MultiChannel Acquisition and Middle of the Funnel Campaigns

What you’ll learn

This playbook will help you execute effective multitouch acquisition campaigns. The goal is to identify the right accounts, drive high engagement, and deliver quality leads for sales outreach.

• Primary Objective: Drive the accounts most engaged from your awareness and engagement campaigns into higher engagement and generate net new contacts as a result.
• Key Targets: high-intent and high-engagement accounts into new sales opportunities by providing Sales the high-quality leads and account intelligence they need to progress to opportunities.

 In Advertising Dashboard:

• Accounts Reached, Visited, Clicked, Interacted, New Onsite
• Lifted accounts (more engaged post-launch than pre-launch)
• Creative & Publisher Performance
• Campaign Influence (opportunity, pipeline, and revenue data)

 In ABX:

• Real-time insights from targeted accounts including highly engaged, visits to high-value pages, how to build the “next” campaign audience.
• Impact of campaigns on lead generation across other digital channels and journey stage progression.
• How to build and sync optimized audiences to LinkedIn, including account lists and person lists

Why is this important?

Acquisition campaigns bridge the gap between marketing and sales by targeting high-potential accounts with precision and focus.

By prioritizing engaged accounts and automating outreach, you ensure that every effort drives results, whether it’s through increased engagement, lead generation, or measurable pipeline growth. This impact is magnified when targeting accounts showing high research intent, maximizing ROI from spend across channels.

What you need to get started

Starting with a solid foundation is critical to any successful acquisition campaign. This step ensures that all elements are in place before the campaign starts.

To prepare effectively, ensure you have the following in place:

• Tag Onsite
• OOTB Engagement Minute Set Up
• OOTB Journey Stage Set Up
• Intent Keyword Set
• Target Account List
• Landing page URLs + UTMs
• Creatives (per channel specs)
• Ability to sync Audiences to LinkedIn via Advertising license or Orchestration
• List of high-value web pages that are specific to the campaign/solution
• Connected status for
  • People list
  • Opportunity data

Step-by-step playbook

Campaign overview

These campaigns focus on the most engaged accounts, aiming to convert new contacts by reaching multiple personas within each account to support Sales outreach.

To enhance lead generation, automate the process using an if-then workflow that surfaces data to the Sales team.

If highly engaged accounts:

• Reach a specific number of visits to high-value pages, showing strong research intent, or
• Visit critical pages like “Contact Us” or “Request a Demo” but don’t complete the form,

Then automatically add them to campaigns targeting net-new contacts across multiple digital channels.

Channels Include:

• Display
• LinkedIn
• Paid Search
• Email

Additionally, automate the inclusion of net-new contacts in reports and deliver them to Sales for timely outreach.

Part 1: Build an acquisition display campaign audience

• • Step 1: Click on the Database icon
  • Step 2: Navigate to the Account lists option
  • Step 3: Click on Create New.

• • Step 4: Set List Type to “Dynamic” and the Visibility to “Public”.

• • Step 5: Select the Advanced Selector Option

• Step 6: Use these Advanced Selectors to build your account list:

Selector #1: Use the Member of List selector to segment by another list in the database. In this case, the solution-specific ICP for the solution the campaign is promoting.

Selector #2: Use the Journey Stage selector to segment by accounts that are in either the Engaged or MQA journey stage. The OOTB definition of ‘Engaged’ is accounts with an engagement score of 10 or more for the last 3 months, and MQA is accounts with a pipeline predict score of 85%+ or marketing engagement score of 100+ for the last 3 months.

For more on Journey Stages, visit here.

Selector #3: Use the Accounts with Any Activity selector to segment by accounts showing high intent for the specific solution the campaign is promoting. This same intent keyword set will be used on the display campaign level, resulting in a “bookending” of optimizations that ensure the best use of every display dollar across campaigns.

Acquisition display campaign content & budget recommendations

The Right Content:

• Focus Areas: Use engagement-driven, intent-based, and personalized content to target accounts showing high intent signals and strong website engagement. These accounts have met specific engagement thresholds (e.g., number of relevant page views, visits to high-value pages) and have been dynamically moved into this campaign from the earlier Awareness stage.
• Content Types: Include high-value resources such as webinars, ebooks, demos, and events. Both gated and ungated content can be used, depending on the audience and their stage in the buyer journey.
• Real-Time Insights: Leverage real-time data on what individuals within the target accounts are consuming to deliver the most relevant and valuable content.
• Content Mapping: Align content with the buyer journey stages to enhance the campaign’s effectiveness and provide a seamless experience. Use the rich content insights available in your database to guide this process. For additional guidance, refer to content mapping templates and resources.

The Right Spend per Account:

• Spend Recommendations: Allocate $35–$60 per account to achieve 2,500–3,000 impressions per account.
• Budget Allocation:
  • Use the higher end of the range ($60) for enterprise accounts.
  • Use the lower end ($35) for small and medium-sized businesses.
• Campaign Spend Formula:
  Total campaign budget = Spend per Account × # of Accounts × Campaign Duration (in months).
• Key Considerations: Acquisition campaigns require a higher spend per account compared to Awareness campaigns due to the reduced number of target accounts. Ensuring sufficient spend per account is critical for campaign optimization and performance.

Determine the campaign budget using our budget calculator

Below, we outline two methods for using the budget calculator, whether you are starting with a predetermined budget or a fixed number of target accounts (For an Acquisition campaign, select Middle of Funnel for campaign strategy).

Method 1: Start with a Set Budget

If you know how much you can spend, follow these steps to calculate your target account list:

• Enter your budget: Get an estimate of how many accounts can be targeted based on your budget.
• Align your campaign goals: Make sure your budget covers the full campaign duration and hits benchmarks for key metrics such as impressions, clicks, and engagement.
• Stick to your budget: This method helps you avoid overspending while keeping performance on track.

Method 2: Start with a Set Number of Accounts

If you already have a target account list in mind, use these steps to determine your budget:

• Calculate Costs with the Budget Calculator: Enter your account list to estimate the amount needed for the entire campaign.
• Adjust If Necessary: If the recommended budget exceeds what you can spend, consider reducing the size of your account list.

Pro tip: Here’s how you can optimize your list without sacrificing performance:

• Use Real-Time Insights: Focus on accounts showing the strongest intent, such as moving from medium-to-high intent groups to only high intent.
• Create a Control Group: Select some accounts to leave out of the campaign as a control group. This not only saves the budget but also helps measure the campaign’s impact more effectively.

Part 2: Building and syncing LinkedIn acquisition campaign audiences

1. Build the audience.

This includes accounts engaged by prior Display campaigns + web visit filter (people in the account visiting gated/contact us/demo request page etc without filling out the form).

• • Step 1 – Create a new account list using these Advanced Selectors:
    • Selector #1: Use the Member of List selector to segment by another list in the database. In this case, the solution-specific ICP for the solution the campaign is promoting.  For more on how to build your ICP, visit here.
    • Selector #2: Use the Journey Stage selector to segment by accounts that are in either the Engaged or MQA journey stage. The OOTB definition of Engaged is accounts with an engagement score of 10 or more for the last 3 months, and MQA is accounts with a pipeline predict score of 85%+ or marketing engagement score of 100+ for the last 3 months.  For more on Journey Stages, visit here.
    • Selector #3: Use the Accounts with Any Activity selector to segment by accounts with high intent for the specific solution in the campaign.
    • Selector #4: We want a very optimized list of accounts to sync to LinkedIn for lead generation. Use Accounts with Any Activity selector to segment by accounts with relevant web visits/engagement. This can be web visits to high-value pages that indicate very strong interest, such as product pages or Contact Us/Demo Request type pages.

• Step 2 – Create a new person list and use these Advanced Selectors:
  • • Go to the Database tab within the Demandbase platform.
    • Navigate to the Person Lists.
    • Click on ‘Create New’ to start building the list.
    • Choose these list options: Select List Type = Dynamic and Visibility = Public.

  

  • Choose the Advanced selector option to populate the person list:
    1. Use the Member of List Selector to filter accounts from the target account list created for the campaign.
    2. Set the Email selector to “Exists”.

2. Create and sync the Account list in Audiences

• • Step 1: Click on the Orchestration Tab.
  • Step 2: Go to the Audiences Section.
  • Step 3: Create a New Account Audience.
  • Step 4: Enter the name and choose “Account (1 destinations available)” as the Member Type.

• • Step 5: Use Member of List selector to choose the account list you created in the database.

• • Step 6: Add LinkedIn as the Destination.

• • Step 7: Add the Audience Name & choose the LinkedIn Ad Account.

• Step 8: Go to Scheduler and Set a Start and End Date for Audience Sync.

3. Create and sync the Person list in Audiences

• • Step 1: Click on the Orchestration Tab.
  • Step 2: Go to the Audiences Section.
  • Step 3: Create a New Account Audience.
  • Step 4: Enter the name and choose “Person (5 destinations available)” as the Member Type.

• • Step 5: Use Member of List selector to choose the person list you created in the database and set the Email selector to “Exists”.

• • Step 6: Add LinkedIn as the Destination.

• • Step 7: Add the Audience Name & choose the LinkedIn Ad Account.

• Step 8: Go to Scheduler and Set a Start and End Date for Audience Sync.

4. Find audiences in LinkedIn Campaign Manager

• • Step 1: Go to the Audiences dropdown in the Plan tab in LinkedIn Campaign Manager.

• Step 2: Filter by Source for Third Party audiences and you’ll see the Audiences synced from Demandbase.

5. Add Demandbase audience to a LinkedIn Campaign

• • Step 1: When setting up the campaign in this section to define your target audience, toggle to the Third-party audiences.

• • Step 2: Choose whether you want to use an account list (Third Party Company) or a person list (Third Party Contact).

• Step 3: Find the relevant synced audience(s) from Demandbase in the list. You can use both, account and person list types together or even use one as a suppression list. You can combine multiple audiences to use together.

6. Automate suppression of known contacts with synced audiences

• • In Demandbase → Sync audiences via Advertising or Orchestration:
    • Account List – All Target Accounts
    • People List – All Current Contacts

• In LinkedIn Campaign Manager→
  • Target the account list
  • Suppress the people list
  • No Wasted Spend targeting known contacts when the campaign goal is net new contacts

The results

This playbook is ideal for demand generation teams and marketers that aim to convert engaged accounts in MOFU campaigns into actionable sales opportunities. By executing this playbook, you should expect the following outcomes:

1. Enhanced Engagement
   • Increased activity from high-intent accounts on key web pages.
   • Real-time insights into behaviors and interests to refine targeting further.
   • Higher conversion rates from targeted content and touchpoints.
2. Improved Lead Generation
   • Steady growth in net-new contacts from key target accounts.
   • Broader reach across multiple personas within high-potential accounts.
   • More gated content downloads and demo requests from engaged accounts.
3. Pipeline Progression
   • A noticeable lift in marketing-qualified accounts (MQA) transitioning into active sales opportunities.
   • Direct impact on opportunity creation, pipeline velocity, and revenue recognition.
4. Optimized Campaign Effectiveness
   • No wasted spend from known-contact suppression, leading to improved ROI
   • Real-time audience adjustments driving campaign precision and relevance
   • Fully aligned sales and marketing efforts for smoother handoffs and better collaboration.