Guide to Scaling a B2B Company With LinkedIn Ads
This guide is for you if you’re trying to grow a business that has business customers, and you’re running or want to run B2B ads.
Linkedin For B2B Marketing?
LinkedIn ads are an obvious first thought for any B2B company. LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional social networking site. Each person voluntarily gives up data points about their company and job in their profile. The ad platform can use that data to give you fantastic B2B targeting options that other firms can’t match.
In general, LinkedIn ads should be used if:
You’re targeting traditional B2B customers (10+ employees, not B2SMB).
This is because small business owners don’t use LinkedIn, outside of several niche industries.
You have a high estimated LTV of your customers (at least $3k per customer, the average on LI is higher).
LinkedIn is very expensive, cost per lead ranges from $100 - $800 depending on qualification. The cost per click can be as high as $50. Your expected value from a lead has to be high to make it work.
You have a sales team that can call leads generated from content ads, such as guides, checklists, templates, etc. LinkedIn works best with top-of-funnel advertising. You can and should still track this top of funnel ad spend down to revenue, but direct-to-demo campaigns on LinkedIn are hard to scale. Almost all successfully scaled LinkedIn campaigns pivot to content ads. See more in the section below.
What should you promote with LinkedIn ads?
Every time we get a new advertiser, we field the age old question, what should we promote on LinkedIn? This question is more complex than you might think since it relies on structures besides your demo flow and your content flow. Below are some of the considerations we go through when we tell clients which strategy to go for.
DO YOU HAVE A STRONG OUTBOUND SALES TEAM?
How an organization structures their sales team will change how we recommend a content strategy. While demo ads show a higher level of intent, the challenge always is scale at that level of intent. Content ads are much more scalable in your target audience if you are providing value in your content. The leads, more often than not, are much cheaper than demos as well. The challenge becomes if you have a sales team that is not used to higher volume, higher support, outbound leads then you will have a hard time fielding content leads.
If you have a really solid outbound sales team that can book demos for your AEs, the content to closed model becomes a math equation where you are working to make incremental gains at those different stages. For example with a $100 cost per content lead lead with a 6% demo rate leads to a cost per demo at $1,666 cost per demo, and if your demo to closed rate is 20% that leads to a $8,330 cost per closed one.
HOW GOOD IS YOUR CONTENT?
The biggest mistake I see advertisers make when developing content is making content that they think provides value for the target audience but is more just wasted thought leadership that the audience doesn’t care about. What is your target demographic having issues with currently? Write guides about how to solve or support those problems. It’s that simple.
For those advertisers with 3rd party reports ex. Gartner, Forrester, etc, you can use these as well. Readers take a lot of stock in these third party reports since bias for the product is thrown out the window and they can get a better understanding of the space.
Don’t throw your eggs into one content basket! Consistent content development and testing new topics is really important to consistent lead flow. Just like ads, audiences can get saturated by seeing the same piece of content over and over. If your piece of content gets saturated, you can always add in new pieces of content, pause the saturated content down, and re-release the content a few months down the line after the saturation has gone down.
HOW GOOD IS YOUR LEAD FLOW/MARKETING AUTOMATION
A solid marketing automation strategy and consistent lead routing is super important to a content strategy. Because they will have less intent than a standard demo ad, they need to be put into nurture and outbound sequences immediately in order to source the intent that is there, but also to improve the intent over time with solid email marketing sequences. Just because they don't convert to a demo this month does not mean that they can’t become a demo a few months down the road after a solid email marketing sequence. Content can be the gift that keeps on giving to your email teams and sales teams.
SUMMARY:
There are a bunch of different considerations to running a full content marketing strategy on LinkedIn but if you have a strong outbound sales team, great content, and solid email nurture/sequences, you’ll have a great chance at scaling LinkedIn successfully.
Finding your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) on LinkedIn
Let’s use an example to start. Let’s say you are an HR software company looking to sell to SMBs. How do you build an audience? Well, it’s actually more simple than you think.
Select the company size segments you want to target. 11-500 employees for this example.
Select the job function for the decision-makers and influencers of your product. The HR job function for this example.
Select the job seniorities where your decision-makers and influences exist. Manager and up for this example.
If you have this info and know what you DON’T want to target you can also add exclusions for certain industries, company sizes, etc to help you increase the quality of your audiences.
Using this simple goal of finding your ideal customer profile, any B2B company can build a LinkedIn audience with ease
Using the right offer
You can build the perfect audience on LinkedIn but if your offer is not interesting enough, you will never see a good performance.
There are a few different ways to deliver interesting offers to your audience.
Build and deliver gated content that is helpful to your ICP
a. While not as down funnel as a demo, if you are doing prospecting, content is the ideal driver of leads and performance as you build up your email list for marketing automation and your retargeting audiences as well.
Use incentivized demos to build your meetings booked pipeline
a. Driving demo on leads can be a challenge but incentivizing the leads can work super well to generate meetings and pipelines. Typically we see gift card offers from the $50 to $200 mark depending on the seniority of the target. This only works well if you have a well-defined audience and a solid sales team that can leverage that meeting into a sales conversation.
Free Trials
a. Not every business can do a free trial but those that do can see a solid lift in performance by giving a user experience in the platform so they can see the value of what they are getting.
Building the right creative
Here are a few tips to build the right LinkedIn creatives.
Use square creatives and not rectangular
a. Advertisers have seen a 15%-60% increase in CTR from using square over rectangular as it takes up more of the screen when browsing the feed.
Use text on image to be very clear about what the person is getting if they click on the ad.
a. Brand advertising can be fun but being vague and less defined will only hurt your performance in-demand marketing. People want to clearly understand what they are engaging with and that not only helps in click-through rates but also with post-click intent
Test different ad variables
Sometimes it works to contrast against the LinkedIn feed and sometimes it can work to blend in. But regardless the goal should be to test different themes, colors, and imagery to continue to push the envelope towards progress for creatives.
Choose the right objective and bid type
LinkedIn has a ton of great options for campaign objectives but we are going to focus on 2 for today’s exercise.
Website conversions are pretty straightforward, it’s for driving conversion on your website. These conversions are generally tracked back on URL-based pixel events on your website so that when someone hits the thank you page after the intended action. This is my typical recommendation for a campaign objective if you have an onsite demo, free trial, or content on site that you need form submissions for. This objective allows Linkedin to optimize delivery for the conversion you have built. Assuming it has enough data to do so.
Lead generation objective on LinkedIn has you deliver a standard LinkedIn sponsored content ad, but the difference is instead of leading that person to a website, it opens up a lead form on LinkedIn for the person to fill out. This can be great for companies to create an artificial gating of content without creating a form on-site, and it can also be great to lower the barrier to entry since a lot of the information provided is auto-filled by people’s profiles.
For bidding, I always recommend doing manual bids. LinkedIn delivery algorithm is not as sophisticated as Fb, it doesn’t moderate spending throughout the day if it is on an autobid. Manual bids allow for optimal controls depending on the budget and CPA being met. For example, if you bid $16 CPC and are spending all of your budget in the 16th hour of the day, that’s a signal to pull back the bid. With automated bidding, you could not regulate that.
Campaign settings
There are 2 different options that start as auto-on when you create a new campaign and I always turn them off.
Audience network. This allows LinkedIn to deliver to ad space outside of the LinkedIn feed. I typically turn this off as you do not get to control how much delivery you get to push to there vs the standard feed, and performance on the audience network is typically worse compared to the feed. It can be a place to find additional scale for some audiences who you see a ton of great performance and have seen a delivery cap but that is few and far between.
Audience expansion. This allows LinkedIn to deliver to people on LinkedIn outside of your defined audience. This is typically counterintuitive because we build specific demographic audiences for a reason so why is it delivering outside of it. Another point is that if you set specific quality guides like manager+ seniority targeting, it can deliver outside of that. I can’t mention how many times I have seen audits of companies that are delivering to entry level people and interns.
I hope this guide is helpful for scaling your LinkedIn campaigns, now get out there and do it!