Firmographic Targeting and Account Lists That Match

A LinkedIn list audience does not serve until 300 members match, and a company list uploaded with names alone matches materially worse than one uploaded with website domains. So the first thing we do with your target account list is not upload it. It is check whether those accounts exist in a form the platform can read at all. Where B2B targeting usually goes wrong: Over-segmentation. A thousand-account list split by industry, then seniority, then geography, produces a dozen audiences that each spend their budget in the first four days of the month and none of which ever accumulates enough conversions for delivery to learn anything. We typically collapse an inherited structure by about two thirds, and the campaign that survives beats the twelve it replaced inside one cycle. Job titles: We do not target them. Titles are self-reported and inflated, and a Director of Operations at a sixty-person 3PL and a Director of Operations at a national carrier are two different buyers wearing the same string. Function combined with seniority is derived from more signal than the free text a member typed about themselves. We use function, seniority, company headcount and member skills. When a client insists on titles, we run the title audience against the function audience and let the result settle it. Building the account list: We start in your CRM, not in a data vendor. Open opportunities, closed-lost from the last eighteen months, and current customers, each as its own audience, because those three groups need different messages and one of them usually needs excluding entirely. Then intent where you have it, pushed in as lists with a decay rule attached, because a surge signal from nine weeks ago is not a buying signal, it is history. Then lookalike expansion, treated as an experiment with a kill date rather than a permanent fixture of the account. Exclusions, which is where the money is saved: Current customers, unless you are running expansion and have said so. Your own employees. Agencies and consultants selling into your category, who click far more readily than buyers do. Competitor staff. In the first month, exclusions are usually the single highest-return change we make, and they are the change nobody gets credit for. Settings switched off on day one: Audience expansion, which quietly widens targeting past the definition you approved and is not separated in default reporting. The Audience Network, unless it has been run as its own line item and can show what it delivered against its own cost. Both can be switched back on with evidence. Neither gets to be on by default. What you receive: A documented audience architecture with reasoning per segment rather than a list of settings. The exclusion set. Matched sizes against uploaded sizes, so you can see the attrition honestly instead of discovering it in month three. A refresh cadence and a named owner per list. And a written recommendation on which segments are large enough to hold their own campaign and which should be folded in. Not included: We do not sell or supply contact data, and we do not enrich your records. If your list needs enrichment we will name the vendor and step back. No creative, no landing pages, no campaign management inside this scope. Who this is not for: Companies with a total addressable market under a few hundred accounts. At that size targeting is not your constraint and paid social is the wrong instrument, whatever your board read last quarter. Companies committed to job-title targeting and closed to being wrong about it. And anyone who cannot get us a CRM export.