LinkedIn has continued to grow consistently in recent years. This makes the platform increasingly attractive for advertisers in the B2B sector. Due to the high concentration of professionals on LinkedIn, reaching these individuals has never been easier. With LinkedIn ads, you can reach your ideal target audience and connect with stakeholders and C-suite decision-makers.
Why You Should Choose LinkedIn Ads in 2023
For many companies, investing in marketing often feels like a black hole. This is because determining results and calculating return on investment (ROI) is often difficult to track. What exactly is the impact of your content? Where are the new customers coming from? A clear overview is often lacking. By integrating LinkedIn ads into your marketing strategy for 2023, you solve these problems by directly addressing your ideal target audience. With a targeted strategy, you can place yourself at the front of the line and stimulate interaction.
As competition in marketing intensifies, marketing costs are also rising. A smart marketing approach is therefore the solution to staying ahead of your competitors in 2023. Advertising on LinkedIn is often considered expensive. This is because the average cost per lead is higher than on other social media platforms. However, what people often fail to account for is the value of these leads. By advertising on LinkedIn, you engage in direct interaction with the high-quality leads you want to acquire. You will not find such a specific method of targeting on any other platform. There are also useful ways to reduce your advertising costs. (For more information on this, you can view our blogs on LinkedIn benchmarks & manual bidding here).
What Is Required to Achieve Success with LinkedIn Ads?
Advertising on LinkedIn works slightly differently than what most people are used to. LinkedIn is a platform where people spend less time on average than on other social media platforms. This means that stimulating interaction with the target audience requires more attention. Do you also want to achieve success with advertising on LinkedIn? It is possible, but you must take into account that it consists of various components. In this blog, I will explain three important elements that, alongside in-depth knowledge of the Campaign Manager, lead to the success formula for LinkedIn.
- Personalizing your advertisements for your target audience.
- Truly helping your target audience by solving problems or providing valuable content for free.
- The link with a CRM system where Analytics and website traffic can be tracked.
Within the B2B marketing sector, you do not want to create space for your competitors to interrupt the customer journey. To achieve this, the strategy must run smoothly from A to Z. I will now explain how you can accomplish this.
How Do I Personalize Advertisements for LinkedIn Advertising?
When you are scrolling through LinkedIn, you are subconsciously looking for something that piques your interest. Something that holds personal value to you will be registered by your brain sooner, signaling you to stop and see what is happening.
The techniques we apply to capture the attention of our target audience are as follows:
- Targeted call-outs: this involves using a direct call-out for the job title, region, or company, etc., of your target audience. This is one of the simplest ways to generate interest while advertising on LinkedIn.
- Related images: one of the most basic and common examples is using people in your advertisement images. A specific example could be: placing the logo of a company you are targeting, or a product or service that the target audience works with.
- Addressing pain points: it is often unpleasant to be confronted with your pain or frustrations, but if a solution is linked to them, it may still be worth investigating further. Do you know what your target audience struggles with or what they encounter in their work? Use this to attract attention if you can actually help them.
An A/B test is a frequently used technique to see what your target audience responds to best. This is valuable information for all your current and future campaigns.
Offer the Right Content to Your Target Audience
Advertisements are often seen as a means to sell something or to push a product, but what if you actually offer value to your target audience? In the B2B world, we are not looking for consumers to sell to, but for mutualistic partnerships. If you can truly be of service to your target audience, there is no harm in being transparent. Look at it from this perspective: you do not make a profit without the customer, and the customer makes less profit without your product or service.
The customer just needs to find out that you can help them. The best thing you can do in this scenario is to give away value without asking for anything, or at least not too much, in return. It should not feel like an equal exchange as soon as people click on your advertisement. The interaction with the advertisement itself is enough if you have set up the appropriate analytics and tracking.
Examples
Examples of content and tactics we use to offer value to the target audience:
- High-value whitepapers: the ideal way to identify all the problem statements of your target audience and how you can solve them in a compact text. Invest in creating this content before you start your campaign. View our blog here for tips on creating a good marketing whitepaper.
- Case studies: an excellent way to show that target audience exactly how you execute your projects. You can also create a case study specifically tailored to a certain target audience to incorporate their problems and how you solved them. We often see an approach in case studies that is too general, with too much focus on results.
- Linking minimal information to a lead form: if you place a lead form behind one of your advertisements to collect data, ask for as little as possible. What we often use is: name and email address, or just a LinkedIn URL. With this information, you can reach them in sufficient ways, and if they are interested, they will certainly engage in conversation.
- Free demos: can be used as a retargeting strategy for people who have previously shown interest in your product or service. We often see that a demo does not perform well as a lead generator at the beginning of the customer journey, but only receives more clicks later when your target audience is already familiar with your company.
We recommend collecting or having one or more of these types of content created before you start advertising on LinkedIn. The reason for this is to keep the customer journey as airtight as possible from A to Z. This keeps the return on your LinkedIn ads higher, and you can potentially launch extra campaigns with the budget you save by offering valuable content.
Advertising on LinkedIn Combined with a CRM System for Optimal Success
Now that the lead generation model within LinkedIn has been established, it only remains to ensure that these leads end up in the correct sales funnel. With all the digitalization and changes in systems used for marketing, it is almost impossible to have a good overview without a centralized program. For LinkedIn ads, I personally recommend HubSpot because LinkedIn works closely with HubSpot. However, any other CRM system with a LinkedIn ad integration is sufficient.
In the CRM system, you want to automate processes that minimize contact between you and the marketing and sales departments. When leads come in, you do not want to have to constantly contact sales before anything happens with them. In a CRM system, you can add leads directly to your sales department’s accounts with the lead status. The sales department can then see which advertisement the lead clicked on, which pages they visited, which lead form they filled out, and if any notes were added. From this point, sales can track the lead themselves in the CRM system and guide it through the sales funnel.
This is, of course, a very superficial explanation of a CRM system. The possibilities are virtually endless but vary drastically depending on the type of company using it. Purely from the perspective of advertising on LinkedIn, it is a necessary connection to save time and prevent miscommunication and frustration. However, how you further use the CRM system as a company is not relevant to LinkedIn ads.
Tip: a free HubSpot account is sufficient to enable the LinkedIn ad integration.
Predictions for the B2B Marketing Landscape in 2023
In 2022, LinkedIn itself made a major commitment to stimulating B2B marketing and devoted large-scale attention to it. The discussions and conversations taking place on the platform are very in-depth, and the comments are highly constructive. Many ‘thought leaders’ try to distinguish themselves by giving extra attention to various aspects of their strategies and offering them as the ultimate solution. Unfortunately, B2B marketing cannot be so easily generalized. The term B2B marketing encompasses too much to be turned into an exact science. As much as I and all marketers would like this, we must accept that it is a landscape of continuous change. Consequently, advertising on LinkedIn also remains in a state of constant flux.
My expectation for 2023 is that we will see much more focus on an ABM approach to advertising. Marketers are becoming increasingly aware that every company works differently, every target audience thinks differently, and that you must rethink customer acquisition for each campaign. Furthermore, the shift toward digital marketing and the integration between sales and marketing will continue to evolve. Outsourcing customer acquisition will become increasingly advantageous as more companies commit to the digitalization of the entire process. This, in turn, provides room for improving internal company structures to adapt to the rapidly changing B2B landscape.
Conclusion
LinkedIn ads are therefore the way to expand your customer acquisition models in 2023. By personalizing your advertisements, offering value to your target audience, and applying a CRM integration with LinkedIn to track your conversions, you can build a strong foundation to become successful on LinkedIn in 2023. Of course, the B2B marketing world is constantly in motion, and it will take a great deal of attention and shrewdness to keep up. Fortunately, LinkedIn is not going anywhere for the time being, and you can use the platform as a strong basis for building future customer contact.
Are you already advertising and do you need help, or would you like to start advertising on LinkedIn? Feel free to send us a message without obligation, and we will make time to explore the opportunities available to you.
info@primemarketing.nl
