Making LinkedIn ads work for you
Would you like to know how to make LinkedIn ads work for you?
CMOs and marketing directors from top companies and brands consider LinkedIn the most effective platform for B2B lead generation. But LinkedIn ads are not cheap. And many CMOs find that they don't have the in-house expertise to get the most out of their investment. That's why we invited 6 top LinkedIn experts to share their experiences and tips in a recent podcast episode.
Host
Joaquin Dominguez, was joined by marketing experts to discuss the topic.
Guests
Hiten Patel, Digital Marketing Manager, WebLoyalty
Conrad Ford, Chief Product Officer, Allica Bank
Phillippa Warren, Marketing Director, MovableInk
Sarah Murray, Marketing Manager, Locate a Locum
Alex Oftkans, Marketing Director, Sciex
Key themes that emerged include:
Target your audience
Set your goals and budget
Create high-performing ad copy
Design eye-catching visuals
Measure your results
Use niche keywords to overcome job function targeting limitations
LinkedIn’s native job function targeting lacks sophistication, but Alex Ofkants, Sr. Digital Specialist at SCIEX, has found a workaround.
“Because our products and topics are so niche, we can search for those interests as well. For example, ‘LC-MS’ is one of our mass spectrometry terms. It’s not really used anywhere else, so if someone has that on their profile, that’s of interest to us.”
Alex Ofkants
Use of percentages in ads and open a conversation in comments
Hiten Patel, Digital Marketing Manager at Webloyalty, found that featuring statistics in his ad creative and following up with a question in the comments helped increase his conversion rate.
"I find that using statistics has helped increase the conversion rate over ads that don't have that and allow us to open a conversation as we do in organic posts,"
Hiten Patel
This idea of using percentages totally makes sense for Conrad Ford, Chief Product Officer at Allica Bank:
"If you use % in email subject lines you would probably get more attention and better conversion, but most likely, you will end up in spam. So using it in your ads totally makes sense as you don't have the spam problem. I will try it". Conrad Ford
A/B Testing and animated imagery
According to Philippa Warren, Senior Manager, Digital Marketing at Movable Ink, Animation has been proven to be an effective way to draw in viewers and enhance their experience. After running multiple A/B tests have concluded it's their most effective kind of content.
"At Movable Ink, we leverage animation regularly for our targeted digital campaigns. Unfortunately, LinkedIn's A/B testing tool is limited because it only works with large audiences. Philippa Warren
Not only good imagery but also volume increases frequency
For Alex Ofkants, it is crucial to have images with clearly marked calls to action, good contrast, and eye-catching elements; in other words, a good design entices people to click. However, the best conversion for him is the volume of different types of images and texts. "Before, we might do an ad and only have one type of image. Now we have five different types of texts in five or six types of images".
When you are targeting smaller audiences, following that strategy allows you to increase the frequency of ads. Similar to other channels like email, calls, etc. A good rule of thumb is to reach at least three ads per audience member, on average. That gives you a good penetration and exposure into the audience. If the number is considerable smaller, it could be an audience too big, the budget too small or the content is too limited.
Use LinkedIn to increase account penetration and prospect touchpoints
According to Hiten Patel, Digital Marketing Manager at Webloyalty, a way to align the goals of Sales and Marketing teams is by targeting accounts that Sales identify as being engaged but needing further encouragement:
"By using targeted LinkedIn ads, instead of blindly generating leads by looking at job titles, we get leads from those specific accounts that could be brought into existing conversations, making Sales work much easier".
Hiten Patel
Advertising webinar events
Sarah Murray, on the other hand, noted that her company has had success advertising webinar events on LinkedIn as a way to warm up leads, particularly using Prospect Labs. This automated tool allows them to send personalised invitations to connect and follow-up messages.
“Once people attend the webinar, they're actually through a third touchpoint. When you do your typical email follow-up, they will have had, say, seven touchpoints before they even fill out a form. So whenever they do land on the sales team desk, they’re really hot.” Sarah Murray
Balance conversion with lead quality when testing
LinkedIn’s lead generation forms
Multiple participants in our roundtable agreed that, whilst capturing leads with LinkedIn’s in-built lead gen forms increases opt-in rates by minimising friction, lead quality often suffers, as viewers don’t always have enough information to self-select out.
Sarah Murray cautioned that low lead quality could cause a loss of confidence from SDRs, while Hiten Patel recommended including no more than four fields and Alexander Ofkants suggested leaving off phone number fields to increase submissions.
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