The Top 5 Ways to Integrate Your Existing Strategy with LinkedIn Ads
And Leave No Room For The Competiton
Why LinkedIn Ads?
Your prospects are on LinkedIn – with 1 Billion users and 100 Million active decision-makers that’s a statement I feel 100% confident in making – so the platform is an invaluable resource for any marketer.
But with such a large target, lead generation can seem like an equally large task.
At StraightIn, we have a metaphor for all outbound lead gen campaigns called “the leaky sieve”. This means no matter your chosen channel, how well your outreach performs, or how strong your targeting is; there’s going to be a high percentage of unresponsive, unopened, and unconverted prospects who could be your next high-value client.
Let’s take the average LinkedIn outreach campaign as an example (statistics sourced from our CRM based on the last 6 months of campaigns):
- 40% Acceptance Rate
- 30% Response Rate
- 10% Lead Rate
These are impressive stats, delivering over 10 leads a month, but it still leaves 60% of our target without a message, 70% unresponsive, and 90% not in our sales funnel.
Apply this to one of your own campaigns, and I’m sure you’ll come up with an equally impressive gap in your prospecting you’d rather leave off your reports.
To truly get the most out of your audience, a parallel strategy using multiple channels will earn you the highest reward. So that 90% of your unresponsive, unopened, and unconverted target now know: who you are, what you do, and that they’re relevant to you – they just need a bit more convincing.
LinkedIn Ads is your road to market domination, plugging any gaps in your strategy to the point where prospects will be firm in their belief that you are the industry leader. This guide will show you how to effectively retarget your already engaged audience and take advantage of the campaigns your competitors won’t know how to.
Play To Your Audience
With LinkedIn Ads, the audience function will be your best friend.
This allows you to upload a custom list into your targeting, making it easier to create ads that are relevant, timely, and sometimes sneaky.
There are 3 things you must remember when uploading your audience:
- You should have at least 500 prospects on the list
- You must line the fields up with the provided template
- You must have up-to-date contact information
Why are these so important?
Match rate is what will decide how much of your uploaded audience is usable.
LinkedIn will go through your list finding the individual profiles on the platform that match, and once complete, this will be returned to you as a percentage, or, match rate.
Provided your contact information on all prospects is good, and you lined up all the fields with the template – then your match rate will on average be anywhere between 60-90%.
According to LinkedIn’s requirements, You can’t use a list with less than 300 prospects, so to be safe 500 contacts should give you the minimum match rate to progress with the next steps.
It can take up to 48 hours for your audience to finish building, but it’s worth the wait.
The Common Misconception
A common misconception with LinkedIn Ads is that you can generate a high quantity of leads straight from a cold audience e.g. people who have never interacted with you or your business before.
This is where most campaigns fall down.
Step one is always to build a rapport – you wouldn’t ask someone to marry you on a first date so why ask a prospect to give their details on the first interaction?
That’s where the Ads Funnel comes into play:
- Top of Funnel – Engagement and Awareness
- Middle of Funnel – Add Value with Lead Magnets
- End of Funnel – Generate SQLs
ToF campaigns (with a £500/month ad spend) will on average take 28-35 days to reach the minimum number of engagements to retarget into a MoF – then another 40-60 days to generate enough engagement for the EoF
Uploading an audience of already engaged prospects lets you leapfrog the ToF, saving a month of time and ad spend meaning you can hit the ground running with lead generation.
But where are the best places to source this audience from?
P.S. Try PPC
Let’s revisit those 90% of unconverted prospects you’ve already engaged through outreach.
Whether you’ve gone to market through Email, LinkedIn, or SMS, sourcing data from the likes of Apollo, Cognism, etc – then using your contact lists in LinkedIn ads will boost your reply rates and provide additional value to the unresponsive, on-the-fence, prospects.
Instead of doing a spam check on your 1000th follow-up, simply export your contacts as a CSV file and upload them to your LinkedIn audience using the contact list template.
For the best results, upload the contacts that have opened your outreach. They will be the most engaged and aware of your offering and more likely to re-engage via ads.
A recent campaign we ran using this strategy achieved in 14 days:
- 1.28% CTR
- £2.56 CPC
- £19.75 CPL
- 8 Leads
For context, your average statistics for a LinkedIn ads Campaign are:
- 0.44% CTR
- £5.82 CPC
- £11-270 PCL
So to summarise, upload your outreach lists to cut costs, boost results, and clean up those cold contacts.
Caught In Your Own Web
If you’re using any IP tracking software like Warmly, Lead Forensics, Lead Info, etc. on your website – well done!
If you don’t, here’s why you should:
These software products allow you to see every visitor on your website, who they are, who they work for, which pages they’ve spent time on (and for how long), and importantly, where they originated.
Exporting these prospects and uploading them into an ads audience is one of the most powerful strategies we’ve found for re-engagement campaigns.
In the first 7 days of our campaign where we used this approach, we saw:
- 1.29% CTR
- £2.92 CPC
- £5.83 CPL
- 10 Leads
If we reference these back to the average LinkedIn Ads stats – this campaign achieved over 3x the CTR, nearly 50% lower CPC, and anywhere between 50-4500% lower CPL in just a week of activity.
Don’t leave your web visitors hanging.
All Is Not Lost
Closed/Lost Opportunities. Or not?
These people were in your pipeline, interested in your product, but for some reason or another, dropped out of the process.
Maybe it was pricing, features, timezone differences, or just a bad Monday – chances are they’re still out there looking for a solution, and it will be in the form of your latest competition.
Stay competitive, export them from your CRM, upload them to an audience, stay at the front of their decision-making, and watch those Closed/Lost become Call/Booked.
In 14 days of a campaign we ran using this, the stats were:
- 0.6% CTR
- £3.63 CPC
- £18.44 CPL
- 3 Re-opened Opportunities
Be Bold
So what does an ads campaign using these audience sources look like? It has to be bold.
They opened your email and didn’t reply? Tell them you saw them peeking.
They’ve been on your website twice this week? Ask them if they found what they’re looking for.
Don’t hold back and disappear into the noise of LinkedIn, make sure your target knows you’re talking to them and give them a reason to listen.
Take some inspo from us or get in touch and we’ll send you some personalised tips!
Contact us Today
LinkedIn Ads FAQS
Yes – LinkedIn Ads has a minimum target size and you must have at least 300 prospects in your audience to launch a campaign.
You only need 3 things to run ads on LinkedIn:
- An up-to-date company page – this is the first interaction your prospects will have with your business, so make sure you’re standing out from the crowd and showing off your USP.
- A Website/Landing page to send your clicks to – same as your LinkedIn company page, you need to make a good impression with your site. Make sure it’s optimised for speedy loading times and high engagement.
- An active card to bill your clicks – it goes without saying, “Pay Per Click” won’t go very far without the “Pay” part
For more detailed strategies – check out our blog: https://straight-in.com/blog/
Not at all – LinkedIn Ads do not have to be expensive. As with any Paid Advertising campaign, you only pay per click – and the average cost per click can range between £3 – £10.
For a successful campaign, we recommend a minimum monthly ad spend of £500 – £1000 per month.
You can read more about the right lead gen strategies for you on our dedicated LinkedIn Advertising Page – https://straight-in.com/what-we-do/linkedin-paid-advertising/
