How We Optimize Ad Spend With Hyper-Targeted Campaigns

This post was originally shared on LinkedIn

How we optimize our ad spends by being (a) hyper-targeted and (b) orchestrated with the sales team, even outside of ABM program(account-based marketing).

✅ 1) Create a list of key contacts within our target accounts in our CRM, updated every month.

Why every month? 20-40%+ people change their jobs each year. The goal is to have the most accurate & up to date list to avoid wasting $ on people who aren't a fit.

Depending on the audience size, we sometimes filter by "Last Activity in CRM within X days" (usually 90 or 120 for us).

These are the same contacts your ADRs and AEs are actively working — so your ads reinforce live sales conversations and lift conversion rates.

We use UserGems' Account Trackingto automate this step.

Other providers can supply contact data, but the value here is accuracy at the account level — contacts that are current, mapped to CRM activity, and automatically refreshed so your audiences don't drift.

Step 2: Segment Your Audience for Relevant Creatives

✅ 2) Segment the audience above for more relevant creatives and emails:

• Persona-based: Sales vs Marketing vs RevOps. We have fuzzy logic in Salesforce to automatically map titles to persona.

• Buyer journey stages: from unaware until hand-raisers. We map contacts across 8+ stages, from unaware to hand-raiser.

• Relationship-based: Previous Customers vs Previous Prospects. The CRM also routes these contacts to the right email sequences depending on how well they already know us.

We use UserGems' Contact Tracking to tell us which key contacts have previous relationships with us. Eg, previous customers, previous power users, even previous Closed Lost prospects.

Step 3: Dynamically Create Audiences Across Ad Platforms

✅ 3) Dynamically create audiences on LinkedIn/Facebook & Instagram/Google

We use Primer; Metadata.io covers similar ground if that's already in your stack.

You can also manually upload the lists to each ad platform, but it'd be hard to sustain and keep the audience updated over the long run.

✅ 4) We optimize our ad strategies for reach. We keep all content ungated.

The goal is to stay visible with the right buyers at the right time — reinforcing the signal-based targeting that sales is already acting on, so when intent shows up, the brand is already familiar.

When a buyer shows intent, the team is already in motion.