019. LinkedIn Ads Essentials for B2B Marketers

This is Emilio Garcia from Bountiful Life. Welcome to another episode of this live streaming series of events and podcasts where we discuss demand generation topics for B2B professionals and I am really happy to have the opportunity to talk to you today. If you are looking at this event right now in real time, please say hi. Tell us where you are watching or listening. I'll be happy to have a conversation at the end of the episode if you have any questions. Today we are going to have a very interesting conversation around LinkedIn ads. We're going to talk about the essentials of LinkedIn ads for B2B marketers. I'm really excited to start about this topic. Let us start right away and the first part of the conversation will be what's the different about LinkedIn ads? It's a social media platform, just Facebook or Twitter, but it has very special and unique things because it is geared toward professionals and people that put up their job description and resume on the platform and that gives the platform a very unique advantage. They have a set of data that is very hard to replicate on platforms like Twitter or or Facebook where there's more personal or in the case of Twitter, very limited information that it's important because when we are targeting on advertising platforms the quality of the data really makes a difference on the results. Especially for B2B marketers which is the focus of today. One of probably of the biggest disadvantages of the network is that it doesn't have as many users as Facebook. For example, Facebook has close to 3 billion people on its database and LinkedIn only have and only have 700 million which is still a lot of people. But definitely the reach is smaller than other social media platforms. And the other probably the other big difference is how engagement works and people spend time there, but not as much as Facebook necessarily where family and friends are there too. Depending on the industry you might have less interaction for it. However, there's still a lot of opportunity on it and I still believe that unless you have a wealth of information on your own or through third party platforms that can where you can layer that information on top of something like Facebook, LinkedIn natively have the most advanced information for video marketers to take advantage of. Those are the things I believe make it different. Now when you are exploring starting a campaign, I cannot stress enough how important is that you define clear goals and objectives for your campaign. I have seen many times myself and with clients that the exact same demographic or target audience plus the same ads or ad format, the same offer in a campaign two Campaigns behave so differently depending depending on the goal or the objective that you selected. And the reason why that happened is because these algorithms have gone very good at matching the advertiser goal to the audience that they want to or the audience that they reach to. It's not just a matter of the audience itself and the ads and the offer. Obviously that matters. But there's also really, really important that you have a clear understanding of your goal or objectives. And LinkedIn have many. But if want to bucket them into three big categories, you will say that they have awareness goals or objectives. You have considerations and consideration objectives and conversion objectives which pretty much resembles or mimic the buyer journey that has been made popular by platforms like HubSpot. This is pretty standard across social media platforms like LinkedIn. Also Facebook and even Google Search has a concept of that. For brand awareness or for awareness, Usually your objective will be brand awareness. It's either reaching out to as many people as possible within your target, or making sure that you have brand left, that people remember the brand. And in those cases, for those particular goals, you are worrying more about reaching and making an impression to using that word, rather than making sure that a person visit the website or actually complete a conversion that will be the main goal. For consideration goals, you have objectives like website visit, engagement on the LinkedIn page, or just someone viewing a video format that you pick as video. In those goals, as you can see, you want to make sure that not just a person remembers the brand, or maybe they're already aware of the brand. You want to make sure that they understand a little bit more the kind of problems that you solve and also especially the kind of solutions that you can bring to the market. Even when they might not be ready right now, and this is especially true on social media, they might not be ready right now to buy because there's no clear intent from the potential buyer. And finally you have conversion goals. And the three main ones here are lead generation, website conversions. And something that is Quite unique to LinkedIn ads is job applicants. In the case of HR, teams are looking for candidates for job candidates. Obviously we will not cover that. But the other two, the lead generation and website conversions obviously are geared toward. We are at the bottom of the funnel looking for people that is already aware of the problem, that they have, aware of the potential solutions, and you want to make sure that they see in your brand the best option for them. The main difference between lead generation and website conversions is that lead generation is a format where a person doesn't have to leave the platform to Fill out the required information that you might need for a follow up on sales and a website. Conversion is the more traditional approach where you send someone to a landing page or your homepage and there you have a workflow which allows you to get a demo or start a conversation, set up an appointment or something like that. Those will be the three main goals. And again, I need to stress a lot the fact that this is critical. If for example, in your company, depending on the objectives that you are trying to accomplish, you need both awareness and consideration, or consideration and conversion, then set up a couple of campaigns, set up a dedicated budget, and that way you can work on those goals at the same time. But don't expect one specific campaign to accomplish one of the goals, the two goals at the same time with the same proficiency. That's not going to happen. If you want reach, then you probably will not get as many visits as you wanted to. And if you want conversions, probably you will not have necessarily a lot of visits, but just people that have already some intent. And obviously you will have to match your audience to those goals for sure. Really important to define your goals and objectives. The next big portion of setting up a campaign successfully on LinkedIn ads is having a clear understanding on the levers that you have to defining your audience. And here LinkedIn brings some criteria that is common to all platforms and obviously taking advantage of the information that they have on their users. And they also bring some criteria that is quite unique to it. I will start with the basic ones, with the ones that we will expect. Obviously you can select people based on location, part of the demographics. You can go as high obviously as country and go as detailed as state and city. One feature that I think LinkedIn lacks so far is that doesn't have options like radios around a location or or even zip code, something more specific than just the city. I also understand why I don't expect LinkedIn to be the kind of platform where small businesses will advertise, necessarily where you have restaurants and radios, but nonetheless having more granularity. Granularity will be something to happen in the future, but you can at the end of the day select by city if you want to that level of detail. You have language as an option too and obviously some basic demographics like gender and age. You also have something related to interest. And in this particular case LinkedIn lacks a lot compared to platforms like Facebook where because of the nature of the platform they have so many criteria for interest from, you know, personal aspect, life. LinkedIn doesn't have that wealth of information they rather focus on more on a membership for groups. And there's a little bit of general interest, not as detailed as Facebook, but still you have some of it like business than hell. Something that is very interesting about the network is that you can select on some product interest. Like one quick example is someone looking for a call center software. This matches closely to what Google does with the keyword custom keyword. Intent is very interesting to explore and obviously specifically for job seekers there are some things related to behavior and that's something available there. Obviously you have education and here you can be very confident on the kind of information that they have because most people trying to set up their resume in the right way will put detailed information about their degrees, the field of study and similar information. Now what I consider LinkedIn's best criteria for audience is related to the companies that your potential buyers work and what we what we will call the ideal client profile. Right on the marketing circles you can match very nicely to LinkedIn criteria for audience. Of course you can select companies even in some categories, like I want to work only where I want to show only for Fortune 500 companies you can select that obviously you have industry, you have the size of the company, even parameters like growth rate. And something very unique to LinkedIn is that you can select specific company names. If you have an ABM approach to your advertising or a specific effort where you want to just advertise to a very small reduced group of companies, you can just select that handful of companies, especially if they're big. So you will have a large enough audience in actual people to show and that will be available and allowed by LinkedIn. That's a great feature there. Going into the buyer itself, you can select by one of the two ones that I like the most are function where someone is on sales or it's on accounting or depending the function they're interested to. And obviously seniority. If you want to focus on decision makers or influencers, you can select by VPs, CXOs or if you want to go for managers or even influencers, you can make those selections. And obviously you can also exclude some of the criteria that you don't intend to advertise to. Another powerful feature that they have been developing over time, I think in just this particular area they were lacking or they were behind platforms like Facebook and Google, even Google. It's all the audiences that you can bring to the table because of the information that you store on your own CRM or any other database. Simple things that you can do is that you can upload a list of contacts that you own or a list of companies. And this is very interesting based on the domain. That way you can have a larger list instead of manually typing each company. You can also take advantage of lookalike audiences, very similar to Facebook, where if you already have a website that have a big crowd visiting every day and there are some specific pages or type of audience that you want to match, you can use that lookalike audience to target them. Obviously you can do regular remarketing, which you just target people that have visited the website in the past. And one of the most powerful features is that it can integrate with many CRM platforms. For example HubSpot. If your marketing team, but especially your sales team, is actively adding companies, actively adding contacts to that database and keep them up to date, you can sync the information between the two of them and create dynamic audiences for your ads. One great example how to use that Imagine that you have a campaign that you want to gear only toward open opportunities. Monochrome clients and not leads are not qualified, something that's very hard to maintain manually. But if you have well maintained CRM, there's something very easy to sync and that you can take advantage of. The general recommendation here is that whatever audience you define, keep in mind your objective at the beginning. You are allowed to go broad and cold on audiences that you intend to do brand awareness campaigns, because in this case you want to make people aware of your brand, aware of the kind of problems that you solve, and aware maybe of the potential solutions that you offer. But if you intend to do goal objectives or campaigns that are geared toward conversion especially, and even consideration, then it will be better if you focus on audiences that are warmer to you, audiences that you own, or they're very small and specific. And you don't lose performance trying to talk to people that have never heard of you before. That's really important. Now another important criteria is choosing your offer. And your offer is what's going to happen after a person clicks the ad. And you have many options here. You can offer demos, you can offer an ebook, you can offer a case study, you can offer a calculator. You can just offer a piece of content on your blog or video. So do you have this wealth of information? Obviously there are many things that you can test, but the general approach, just as I was telling with audiences, is that you should try to match your offer to your initial goal and therefore your audience. That's super important. And one mistake that I see happening time and time again. For example, if you intend to do A conversion campaign where you want people to start a conversation with your sales team. Your goal has to be conversions, of course, but your audience have to match that offer. And the same happens. If your offer is going to be a case study, it will only matter to people that have been warm to your brand already. Be mindful of that. And obviously you can go a little bit broader with more top of the funnel offers like ebooks or maybe a webinar will be something considered for that I will use for considerations. Make sure that when you are laid out the expectations of your campaign, you match from the audience, you match the offer and therefore you match the goal. That will be the general recommendation. Now on choosing your format, your ad format or message, how are you going to convey that offer that you have to that target audience that you have selected? You have many options here, some that you might expect from any social media platform like LinkedIn. The one that is the most commonly used, the one that you will probably see the most, because I believe it reflects natively on the platform itself, is the single image or even the carousel images where you have multiple images there. That's a nice format, allows you to set up an image. I usually recommend little text, if any, not text heavy and you have the option for a headline, a little description and text that I believe is usually undervaluated. That text that behaves like the description on a regular post is really important. You really take it and should take advantage of it. And it's a very flexible format. You can use it for brand awareness, you can use it for consideration, you can use it for conversion. Pretty much what changes is the offer that you're going to put after someone clicks on that. That's the pretty standard format and the one that most campaigns will use. You also obviously have video. And while you can use video for brand awareness, consideration and conversions, in my experience usually video works best for either awareness if you have something broad and consideration if you have something a little bit more specific. The only way that I have seen video work on conversions is when you have your client or customer recorded on a testimonial. That will be a good example of using video, but in general it's a format that not certainly entice people to take a next step right away. It's more of making people aware of it. There's another one text that to be honest, I don't know why it's still there. Probably some of you have never noticed or barely noticed that at the very top of a LinkedIn page, I believe is just in Desktop, you have this little text ad, like a search ad, but it's just very small amount information, but it's available there, you can test it. Of course, as always, there are some ones that are super specific to LinkedIn. For example, the follower ad, as you might expect, is for engagement campaigns. And that allows you to pretty much invite people to follow your page if your goal is to increase your following, which might be a good goal if you also have something in the organic realm working at the same time. And there's a couple that are important for lead generation, which are the message and conversation ads. Very similar here. Some of you might have already experienced it. The main difference between the two is that the message ads will show up in your inbox, like when you get an email message from another user of the platform. And conversations will show up more like in a chat format, like you are having a chat conversation. Very similar to what Facebook do on Messenger. Both of them have the benefit of reducing friction. For example, especially if you're doing Legion, you don't have to send someone to a landing page and then wait for the page to load and for the user to type in the information. They usually take advantage of the information that the user already have on the profile. So that's helpful. However, one of the disadvantages is that yes, you reduce friction, but probably you will guess you will get less qualified leads because it's more easy that someone just out of curiosity decides to fill the form, but maybe doesn't have real commercial intent. I invite you for those two formats, message and conversation, to test. One way that you can test is that you can set up a campaign with conversion goals and your ad format is message or conversation ads. And then you have another one where you send a person to the landing page and you make them fill that regular form and then you can compare the quality of the lead not just by the amount and the cost. Probably the amount and cost on the native ones is going to be lower for sure, but also on the performance longer run. Do those leads become marketing qualified leads and eventually opportunities. That will be a good question to ask. That's. That's a tip there that you can take advantage of. Now the. The next consideration would be budget. And here LinkedIn for me is a steal. Of all the platform, the one that is in general the most costly. And there are a couple of reasons for that. One is that just as a social media platform, usually the cost per click or the cost per impression, or even the cost for action compared to platforms like Facebook and Twitter is higher. They command a premium on that. I believe it's a combination of the fact that they have a smaller base and the kind of businesses that advertise there. So the competition is a little bit higher. But it's also a factor of the fact that their minimum budget is high compared to other platforms. They start at $10 per day, which is not super high for big companies. But still, if you want to run multiple experiments where you have multiple industries or multiple decision makers or multiple locations, then each of your campaigns will have to have that minimum to start with. Because they don't have a concept of ad groups. You cannot lead within the campaign, multiple ad groups. Pretty much the campaign is at the same time just one ad group. You can start to spend thousands of dollars quite easily again for the right crowd, for especially B2B where you have a high value product that completely makes sense. And that will be part of my recommendation that you start. For example, if you want to scale the campaign, you start with a broad perspective in terms of your ideal client profile and buyer Persona. And as you start laying out the ads, then you start splitting the campaign and creating more, more specific groups and more specific ads for industries, for sizes, for type of decision makers, if that makes sense. If you have no clear idea of where your opportunity is going to be, and of course if you already have a clear understanding of the buyer, the industry that you want to tackle, then put all your budget there. Just be mindful that in general your cost per click, your cost per impression and even your cost per action is going to be relatively higher than Facebook or Twitter. And you will not have the intent that usually you might expect from search because people is not searching for your company necessarily. Finally, one last important aspect of having a successful LinkedIn ad campaign for B2B company is to obviously to track results. And what kind of results and have you tracked them will depend heavily on your goal and objective that you set up at the beginning of the campaign. As we said at the beginning, you will have little information. My recommendation is look at the demographic section, something that LinkedIn from my point of view do very well. They have information obviously about the kind of company that is watching the or seeing the ads at the beginning, the sizes or all the parameters that you decided at the beginning. You will get a lot of information initially just impressions and then obviously it will trickle down into clicks. And if you're tracking conversions, intro conversions, but take a look at demographics to see the kind of the crowd, the type of crowd that is watching your ads and the engagement that they're having so you can make decisions faster in terms of what industries or what kind of persons you want to exclude, which is pretty much what you do after and obviously the kind of ads that work better for you and obviously at the regular performance charts where you will go after impressions and clicks and cost per impression, click cost per conversion and so forth. Obviously depending on the type of goal you will focus on a specific metrics for as I was saying at the beginning, if you were doing an awareness campaign then you will focus on reach and impressions mostly trying to understand if you are reaching your whole population. If you are not and you have budget you might increase to make sure that you are getting to everyone. Obviously you want to prevent the flip coin of that idea which is you are showing up too frequently to the same people. You want to control your impression frequency for those type of campaigns. If you are more into consideration then you will focus on either followers if it's a campaign where you are trying to increase the following to your landing page or engagement. If you have a campaign where you want people to engage and comment and share the content that you are promoting on the page and obviously if you are working toward the website, then I highly recommend that you set up some conversion tracking. Some of the things that you can track on LinkedIn is a specific page, something that is key to you, for example pricing page or the contact us page or something similar. You can track a specific conversions or macro conversions like someone filling up a form or requesting a demo. And if you combine it with some tracking software like CallRail, it allows you to also track and record phone calls if your business relies on them heavily. And you can obviously take a look at how people is answering the phone and what kind of questions your potential buyers have. So you can tweak your ads and rare cases where the BB2B company also happens to be an E commerce one. Then you can also track the purchasing path right from someone seeing the product or the service to putting in a in the cart and eventually making the purchase. There are nice integrations with e commerce platforms where you can lay out all those conversion points and track properly. The general recommendation here will be again making sure that you have a clear understanding of your goal, setting up the right kind of ads and offer and then making sure that you have from the beginning that tracking of the results, especially on the conversions so you can go back and analyze the results and based on that make changes on either the ads, the way that you present your offer or even change your audience to improve the performance of the campaign. That's all that I have for today. Has been a pleasure and talk to you on the next episode. Have a great day. Bye bye, Sam.