six valuable SaaS growth resources we’ve put out. I hope they are useful to you!

Six Helpful Free SaaS Growth Resources from SaasRise

The most in-depth guide for scaling up SaaS companies from $0 to $50M in ARR. Including over 1,200 slides on every aspect of SaaS scaling.

How to determine whether to scale up or down your marketing channels

How to calculate ARPU, LTV, Churn, Lifespan, CPL, CAC, and Max CAC

A fourteen page in-depth PDF on we take each CEO client through a six-phase process designed to increase lead volume, customer acquisition, and revenue growth — and then scale up the sales team, executive team, and investor support as we help you prepare for future fundraising rounds (if needed) or an exit (if desired).

A twenty page in-depth PDF on how to scale a B2B SaaS Company from $1M to $50M ARR. Covering CAC-based customer acquisition, sales team scaling, venture capital markets, and preparing for the exit.

The SaaS Growth Formula was written to help SaaS CEOs who are focused on growing their company's sales - by implementing a simple formula called The Growth Formula. This formula is for companies that have already established product/market fit, already have paying customers, and are now ready to scale up through scientific and CAC-based digital marketing, inbound sales, and outbound sales.

Join Our Saas Growth Mastermind for CEOs and Founders With $1M+ in ARR

If you like the above resources and want more stuff like this, apply to join SaasRise, our mastermind community for SaaS CEOs and Founders with $1M+ in ARR who are focused on scaling up MRR. Every Wednesday we jump on a call to support each other and share what is working with scaling our companies – and we support each other throughout the week in our private community.

About The Author

We’ll see you next time with more great SaaS growth and scaling content!