Advanced ABM Tactics: An FAQ on Using 6sense & Terminus with Google and LinkedIn Ads
Leveraging intent data from platforms like 6sense and Terminus is crucial for modern B2B marketing, transforming how revenue teams approach account-based marketing (ABM). By understanding which accounts are actively in-market and what topics they are researching, you can move beyond guesswork and execute highly targeted, personalized campaigns across channels like Google and LinkedIn. This FAQ provides practical, in-depth answers to common questions about integrating these powerful platforms into your advertising strategy, helping you optimize spend, increase engagement, and accelerate revenue growth.
We have 6sense/Terminus data. What's the best way to use it in our LinkedIn and Google campaigns?
Leveraging Intent Data for Smarter Ad Campaigns
The most effective way to use 6sense or Terminus data is to power dynamic, multi-channel campaigns that adapt to an account's buying stage. Both platforms integrate with LinkedIn and Google Ads, allowing you to push audience segments directly for targeting.
Start by creating dynamic audience segments in your ABM platform based on specific criteria that matter to your business. This could include accounts showing high intent for your tracked keywords, those in a specific buying stage like 'Decision' or 'Purchase', or accounts that fit your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and are visiting your website. These lists are continuously updated, ensuring your campaigns always target the most relevant accounts.
For LinkedIn, upload these account lists to create Matched Audiences. You can then layer additional LinkedIn targeting, such as job titles or seniority, to reach the specific buying committee members within those accounts. For Google Ads, you can use these lists for search (RLSA), Display, and YouTube campaigns to ensure your ads are served to high-value accounts actively researching solutions like yours.
Key Strategies:
- Personalized Messaging: Tailor your ad copy and creative to the account's buying stage or the specific intent topics they are researching. An account in the 'Awareness' stage should see high-level educational content, while an account in the 'Decision' stage can be served case studies or demo offers.
- Air Cover Campaigns: Use display and social ads as 'air cover' to build brand awareness and warm up accounts before and during sales outreach. This ensures that when sales makes contact, the account is already familiar with your brand.
- Suppression Lists: Don't forget to use your data for suppression. Exclude current customers, competitors, and low-intent accounts from prospecting campaigns to improve efficiency and focus your budget where it matters most.
How do we target accounts that are in the 'Decision' or 'Purchase' stage but may not know who we are?
Targeting accounts in late buying stages that are unaware of your brand requires a strategy that combines precise targeting with compelling, direct-response messaging. These accounts are actively evaluating solutions, so the goal is to introduce your brand as a superior option they must consider before making a final choice.
Using a platform like 6sense, you can identify these accounts by filtering for those in the 'Decision' or 'Purchase' stages (e.g., 6sense score of 70+) who have had little to no direct engagement with your website or sales team. These accounts are demonstrating strong third-party intent signals—researching competitors, browsing review sites, and consuming content related to your solution category—but haven't landed on your digital properties yet.
Tactical Execution:
- Platform Integration: Push this dynamic segment of high-intent, low-engagement accounts to LinkedIn and Google Ads.
- Compelling Offers: Your ad copy should be assertive and value-driven. Instead of general awareness messages, focus on offers that intercept their decision-making process. Good examples include competitor comparison guides, ROI calculators, invitations to a product demo, or a free trial.
- Competitive Keywords: In Google Search, bid on competitor brand names and high-intent, long-tail keywords that signify a readiness to buy (e.g., "[competitor] pricing," "best software for [use case]").
- Highlight Differentiators: Your ads and landing pages should immediately highlight what makes your solution different and better. Use testimonials, case studies, and clear benefit statements to build credibility quickly and persuade them to evaluate your offering.
The key is to acknowledge their advanced stage in the buying journey and provide them with the exact information needed to add you to their shortlist, even at a late stage.
What's the difference between targeting a 'Target Account List' and using broader ICP criteria with intent signals?
The difference between these two targeting methods lies in their approach to audience creation: one is static and human-driven, while the other is dynamic and data-driven.
Target Account List (TAL)
A Target Account List (TAL) is typically a static list of high-value accounts that sales and marketing teams have manually selected based on firmographics, strategic value, or existing relationships. This is a foundational ABM approach often referred to as 'named account' targeting.
- Pros: Ensures focus on strategically important accounts that are known to be a good fit. It aligns sales and marketing on a defined set of targets.
- Cons: It's static, meaning it doesn't adapt to market changes. An account on the list may not be actively looking for a solution, leading to wasted ad spend. It can also miss high-potential accounts that weren't on the initial list but are currently in-market.
Broader ICP with Intent Signals
This is a more dynamic and scalable approach. You start by defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) using firmographic and technographic criteria (e.g., industry, company size, revenue, technologies used). Then, you use an intent data platform like 6sense to overlay real-time behavioral data. This allows you to target any account that fits your ICP and is also actively researching topics relevant to your business.
- Pros: It's highly efficient because you focus resources on accounts that are both a good fit and actively in-market. It uncovers new, unexpected opportunities and allows you to engage accounts at the very beginning of their buying journey.
- Cons: It requires a robust intent data platform and trust in its predictive models. The audience can fluctuate, which requires a more agile campaign management approach.
In practice, the best strategies often use a hybrid model. Start with a TAL for your most strategic, one-to-one ABM efforts, but also run 'always-on' campaigns targeting a broader ICP with intent signals to capture emerging demand and fill the top of the funnel.
The audience size for our 6sense segments is very small. How can we effectively run ads without high frequency?
Running effective ad campaigns with small, high-intent audiences is a common challenge in ABM. The goal is to maintain presence without causing ad fatigue. Instead of abandoning these valuable segments, the key is to diversify your tactics and manage frequency carefully.
Strategies for Small Audience Sizes:
- Multi-Channel Orchestration: Don't rely on a single channel. A small audience on LinkedIn might be too small to serve ads to effectively, but when combined with audiences for Google Display, search, and even programmatic advertising, your total reach becomes viable. Orchestrate a journey where the user sees different message formats across platforms.
- Rotate Creatives and Offers: High frequency is less of an issue if the message changes. Plan a sequence of ads. For example, start with a thought leadership article (TOFU), then rotate to a case study (MOFU), and finally an ad for a demo or consultation (BOFU). This tells a story rather than repeating the same ad.
- Set Strict Frequency Caps: On platforms that allow it (like Google Display and programmatic), set aggressive frequency caps (e.g., 3-5 impressions per user per week) to prevent oversaturation. While LinkedIn doesn't offer manual frequency capping, rotating your ads frequently (every 1-2 weeks) can help mitigate fatigue.
- Focus on High-Impact Formats: With a small audience, every impression counts. Consider using more engaging formats like video ads or LinkedIn Conversation Ads, which can provide more value and feel less repetitive than a static image ad.
- Use as a Retargeting Layer: Use the small 6sense segment not for cold prospecting, but as a retargeting layer for accounts that have already visited your site. This adds a layer of qualification and ensures your ads are seen by users who have already shown some first-party interest, making the engagement more meaningful.
Ultimately, a small audience of high-intent accounts is extremely valuable. The focus should shift from broad reach to deep, meaningful engagement through a carefully orchestrated, multi-channel approach.
How do we define the different funnel stages (TOFU, MOFU, BOFU) within 6sense?
6sense redefines the traditional B2B funnel by using predictive modeling to classify accounts into distinct buying stages based on their research behavior. These stages are more fluid and data-driven than the classic TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU model. While the terminology is slightly different, it maps directly to the funnel concept.
Here’s how 6sense typically defines its buying stages and how they align with the traditional funnel:
1. Target (Corresponds to Pre-TOFU)
These are accounts that fit your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) but are showing little to no recent research activity. They are not considered 'in-market' yet. Marketing to this group is about staying top-of-mind for when they do begin a buying journey.
2. Awareness (Corresponds to TOFU)
Accounts in this stage are just beginning their research. They are showing early-stage buying signals, such as researching high-level keywords related to a problem. They are becoming problem-aware. The content for this stage should be educational and vendor-neutral, like blog posts, ebooks, and infographics that help them understand their pain points.
3. Consideration (Corresponds to MOFU)
At this stage, accounts are exhibiting more significant research activity. They have defined their problem and are now actively evaluating different solutions and approaches. They might be comparing different types of products or methodologies. This is the time for solution-oriented content like webinars, in-depth guides, and vendor comparison sheets that position your offering as a viable option.
4. Decision (Corresponds to BOFU)
Accounts here are showing strong buying intent. Their research is focused and often includes your brand, your competitors, and review sites. They are comparing vendors and getting ready to make a choice. Your marketing should focus on reinforcing their decision with case studies, customer testimonials, and demo offers.
5. Purchase (Corresponds to Late BOFU)
This is the final stage, where accounts are most likely to convert into an opportunity. They are displaying the most significant intent signals, such as visiting your pricing page or looking at implementation details. The primary goal here is to trigger a sales engagement and provide them with everything they need to make a purchase decision.
Should we use different ad copy and offers for accounts showing third-party intent versus first-party intent?
Yes, absolutely. Differentiating your messaging based on the type of intent signal is a sophisticated tactic that significantly improves relevance and campaign performance. First-party and third-party intent reveal different levels of awareness and proximity to your brand, which should be reflected in your ad copy and offers.
Third-Party Intent (The 'Dark Funnel')
This refers to research behavior happening outside of your owned digital properties. An account is researching relevant keywords, competitors, or topics on the broader web, but hasn't visited your site yet. They are problem-aware or solution-aware, but not necessarily brand-aware.
- Ad Copy Strategy: Your copy should be focused on capturing their attention and introducing your brand as a credible solution to the problem they are actively researching. Focus on the pain point or the solution category. Use headlines like, "Struggling with [Pain Point]?" or "The Top-Rated Platform for [Solution Category]."
- Offers: The goal is to draw them to your website and convert them into a first-party audience. Use high-value, low-friction offers like insightful industry reports, educational guides, or webinars that align with their research topics.
First-Party Intent (Your Website Visitors)
This is behavior happening on your website or with your sales team. These accounts know who you are and are actively evaluating your specific solution. They might be visiting your pricing page, product pages, or reading your blog.
- Ad Copy Strategy: Your copy can be more direct and brand-specific. You can assume they have a baseline level of knowledge about your company. Use copy that reinforces your value proposition, highlights key differentiators, and encourages the next step. Examples include, "See Why Companies Choose [Your Brand]" or "Ready to Boost Your ROI? Get a Demo."
- Offers: Since they are further down the funnel and have shown direct interest, your offers can be more sales-oriented. This is the perfect time for demo requests, free trials, consultations, or customer case studies that validate a purchase decision.
By tailoring your approach, you meet the account where they are in their journey, providing a more personalized and effective experience.
How do we measure the success of our ABM campaigns if the sales cycle is very long?
Measuring success with a long sales cycle requires shifting focus from immediate, lagging indicators (like closed-won revenue) to a combination of leading and mid-funnel indicators that demonstrate progress over time. Relying solely on revenue attribution is impractical when a deal may take 6-12 months or longer to close.
A successful measurement framework for long-cycle ABM includes metrics across several categories:
1. Early-Stage Engagement Metrics (Leading Indicators)
These metrics show if you are reaching and resonating with your target accounts.
- Account Coverage: What percentage of your target account list has been reached by your campaigns?
- Account Engagement: Are the right accounts engaging? Track metrics like website visits from target accounts, time on site, and content downloads. Platforms like 6sense provide an 'engagement score' that rolls these up.
- Ad Engagement: Look at campaign-specific metrics like click-through rates (CTR) and video completion rates specifically from your target segments.
2. Mid-Funnel Progression Metrics
These metrics indicate that accounts are moving through the buying journey.
- Buying Stage Progression: How many target accounts have moved from 'Awareness' to 'Consideration' or 'Decision' within a given period? This is a key indicator that your marketing is effectively nurturing accounts.
- Buying Committee Penetration: Are you reaching multiple stakeholders within an account? Track the number of engaged contacts per target account. Success means engaging not just one person, but the whole committee.
- Pipeline Velocity: While the overall cycle is long, you can measure the time it takes for an account to move between stages (e.g., from first touch to MQA, or from MQA to Sales Accepted). A decrease in this duration indicates your efforts are accelerating the journey.
3. Late-Stage Business Impact Metrics (Lagging Indicators)
These are the ultimate goals, even if they take time to realize.
- Pipeline Generation: How much new pipeline (in dollar value) has been created from your target accounts?
- Win Rate: Is your win rate higher for ABM-targeted accounts compared to non-targeted accounts?
- Average Deal Size: Are the deals from your target accounts larger than your company average?
By tracking a balanced set of these metrics, you can demonstrate the value and progress of your ABM program long before the final revenue is booked.
Our Terminus and LinkedIn audiences don't seem to be syncing correctly. What could be the issue?
Audience sync issues between Terminus and LinkedIn are common and can usually be traced back to a few key areas. Troubleshooting this requires checking configurations in both platforms as well as understanding the inherent limitations of the integration.
Common Causes and Troubleshooting Steps:
- API Authentication and Permissions: The most frequent issue is a broken or expired connection. First, re-authenticate the connection between Terminus and your LinkedIn Campaign Manager account. Ensure the user account that authorized the connection has the correct permissions (e.g., Campaign Manager or higher) in LinkedIn.
- Audience Size and Match Rate: LinkedIn has a minimum audience size requirement, which is typically 300 matched members for an ad campaign to run. Your segment in Terminus might be too small to begin with. Furthermore, the match rate between Terminus's account data and LinkedIn's user base is never 100%. A low match rate can cause a sufficiently large Terminus list to fall below the 300-member threshold in LinkedIn. Check the matched audience size within LinkedIn Campaign Manager a few hours after the sync.
- Data Sync Latency: There is often a delay between when Terminus pushes an audience and when it becomes fully available and populated in LinkedIn. This can take anywhere from a few hours to 24-48 hours. If you've just set up the audience, it may simply be a matter of waiting.
- Incorrect Audience Configuration: Double-check the audience settings in Terminus. Ensure you have selected the correct list and that it is set to sync with your desired LinkedIn ad account. Verify that there are no conflicting filters or rules being applied that might be unintentionally excluding most of the accounts.
- LinkedIn's Data Matching Logic: The integration relies on matching company names and domains. Discrepancies in naming conventions (e.g., "Global Corp Inc." vs. "Global Corp") can sometimes lead to failed matches. While largely automated, ensuring your account data in your CRM and Terminus is clean can improve match rates over time.
If you've checked all these steps and the issue persists, the next best step is to contact Terminus support directly. They can investigate the API logs on their end to identify specific points of failure in the data transfer process.
Can we use intent data to inform our content creation strategy?
Absolutely. Using intent data to inform your content strategy is one of its most powerful applications. It allows you to move from making educated guesses about what your audience wants to a data-driven approach based on what they are actively researching.
Intent data platforms like 6sense provide insights into the specific keywords and topics your target accounts are consuming across the web. This information is a goldmine for content teams.
How to Use Intent Data for Content Strategy:
- Identify High-Interest Topics: Your intent data platform will show you which non-branded keywords are surging among your target accounts. If you see a spike in research around "data warehouse automation," that's a clear signal to create content—such as blog posts, webinars, or whitepapers—addressing that topic. This ensures your content is relevant and timely.
- Map Content to the Buyer's Journey: Intent data helps you understand where an account is in their journey. Create different types of content tailored to each stage. For accounts in the 'Awareness' stage, create high-level, educational content. For those in the 'Consideration' or 'Decision' stages, develop more specific content like competitor comparison guides, case studies, and implementation checklists.
- Discover Content Gaps: Analyze the intent keywords where you have low content coverage. If target accounts are searching for topics that you don't address on your blog or website, you've found a critical content gap to fill. This helps you capture more organic and direct traffic from interested buyers.
- Personalize Existing Content: Intent data can be used to personalize the experience on your website. For example, if you know an account is showing intent for a specific product feature, you can dynamically feature a relevant case study or blog post when someone from that company visits your homepage.
- Inform Competitive Content: Track intent signals for your competitors' brand names. When you see an account researching a competitor, it's an opportunity to create and promote content that directly compares your solution, highlighting your unique advantages.
By aligning your content creation with real-time intent signals, you produce resources that are not only valuable but are actively being sought by your most important accounts.
What is 'predictive audience' targeting and how does it use our intent data?
Predictive audience targeting is an advanced approach used by platforms like 6sense to identify accounts that are most likely to buy, even before they have directly engaged with you. It moves beyond simple demographic or firmographic segmentation by using artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze vast amounts of data and predict future behavior.
This process combines several layers of data, with intent data being a critical component:
- First-Party Data (Your Historical Data): The predictive model starts by analyzing your own historical data from your CRM and marketing automation platform. It looks at all your past won and lost deals to identify common attributes and behaviors of your best customers. This creates a foundational 'fit' model based on firmographics, technographics, and engagement patterns.
- Third-Party Intent Data: This is where the real-time, predictive power comes in. The model ingests massive volumes of third-party intent data, which are behavioral signals from across the web. This includes tracking which companies are researching specific keywords, visiting competitor websites, reading articles on certain topics, or looking at product reviews.
- AI and Predictive Modeling: The AI engine connects the dots between your historical data and the live intent signals. It identifies which current accounts are behaving like your past successful customers. By recognizing patterns in the research behavior that preceded past purchases, the model can 'predict' which accounts are currently in-market and assign them a score based on their likelihood to buy.
How It Creates an Audience:
A 'predictive audience' is a dynamic segment of accounts that the AI has identified as being a good fit for your product and showing active buying signals right now. For example, instead of just targeting all companies in the finance industry, you would target companies in the finance industry that are actively researching keywords like "revenue recognition software" and have a predictive score above a certain threshold. This ensures your marketing and sales efforts are focused on accounts with the highest probability of converting, dramatically improving efficiency and ROI.
How often should we be refreshing our intent-based audience lists?
The Power of Dynamic, 'Always-On' Audiences
The short answer is: your lists should be refreshed continuously and automatically. The primary advantage of using a sophisticated ABM platform like 6sense or Terminus is their ability to create dynamic audiences that are 'always-on'.
Unlike static lists that you manually upload to ad platforms every quarter or month, dynamic segments are constantly updated based on real-time data. Here’s how it works:
- You define the criteria for an audience once (e.g., accounts in the 'Decision' stage showing intent for 'Keyword X' with over 1,000 employees).
- The ABM platform continuously monitors its data streams for accounts that meet these criteria.
- When an account's behavior changes—for instance, they move from the 'Consideration' to 'Decision' stage—they are automatically added to the corresponding audience segment.
- Conversely, if an account's intent signals fade over time, they are automatically removed from the segment.
This automated process ensures that your ad campaigns are always targeting the most current and relevant set of in-market accounts without any manual intervention. It allows you to capture buying signals the moment they appear.
Practical Cadence for Manual Lists
If you are not using a platform with dynamic sync capabilities and are relying on manual list uploads, the refresh cadence depends on your resources and sales cycle length. However, to truly capitalize on the timeliness of intent data, you should aim for a refresh as frequently as possible:
- Best Practice: Weekly. A weekly refresh allows you to act on new intent signals while they are still hot and remove accounts that have gone cold.
- Acceptable: Bi-weekly or monthly. Anything less frequent (e.g., quarterly) largely defeats the purpose of using real-time intent data, as you will miss critical windows of opportunity when buyers are most active in their research phase.
In summary, the ideal approach is to leverage the dynamic syncing capabilities of your ABM platform. If manual uploads are your only option, a weekly refresh is the recommended cadence to stay agile and responsive.
Is it better to target the whole buying committee at an account or focus on specific job titles?
For complex B2B sales, targeting the whole buying committee is almost always more effective than focusing on a single job title. This strategy, often called 'multi-threading' in a marketing context, acknowledges the reality that modern purchasing decisions are made by a group of stakeholders, not by an individual.
Why Targeting the Whole Buying Committee is Superior:
- Decisions are Made by Consensus: B2B purchases, especially for high-value solutions, require buy-in from multiple departments. A typical buying committee includes an end-user, a technical evaluator (like IT), a financial stakeholder (like a VP of Finance), and an executive decision-maker. Each has different concerns and priorities. Ignoring any of them creates risk in the deal cycle.
- Builds Internal Champions: By marketing to the entire committee, you create broad awareness and build multiple internal champions. When your primary contact presents your solution internally, other stakeholders are already familiar with your brand and value proposition, making the conversation much smoother.
- Reduces Single-Threaded Risk: If your entire deal hinges on one contact, you are in a precarious position. That person could leave the company, change roles, or lose influence. A multi-threaded approach ensures the deal's momentum continues even if your initial champion disappears.
A Practical, Tiered Approach:
While targeting the whole committee is the goal, your approach can be nuanced:
- Broad Air Cover: Use display and social media ads with more general, top-of-funnel messaging to build brand awareness across a wide range of job functions within your target accounts.
- Persona-Specific Messaging: For more targeted channels like LinkedIn ads or personalized nurture emails, segment your messaging for different personas. The financial stakeholder should see content about ROI and TCO, while the technical user should see content about integration and security.
- Focus on Key Personas for High-Cost Actions: While you want to influence everyone, you might reserve your most expensive or time-intensive efforts (like direct mail or personalized sales outreach) for the most critical job titles, such as the primary decision-maker or budget holder.
In summary, start with the mindset of targeting the entire buying committee to ensure widespread influence, and then layer in persona-specific messaging to address the unique needs of each stakeholder.
