Targeting B2B? Here's why you should run LinkedIn Ads over other platforms
Most people's perception of LinkedIn ads is fucked because 99% of ads are terrible. If you're a B2B SaaS (or in some cases professional B2C or B2G), here's why you should be running LinkedIn Ads and I'll also include a bit about how to run them. As a note, this is really only profitable if you solution is relatively high-ticket (i.e., at least a few hundred/month)
Why Run LinkedIn Ads?
- No one knows what they’re doing
The majority of people running ads on LinkedIn have ZERO idea what they are doing. If you’ve tested them out before chances are you didn’t either. Most people will do one of three things
Push Lead Gen Forms
Push Demo Requests
Push Articles
It makes sense why you would push these. You want more demos, you want to generate leads, and you want to drive traffic/awareness. Unfortunately, LinkedIn will eat all you money if you do this (especially if you follow their suggested settings). Honestly, we’ve seen people put 1000s into LinkedIn ads to get 0 leads at all.
- ICP Targeting
We’ve tried pretty much all channels Meta, Google, and even Reddit. But if you’re targeting B2B no platform offers the type of targeting that LinkedIn has. It’s literally a professional network so you can target your exact ICP unlike Google or Meta you can do Job Titles, Company Headcount, and company location. An even better feature is email uploading which I’ll touch on more later.
- Lack of Competition
The good thing about no one knowing how to run LinkedIn Ads is if you know what to do you have essentially no competition meaning you can get ridiculously low CPLs and CPAs. Remember you’re competing with people following maximum delivery strategies (never use this) on Lead Gen forms and Demo requests. We’ve audited 100s of LinkedIn ad accounts at this point and a lot of people don’t even try to dial in targeting for different regions or audiences. The majority of ad accounts we’ve looked at have been just running global ad targeting (not country or even region broken down), all in English, and being extremely self-led as opposed to customer-focused. By being customer-focused you stand out like a lighthouse in the dark, everyone will notice you.
- Your Prospects are in Work Mode
Most people use LinkedIn when they are in ‘work mode’, unlike Meta where they’d use it casually. So if you can provide some value (even better if it’s entertaining) you’re getting people when they are focused on work and thus have higher buying intent. Another positive about this is people are more likely to take action on ads. If someone sees a Meta or Google ads they’re very likely to think “This is cool, I’ll look into this later” and completely forget about it. But on LinkedIn chances are they’ll check you out right away, even if they don’t convert then, you can re-target them at a much lower price point than cold traffic (more on this later).
- Next Level Email Compatibility
If you’re running outbound email, which you should be for B2B targeting, LinkedIn ads compliment it like no other platform. LinkedIn, unlike any other major ad platform, allows you to upload people's work emails to push ads to them. The majority of people don’t have their Meta account connected to their work email. So you can upload the same lead lists of people you’re targeting via email to LinkedIn and have an additional non-invasive touchpoint with them, think about the traditional 7 touchpoints of marketing. Another great feature about this is you can use better targeting/segmenting/intent-date tools such as Apollo, Clay, Crunchbase etc to get emails to target based on recent events or even revenue, upload this to LinkedIn, and then target these exact people.
- Attached Social Proof
When you run LinkedIn ads, people don’t even need to leave the platform to find out more about you, your company, or find social proof. You likely already have everything available on your/your company’s LinkedIn profile. This helps reduce friction in the sales process.
So now you're probably wondering how to profitably run LinkedIn Ads. Here's how:
Top-of-funnel:
We target a cold audience with only 2 types of ads. They are:
- Thought-Leader Ads (TLAs)
And
- Text ads
Thought-Leader Ads:
TLAs are video ads that we run from the personal LinkedIn profile of the CEO (or one of the other company Directors/C-suite) of the company. The reason we run video ads from a personal profile instead of a company page is because it makes them look less like ads, and more like organic posts.
This allows us to grow our initial retargeting audience faster, as people are more likely to watch the videos - and all we need is for them to watch 50% of one of our videos and they’re brought into our re-targeting audience.
This is important because retargeting audiences are much cheaper to run ads to than a cold audience.
Text ads:
We also run text ads to a cold audience, which consist of:
Our logo / profile picture (depending on which route we’re going)
A tagline (where we put our offer)
These ads are pay-per-click only, but they don’t get that many clicks. So why do we run them? Because you can get 100,000s of impressions on your company and offer for just a few dollars.
It’s worth it for the brand awareness, and you only pay $2 when someone actually does click on your website
Bottom-of-funnel:
After creating the re-targeting audience, our job is to turn audience members into prospects who will book calls with our company’s sales team to close.
We do this in 2 ways:
- Video ads
And
- Lead gen form ads
Video ads:
Initially, we use TLAs to form the re-targeting audience, but after we re-target those people with video ads from the company page.
Why?
Unfortunately, TLAs have their limitations, and you can’t bring people directly to your website from these ads. That’s why we only use them to build a retargeting audience that we can then push video ads to that they can click on to go to your company page / book a call page or whatever funnel you like to use.
We retarget website visitors with ‘demo request’ ads - ads where they can request a demo call with our company. We also message them on LinkedIn to convert them to a booked meeting and in the end, a closed win.
Lead Gen Form ads:
These are ads where you give away a piece of educational content (e.g. a mini guide) in return for the user's LinkedIn URL and Email address.
We usually use a case study (with added information such as how to do X, Y, and Z) for these guides and target people in a similar industry to the company in the case study. This is so the companies we target with ads will be interested in receiving the case study as we show them how we achieved a good result for a company in the same industry as them.
From there, we warm email the prospect and message them on LinkedIn to get them to book a call in with our company.
Booking meetings:
If the prospect hasn’t already booked a demo call from one of our ads, we get them on demo calls with warm outreach.
We message the people who fill out the Lead gen form ads on LinkedIn + send them an Email.
We’re also able to access the LinkedIn users who have watched our ads and send outbound LinkedIn messages to them. These work a lot better than normal cold outreach as the prospects have already seen our face multiple times with video ads and are interested in our product.
This lets us hit every possible interested lead from our ad targeting on LinkedIn and help us sign as many clients from LinkedIn as possible.