LinkedIn Advertising offers one of the best potentials among B2B digital marketing channels, especially if your Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) are present there.
It’s not just effective, but also efficient. Despite often higher click prices, when you account for attribution and cost per result, LinkedIn proves to be one of the most cost-efficient platforms due to the high quality of its audience. You might pay 10x more per click compared to Meta’s platforms, but you’ll require only 1% of the traffic given there’s less irrelevant traffic.
However, the platform is merely a tool. Without the right strategies, you could waste a lot of money or end up with impressive graphs that don’t contribute to your bottom line.
Speaking of graphs, if you want to learn how to measure your LinkedIn Advertising impact, check out one of our latest blog posts: B2B Marketing Measurement – Creating a Meaningful Measurement System.
Bases for LinkedIn Advertising strategies
One thing to remember from the start is that you must be willing to use LinkedIn Campaigns (the ad platform) in unconventional ways to utilize different strategies.
Sure, you can set up a campaign with the ‘Traffic to website’ goal and ‘Maximize clicks’ bidding strategy. However, you often achieve better results and cheaper clicks from the same audience by using the ‘Engagement’ goal and, after a while, capping your click costs.
Also, if you want your video to be seen as widely as possible, you shouldn’t bid for video views but for clicks. Your aim is not to get clicks but distribution. Now, you’re getting the distribution practically free, just as you wanted.
These are just small individual tactics, of which there are tens if not hundreds being used daily to optimize organizations’ B2B digital marketing on LinkedIn. But you get the point, right?
5 example LinkedIn Advertising strategies for B2B
In this section, I will provide a few example strategies. The goal is to offer something for everyone and inspire you. Remember, there are also many strategies that can be chosen within the context of a specific company.
1. Finding venture investors with LinkedIn Advertising
There’s a good chance you’ll be seeking venture capital at some point. LinkedIn provides a useful platform for expanding and amplifying your fundraising campaign if you can’t secure all investments on the first day.
For identifying potential investors, consider a lead generation campaign. Users can download a condensed version of your pitch deck and leave their contact information for follow-up.
In terms of targeting, LinkedIn offers suitable solutions. Investment categories are among the user traits and interests, which is beneficial because traditional job title, job seniority, job function, etc., targeting won’t be helpful in this context.
If you already have a list of investors, consider using a “carpet bombing” approach by uploading company lists supplemented with LinkedIn’s additional targeting options. This targeting allows you to deliver content supporting your message to the right people in the right company. It also helps you understand who you’re reaching and who shows interest, which we’ll discuss later.
2. Supporting B2B sales process phases with LinkedIn Advertising
LinkedIn Advertising can serve as a potent lead generation tool. However, its utility in the B2B sales process extends beyond that. The platform can be incorporated into your entire sales process with these straightforward, albeit not always easy, methods.
This requires ensuring your CRM data is in such a condition, so you’re able to import the target company names (and/or other information) to LinkedIn. You will create different campaigns for each stage with their own creative (ads). Once the different campaigns for different stages in the sales cycle has been done it’s all about importing the up-to-date data from your CRM to make sure the leads “move” to a new stage in your ads as well.
While the process may seem overwhelming initially, it becomes a routine task over time. This method aims to result in faster sales cycles, increased sales conversions, and improved retention throughout the sales cycle.
3. Being digitally present for your B2B clients before and after a fair or event
Conventions, exhibitions, and fairs have long been at the heart of B2B marketing and sales. They’re not cheap endeavors, so you should really maximize their potential. LinkedIn offers some valid options for having a more long-term effect in addition to contacting people for meetings at the expo and having your booth.
This is divided into three phases:
- Before the convention, you determine your target audience with a list or other targeting option that you want to reach both before, during, and after the convention. So, those that will attend. For this audience, you will target your advertising promoting both your solutions and your attendance.
- During the convention, your campaign targeting should be narrowed geographically to consist only of the area, city, or country in addition to the previous target, based on the most narrow targeting that will still let your ads run.
- After the event, you can work with the phase number 1 audience and continue supporting the story with new ads.
At this point, you, and many others, are asking whether we can attribute how well the digital campaigns are contributing to people taking meetings, visiting our booth, or converting to sales. And I have a controversial answer: don’t worry about it. You’ve spent 10,000 to 200,000 euros or dollars to invest in a single event. Spending 200 to 900 euros to increase the odds of succeeding is worth the bet even without the ability to find out the attribution percentage to sales. You will be reaching your ICPs (Ideal Customer Profile) and you can measure and prove it. Don’t get me wrong, the attribution can be done. It’s just not worth the effort as it’s more complex here.
4. Leveraging earned media in lead generation
Getting some earned media, for example, as a result of your PR efforts, is great. But that’s not all. You can use the articles to support your lead generation efforts.
- Create a campaign with your ICP targeting and make the ad creative about the media article, then drive the traffic to the media outlet’s article.
- Create retargeting for those who have engaged or even seen the ad.
- Use the retargeting audience to offer lead generation advertising on the platform or whichever is the next part in your lead gen operations.
Paying money to send traffic to someone else’s site might seem a bit counterintuitive, but we’ve been able to prove with data that this tactic works better than direct response ads on the platform.
5. Prioritizing sales efforts with behavioral data
You likely have a larger ICP audience than your sales team can, or even should, put maximum efforts into. Prioritization is key. It should be done based on behavioral data on the ICP audience rather than just picking a list and starting from the first row. LinkedIn Advertising offers a great deal of assistance here, especially if you’re running a campaign:
- You can build Engagement reports for key companies to understand which have been most affected and should be a priority. Read more from our previous blog post: What is Account-Based Marketing (ABM)? -Benefits & 5 Steps to Success.
- You can see which companies, among many other variables, your ads are reaching and which ones are engaging, guiding your actions to start with the most interested.
There’s much more you can do when you combine the different features offered.
Take these ideas or create your own
This list is not exhaustive, but it serves as a good starting point when considering tools like LinkedIn Advertising for your digital B2B marketing functions. Remember, these are just tools. Often, their creators may not know the best usage, and your limitations are only your own creativity (within the terms of service and regulations).