The Guide to Cracking the LinkedIn Ads Platform

Transcription

1 The Guide to Cracking the LinkedIn Ads Platform Learn how to set up revenue tracking, improve your ads, and generate more high quality leads, pipeline, and ultimately, revenue Brought to you by Bizible, a marketing attribution solution that connects marketing data to sales data, enabling you to make smart decisions based on revenue.

2 Whether you are a seasoned pro or thinking about using LinkedIn Ads for the first time, in this guide you ll find helpful information on generating more revenue from your paid social campaigns. This guide explains an approach to LinkedIn Ads that is focused on revenue generation. While click-through-rate (CTR) and leads are good indicators, revenue provides a better metric for creating more effective LinkedIn Ads. We call this strategy pipeline marketing. First, we will explain how to get started with LinkedIn Ads, from copywriting to bid management, and then we ll discuss how to accurately track revenue, so that you can measure your return on ad spend (ROAS). From setup to optimization tactics, this guide provides the best strategies for getting the most out of LinkedIn Ads. Content 1) The Case for LinkedIn Advertising 2) Developing Effective Ads 3) Targeting the Right Audience 4) Account-Based Marketing 5) Managing Bids 6) Maximizing Your Results 7) How to Optimize by Revenue 8) Using Advanced Techniques Let s get started!

3 CHAPTER 1: THE CASE FOR LINKEDIN ADVERTISING When considering which channels B2B marketers should invest in, LinkedIn should be at the top of the list. When it was launched in 2003, LinkedIn was primarily a marketplace for employers and job seekers, offering tools such as pay-per-click job ads and access to resume databases. Five years later, LinkedIn launched an advertising product that is now one of the most effective B2B paid social platforms. But because its foundation is being a professional network first, and has become a social channel second, its users volunteer important professional information that they likely would not provide to other networks. Therefore, the platform gives advertisers the ability to target buyers not only by demographics, but by profession-specific factors like job title, industry, company size, and more. This combination makes it the ideal social channel to target a variety of industry verticals and find the right audience for your product or service. Today, LinkedIn continues to develop its advertising platform and is frequently introducing more sophisticated methods for businesses to target the right audiences. Let s get started on creating campaigns that convert and generate revenue. The Guide to Cracking the LinkedIn Ads Platform 3

4 CHAPTER 2: DEVELOPING EFFECTIVE ADS There are five types of ads you can create on LinkedIn. The first and most popular is the Sponsored Update ad type. These are LinkedIn s native ad unit, which show in the central feed across all devices. Additionally, there are Sponsored InMail Ads (which are similar to an or direct message), Dynamic Display Ads, Display Ads, and Text Ads. Some of these ad products are unavailable to the standard business account. Sponsored Updates (or Sponsored Content) are the bread-and-butter of the LinkedIn Ad platform. We will spend most of our time in this guide on these. If you re just getting started on LinkedIn, this is a great place to start. Here are the steps to setting up a well organized Sponsored Update campaign. To get started, in the Campaign Manager portal of the LinkedIn website, click on Create Campaign and then select Sponsored Content. Then, name your campaign something that you will remember later for ease of campaign management. If you re going to be setting up many different campaigns, now is the time to figure out your naming convention. The Guide to Cracking the LinkedIn Ads Platform 4

5 Once you ve set up the campaign, the next layer is to create ads within the campaign. There are two ways to create Sponsored Updates. You have the choice to promote an existing organic LinkedIn update (post) or you can create a new ad (Direct Sponsored Content). At this point, regardless of which ad type you are going with, it is extremely important to be sure to use different UTM parameters for every single ad within the campaign. It s best practice to specify the source, medium, campaign, content, and optionally, term. For example, we use content to specify the asset that we re promoting (e.g. ebook title) and term to specify the particular ad. This will allow you to track the revenue performance of each ad and its contents, which we ll show later in the guide. If you re using Salesforce CRM, Bizible will automatically import UTM parameters into Salesforce so you can see how much campaigns and ads are contributing to revenue. Here is what creating a Direct Sponsored Content ad looks like: The Guide to Cracking the LinkedIn Ads Platform 5

6 Notice how the URL includes UTM parameters (it will be shortened by LinkedIn automatically upon publishing). To effectively test and track ad copy and images, it s important to use unique UTM parameters for each so that you can A/B test and optimize using bottom-of-the-funnel metrics. Four Tips for Effective Ads 1. Improve your copywriting For better copywriting, the key is to empathize with your audience. Ask questions or provide answers that address their needs (which means that you have to do your research to find out what their actual needs are!). For example, Need better LinkedIn Ads Results? or Get Accurate Salary Data are ad headlines that imply tangible benefits if the audience clicks on them. They address needs and desires, and will perform better than generic or vague copy. Similarly, experiment with your copywriting. For example, we sometimes test whether a question will perform better than a statement. Even though they may convey the same message, sometimes how it s phrased makes a difference. 2. Provide a compelling offer Provide a compelling reason to take notice with a special offer, such as a unique benefit, whitepaper, free trial or demo. 3. Use a strong call-to-action (CTA) Think verbs here, like try, download or get. 4. Make sure images have context Use images that have context relating to your offer. This makes your ad more tangible, cohesive, and clear. It communicates to your audience visually, telling them what the offer or benefit is all about. Now that you know how to create great ads, the next step is targeting the right audience in order to engage qualified professionals. The Guide to Cracking the LinkedIn Ads Platform 6

7 CHAPTER 3: TARGETING THE RIGHT AUDIENCE Now you re ready to set the targeting for your ad placements. Unlike other social ad networks that may have larger audiences, LinkedIn sets itself apart by offering the richest professional pivots. To keep content relevant and offers interesting, here are the six main targeting options we use. You can include and exclude these parameters in your ad campaigns: - Job function and level / seniority - Industries - Company name - Company size - Skills - Professional interest groups However, keep an eye on how audience size -- the number of potential members that can see your ad -- changes, which LinkedIn clearly shows. Too small and you won t get enough clicks. Too big and you ll (likely) be getting unqualified traffic. The Guide to Cracking the LinkedIn Ads Platform 7

8 Typically, it s smart to start with audience sizes around 50,000 members then slowly increase to around 150, ,000 if the more-focused audience engages. Here s an example of the audience parameters for one of our ads: Finally, be sure to test different audiences (for example, job skills targeting vs. job title targeting vs. groups targeting) to figure out the best way to reach your prospects. It s a good idea to include an audience indicator in your campaign UTM parameter if you re testing audiences. Tip: Using exclusion parameters (rather than creating a long list of parameters to include) can often speed up your workflow, which is helpful when managing multiple campaigns. The Guide to Cracking the LinkedIn Ads Platform 8

9 CHAPTER 4: ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING (ABM) Account-based marketing (ABM) is a B2B marketing methodology in which marketers start with a list of qualified target accounts and base their marketing efforts around reaching the right personas within those target accounts. This runs in contrast to a demand generation methodology, where marketers start with engaging a wider audience and qualify prospects later in the process. The LinkedIn Ads platform has and continues to develop tools to enable marketers to run ABM campaigns. As of the writing of this guide, The Guide to Cracking the LinkedIn Ads Platform 9

10 organizations that have Assisted Accounts with LinkedIn can bulk upload a list of target accounts/organizations, which are then run through a matching process. Once the list is matched, marketers can use the same targeting parameters that we discussed earlier (e.g. job title). For organizations with self-service accounts, ABM is still attainable through audience targeting by company name. There are two caveats to this: 1) there is a 100 company max per campaign, and 2) there is a 1,000 audience member minimum per campaign. Reaching the 1,000 audience member minimum can prove challenging because it can limit how much you are able to use additional filters on top of company name if you are targeting small or mid-sized companies. Our early tests with these ABM tools have shown promise. Despite the significant upfront effort required to build and upload lists, for marketers who are doing a lot of ABM or are moving to an ABM-centric strategy, it s worth trying out and staying up-to-date with the ad product. The Guide to Cracking the LinkedIn Ads Platform 10

11 CHAPTER 5: MANAGING BIDS Once you ve created your ads and set the targeting, the next step is managing how much you are willing to pay. The LinkedIn Ads platform is based on a live auction system, which sounds complicated, but in reality it means setting a daily budget and a maximum amount you are willing to spend on either a click-basis (cost-per-click or CPC) or impression-basis (cost per thousand impressions or CPM). Keep in mind that the amount you set is a ceiling, so the actual price that you pay will often be less than that number. According to LinkedIn s Help Center: - CPC means that you pay when someone clicks on your ad. You can specify the maximum amount you re willing to pay for each click by a member of your target audience. (Recommended method) - CPM means that you pay up to your maximum bid each time your ad is shown 1,000 times on LinkedIn, no matter how many clicks you receive. The Guide to Cracking the LinkedIn Ads Platform 11

12 CPC or CPM It s not always clear which payment basis is ideal. Either way, LinkedIn will provide a suggested bid range based on the competing bids by other advertisers targeting the same audience.the higher you bid, the more likely your ad will receive impressions and/or clicks. How much it costs is directly tied to the audience that you ve decided to target. Each targeting selection has its own floor or minimum CPC. For example, a highly desirable audience will have a more expensive minimum CPC than a more general audience. So how should you bid? Let's say you are running a campaign to all company sizes and the minimum bid (LinkedIn tells you this) is a CPC of $2.00. Now let's say you exclude companies that have fewer than 10 employees and the audience size drops 10%. Generally, that's a good thing. You're making sure you get the clicks from qualified LinkedIn users. What if the minimum bid increased to a CPC of $3.00? If you just wanted to bid the minimum you are paying 50% more for just a 10% smaller audience. In this case, it would probably be beneficial to target the larger audience, even if a small portion of the clicks would not be qualified. In summary, if you limit a specific company size and the audience size goes down 3%, but the CPC rises 30%, it s probably going to be cheaper to keep targeting the larger audience. One interesting thing to note is that increasing audience size by adding more countries may actually RAISE the minimum bid. Some countries have a minimum bid that s higher than the United States and Canada, so best to group international ads in their own campaigns, which you should do anyways so you can measure each separately. We will discuss bid optimization in the optimization section of this guide. The Guide to Cracking the LinkedIn Ads Platform 12

13 CHAPTER 6: OUR OWN RESULTS AND LEARNINGS Over the last couple of years, we have continued to increase our investment in LinkedIn ads and have closely tracked changes in performance over time. At the beginning, we started our content marketing efforts without Sales Development Reps (SDRs) in place. (SDRs, at our company at least, call all inbound leads, ideally within a few minutes of downloading content, accompanied by a personalized ). Once the SDRs were added, the conversion rate from lead-to-opportunity increased a whopping 68%. Learning: Have SDRs in place from the beginning of your promoted content efforts. We also have noticed that our CPCs tend to increase to reach the same amount of total clicks over the duration of campaigns. We suspect this is partly due to audience fatigue, which causes us to raise bids and rotate in new ads over time to keep getting clicks. We do, however, believe that external competition for the audience also plays a significant role. As LinkedIn Ads introduces new products and attracts more customers, competition for ad placements will continue to increase. Recently, we ve migrated our LinkedIn ads efforts to an almost entirely The Guide to Cracking the LinkedIn Ads Platform 13

14 ABM-centric approach. There are always a few bumps that occur when transitioning strategies, but the early results have been promising. Because we are starting with a list of qualified accounts, we know that everyone who sees the sponsored update, clicks on it, and then fills out a form on our website will be qualified (with a few exceptions). The top of our funnel may be narrower, but it s a lot less leaky. In our experience, the match rate for our list has been over 90%, which is impressive for an audience match tool. Ultimately, with ABM, we know that we re only paying for people that we know are valuable, which is very powerful for reducing wasted spend. The Guide to Cracking the LinkedIn Ads Platform 14

15 CHAPTER 7: OPTIMIZING BY REVENUE While many marketers pay attention to click-through-rates and cost-per-lead, it s important to remember the real goal of marketing: to drive revenue. Disconnected marketing and sales data, longer sales cycles, and multi-channel marketing campaigns can sometimes make it difficult to track revenue after the first ad click. Furthermore, with multiple ads, it can be difficult to track which one lead directly to the form submission. Using the unique UTM parameters that you created for each ad and Bizible marketing attribution, you can finally track the true impact that every ad had on revenue with fractional credit. Because Bizible offers W-shaped multi-touch attribution, this includes tracking the impact of the first click, even if they eventually bounced without filling out a form. W-shaped attribution modeling enables you to run ungated content on LinkedIn because you can track the downstream performance of those engagements. The Guide to Cracking the LinkedIn Ads Platform 15

16 [W-shaped attribution] Reporting The image below shows one of our Salesforce reports for LinkedIn social ads. From Bizible data we are able to sort by touchpoint source (LinkedIn) and see the exact content that led to sales opportunities and ultimately revenue. In this case, you can see that our AdWords Guide To Lead Generation white paper generated quite a few opportunities and over $50,000 in annualized revenue from closed deals. You can also see the UTM parameters - channel, source, medium, and content. The Guide to Cracking the LinkedIn Ads Platform 16

17 Here s how it works. When someone clicks on a LinkedIn Ad and get s taken to a landing page, Bizible will track that UTM parameter on that landing page visit, identifying the ad content that drove the click. A visitor may leave. They may click on another ad. But when the visitor submits the form and a lead is created in Salesforce, all their activity tracked by the UTM parameters (plus much more) is automatically imported. We are able to see this prelead activity and use that information to optimize our LinkedIn ads. When that lead converts to a closed-won deal, you ll know right away what ad they clicked on initially. Sometimes you ll find the ads and campaigns that were generating lower lead volumes are actually generating higher revenue. Furthermore, this revenue data should also be used to inform future bid management. If a particular campaign or audience group is exceeding expectations in terms of revenue, you may want to consider increasing your maximum bid because the impressions and/or clicks that you re able to generate are worth more than you previously thought. Actual revenue data that you re confident in allows paid media marketers to better calculate key figures like cost-per-lead and maximize both growth and ROI. This revenue-based optimization is a powerful way to improve the ROI of your LinkedIn Ads campaign. The Guide to Cracking the LinkedIn Ads Platform 17

18 CHAPTER 8: USING ADVANCED TECHNIQUES After we saw the success of using LinkedIn for content downloads, we decided to see if we could replicate with different types of ads. One of those tests was running bottom-of-the-funnel ads. These ad campaigns were targeted towards more qualified buyers (very targeted campaigns), sometimes to just 2,000 LinkedIn members. We spent about $5,000 on the ad campaign shown below and it has resulted in over 7x return on investment in the pipeline. The headline is targeted to where they are in the buyer journey. This qualification is more likely to resonate with this particular audience, and get the click. We also used a simple graphic that added context to the offer. The Guide to Cracking the LinkedIn Ads Platform 18

19 Another test we ran was creating persona specific ads. Again, targeting the right demographic, in this case a specific persona, we were able to choose content that was relevant to specific personas. The below ad has a CTR of 0.7% which is more than double the typical CTR on LinkedIn Sponsored Update ads. Furthermore, it has generated over 6x ROI in open pipeline. The ad resonates with this persona because they see that it is specific to their job function and level. It immediately identifies with them due to its personalization. The Guide to Cracking the LinkedIn Ads Platform 19

20 WRAPPING IT UP Now you are set up for success on LinkedIn Ads! We covered how to set up a campaign, how to target audiences, use UTM parameters, track ROI in your CRM, and optimize based on revenue. Using this method, and the advanced techniques covered in the last section, you ll find success in your paid social investments. We hope you found this guide helpful. We invite you to learn about our marketing attribution solution that provides actionable data on ALL of your paid advertising and social media channels. Excited to learn more? Click here to request a demo. LinkedIn + Microsoft In June, Microsoft announced the acquisition of LinkedIn. When it comes to advertising on LinkedIn, one of the biggest impacts is that LinkedIn Sponsored Content now has access to a larger inventory. Click here to read more thoughts on the acquisition. The Guide to Cracking the LinkedIn Ads Platform 20

21 ABOUT BIZIBLE Bizible is the leader in B2B marketing attribution with hundreds of customers including Optimizely, MongoDB, Xamarin and ADP. We provide a B2B marketing attribution solution dedicated to helping companies make profitable marketing decisions. Our technology connects all marketing activity (both online and offline) to revenue, enabling revenue credit to be accurately distributed to the marketing channels that are making an impact. This advanced, multi-touch attribution technology allows marketers to do more effective and more efficient marketing. To learn more, visit bizible.com.