ABM Campaign Build on LinkedIn Matched Audiences

What exists at the end: An audience architecture inside your own Campaign Manager — usually 12 to 20 named audiences across three account tiers — with the matched-audience uploads, the exclusion sets, the campaign shells and a naming convention that still makes sense to somebody reading it in nine months. Three to four weeks, and roughly half of that is spent on your account list rather than on LinkedIn. Match rates, said plainly: A company list uploaded as website domains matches better than the same list uploaded as company names. In my builds, domains land around 80 to 90 percent and names 55 to 70, because a name like Siemens resolves to dozens of entities and your CRM spells three of them differently. Contact lists are harder: business email addresses from a CRM export match roughly a quarter to a half. LinkedIn will not activate an audience holding fewer than 300 matched members, and that single fact kills most tier-one plans — a 150-account list cannot be its own audience, so it runs at contact level, through Sales Navigator, or not at all. I would rather tell you that in week one than build campaigns that never serve. Tiering: Tier one is the named list your sales leadership will defend in a board meeting. Creative there names the industry and the problem, never the company, and budget is deliberately over-weighted against every argument CPM would make. Tier two is the look-alike of tier one by industry, headcount band and function. Tier three exists to feed retargeting and to tell you whether tier one was chosen well. The split is not even, and you will see it before you ask. Exclusions are half the build: Current customers, open opportunities your sellers do not want disturbed by an ad, your own employees, competitors, agencies and recruiters. The suppression list is refreshed from CRM monthly because it goes stale faster than anything else in the account, and a stale one puts your ads in front of the customer you are mid-renewal with. Vertical notes: In energy, the committee spans procurement, sustainability and plant engineering, and those three read nothing alike; one audience covering all of them is the most common structure I unwind. In medtech, clinical and commercial audiences are separated at the build stage, because your review process treats them as different documents and merging them costs you a quarter. In HR and recruiting, LinkedIn restricts targeting on ads promoting employment opportunities — if any part of the programme advertises jobs rather than software or services, the available facets change and we design inside that from the first day. Not included: Media budget. Creative production, which I brief and quote separately. Ongoing management once the build is live; that is a retainer and I will say so rather than quietly extend. I do not buy third-party intent lists or contact databases, and I do not scrape LinkedIn. If your list came from a vendor, its match rate gets tested before budget goes behind it, and sometimes that test is the whole first week. Who this is not for: Fewer than about 200 target accounts — at that size you want sellers working by hand, not a media buyer. Companies that cannot export a clean account list with domains inside two weeks. And anyone who wants an ABM programme announced internally before the pipeline data has said anything; this build stays quiet until it has earned an audience. What I need from you: The account list with domains, CRM read access, one hour with the person who decided which accounts made the list, and the name of whoever owns your suppression data.