Key Takeaways

• A strong LinkedIn ads strategy starts with a shared revenue goal between sales and marketing.
• Platform metrics can validate ad performance, but pipeline metrics determine business impact.
• Cost per MQL and SQL conversion rates matter more than cost per lead.
• CRM visibility creates the feedback loop required to improve spend efficiency over time.
• Budget allocation should match funnel stage and buying intent

Oftentimes as paid media marketers, it’s easy to stay inside LinkedIn’s platform reports and manage performance strictly from the ad side. When CTR improves, cost per lead drops, and lead volume increases, it can feel like the campaigns are doing their job. And to a certain extent, they are. Those metrics can tell you if the ads are resonating and whether the platform is functioning efficiently. But they do not tell you whether the spend is actually generating qualified pipeline.

That is the blind spot.

For B2B companies, especially in SaaS, pipeline quality matters far more than lead quantity. A high volume of low-quality leads can create the illusion of performance while introducing inefficiency into the sales process. Sales spends time chasing accounts that never had a chance of converting, forecasts become inflated, and budget gets defended against metrics that have little connection to revenue. The fix is not more reporting. The fix is building a LinkedIn ads strategy around pipeline from the beginning.

Why Most B2B LinkedIn Ads Strategies Stall at Platform Metrics

Most B2B paid media teams are optimizing against the easiest data to access. LinkedIn Campaign Manager gives immediate visibility into impressions, clicks, click-through rate, and cost per lead, which naturally become the default KPIs. Those metrics are helpful for understanding campaign mechanics, but they are incomplete when it comes to understanding business impact. They tell you if the ad earned attention. They do not tell you whether the spend created opportunities.

This becomes especially problematic in long sales cycles. In B2B, the buying process often involves multiple stakeholders, budget approvals, and weeks or months of qualification. That means not every lead has equal value. A cheap lead that never progresses through the pipeline is far more expensive than it appears in-platform because it consumes sales time and distorts performance expectations. If marketing is celebrating lead volume while sales is struggling to find viable opportunities, the strategy is already misaligned.

This is where many LinkedIn strategies break down. Teams optimize toward what looks efficient inside the platform rather than what moves pipeline forward. That can create a dangerous feedback loop where budget continues flowing toward campaigns that look productive but fail to influence revenue. The solution is not abandoning platform metrics altogether. It is putting them in the right place. Platform metrics should validate ad health. Pipeline metrics should define strategy.

Start With a Shared Revenue Goal, Not a Campaign Goal

Before any campaign launches, sales and marketing need to agree on what success actually looks like. That conversation should not start with leads. It should start with revenue. A strong LinkedIn ads strategy begins by understanding how much pipeline needs to be generated to support the business goal, then working backward to determine how the channel contributes to it. Without that alignment, campaign goals often become disconnected from the financial outcomes the business actually cares about.

Take a hypothetical B2B SaaS company like Northwind Analytics. Let’s say the company needs to generate $2M in new ARR this quarter. With an average deal size of $50K, that means they need 40 new deals. If their SQL-to-close rate is 20%, they need 200 SQLs to hit that number. If 40% of MQLs convert into SQLs, they need 500 MQLs entering the funnel. That pipeline math creates clarity across both teams and gives marketing a much more practical operating target.

This is where marketing and sales alignment becomes operational, not theoretical. Marketing now knows the exact pipeline contribution required to support the business. Sales knows what volume and quality they should expect entering the funnel. Together, both teams can evaluate whether the budget, audience size, and targeting strategy are capable of supporting that outcome.

Choose LinkedIn Ads Metrics That Map to Pipeline

Once the revenue goal is established, the next step is choosing the right metrics. This is where many B2B teams make the wrong tradeoff. They rely too heavily on platform efficiency metrics because they are easy to access and easy to explain. But not every metric deserves equal weight. A metric only belongs in your strategy if it helps explain pipeline performance.

The easiest way to think about it is by separating platform metrics from pipeline metrics. Platform metrics tell you how the campaign is functioning. Pipeline metrics tell you how the campaign is contributing to revenue. Both matter, but only one should shape strategic decisions.

Define the revenue outcome before the campaign

Every LinkedIn campaign should have a North Star Metric tied directly to pipeline. If Northwind Analytics needs 125 MQLs from LinkedIn to stay on pace for quarter goals, that becomes the operational target. Budget, audience reach, and campaign structure all work backward from that number. This creates discipline in planning and makes performance easier to evaluate once campaigns go live.

Without this level of specificity, budget decisions become arbitrary. Teams often launch campaigns based on what they can spend rather than what they need to generate. That usually leads to underfunded campaigns, incomplete data, and unreliable conclusions. Defining the outcome first prevents that.

Know why LinkedIn leads are not MQLs

This is one of the most common mistakes in B2B LinkedIn advertising. Campaign Manager might show 300 leads at a $90 cost per lead, which sounds efficient. But once those leads are reviewed inside the CRM, maybe only 80 qualify as MQLs and 20 move into SQL status. Suddenly the real cost per qualified lead is much higher than what the platform reported.

That gap matters because it changes how performance should be judged. If the strategy is built around cost per lead, the campaign may appear successful. If it is built around cost per MQL or cost per opportunity, the inefficiency becomes much more obvious. That is why lead volume alone is a weak KPI for B2B.

Learn how sales qualifies a lead

A strong LinkedIn ads strategy requires understanding the sales process. How does an MQL become an SQL? What disqualifies a lead? What account characteristics tend to convert at the highest rate? Those questions matter because they directly influence how campaigns should be targeted.

For Northwind Analytics, sales found that VP-level operations leaders in enterprise SaaS companies over $50M ARR had the highest close rates. That insight changed how the marketing team built audiences. Instead of casting a wider net, they tightened targeting to focus on the highest-value buying committee members. That improved lead quality and reduced wasted spend.

Close the loop between ad spend and pipeline

This is the point where a LinkedIn strategy becomes truly measurable. By connecting Campaign Manager data to CRM outcomes, teams can see which campaigns are generating MQLs, which are influencing SQLs, and which are creating opportunities. This creates a much more complete view of efficiency.

Without that connection, optimization becomes reactive and shallow. Teams shift budget based on CTR or CPL because that is all they can see. But once pipeline data is available, decisions become much more strategic. Spend can be moved toward the audiences and offers creating real opportunity volume. This is the core of strong paid media strategy.

Build the Sales and Marketing Feedback Loop

The strongest LinkedIn strategies are built on shared visibility between sales and marketing. Marketing owns spend, targeting, and creative. Sales owns qualification, pipeline progression, and close rate. If those teams are operating in separate systems without shared reporting, neither side has the context needed to improve performance.

This feedback loop should be practical and consistent. Marketing should be reviewing campaign efficiency, audience performance, and creative engagement. Sales should be providing feedback on lead quality, common disqualifiers, and opportunity creation rates. Together, this gives both teams a much clearer understanding of what is working and what needs to change.

This becomes especially important when business goals shift. If Northwind changes its ICP mid-quarter or adjusts its revenue target, both teams need to respond quickly. Shared pipeline visibility makes that possible. It gives the team the flexibility to pivot strategy without losing momentum. That is where long-term efficiency is built. It is not in static campaign setup. It is in how fast the system can learn and adjust.

You can see this type of strategic feedback loop across real B2B case studies where campaign data and pipeline visibility work together to improve performance over time.

Match Budget and Bidding to the Funnel Stage

A strong LinkedIn ads strategy is not just about targeting. It is also about matching spend to buying intent. Too often, B2B teams spread budget evenly across campaigns without considering where each audience sits in the funnel. That creates inefficiency because not every stage deserves the same investment.

At the top of the funnel, the goal is awareness and education. This is where brands should target defined account lists and introduce category messaging to the buying committee. In the middle of the funnel, retargeting becomes more important. This is where engaged users should receive stronger proof points, case studies, or educational assets designed to move them closer to evaluation. At the bottom of the funnel, budget should be focused on high-intent conversion actions like demos or lead gen forms.

Bidding strategy should follow the same logic. Warmer audiences can support higher bids because their probability of conversion is stronger. Colder audiences require more efficient spend because the conversion window is longer. This is where experienced paid social advertising teams separate channel strategy from simple campaign execution.

What a Pipeline-First LinkedIn Ads Strategy Looks Like in Practice

To understand how this works in practice, go back to Northwind Analytics. The team started the quarter with a shared revenue goal, built pipeline targets based on conversion rates, and aligned marketing and sales around the same expectations. LinkedIn campaigns were structured to support those targets, with different audiences mapped to different funnel stages. Instead of judging performance by surface-level platform metrics, the team measured every campaign against MQL creation, SQL progression, and cost per opportunity.

Within the first month, the data revealed something important. One audience segment was generating the lowest cost per lead and the highest click-through rate, which made it look like the strongest performer inside Campaign Manager. But once the team reviewed Salesforce data, they found that another segment was converting into MQLs at nearly double the rate and producing significantly more opportunities. On the surface, it looked less efficient. In the pipeline, it was far more valuable.

That visibility changed the strategy immediately. Budget was reallocated toward the higher-performing segment, targeting was refined using sales feedback, and future creative was adjusted based on what the qualified accounts were responding to. Instead of optimizing toward what looked best in the platform, Northwind optimized toward what was creating the strongest pipeline outcomes. That discipline is what separates campaign management from true strategic execution.

This is also the type of operational framework that informs methodologies like DiscoverabilityOS, where channel performance is measured against business impact rather than isolated marketing metrics.

Turn LinkedIn Ad Spend Into Pipeline

Most B2B teams still optimize LinkedIn ads against platform metrics and stop there. That creates a major blind spot because it disconnects ad performance from actual business impact. Cost per lead may look healthy, but if those leads are not converting into qualified opportunities, the strategy is underperforming regardless of what the platform says.

The better approach is to build LinkedIn campaigns around shared revenue goals, pipeline visibility, and closed-loop reporting. That creates accountability across both marketing and sales while giving teams the insight needed to improve efficiency over time. When the strategy is built this way, LinkedIn becomes more than a lead generation channel. It becomes a predictable pipeline driver.

Directive helps B2B companies build LinkedIn programs that connect ad spend to qualified pipeline through shared goals, CRM visibility, and full-funnel execution. If you want a LinkedIn ads program measured against pipeline instead of platform metrics, explore our LinkedIn advertising agency services.

LinkedIn Ads Strategy FAQs

What is a good CTR for LinkedIn ads?

For B2B sponsored content, a CTR between 0.4% and 0.6% is often considered a healthy benchmark. But CTR should be used as a performance signal, not a business KPI.

Which LinkedIn ads metrics actually matter for B2B?

Cost per MQL, lead-to-MQL conversion rates, MQL-to-SQL conversion rates, pipeline created, and cost per opportunity are the most valuable metrics because they connect directly to revenue.

How do you measure ROI on LinkedIn ads?

ROI is measured by connecting campaign spend to pipeline and revenue through your CRM. This gives visibility into cost per opportunity and revenue influenced rather than relying on cost per lead alone.

What is a good budget for LinkedIn ads in B2B?

The budget should be large enough to consistently reach your ICP and gather meaningful conversion data. For most B2B programs, that usually starts with several thousand dollars per month depending on audience size.

Why advertise on LinkedIn for B2B?

LinkedIn offers unmatched targeting by company, industry, job title, and seniority, which makes it one of the strongest channels for reaching B2B buying committees. Its value comes from precision and pipeline influence, not cheap clicks.

The post How to Build a B2B LinkedIn Ads Strategy That Drives Pipeline, Not Just Leads appeared first on Directive.

Key Takeaways

• LinkedIn’s native targeting is more sophisticated than ever, but it still rests on user-generated profile data that members rarely update.
• That gap between precision and accuracy is where B2B budget leaks: your filters look exact while your audience drifts toward the wrong accounts.
• Targeting off stale data inflates CAC and corrupts the performance data you use to make every future decision.
• The fix sits upstream of the platform. Verify your account list against your ICP before you spend, not after.
• The payoff is lower CAC, cleaner data, and budget that only reaches accounts actually in your market.

LinkedIn still offers the most precise B2B targeting of any platform, and in 2026 it is more capable than ever. It retired its lookalike audiences in early 2024 and replaced them with predictive audiences. Those use machine learning to take a seed of your converters, lead gen form fills, or CRM contacts and expand it toward the members most likely to act. Inventory has pushed past the feed into Connected TV, running against LinkedIn’s professional data through publishers like NBCUniversal and Paramount, or programmatically through Amazon’s DSP. Account-based motions that once needed a standalone tool now run natively. On paper, you have never had more control over which buyers see your ad.

And yet B2B advertisers keep paying LinkedIn’s premium CPMs to reach companies that were never in their market. The reason has not changed in a decade, and it is not the interface. It is the data sitting under every filter. The targeting got smarter. The inputs did not. Precision has climbed while accuracy has stalled. That gap is the single most expensive line in your LinkedIn account, and closing it is what the rest of this piece is about.

LinkedIn’s Targeting Options Are Only as Good as the Data Behind Them

For all the new capability, the levers themselves are familiar. You build a LinkedIn audience by combining attributes: industry, job title, company size, seniority, and skills. Then you layer on your own data through matched audiences and predictive audiences. Matched audiences let you target a company or contact list you upload, retarget people who visited your site, or seed a predictive audience that LinkedIn’s AI expands toward members likely to convert. Used well, it is the strongest demand-capture and account-targeting toolkit in B2B paid social advertising.

The catch is the data. Almost every one of those attributes traces back to something a member typed about themselves. People self-select an industry, write their own job title, and set up a company page once before moving on. Think about your own profile. The title is probably a role behind, and your company page was last touched by someone who left two years ago. Most members are no different. The targeting options that look so exact in Campaign Manager inherit every error in that untended data. A precise-looking audience can still be mostly wrong.

The Fallacy: Why LinkedIn’s Native Targeting Wastes B2B Budget

Directive’s CEO, Garrett Mehrguth, has made the point for years: you cannot trust LinkedIn’s ad targeting until you have manually verified your account list against your ICP. The platform will happily build you a clean-looking audience out of dirty data, and it will charge you full price to reach it.

The industry filter is where this does the most damage, because it is the one marketers over-trust. LinkedIn’s company taxonomy runs to more than 400 classifications, but its ad targeting rolls those up into a far shorter list, so most B2B software companies end up filed under one broad bucket like “Software Development.” That single label is asked to stand in for tens of thousands of distinct businesses. There are more than 30,000 SaaS companies worldwide, and a monitoring platform, a log-analytics tool, and a recruiting-software vendor describe themselves in completely different terms, yet the filter sweeps them all into the same generic category. An observability product would disappear into that bucket, indistinguishable from tools its buyers would never confuse it with. Target the bucket and you pay to reach a crowd that only loosely resembles your market, and your CAC climbs with every impression that lands off-target.

The wasted spend is the obvious cost. The hidden one is worse. When your ads reach the wrong accounts, engagement softens, the clicks you do get fail to convert, and the data those campaigns produce is distorted from the start. Then you optimize against it, shifting budget toward the “best performing” segment and doubling down on creative that “worked,” when both signals were noise. This is not a vanity-metric problem you can shrug off. Optimizing an entire paid program toward accounts that will never buy is a pipeline problem, and it shows up directly in CAC measured against qualified pipeline rather than raw conversions. Clean targeting is what keeps that number honest, and it is the discipline that separates real paid media management from spending into an audience nobody checked.

The Fix Sits Upstream of the Platform

If the problem is the data feeding your targeting, the fix cannot live inside Campaign Manager. It has to happen before you spend, and it comes down to one principle: verify your account list against your ICP first.

That starts with a sharp definition of who you actually sell to, built from the customers you already close and keep rather than the ones you wish you had. The tighter that definition, the better it converts, which is why the most useful version names the vertical, the buying-committee titles, and a company-size range. Use employee count, not revenue, as that size cut, since most private B2B firms never disclose revenue and the tools you validate with lean on headcount anyway. This is the same work that goes into defining your ICP and verified TAM, and it is the foundation everything else rests on. A finished ICP might read: platform and DevOps leaders at mid-market B2B SaaS companies in North America. Specific enough to judge any account against in seconds.

From there, the account list gets validated against that definition before a dollar moves. In practice, rigorous verification routinely removes close to half the accounts on an initial list, which is not a setback but wasted spend cut proactively instead of discovered in a month-end report. At enterprise scale that work is impossible by hand, which is where Stratos AI-powered TAM verification comes in, validating the addressable market across thousands of accounts and feeding only the clean ones into your ad platforms and CRM.

The last move is to run everything off that one verified list. Uploaded as a matched audience, it powers every format you use, from sponsored content to conversation ads to Connected TV, all pointed at the same validated set of accounts. Pushed into your CRM, it gives paid, sales, and reporting a single source of truth on who is genuinely in-market. That alignment is as much a revenue operations problem as a paid one, and solving it is what keeps the whole motion measured against pipeline instead of impressions.

The Payoff: Lower CAC, Cleaner Data, Stronger Pipeline

Verification is work, so here is the return on it. Your budget reaches in-market accounts only, instead of subsidizing a generic industry bucket. Ad relevance climbs and lead quality rises with it, because the people seeing your ads actually match your ICP. Wasted impressions and clicks fall, and CAC falls with them. Most importantly, your performance data finally reflects reality, so every optimization cycle compounds on the last rather than fighting it.

The strategic upside is the one most teams miss. Once you trust your data, you can get aggressive. You can test bolder creative, sharper offers, and newer formats knowing that a win is a win because the audience was right, not because the data lied to you. Clean targeting does not just lower CAC. It buys you the confidence to scale, and it connects your channel performance back to the wider go-to-market strategy instead of leaving it stranded as a line item.

LinkedIn Ad Targeting Best Practices

A few principles keep your targeting honest.

Start narrow. A specific, verified niche will always beat a broad audience that looks bigger in the forecast but converts worse in the pipeline. The instinct to widen reach is usually the instinct to waste budget, because every account you add past your real ICP dilutes the spend that was working.

Verify the account list before you launch, not after. Checking your audience once you have already spent into it only tells you how much you lost. Verifying it upfront keeps that money in market in the first place, which is the entire point.

Target specific companies with a verified company list, not the industry filter. Load that list as a matched audience and you reach the businesses you actually chose. Lean on the industry filter alone and you reach whichever companies happen to share a generic label, most of which you never wanted.

Use employee size as your company-size proxy. Most private B2B firms never disclose revenue, and the enrichment tools you validate against lean on headcount anyway. Size bands built on employee count are far more reliable than ones built on a guessed revenue figure.

Layer matched audiences and predictive audiences on a clean seed, never on raw native data. Predictive audiences amplify whatever you feed them. A verified seed produces a sharp expansion, and a polluted one simply scales the error across a larger audience.

Add exclusions deliberately. Screening out the industries, titles, current customers, and competitors you keep paying to reach is one of the fastest ways to cut wasted spend. Most accounts never set them up, and it shows in their CAC.

Refresh the list on a fixed cadence. Quarterly is a reasonable default, because firmographic data keeps drifting as companies grow, pivot, and reorganize. A list that was clean six months ago is already decaying.

Make Your LinkedIn Targeting More Accurate with Directive

Most B2B teams trust LinkedIn’s targeting because it looks precise. Far fewer can say how much of their spend actually reaches in-market accounts, and how much leaks into a generic industry bucket. That blind spot is what quietly inflates CAC while the dashboards still look healthy.

Directive helps B2B companies make LinkedIn targeting accountable: verifying the account list against the ICP, building matched and predictive audiences on clean data, and tying spend to qualified pipeline instead of impressions. If you want a sharper view of who your budget is actually reaching, see how our LinkedIn advertising team builds verified audiences.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you trust LinkedIn’s ad targeting?

Not on its own. LinkedIn’s filters are accurate only to the extent that members keep their profiles and company pages current, which most do not, so targeting straight off native data routinely reaches out-of-market accounts. Verifying your account list against your ICP before you launch is what makes the targeting trustworthy.

Why is my LinkedIn ad targeting inaccurate?

Because most of the data behind it is user-generated. People self-select an industry, type in their own titles, and rarely update either, so filters like industry and job title inherit years of stale information and your ads drift toward the wrong people.

How do I target specific companies on LinkedIn?

Build a company list from your CRM or a prospecting tool, verify that each account fits your ICP, then upload it as a matched audience for company-list targeting. That reaches named accounts far more reliably than the industry or company-size filters ever will.

What are LinkedIn matched audiences?

Matched audiences let you target your own data: uploaded company or contact lists, website retargeting, and predictive audiences built from a seed list. They are only as good as the list behind them, which is why verifying that list first matters.

How often should I refresh my LinkedIn target account list?

Re-verify on a fixed cadence, with quarterly a sensible default, because firmographic data keeps drifting as companies grow, pivot, and reorganize. Re-running verification also lets you reclaim credits from your data provider for newly mismatched accounts.

The post Why LinkedIn Ad Targeting Fails B2B Advertisers (And How To Fix It) appeared first on Directive.

Like any B2B marketing channel or touchpoint, taking the right approach is essential to ensure sustainable success—and a big fat return on investment for your efforts. Most B2B SaaS brands underinvest in their LinkedIn ad strategy. But here’s the thing…

In the past 12 months, we’ve run $25M of LinkedIn ads for some of the biggest brands in SaaS. We’ve also helped each of our ambitious clients earn a healthy ROI for their LinkedIn marketing efforts.

How did you do that, exactly? You ask. We did this by using our Customer Generation methodology. At the heart of this approach lies a little something called LTV:CAC modeling—a data-driven approach to balance your LinkedIn marketing scales.

Intrigued? Read on and discover the true value of original LinkedIn ads in today’s ultra-competitive B2B SaaS landscape.

The importance of investing enough in LinkedIn ads

According to SproutSocial, 89% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for lead generation. Not all of them get the results they’re looking for from their ad content. One of the biggest culprits for this is underinvestment.

One of the biggest roadblocks we’ve noticed when it comes to underinvestment is SaaS brands getting stuck in the LinkedIn ‘learning phase’ which, in turn, makes it almost impossible to scale.

A failure to define clear cut growth generation goals coupled with misaligned messaging and use of the wrong metrics is also stunting the LinkedIn marketing growth of so many B2B SaaS businesses.

But it doesn’t have to be this way (no way). With an ample level of investment, you can maximize your growth with original LinkedIn ads. Doing so will come with some brand-elevating perks, too…

• Targeted reach for better quality leads
• Enhanced brand awareness and understanding of your product’s USPs
• Measurable results and the ability to evolve your efforts
• More high-value traffic to your landing pages or website
• The chance to connect with prospects on a more personal level

By making LTV:CAC modeling the foundations of your paid LinkedIn marketing strategy, you can consistently maximize your growth while gaining an all-important edge on the competition.

What is  LTV:CAC modeling? Here’s what you need to know

At its core,  LTV:CAC modeling is the concept of comparing your lifetime value (LTV) and customer acquisition costs (CAC).

Here’s a brief definition of these valuable metrics for your reference:

LTV: A metric used to understand how much revenue a client or customer is likely to generate over the course of their relationship with your business.

CAC: This is a metric used to pinpoint the total cost or spend of gaining a new client or customer for your business.

By using these two prime LinkedIn marketing metrics in unison, it’s possible to understand how much it will cost to acquire a customer compared to how much they’ll generate for your business. This approach is pivotal in setting a healthy budget for your advertising activities while allocating your resources accurately.

Leveraging LTV: CAC modeling will help you formulate a sustainable pricing strategy and ultimately, validate LinkedIn as an effective B2B SaaS marketing channel. It’s how you can get the buy-in you need to succeed.

Read: How to use SaaS marketing metrics to track your growth

The steps to building a brand-boosting SaaS LinkedIn ad strategy

Earning sustainable results from LinkedIn marketing may be a bugbear for many SaaS businesses. But, we’ve solved the problem with an approach that allows our clients to confidently take a market share with their exact ICP. Here’s how we do it.

1. Set clear KPIs and metrics

First of all, you need to define clear business goals and set the right KPIs. Why? Well, because your business needs to earn the ability to advertise on LinkedIn. Your strategy needs shape and direction. There are no shortcuts here.

To set effective goals and work with the metrics that will earn sustainable success, here are the drivers you should look at:

1. Are you charging enough to outperform the average cost per customer on LinkedIn (according to our benchmark data)?
2. Do you have a high enough gross margin for your LTV number to be substantial enough?
3. Do you retain your customers long enough to justify the required payback period?

Take the time to answer these questions and you’ll create a solid base for your LinkedIn marketing strategy.

FYI:  Download our practical LTV:CAC analysis example worksheet to shape your data-driven LinkedIn advertising strategy. It’s a methodology we’ve used here at Directive for the past four years—and it works.

2. Model out your expectations

With your goals, KPIs, and metrics firmly in place, you need to start modeling expectations. During this phase of the operation, you need to model potential LinkedIn advertising outcomes based on your existing lifecycle performance.

By looking at the percentages of your marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs) and playing with the spend data from your existing lifecycle will help you gauge how much it costs to acquire a customer while exploring potential outcomes in terms of engagement or performance.

Taking the time to model your expectations using your set KPIs and metrics will give you the tools to allocate your budget wisely while rolling out your LinkedIn ad content as efficiently as possible.

FYI: Use our LTV: CAC worksheet. In the very first column of the worksheet, we’ve added a column labeled “Model”. The goal of this column is to understand how much you can pay to acquire a customer. Put in your current lifecycle stage performance, so what percent of MQLs > SQLs, etc. and then play with the spend data to model various outcomes.

3.  Review your costs per targets

Setting realistic costs per target is pivotal to earning a continually healthy ROI for your LinkedIn advertising content.

If you’ve followed the first two steps, you can now review your cost per lifecycle stage targets and see whether you believe your model or expectations are genuinely realistic.

FYI:  According to our data, fully blended cost per lead (CPL) is around $500 (this is related to the people asking for a demo). By using this data point, you can audit your economic impactors as well as your funnel performance. This will lead you to your ideal budget and empower you to plan your ad content accordingly.

If you find that you need to make tweaks to your costings or strategies, the answer may come in the form of…

• Raising your prices?
• Improving your close rate?
• Increasing retention?
• Lowering the cost of your goods sold?

Read: LinkedIn conversion ads that actually work

LinkedIn for B2B SaaS businesses: Final thoughts…

“If you’re not using LinkedIn for B2B marketing, you’re missing out. It’s a great place to establish yourself as an authority in your industry.”—Jeff Bullas, Social Media Marketing Expert

So, can you really maximize your B2B? Absolutely—if you know your goals, do the work, and do the math.

The key here is not to attempt to drastically lower your CPL to record lows. Instead, the growth potential lies in focusing on improving the actual economic drivers of the business.

There’s an inverse correlation between reducing CPLs in SaaS and boosting ACV, Close Rate, and NRR. This isn’t the kind of consumer advertising where growth derives from the volume of widgets sold. The lesson here? Don’t optimize your ads and content for the wrong things.

While with a targeted approach, Google Ads is a potent lead generation tool—particularly when it comes to targeting high-intent searches—LinkedIn has a colossal level of brand-boosting scope. Get a grip of your LinkedIn marketing strategy and you’ll benefit from expanded brand reach while earning higher conversion rates from assets including lead generation forms.

Now it’s over to you. Follow our LTV: CAC framework and maximize your LinkedIn growth with original content. Oh, and if you need to, hire the right talent to get the job done.

If you need specialist support and expert guidance to optimize your LinkedIn advertising strategy and win big on the commercial battlefield, book a call with us. We have B2B SaaS marketing experts ready to get you where you need to be (and beyond).

The post Maximizing SaaS Growth with LinkedIn Ads: A Strategic Guide for B2B Marketers appeared first on Directive.

By analyzing $55 million in Google and LinkedIn ad spend from leading B2B SaaS players like Outreach, Super Metrics, and AWS—we unearthed some pretty eye-opening insights.

Drilling down into this level of ad spend has certainly refreshed our perspective on paid media for B2B SaaS brands, and we’re going to share our discoveries with you right now.

1. Cost per conversion (CPC) insight

As you may well know, CPC is a critical metric for B2B SaaS brands as it has a direct correlation to ad performance and the efficiency of your budget.

Now, one of the most significant discoveries we made during our analytical journey is that cost per conversion on brand search through Google ads is 212% more expensive for sales-led companies than product-led companies.

This may seem like a steep figure—but it does make sense. Why? A free trial or subscription offer on an ad is far more enticing than the prospect of attending a demo or meeting with a sales rep to experience a product before you even make a buying decision. 

As a result, sales-led model companies can learn from product-led brands and to make their offer more conversion-worthy and user-friendly. Working with actionable product-led CTAs (including free trials, links to succinct landing pages with demo videos or access to live product testing pages) will help you to optimize your CPC for your paid demand generation campaigns.

2. The challenges of monetizing non-branded search

Another big discovery we made concerns non-branded search. Here’s what we found out:

If your average order value (AOV) range is above $500K+ or less than $50K, you should choose your keyword sets with due care and consideration. This is because your costs can literally double compared to a $50K to $500K AOV range. 

To mitigate the situation and earn a healthy return on investment (ROI) from your non-branded search ads across LinkedIn and Google, should narrow your efforts down to high intent keywords—with modifiers—to help searchers self-qualify.

Taking this measured approach will empower your SaaS business to interact with the prospects most likely to engage with your content, optimizing your click-through rates (CTR) and non-branded ad performance in the process.

3. Competitor campaign performance (or lack thereof…)

Many B2B SaaS marketing leads scream about the lead generating value of competitor ad campaigns on the likes of LinkedIn and Google. But let us play devil’s advocate for a moment.

Competitor campaigns are probably burning a giant digital hole in your ad budget. Yes, we’ve discovered that competitor campaigns are the most expensive type of campaign on Google Ads. Here’s the hard truth:

Not every B2B SaaS company can, or should, run competitor campaigns for commercial growth or demand generation. 

Why is this the case? This is because some of the competitor keywords you use may not have a clear cut intent. 

Despite a poorer performance (an undesirable pairing of high costs and a low ROI), the results we’ve seen suggest that you can still drive a solid level engagement from your audience—if you deploy your competitor campaigns correctly.

Monitor high-performing key terms with a fine tooth comb is the best way to derive growth from competitor campaigns should you want to walk that route.

Here are some insider tips for your consideration…

• Exclude ‘login’ as a negative
• Exclude your competitor’s brand name as a negative
• Add exact match keywords for:
• “Competitor Name” + pricing
• “Competitor Name” + reviews
• “Competitor Name” + alternative
• “Competitor Name” + integrations

Read: How to spy on competitor’s keywords with SpyFu

4. Leading with lead gen forms

Without any shadow of a doubt, performance data suggests that lead generation forms outperform landing pages by three times (x3). That’s pretty significant, to say the least.

That said, you should always look to leverage lead gen forms on Linkedin. One of the main reasons for this is that LinkedIn lead gen forms keep users on-platform rather than sending them away to another domain. In turn, an effective and highly-targeted lead gen page can streamline the user experience (UX), hold engagement, and conversion-driving action.

By using the data that users have already served up to LinkedIn when creating their account, you can convert at a higher rate with lead gen forms—utilizing fewer resources for landing pages + tracking in the process.

FYI: Responsive LinkedIn lead gen forms with clearly defined input fields and a definitive CTA are the most likely to convert. Free trial sign ups, video-based product walk-throughs, service signups, quote requests, and practical tools are among the most effective types of lead gen forms on the platform.

5. LinkedIn conversion ads open rates

Another striking discovery we connected with during our $55 million ad spend analysis is the fact that LinkedIn conversion ads have an average open rate of 50%. A toss of the coin figure that sparks  a slew of noteworthy results.

With a $400 cost per conversion and a 50% open rate, we always directly test the performance of SDR teams against conversation ads. This is one of the most underutilized tactics in SaaS marketing today and a surefire way to optimize your paid ad strategy while earning consistently healthy conversion rates.

Key takeaways and final thoughts…

To drive consistent success from your LinkedIn and Google advertising strategy in today’s B2B arena, you have to match your campaigns with your existing business models. Sweating the data is also paramount to sustainable success.

Offline tracking and data integration is key

Optimizing your Google Ads with offline conversion tracking and consolidating your most potent insights into a solid data integration CRM will give you the analytical scope to drive a consistently high performance from your efforts. It’ll give you the edge you need to stand out in your niche and ultimately, build a roster of high-quality customers or clients.

Benchmark your ad performance

By making performance benchmarking a core part of your paid advertising strategy, you’ll gain a clear understanding of what works and what doesn’t. As the likes of BlackBerry and General Motors (pre-bankruptcy) found out (the hard way)—there’s no room for complacency in business.

So, identifying your strengths and weaknesses will give you the insight required to optimize your paid advertising campaigns while continually evolving your efforts in a tech-driven landscape that moves at warp speed.

Working with valuable data from HubSpot and Salesforce, you can set actionable benchmarks and keep working towards constant growth. Defining your specific B2B SaaS business goals clearly will help you define the KPIs and metrics that will maximize your Google and LinkedIn marketing efforts. In turn, you’ll earn a healthy ROI from your paid ad initiatives (which is the aim of the game here).

Gain greater direction with Directive

To date, we’ve utilized our data-driven discoveries and insider paid advertising practices to generate growth and cement success for some of the brightest brands in the SaaS world, including Zapproved and edenhealth. Now we want to give you the tools to thrive.

Book a call with our in-house experts and we’ll work with you to align innovative thinking with your business’s core strategies and drive better results from your paid advertising campaigns. We’re here to help you thrive.

For a deeper dive into the current state of the industry and connect with a treasure trove of invaluable insider insights, download The Verdict—our definitive B2B SaaS report—today.

The post The Lowdown: The $55M value of LinkedIn and Google advertising for B2B SaaS brands appeared first on Directive.

Let’s dive into the step-by-step actions to create a campaign that actually works with these proven LinkedIn conversation ads examples from Directive.

Step 1: Create a new campaign in LinkedIn Campaign Manager

To start, navigate to the LinkedIn Campaign Manager and create a new campaign. Once there, rename the campaign to something relevant and ensure you’re working in the advanced tab before clicking next.

Step 2: Choose between website visits/conversions or lead gen forms

LinkedIn conversation ads offer two primary options (but appear in the ad formats for five objectives): sending users to a website or using a lead generation form. Since this ad type is more expensive, we’d recommend avoiding using these for brand awareness and engagement campaigns. The choice between these options depends on your specific goals:

• If your objective is to have users download an asset or interact with a call-to-action on your website, then choose the website visit or website conversion option.
• If your goal is to incentivize meetings or book demos, opt for the lead gen form, which generally leads to higher conversion rates.

While some may argue that lead gen forms can bring in lower-quality leads, there are strategies available to optimize their effectiveness.

Step 3: Set up your campaign targeting

Target a specific audience you want to craft messaging to that makes sense for their job title, industry, etc. In this example, we’re targeting 800-900 C-level marketing professionals in Canada and the US.

Utilize LinkedIn’s extensive targeting options, such as job titles, industries, company sizes, and geographic locations layered on top of your first-party, manually verified Total Addressable Market list (that you can upload via CSV file in LinkedIn’s audiences).

By layering multiple targeting criteria, you’ll improve the relevance and personalization of your ads and ensure that every send is to someone your sales team can sell to.

Exclusions layered on the campaign are an element of targeting that is just as important, if not more, than the inclusions. Continuously maxing out the number of exclusions you add to your campaign will help hone your audience targeting to exactly who you need to hit.

You can easily do this by routinely reviewing the demographics for the campaign and deciding whether a job title, job seniority, company size, etc., is a fit. If they are not, you can add them to the exclusions and cut down on wasted spend.

For example, even with all of the exclusions we use we still can see Advisor, Member, Board Member, Founder, and Co-Founder in our demographics for the campaign.

Be sure to test different targeting combinations to determine the most effective approach for your specific campaign. Since this approach creates smaller target audience sizes, you want to find more opportunities you might be missing.

For example, by layering industry and job titles while excluding your TAM list, you will only pull net new companies outside your TAM.

Lastly, ensure “Enable Audience Expansion” is not selected for a more focused approach.

Step 4: Establish your budget and bid

Set a higher initial daily budget and bid high to win the auction to send a message, keeping in mind the 21-day limit per person. With the updates LinkedIn recently rolled out to conversation ads (which are currently still ramping up – the tentative release schedule will have 100% of accounts ramped by early September 2023), members can see the same ad up to 3 times in 7 days, so you can reach more of your target audience more often.

• Not everyone will view the messages at the same time, so bidding high initially is important.
• Although the recommended bid might be around 40 cents, bidding high increases your chances of being sent first.
• The maximum bid limit is $300, but most campaigns don’t reach that amount; they usually stay between $4 and $20.
• Many people don’t bid high, so your actual spending will likely be lower than your bid.

Step 5: Choose a sender

Select a sender whose title is closely associated with the person being marketed to, ideally within the same department. For example, if you’re marketing to Chief Marketing Officers or Heads of Demand Generation, a sender with a title like ‘Director of Marketing’ will be more effective.

• Consider using someone at your company who is highly engaged and has a strong following on LinkedIn, as this can lead to increased open rates.
• Ensure the sender’s title is relevant to the target audience for better engagement.
• Avoid using sales titles unless you’re marketing to salespeople.
• Female senders often have a 5% higher open rate compared to male senders.

Step 6: Design your ad message

This is where the magic happens. Use a blank template to create the ad and include details about the incentive. This can be as simple as offering a gift card for scheduling an intro call.

In the description, give people more insight into what the call is about to set their expectations.

LinkedIn’s lead generation form auto-fills fields like first name, last name, job title, company name, company size, and industry, which helps maintain high conversion rates.

For work email addresses, not everyone has one on their LinkedIn profile. You can create a custom field that requires manual input, which may slightly lower conversion rates but will likely result in more work emails being collected. This decision depends on your organization’s priorities.

LinkedIn also recently added an option to validate the work email field which will restrict members from submitting common personal emails (i.e. gmail, hotmail, etc.), therefore improving the quality of emails collected but impacting the overall submission rate.

In the next message, mention the incentive again and provide a scheduling link using a tool like Chili Piper. This allows prospects to book calls directly instead of waiting for your sales team to reach out. Incorporating a scheduling link has been shown to significantly improve conversion rates.

• Craft a compelling ad message that highlights the incentive and provides context for the call.
• Utilize LinkedIn’s auto-fill feature to streamline the lead generation process.
• Offer a scheduling link in the confirmation message to facilitate direct bookings and boost conversion rates.

Step 7: Design an offer that converts

Create an enticing offer that combines both the incentive and the value of your service or product. To design an offer that effectively converts, follow these guidelines:

1. Highlight the incentive: Lead with a gift card or other incentive you’re offering, but ensure it complements the overall value of the call or meeting.
2. Emphasize the value: Clearly communicate the benefits of the call or meeting, such as innovative marketing strategies or valuable insights tailored to the prospect’s needs.
3. Include social proof: Showcase your credibility by adding testimonials, case studies, or mentioning well-known clients you’ve worked with. This helps build trust and demonstrates the effectiveness of your services.
4. Outline your services: Provide a brief overview of your services, ensuring they align with the prospect’s interests and pain points. This helps prospects understand how your offerings can help them achieve their goals.
5. Reiterate the incentive and add a scheduling link: Remind prospects of the gift card or other incentive and include a scheduling link in the thank you message after they submit the lead gen form. This reinforces the meeting’s value, encourages action, and streamlines the booking process in full-funnel campaigns.

By carefully crafting your offer and highlighting the incentive alongside the value of your services, you can create a compelling message that drives conversions and increases engagement with your LinkedIn conversation ads.

Conclusion: Master LinkedIn Conversation Ads and Crush Your Goals

There you have it – the key ingredients for crafting great conversational ads that truly work and keep you ahead of the competition.

By implementing these proven strategies, such as engaging ad messages, appealing offers, and convenient scheduling links (for a seamless booking experience), you’ll effectively capture your target audience’s attention and drive conversions.

Remember to test, adjust, and test again to optimize your campaigns. After all, achieving marketing success requires a blend of data-driven decisions and creative flair.

LinkedIn Conversation Ads FAQ:

Q: What are LinkedIn Conversation Ads?

A: LinkedIn Conversation Ads (sometimes known as conversation starter ads) is an innovative marketing solution designed to engage your target audience with personalized, interactive messages. These ads foster meaningful conversations by delivering tailored content, strategic offers, and seamless scheduling links, ultimately driving conversions and enhancing your brand’s presence on the platform.

Q: How do I track and measure the performance of my LinkedIn Conversation Ads?

A: You can track and measure the performance of your conversation ads with three tools in LinkedIn: reports, flow charts, and demographics.

Using LinkedIn’s reporting, you can select Sponsored Messaging in the columns, which will pull up all metrics relevant to conversation ads. The most impactful to monitor are:

• Open Rate: Total opens divided by total sends. It’s good to be mindful of the rate in which your conversation ads are opened, especially with the recent delivery changes made by LinkedIn.
• Click to Open Rate: Percentage of people who clicked after opening your InMail (clicks divided by opens). This will help you understand if your first message (and offer) is engaging enough to warrant a click once the recipient has opened your ad.
• Leads: This one is self-explanatory.
• Cost Per Lead: Amount spent per lead collected. You should expect higher CPLs from conversation ads since they are more expensive. The better and more enticing your offer, the lower the CPL.
• Lead Form Opens: Number of times a member opened a lead form. This helps you get a sense of how often someone is making it through your flow to the lead gen form.
• Lead Form Completion Rate: Percentage of opened forms that were submitted (form submissions divided by form opens). This one’s important. This will let you know how well your Lead Gen Form is working. If there is a low completion rate, evaluate if you are asking for too much information or if you are clearly explaining what they get out of submitting the form.
• Metrics from your CRM: We look at Intro Calls Scheduled, Intro Calls Held, all the way down to Closed Won and the amount of the deal. This helps us evaluate the LTV:CAC ratio and if the ROI is there.

With the Conversation Ad Flowchart, you can view the number of clicks received for each call-to-action button in your conversation ad. You can also optimize the performance of your conversation ads by reviewing the engagement with each action available in your ad and changing out pieces of the flow where you see clicks drop off. If you edit a conversation ad, the flowchart only displays clicks from the most recent version of the ad. All other reporting tools and exported reports include clicks from all versions of the ad. Demographic reporting for your conversation ads is available at the account, campaign group, campaign, and ad level in Campaign Manager. The Demographics section provides reporting on the demographic dimensions associated with the people who interacted with your ads and outlines areas you can improve your targeting at the campaign level:

• Job function
• Job title
• Company
• Company industry
• Job seniority
• Company size
• Location
• Country

Q: What are the targeting options and best practices for LinkedIn Conversation Ads?

A: On LinkedIn, you can target members using profile-based professional attributes, re-target visitors from your website or ad engagement, and upload lists of contacts or companies from your TAM list. Below are the targeting options you’ll find when building your campaign:

• Location and Language
• Company: Company Name, Company Industry, Company Followers, Company Growth Rate, Company Category, and Company Size
• Job Experience: Job Functions, Job Seniority, Job Titles, Member Skills, and Years of Experience
• Education: Degrees, Fields of Study, and Member Schools
• Interests & Traits: Member Interests, Member Groups, and Member Traits
• Demographics: Age and Gender

Best practices are:

• Layer your TAM list with LinkedIn targeting to create small sized audiences.
• Create an enticing offer and attention-grabbing message that resonates with that specific audience.
• Choose a sender that aligns with that audience.
• Use Lead Gen Forms to create less friction.
• Optimize for both a mobile and desktop view.
• Take advantage of a scheduling tool like ChiliPiper to improve user experience and give more time back to sales.

Q: Are there any specific guidelines or restrictions for creating LinkedIn Conversation Ads content?

A: Your ads must comply with LinkedIn’s typical advertising policies in order to pass their review. You can find the policy here.

• Sender: You can only select from available senders. You must be connected to a person on LinkedIn if you want to add them as a sender.
• Intro message:
  • Your limit is 8,000 characters, including spaces, emojis, and punctuation. You can use up to 10 emojis in the intro message field.
  • Rich text options like bulleting, italics, and bolding are available, although we recommend keeping the formatting simple and conversational since you’re in a conversation space.
  • The intro message field is automatically populated with a sample message, including macro support, which makes it easier and quicker for you to create a custom message. The Insert custom fields dropdown lists the available macros, which include the recipient’s first name, last name, company name, job title, or industry.
  • A tooltip provides information about creating impactful messages, and a dynamic feedback recommendation is enabled for more than 500 characters (as fewer characters can drive higher engagement).
• Call-to-action button text: You can use up to 25 characters, including spaces and punctuation. The maximum amount of CTA buttons you can create per message is five.
• Message Content: You can use up to 8,000 characters, including spaces, emojis, and punctuation but LinkedIn recommends 500. The longer your message, the more time for someone to decide they don’t want to take action. You can use up to 10 emojis per message layer in a conversation ad campaign, but we’ve found no more than three works best.
• Rich text options like bulleting, italics, and bolding are available, but they recommend keeping the formatting simple and conversational since you’re in a conversation space. The less it sounds like a sales pitch, the better.
• Destination URL: URLs must have the http:// or https:// prefix and can use up to 2,000 characters for the destination link.

The post LinkedIn Conversation Ads that Actually Work [With Examples] appeared first on Directive.

Facebook Ads gets all the attention for B2C brands, but LinkedIn is the powerhouse platform for B2B brands when it comes to every kind of marketing.

And while LinkedIn is great for all B2B brands, it’s invaluable for SaaS companies. 

LinkedIn is a high-value platform, and in this post we’re going to take a close look at how to implement a strong B2B LinkedIn strategy specifically for SaaS brands. 

Why SaaS Brands Need to Be Using LinkedIn 

We strongly recommend that all of our SaaS clients use LinkedIn to expand their reach, build brand awareness, and grow their userbase. LinkedIn’s organic and paid advertising options are both highly effective for B2B brands, and it shouldn’t be overlooked. 

Understanding the Role LinkedIn Plays in B2B Marketing 

LinkedIn is so valuable for B2B marketing because it’s a professionally-focused platform; this makes it unique compared to other social media networking sites.

People are on LinkedIn thinking about work (as opposed to Facebook or Instagram, where they might be uploading a picture of last weekend’s #drunkBBQ). This means that they’re open to content about their jobs or in their industry, which isn’t something they may want to do on their downtime.

They’ll be more receptive to both organic and paid content from SaaS brands on LinkedIn, making your campaigns more effective while you’re still reaching people on a personal level. 

Why “B2B” Needs to Be Reframed 

One quick note— there’s this old misconception that “B2B” is really about businesses selling to businesses. It’s all cold facts and logic and you need to appeal to a corporation.

That’s not the case; your customers are always individuals, and you need to appeal to them even if you’re selling to customers who are purchasing on behalf of a business. This is one of the 5 core principles of our Customer Generation Methodology. 

LinkedIn allows you to approach individuals when they’re in the right frame of mind to be open to content and offers, building real relationships and creating strong networks that go beyond cheap sales pitches. 

How to Create a B2B LinkedIn Strategy for Your SaaS Brand  

Ready to create a B2B LinkedIn strategy that will help you attract new SaaS users, build brand awareness, and expand your reach?

We’ve got you covered. 

We’re going to walk you through the process of setting up a powerful SaaS LinkedIn strategy that utilizes a strong organic marketing foundation to put the right pieces in place, and then accelerates growth using paid ads. 

Let’s dive in. 

1. Create a Strong Company Page 

Every SaaS brand needs a solid Company Page on LinkedIn. It will show up in search, and it gives your brand a place to post updates and collect followers. It also allows you to run company ads, which will be important later.

Every Company Page should:

• Include your brand logo as the profile picture 
• Highglight your brand’s USP and core use cases
• Have every field completed (including the company description)
• Have regular posts so that it doesn’t look abandoned or forgotten 

2. Encourage Your Team to Post Regularly (& Do So Yourself!) 

One of the best ways to start to gain traction with LinkedIn marketing is to have individual team members creating content regularly. 

B2B marketing isn’t just businesses sending automated messages to the other’s inboxes, remember; it’s people forming connections with people.

To put it simply, this particular LinkedIn strategy treats your (willing!) employees like brand advocates and influencers. 

Having team members share updates or post content that mentions your brand allows you to start building momentum and leveraging your team’s network for your brand overall. And the reach on LinkedIn is exceptional; when someone interacts with your team member’s content, all of their followers may see that interaction and thus the post. 

3. Share High-Value, Actionable Content 

Actionable content is going to be a core focus on your LinkedIn B2B marketing strategy. Or at least it should be! 

Valuable content that gives people actionable, practical tips or that shares industry insights will be what’s most widely shared on the platform. It has the best engagement and reach, and it can have the most significant impact on your brand awareness as a whole. 

This content should:

• Be as short or long as needed to offer value 
• Offer a unique or original take in some way, even if it’s just written creatively 
• Explain why users should take any specific steps that you’re recommending
• Highlight your expertise and demonstrate credibility 

4. Grow Your Network Proactively 

LinkedIn marketing is like dating; you don’t want to just sit around and hope that someone comes up to you. Sure, they might… but why wait?

It’s better to be proactive and be the one to reach out to people. Grow your network intentionally and proactively on your core team members’ personal accounts. 

As you grow your network, keep the following in mind:

• Send connection requests to relevant users who could actually benefit from your content (quantity matters, but never at the sake of quality and relevance)
• Include a message with your connection request 
• Do not greet all new connection requests with an immediate sales pitch 
• Accept incoming connection requests 

You can also tag other creators or interact with other users’ posts to expand the reach of your personal profile, which will help you attract interested connections. The more active you are on LinkedIn, the better your results will be. 

5. Use LinkedIn Ads to Reach Your Target Audience 

LinkedIn Ads can be undeniably effective; plenty of research shows that. And you can use them in multiple different ways, which we’ll look at over the next few sections.

First though, know that you can use LinkedIn Ads to reach cold members of your target audience to push them into the sales funnel. Whether you want to start at a “learn more about our tool” right away, or to promote content for follows or a lead magnet for an email address, there are plenty of strategic options here.

You can always use a full-funnel approach that starts with a content-centered approach (like promoting a post, or a lead magnet), a video to introduce the tool, and then an ad prompting users to start their free trial.

There are plenty of targeting options here, too, including:

• Demographic targeting (including by job title, company, or industry)
• Location targeting
• Lookalike audiences that allow you to reach users most like high-value custom audiences 

6. Use LinkedIn Ads to Retarget Warm Audiences 

Once you have users in your sales funnel in some way (whether they follow your Page on LinkedIn, have interacted with an ad, or have taken a certain action on your site), you can use LinkedIn’s retargeting options to reach back out to warm audiences.

This can help move interested users through the sales funnel. That may mean getting leads to sign up for a free trial, getting users to convert to paid customers, or even promoting new features as a cross-sell or upsell to existing users. 

7. Use LinkedIn Ads for Account-Based Marketing Strategies 

LinkedIn Ads is one of the most effective platforms for account-based marketing strategies and account-based advertising.

Account-based marketing is the practice of actively marketing to specific individual companies directly instead of just casting a wide net and seeing who bites.

A SaaS company might try to market specifically to a large company like Microsoft, for example, knowing it’s a high-value company. 

And LinkedIn’s Ads allow you to target decision making users at individual companies. You can create hyper-relevant ads specifically for the decision makers at each individual company. Once you do your research, you may be able to identify core pain points or needs. This will make your ads more effective, especially if you’re using lead ads for LinkedIn lead generation.

How to Measure the Success of Your B2B LinkedIn Strategy  

An important component of B2B LinkedIn marketing, of course, isn’t just the strategy itself: It’s assessing the impact of those marketing efforts.

Let’s take a look at a few different ways you should be measuring the success of your B2B LinkedIn strategy. 

Watch for Increased Engagement On-Platform 

Increased on-platform engagement is going to be a good sign that your LinkedIn marketing is having an impact on brand awareness. 

Look for indicators like shares, brand mentions, Company Page follows, and increased engagement on brand-related posts. All of this can be found in your LinkedIn analytics. 

Track Vital Ad Metrics 

As you start running ad campaigns, it’s essential to track their performance.

The results you’ll track will vary depending on the objectives of your campaigns, but may include:

• Video views or video view completion rates
• Clicks
• Lead forms completed 
• Actions taken like a brand follow

Assess The Quality of the Leads You’re Attracting 

As users click on your ads or organic posts and come to your site, it’s imperative to keep an eye on whether or not that traffic is doing anything for you.

You can use Google Analytics to keep an eye on traffic coming from LinkedIn and seeing what happens next. Are they converting at decent rates? Are they signing up for free trials? And if so, are they converting to customers? Which pricing level are they joining at, and how long do they retain?

It is possible to end up attracting clicks that will never convert; recognizing this can help you determine how to shift your campaigns messaging and targeting to ensure that you’re reaching high-value members of your target audience. 

B2B LinkedIn Strategy That Drives SQLs 

One of the best parts of a strong B2B LinkedIn strategy is that it enables your brand to generate solid SQLs on an ongoing basis. People get familiar with your brand through organic and paid marketing options, allowing for a full-funnel marketing approach, so that they’re more likely to convert once they start that free trial.

As a result, LinkedIn is one of our top marketing platforms here at Directive Consulting, as it meets all of our criteria for our 5 principles of our Customer Generation Methodology. It allows for a customer-led approach that prioritizes first-party data and SQLs over MQLs to get SaaS brands real results. 

Want to learn more about the marketing strategies we use to help our clients attract SQLs? Learn about our Customer Generation Methodology here. 

The post The Best B2B LinkedIn Strategy for SaaS Brands appeared first on Directive.

Waiting for your ideal customer to discover you is not a powerful position to be in, nor a successful one. It is a daunting question that many digital marketers face: how can you reach your total addressable market efficiently without wasting your paid ad platform budgets?

Most platforms have a multitude of demographic and interest-based targeting options to reach new users. While you can layer various options together to build an audience you think may respond well, you can remove the guesswork and use your actual data from ad platforms to learn from through the use of lookalike audiences.

This effectively allows your department to market to prospects who are the right fit for the products or services you offer through the use of lookalike audiences.

Maximizing Potential on Key Audiences

Lookalike audiences can be a viable option to find new individuals that closely match users who have previously purchased, signed-up, or converted on your offerings. This can depend on your advertising goal.

Lookalike audiences are based on your curated audiences that exist/can be built within the various ad platforms. These audiences are referred to as source audiences.

Source audiences are most commonly site visitors or manually uploaded lists (customer emails, companies, etc.). Because you provide the source list, you can build different types of lookalike audiences that accomplish a variety of advertising goals.

These goals include awareness, lead generation, and engagement. This takes the guesswork out of the targeting options available, leaving more control in your hands and mitigating wasted ad spend.

Let’s look at a few examples and how much we can efficiently increase our reach by:

In the screenshot below, you can see the original list of marketing qualified leads that were uploaded into Facebook was below 1,000. Through the use of the lookalike audience functionality, the audience size increased by +2,100%, translating to over 2,100,000 people to advertise to.

Similar results can be seen in the example below.

On LinkedIn, an account-based marketing list was uploaded, and through the use of lookalikes, the total audience with similar characteristics increased by 436%. This allows the team to efficiently continue to focus on their ABM accounts and market to an audience similar to our ideal customer profile. This combination helps us to hit our MQL goal.

While the name is a bit different on Google (similar audiences), the concept is the same as a lookalike. Below, we can see that Google generated a list of 300,000 – 500,000 users similar to those converting on our website.

That’s a pool 417% larger than the original.

With a larger potential to efficiently scale your campaigns, using these features is a no-brainer. Let’s take a look at a few strategies you can utilize through the use of lookalike audiences.

Setting Yourself Up For Success

The key to lookalike audience success is ensuring you have a high-quality source audience. If you are confident in the quality of your source audience, your lookalike should work efficiently, as your new audience will be similar to your existing ones.

Outlined below are various methods to leverage to build your lookalike audiences.

Customer Lists

No matter the vertical you are marketing in, chances are, you have a list of customer email addresses. By using a customer list as a source audience, you’ll be able to reach new people who have similarities to your current customers. These people are likely to become new customers.

Google, Linkedin, and Facebook allow you to upload customer email lists. A common concern with custom lists is privacy. However, this is not an issue as their data is kept private and is only used by the platform to discover new users.

This is a useful tactic, as you are essentially building a copy of your existing customer base to scale your campaigns efficiently. For the highest ROI opportunity, segment your source list to high-value customers, to reach people likely to buy more often, spend more money, have a larger contract size, etc.

Customer Lists Are Effective For:

• Scaling/improving transactions
• Lead generation

Form Fills

If your marketing efforts are focused on lead generation, lookalike audiences based on form fills are a strategic tactic. With form fills, you can discover other users with a similar intent to those that previously filled out your form.

For this tactic to work, ensure that there are dedicated “thank you” pages that a user lands on after filling out a form. By creating a source audience based on “thank you” pages (this could be for a demo request, pricing inquiry, industry report, etc.), you can build an audience, based on the intent of the users who are in the market for, or doing their research around what you offer.

If you offer transactional options on your website and post-purchase users are lead to a “thank you” page, you can also build audiences from that URL to be used in a lookalike audience. This powerful tactic creates a lookalike based on a pool of users who have spent money on your site.

Form Fills Are Effective For:

• Scaling transactions
• Lead generation

Login Pages

If your site has a member’s login section or your services or products are hosted online, you can build a source audience from the traffic that goes to your login page (ex:https://www.netflix.com/Login).

The people who travel to and use your site’s login pages are likely current members/customers/account holders. Building a lookalike from these users is a smart way to discover similar people to the ones logging into your site. You can accomplish this by having your source audience target the URL of the login page. From that point, you would build the lookalike audience.

Login Pages Are Effective For:

• Driving relevant traffic

Engaged Users

If your focus is building brand awareness or website traffic, basing lookalike audiences on engaged users is smart. This method will lead you to more users who will interact with your content.

Facebook has some excellent options for this, as you can create custom audiences based on engagement. When creating a new custom audience on Facebook, utilize one of the following.

• For “Video”, you can build source audiences based on how much of your video they watched.

• With the amount of video that users regularly consume on Facebook, this audience is an efficient way to scale and spread awareness for your brand.

• For the “Instagram business profile” you’ll have several options available to mix, match, and adjust, including “criteria type” and “time window”. You can also include or exclude more people based on available criteria shown.

• For “Facebook Page”, the setup and options are similar as above but have different criteria available to choose from.

In Google Ads, you can also create source audiences based off of video. When building a new audience in Audience Manager, select “YouTube users”.

• Here, you can adjust your source audience options including “List members”, “YouTube channel”, “Initial list size”, and “Membership duration” (how long users remain in your audience). Clicking on “List members” will give you your main targeting criteria.

• Here is where you decide what type of engagement you are looking to build off of from your YouTube channel.

Use the above source audiences to create lookalikes based on whichever engagement criteria you aim to meet with your Facebook or Google campaign.

Engaged Users Are Effective For:

• Brand awareness
• Further engagement

Key Content Pages

If you have key pages (demo videos, blog pages, guides, etc.), on your site that are visited heavily, then you have new source audiences you can build. Target those URLs. Then, build lookalikes from the audiences to reach more aligned users.

An example of this would be our “Top 5 B2B Marketing Ideas for 2019” post shown below.

This post shows as a featured snippet on Google and ranks well organically for a relevant keyword, “B2B Marketing”. Our team can confidently believe that visitors to this page include B2B marketers.

Because this audience is a part of our ideal customer profile, creating a lookalike means reaching more of our addressable market, at a fraction of the cost of traditional paid advertising.

Key Content Is Great For:

• Brand awareness
• Driving relevant traffic
• Top-of-funnel content strategy

Steps to Clone Your Audience

Once the foundation has been set with robust source audiences, you can begin to build lookalike audiences across many different ad platforms. Below we’ll walk you through how to create them on some of the most popular paid advertising platforms- Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Ads.

Facebook

The first step is to make sure you have created and set up your Facebook pixel if you plan on using your website data. The Facebook pixel allows you to build audiences based on specific pages users have visited on your site. Additionally, you can create lookalike audiences based on uploaded lists.

1. In the platform, click “Ads Manager” to open the navigation window, and go to “Audiences”.

2. In the audiences, click “Create Audience” then “Lookalike Audience.

3. Here, you can choose your source audience. Either search for an audience you already have built, or create a new source.

• For this example, we’ll create a new Custom Audience. If you have LTV (lifetime value) available, use it! It will build a stronger audience based on your valuable customers. If not, go ahead with “Custom Audience”, which we’ll review in this example.

• Next, choose where you want to source your audience from. Select “Website Traffic” if you’re going to target a particular page on your website, or “Customer List” to build based on your customers. Select “Video” if you want to discover people who watch your content, or another option if it correctly matches your brand’s business goals.

Today, we’ll use “Website traffic” and target the “Thank You” page of one of our website assets.

Example of a “Thank You” page: page that appears after a user completes a desired conversion action.

4. Once you have revised the set-up of your source audience, input your audience location, and select your audience size.

• It is worth noting here that the higher the percent is that you choose on the bottom slider bar (shown above), the larger your audience will become. The smaller the percent you choose, the closer it will resemble your source audience.
• Once you decide on your location and size, click “Create Audience” and you’re done. Utilize this audience in an upcoming Facebook campaign. With the audience we created above, we can expect to reach people with similar characteristics to those who have downloaded our B2B Guide eBook.

Note: Your audience will grow over time. The original size will be minor but will continue to develop over the next day or so.

LinkedIn

Like Facebook, if you plan on using a website audience here, make sure your LinkedIn Insights Tag is set up. Manual list uploads are also possible on this platform.

1. In the LinkedIn Campaign Manager, go to your “Account Assets” and click on “Matched Audiences”.

2. Once on the Matched Audiences page, click on the “Create Audience” button to the left and select “Lookalike”.

• If you have not created a source audience, you’ll need to do that first before selecting “Lookalike”. On LinkedIn, you can create an audience based on website URLs or list uploads. List uploads can include email addresses or company names/websites.

3. From here, name your audience and then select your ideal source audience. After doing this, click “Create” and you’re done.

Note: After creating, your audience will begin to populate. Keep in mind; it may take more than 24 hours to fully build and be ready to be used in a campaign.

Google Ads

Google technically does not use “lookalike” audiences, but tries to accomplish the same idea using “similar audiences”. If you plan on utilizing website audiences, make sure you’ve installed the Google Ads Remarketing tag, or the Analytics tag. This is important if you are going to use Google Analytics to send your audience to Google Ads, and your accounts are linked.

1. In your Google Ads account, on the top-left navigation bar, click “Tools & Settings”, then “Audience Manager”.

2. Google automatically creates similar audiences based on any established audience (website visitors, app users, YouTube users, customer lists) you have in your Google Ads account. If you do not have any audiences, click the blue “+” button, then select what type of source audience you’d like to use:

3. Select your source audience type and follow the in-platform instructions to create.

• You will have the options of “Website visitors” (URL-based), app users, “YouTube users”, or a “Customer list”. “Custom combinations” are not available with similar audiences.

4. Once created, Google will automatically create a similar audience you can use and find in your Audience Manager* to add to your prospecting campaigns.

*Source audience must meet eligibility requirements. If Google is unable to find enough statistically significant similarities, it will not be eligible to use. The larger the pool, the more data Google has to work with and more likely you’ll end up with a similar audience.

Data-driven Approach to Reach the Right Audience

If you know your target audience and utilize Google Analytics data consistently, you’re improving your chances of creating a more efficient audience. But even this tactic can be inconsistent when building from a wide variety of different demographics or interest-based targeting options.

Instead, feed the ad platforms your valuable data to find statistically significant similarities. This can be used to double down on high performing audiences/pages and efficiently scale your prospecting campaigns. Not to mention, the lookalike audience setup is simple and won’t take too much time for you or a team member to implement.

Keep in mind; these audiences are not 100 percent guaranteed to work, as is the case with most paid advertising strategies. So, monitor your campaigns and test various types of targeting options against each other. Find a mix that works for your product, business, and brand.

The post Untapped Opportunity – Lookalike Audiences for LinkedIn, Facebook and Google Ads appeared first on Directive.

LinkedIn’s ability to target companies, job functions, and job seniority makes its advertising platform the perfect tool to promote your content. However, the LinkedIn advertising costs are high compared to other platforms such as paid search management, generally between $6-$9/click, which can be a turnoff to many people.

Also, the inability to do ad scheduling means spend will be wasted on unprofitable time periods.Fortunately, there are other ways to control your spend and make sure that you are efficient with your LinkedIn dollars.

Below are seven simple ways to reduce your LinkedIn ad spend:

1. Be Creative With Your Ads

Click-through-rate is an essential percentage to be aware of when reviewing LinkedIn advertising costs. If your ads are not clicked on, they will end up in a lower position in the feed, and your cost-per-conversion will rise.

Not ideal! The easiest way to combat this is by creating attractive ads.

What do I mean by this?

With LinkedIn, two elements you want to focus on are the ad description and image.

For the image, you want a picture that catches a user’s attention on their feed. However, you also want the image to be relevant to the offer that you are promoting.

Putting statistics in the ad image, as well as starting the description with a direct question to the visitor are two tactics that we have seen perform well in LinkedIn.

See below:

Both of these methods help your ad stand out from the ever so familiar stock images, and by using a question in your copy, visitors feel as if they are being understood. These methods are worth testing in your LI strategy.

Higher click-through-rates = more significant CPC discounts by LinkedIn.

2.  Choose the Right Audience Size

With LinkedIn having the best targeting of any ad platform, there may be an urge for you to over-target and have too many target parameters for your ideal audience. This would be a HUGE mistake.

While you want your audience to be targeted, you also want enough people to click on your ad to opt into your offer. Keep in mind that unlike social media sites such as Facebook, people only use LinkedIn for a particular reason (looking at posts on industry trends,) and for a small amount of time during their day.

So, to target an audience of only a few thousand, you would have to hope that enough of your target audience is logged into the platform to be able to see your ad in the first place. If your audience is too small, you run the risk of not having enough people to engage with your ad, which will lower click-through rate (CTR) and increase your cost/click.

So, the next time you assemble your LinkedIn target audiences, aim for between 30,000-90,000 people. This is an appropriate audience size that will ensure you are getting clicks on your ads to achieve a stable click-through rate that will lower your ad costs.

3.  Bid Low (at least to start with)

When it comes to bidding, what many advertisers do is enter the recommended bid set by LinkedIn:

This is a good option if you want to get an acceptable amount of impressions and clicks, but a better choice is to place the starting bid just above the minimum floor. If LinkedIn’s minimum bid is $4.75 (as pictured below), set the bid to $5.00 to start.

By setting the bid low, and tracking daily spend for the first few days, you can tell if your bid is placed high enough.

If you are not spending your budget throughout the day, your ads are not getting enough reach, so you can raise your bids higher. If you are using all of your spend, then you know you are receiving the right amount of clicks and that your bid is fine as is.

Remember: Bid low and right above the floor for what LinkedIn allows you to do. Monitor your spend levels throughout the first few days. You’ll thank me later!

4.  Change to CPM Bidding

The goal on LinkedIn is for your ads to perform above a 1% click-through-rate so you can switch your ads to cost-per-impression(CPM) bidding.

LinkedIn, similar to Google, gives bid discounts on ads that get clicked on. Having above a 1% CTR and switching to CPM bidding will mean you are getting three times the average response rate and bidding below the floor (could be below $1/click).

If you are interested in learning more about how CPM bidding works, check out AJ Wilcox’s blog post on LinkedIn bidding.

5. Break Up Your Audiences

Advertisers new to LinkedIn usually use the following process:

1) Create ads around their offer.  

2) Add job titles, seniority and functions they want to target into one campaign.

3) Set budget and run ads.

However, this is a huge mistake.

The problem when you add all targeting parameters to one campaign is that you cannot segment your data. LinkedIn only gives you the performance amongst the entire target audience, not individual job titles, job functions or companies.

Let’s use the target audience above as an example. If you are targeting job functions, instead of lumping together marketing, administrative, finance, and operations, create separate campaigns for each of these job functions.

By separating your audiences this way, you will get more granular data and see which audience your offer is performing well for. This allows you to pause campaigns with poor performing audiences and re-allocate that budget to better-performing ones.

6. Make Sure You Have The Right Offer

Ensuring that you have the appropriate offer for LinkedIn is critical, not only to reduce ad spend but to find success on the platform. To do this, let’s take a look at the content funnel for LinkedIn. 

TOFU(Top-of-Funnel) offers – Infographics, blog posts

MOFU(Middle-of-Funnel) offers – Whitepapers, webinars, eBooks, (gated content assets)

BOFU(Bottom-of-Funnel) offers – Trial, demo offer

With LinkedIn, people are at the top of the awareness funnel. Some may have heard of your company or product, but many have not. Offering free trials or demos to people at the top of the awareness stage is a misalignment in intent and will lead to high CPA, low CTR, and overall, low conversion rates.

Also, sending people to infographics and blog posts where personal information is not being collected is a waste of spend and will lead to high spend, high CPA and low conversion rates. Given how expensive LinkedIn advertising costs can get, unless you are receiving a prospect’s contact information in exchange for the content that you offer, it is not worth your time to use the platform.

To decrease CPA and ensure ad spend is not wasted, offer gated content assets that solve a problem related to your product or service. These are lower friction offers where the value still exceeds the cost someone has to pay by putting their personal information into a form.

7. Test Your Advertising Elements on Your Organic Feed

Having a strong organic presence on LinkedIn complements your advertising efforts. By building up a substantial following, you now have a base of people to test your ad copy and offers on. This gives you a good idea of whether or not an offer, image, description will work before you put advertising dollars behind it.

If you are concerned about ad spend, first test your offers, descriptions, images, and headlines amongst your followers. This gives you insight on whether or not people will engage with your paid offers and your spend will not be wasted.

Closing Thoughts

LinkedIn is the best platform for lead generation, being 277% more effective than Facebook and Twitter. High opportunity comes with high LinkedIn advertising costs, but fortunately, there are ways to curb your ad spend on the platform. By following the steps listed above, you will be on your way to lowering costs for the platform.

If you need help optimizing your account, Directive provides PPC management for B2B and enterprise companies. We focus, not only on paid search management but on social channels and directories to reach qualified prospects where they are.

Read our case studies to see how we have helped clients increase their performance in pay-per-click today! 

The post 7 Simple Ways to Lower Your LinkedIn Advertising Costs appeared first on Directive.