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AcademyModule 02 · Sales-Led Growth Reports
SLGPlaybookLesson 2.9·9 min read

The LinkedIn ABM three-tier campaign structure

ICP, in-market, and remarketing — three tiers, three jobs.

The reason most LinkedIn programs plateau is structural, not creative. A single-campaign, single-audience approach blends three fundamentally different jobs into one performance metric, which makes optimization impossible. Splitting the program into three tiers — each with its own audience, creative, and bidding strategy — is the single biggest unlock B2B SaaS teams have on the platform.

Why this matters

Once the tiers are split, you can optimize each one against the metric that actually matches its job: cost-per-MQL for prospecting tiers, cost-per-demo for in-market, cost-per-attended-demo for remarketing. Without the split, you’re optimizing on a blended number that doesn’t correspond to any real decision.

Section 01

The three tiers

Tier 1 — ICP prospecting. Matched-audience ads or job-title ads against your named accounts. Job: introduce the brand. Creative: thought leadership, customer outcomes, founder content. Optimize on cost-per-engaged-account.

Tier 2 — In-market. Layered audiences using G2 intent, content engagement, pricing-page visits, and 6sense or similar. Job: qualify the opportunity. Creative: product-specific value props, ROI calculators, competitive comparisons. Optimize on cost-per-MQL or cost-per-demo.

Tier 3 — Remarketing. High-frequency direct-response ads to anyone who hit pricing, demo, or solution pages in the last 30 days. Job: convert. Creative: demo CTAs, customer logos, testimonials. Optimize on cost-per-demo-attended.

  • Tier 1: Matched audiences + job-title targeting against named accounts
  • Tier 2: Layered intent (G2 + content + pricing-page visits)
  • Tier 3: Remarketing window of 30 days with demo-focused creative
  • Run all three concurrently with separate budgets, not in sequence
  • Push downstream events back to LinkedIn CAPI for matched-audience optimization
Section 02

Reallocating between tiers

Run a Cometly report grouped by LinkedIn campaign with Cost-per-MQL and Cost-per-Demo-Attended as the headline columns. Reallocate budget toward the tier with the strongest cost-per-stage performance — but don’t starve any tier completely. Tier 1 has long-tail effects that only show up six to nine weeks after the spend, so cutting it because of a slow first month is the most common mistake we see.

Common pitfalls

What to watch for.

  • Running all three tiers in one campaign

    You can’t optimize three different jobs against one performance metric. Split the campaigns physically.

  • Killing Tier 1 too early

    ICP prospecting takes 6–12 weeks to show pipeline effects. Don’t judge it on first-month MQL volume.

  • Forgetting to push CAPI events back

    Without Cometly’s Conversion API events, LinkedIn’s matched-audience and lookalike algorithms have nothing to optimize against.

Key takeaways

Recap.

  • Tier 1 — ICP: matched-audience ads to named accounts and target job titles
  • Tier 2 — In-market: layered with G2 intent, content engagement, and pricing-page visitors
  • Tier 3 — Remarketing: high-frequency demo CTAs to anyone who hit a key page in 30 days
  • Use cost-per-MQL by tier as your reallocation signal — not cost-per-click
  • Push pipeline and closed-won back to LinkedIn’s Conversion API for matched-audience optimization
Put it into practice

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