LinkedIn Advertising and Prospecting

ABOUT THE EXPERT

Anthony Blatner is the founder and Chief Advertising Officer of Speedwork Social, an agency specializing in B2B LinkedIn advertising. In this guide, he advises on when to use LinkedIn advertising, when to use Sales Navigator prospecting, and how to make marketing dollars go the furthest given the expense of LinkedIn as a channel.

Table of Contents

When should you use LinkedIn advertising? 

Establish a sales process first LinkedIn ads are an expensive channel, so it’s best to use LinkedIn when you have a sales process set up, and you can feed great leads into that process.

Use LinkedIn for targeting hard-to-reach contacts – LinkedIn lets you get specific by industry, job title, company size, and title. It can be a great way to scalably reach busy targets like company owners, VPs, and CEOs.

When should you use LinkedIn for prospecting? 

Prospecting can be cheaper and more effective – for many companies, it makes sense to start with prospecting first, because it cuts out running ads as a way to get in touch with your audience.

For 1:1 targeting – using Sales Navigator for prospecting, you have access to similar filters based on job title, industry, company size, etc., but it’s a different 1:1 mechanism. You need to be even more targeted, and you need the right offer so people will be interested. 

What variables should you use to target your LinkedIn ads?

The basics:

  • Job title – e.g. CTOs. You can search for prior or current positions. 
  • Company industry – e.g. software companies. They just expanded it to include 400+ industries.
  • Contact and company lists – just like any other platform, you can upload a contact list and target those individuals. What no other platform allows is to upload a list of companies and overlay LI filters (e.g. title, or role) to find the right individuals. 
  • Company size – e.g. the CTOs at startup software companies vs. the CTOs at Fortune 500 software companies are very different people. 

More advanced:

  • Skills/Interests – LinkedIn skills are self-selected, so can be spotty at times based on who decides to fill them out (e.g. if you’re looking for CTOs who work with Python, or who work with AWS). Interests show how they interact on LinkedIn
  • Group targeting – the groups that someone joins on LinkedIn are an indication of their areas of interest.
  • Dynamic lists – they’re a great way to integrate other platforms to LinkedIn. For example, HubSpot has a great LI integration to allow you to take a list of active pipeline deals, synch it to LI, and then overlay executive filters to build brand awareness for active deals.

Third party tools can help you push Sales Navigator lists to Ads – currently, you can’t push a list between Sales Navigator and Ads to target individuals, but this functionality may be coming down the pipeline. Tools can help you scrape Sales Navigator and push to LinkedIn ads. so once you build a list, you can export it, upload it to ads and then you can retarget those companies in ads. 

When should you use LinkedIn to create match audience lists vs. use an ABM approach with a target company list?

Anytime you have a target company list, start there – if you already know the companies you want to target, start there. A lot of companies then split test that versus LinkedIn’s built in targeting. They’ll have ABM list they update quarterly and target, and then supplement that approach and test it against LinkedIn’s built-in targeting. 

The downside is that your ABM lists are easily saturated – if you know the companies you want to target, go after those companies—but that approach can be often exhausted quickly. They might be getting outreach from other channels or you can get to the end of your list quickly. You may want to have another set of leads from LinkedIn’s targeting running. Then, depending on performance, you can test and shift budgets back and forth between built-in targeting and your target lists. 

How much do LinkedIn ads cost (and what does cost depend upon)?

Average cost per click (CPC) is $6-12 – higher-level people are more expensive. For targeting CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, the cost can be closer to $30 per click. If you’re aiming for college students or more recent graduates, that might be $3-5 a click. 

Lead generation costs $50-100 per lead – for each sign-up your lead magnet content offer generates.

For brand awareness, cost per 1000 impressions (CPM) can be $100-250 – LinkedIn is most effective for doing traffic acquisition and lead capture, and then you’ll want to go and nurture them in cheaper ways. CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) can cost between $100-250. Video views cost an average 25 cents (depending upon seniority), and InMails cost an average of 25-50 cents to send. 

How can you control your spend on LinkedIn?

Set cost controls – you can set maximum daily budgets, maximum total budgets, and date ranges for running an ad.

Depending upon the size of your target pool, you might hit a ceiling – LinkedIn allows a max of 4 impressions in 2 days for sponsored content in the newsfeed, so if you’re targeting a really niche audience, impression limits may curb your spend.

How much do you need to spend to accurately test the effectiveness of LinkedIn advertising? 

Allocate $3K for the first test– that amount will usually give you enough data to make decisions. Typically you want to test:

  • 2 audiences
  • 2 lead magnets (content pieces offered in exchange for an email)
  • 2 to 4 ads per lead magnet

What types of ads work best in terms of content and design? 

For a brand awareness campaign – use blog posts, press releases, and videos designed to send someone to an article. You’ll want to send them to a landing page or blog post where they’ll then give you some info.

For lead capture – use lead magnets like checklists, reports, guides, whitepapers, or case studies to capture sign-ups. Show enough value so someone will have reason to provide their information, and don’t ask for too much from them–less commitment equals higher conversion rate.

Avoid schedulers – going straight to scheduling a time can be too direct; they tend to have a very high cost per conversion.

Images tend to be better for lead capture – we usually start with images because they grab attention quicker. Video works less for lead capture because people tend to get distracted and then don’t click where you want them to. 

What are the steps for setting up a LinkedIn campaign?

Define an audience – who are you targeting? Define your persona and build your campaign structure around that audience.

Set your message – what are the ads going to say and what’s your angle? Tailor this to your audience, and the funnel stage.

Create your offer – this could be a lead magnet or a demo offer.

Plan a follow-up process – what operations occur once you get a lead? You’ll want to have your campaign connected to your CRM so you can track the leads and automatically send follow-up emails from there. 

How do you create high-quality content? 

Start by focusing on your customer – zero in on their needs. If you just write about your product and your company, people won’t find that too interesting, especially if you’re an unknown brand.

There are easy tools for making collateral look good – Canva has valuable templates and is handy for polishing an ad or creating text. As you create your lead magnet (e.g. a report), it’ll probably be a PDF and you can just use Google Docs.

How can you manage nurturing and retargeting?

Take a Multi-channel approach to nurturing LinkedIn leads

  • Email follow-up
  • Outbound calling follow-up
  • Connect or send InMail via LinkedIn
  • Be active with social posts (which will be promoted to connections and followers)

Retarget LinkedIn leads on Facebook – once you have an email, Facebook is cheaper and has lower thresholds. On Facebook you only need 100 people to begin retargeting vs. LinkedIn’s threshold of 300, so you can get started a lot faster. 

Use LinkedIn retargeting when you don’t have an email, or to complement ABM – use LinkedIn for website retargeting (such as if someone reads one of your blog posts and then is on LinkedIn). Or, use LinkedIn for account-based retargeting to complement sales calling when you know of the companies but don’t have their emails (e.g. you could use LinkedIn to target all the IT people or all the salespeople at those specific companies). 

How can employees support and play a role in your LinkedIn advertising strategy?

You can now boost posts from a person using LinkedIn Thought Leader ads – before this came out, you could only boost posts from a company page on LinkedIn. If you ran an ad, the company logo and name would always be there. This is exciting because people are always going to get more engagement than companies—this just allow you to take a post from a subject matter expert or CEO at your company and boost that into a campaign. 

You can make announcements and highlight your experts – you can get more reach and promote the content out of your internal thought leaders. It has to be someone who lists your company on their profile. Right now, it supports posts with images or plain text (and you can have a link in the body copy)—it doesn’t support video or document posts.

Thought Leader ads have two options for campaign objectives: 

  • Brand Awareness objective campaign – these run on a CPM basis. 
  • Engagement campaign – these can be run on either a CPM or CPC basis. 

You can work with thought leaders to craft posts – you can collaboriate with your leaders and craft posts that you know you’ll post. This is a good way to have an always-on campaign to continually boost the top posts of your company and employees and keep yourself in front of your target audience. 

Anytime you post, you can notify employees – these’s a button you can push to give them a little notification on LinkedIn, and they’ll see it and they can go engage with that post. A lot of companies have a slack where they can notify employees through a post (from a Social Media Manager or automation). 

Have a Social Media Manager monitoring comments on your ads – for the most part, LinkedIn comments are buttoned up, but every once in a while you’ll get an off-the-wall comment that you want to reply to or even delete. 

Sometimes, you can even start the conversation on the ad – you can leave some starter comments on your own ad. These can spark conversation and if there’s already comments, the ads will take up more space on that feed. You would do this for brand awareness or content-focused ads—on conversion-focused ads, they can distract the user from the desired next step. 

How should LinkedIn ads fit into your broader digital marketing strategy? 

LinkedIn is great for top of funnel lead generation – bring people into the pipeline and capture the lead. The value LinkedIn has is access to the upper-level people, which you won’t find anywhere else.

Once they’re in your pipeline, follow-up with other means – keeping touching leads with email sequences, Facebook retargeting ads, and Google display ads.

How should you connect LinkedIn to other components of your sales and marketing tech stack for measurement and automation? 

Connect your CRM and email marketing system – as you collect leads, make sure to store them. Big CRMs tend to have native integrations. For everything else, use Zapier to grab leads from LinkedIn lead forms. 

On the prospecting side, fewer CRMs have the integration for Sales Navigator – LinkedIn is more secure with their data on this side, SalesForce and Microsoft Dynamics have connections; with other CRMs you’ll need to do some manual entry.

How can you use the LinkedIn insights tag? 

Put the insights tag on your website – the tag starts tracking people and companies that visit your page. It’ll also tell you the top 10 companies that have visited your site. You can even create audiences based on certain pages, depending on how much traffic your website gets. 

With named accounts, how should you incorporate LinkedIn into prospecting? 

It’s good for the first step of sourcing people – Sales Navigator can help you get started before you have a prospecting database. And as compared to other list sources, with LinkedIn, you know the list won’t be outdated. 

When you connect on LinkedIn, often contact info is available – most people have their email and about a quarter have a phone number available within their network.

How can you use LinkedIn to identify accounts for prospecting?

Use similar criteria to what you’d use for ads

  • Job title
  • Industry
  • Company size
  • Profile keywords – within Sales Navigator use both positive and negative keywords to find the right people and eliminate the wrong ones; for instance, if you were targeting people who sell insurance, you might want people who sell health insurance, but NOT life insurance.

If the job title is broad, start with companies – identify the companies that could need your product, then select prospects using job titles.

Use company name filters – for instance, if you wanted to target alcohol brands, you could put all kinds of liquor names in the filter (because it’s likely that a vodka or whiskey brand will have “vodka” or “whiskey” in the name).

How can you automate outreach within LinkedIn?

Use an outreach automation tool – tools like Expandi or MeetAlfred let you automatically send personalized connection requests and follow-up messages, keeping within daily activity limits. Most of the outreach tools can collect the prospect’s email address upon connection request accepted.

Be careful with your connection requests – if too many people reject your connection request, and then click ‘I Don’t Know This Person’ your account will get restricted. So be careful with your connection request targeting and message.

What types of LinkedIn outreach/engagement tend to be most effective? 

InMail – someone doesn’t need to accept the request to receive a message. You’re allowed 60 a month.

Connect request – find common ground with people so they’ll accept your invitation (and won’t think you’re a bot).

Be active on LinkedIn – post content and interact with others. This will help for your network to keep you top of mind.

How do you make sure your LinkedIn profile looks good?

Make sure your profile is complete and professional

  • Have a good headshot – smiling and inviting
  • Set a banner image – it should reflect who you serve or what you do. Some people put a text call-to-action in there.
  • Fill in your headline and about section – craft a short description and craft as authoritative a title as you can (people are much more likely to accept a connection request from a CEO vs. a “sales manager”).

What are the most important pieces to get right?

For advertising:

  • The lead magnet is the biggest lever – spend time on the offer. Make the data you’re offering appealing, but keep the ask low (ask for an email vs. an appointment).
  • Only include people you want to pay for – LinkedIn advertising is expensive, so focus on a small, specific target audience.

For prospecting:

  • Be even more narrow on your targeting – since you have a limited number of connection requests. Look at the list that is given to you before you start to send out a bunch of connection requests and so you can make the most out of the list. Send a good message so it cuts through the other noise.

What are the common pitfalls?

For advertising:

  • Don’t do call scheduling ads – your audience needs to want what your company is selling first.
  • Don’t be too broad with your audience – be specific with targeting.
  • Be careful with auto-bid – switch to manual bid and bid lower than the suggested range.

For prospecting:

  • Don’t be sales-y or bot-spammy in outreach – be direct and to the point, and don’t include too much text.
  • Don’t be vague on next steps – outline the plan and why you are reaching out to connect.
  • Don’t use links– links generate a large preview and push your text off the page.
Anthony Blatner
Anthony-Blatner-e1638967996977-150x150

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