Making LinkedIn Ads Work For You

Would you like to know how to make LinkedIn ads work for you?

CMOs and marketing directors from top companies and brands consider LinkedIn the most effective platform for B2B lead generation. But LinkedIn ads are not cheap. And many CMOs find that they don't have the in-house expertise to get the most out of their investment. That's why we invited 6 top LinkedIn experts to share their experiences and tips in a recent podcast episode. You'll learn techniques to:


-Target your audience
-Set your goals and budget
-Create high-performing ad copy
-Design eye-catching visuals
-Measure your results

So if you want to learn how to make LinkedIn ads work for you, listen to the podcast:

Thank you Hiten Patel, Alex Oftkans, Conrad Ford for your contribution

Guests

Conrad Ford, Chief Product Officer,  Allica Bank
Hiten Patel Digital Marketing Specialist, Webloyalty
Alex Oftkans Paid Media Specialist, Sciex

Transcript

Conrad Ford 6:19
Hey everyone, I'm Clayton. I'm the Chief Product alaka bank. Advocate Bank is a newish bank focused on medium sized businesses, our target customers and on LinkedIn terms where we keep hearing its help and the value of 10. But we haven't really got there yet. So I'm mainly here to learn from people who are probably further along than we are. Previously, I'm actually a FinTech founder. And fun fact, Tom and I actually met because both of our businesses growth and selling business I founded question part of a startup competition over 10 years ago, so Oh My Goodness me. I know I know. We're still hacking away that

Tom Gatten 6:57
either at least moved on to the next one. After a spectacular success, shouldn't say alright, hit in. Can you give us a quick one sentence?

Hiten Patel 7:09
Yeah, so my name is in the digital marketing manager at a company called Web loyalty. I've been using LinkedIn for over six years now and mainly on paid social advertising, doing HN forms, things like that. So yeah, got a good experience, but also looking for new techniques as well to

Speaker 1 7:29
Fantastic, thank you. Philip, would you mind giving us a quick sentence on yourself?

Philippa Warren 7:35
Yeah, hi, I am. Philippa Warren. I am the senior digital marketing manager for a company called moveable Inc. So it's quite quite a big global company. With a very small international marketing team. So I'm in a bit of a jack of all trades role, despite the digital title. But yeah, so I'm not the main kind of like person that's like in the weeds of all of our like ads and campaigns and that kind of thing. He's based in Hawaii, so it was like, three and so I am here and not him. But I am responsible for like, like, design and kind of copy and bit of the like strategy around it. So it's really easy to learn about all of this stuff.

Unknown Speaker 8:17
Awesome. Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 1 8:21
Okay. Awkward we have one sentence on you.

ahmed 8:27
You Yeah, just briefly, my name is Ahmed. I worked for Siemens digital industries, software, marketing, lead developer in the transaction in moving to the marketing execution. Hence, that's why I'm here in this roundtable. Try to get more information in terms of like executing campaigns using LinkedIn. Right.

Thomas Gatten 8:47
Yeah. So you're in a really interesting position that I think would be really helpful in the conversation in that you have spent most of your career receiving leads from LinkedIn and doing something with them. Yeah, so yeah, that'd be really helpful. Thank you, Sarah. Sarah, yeah.

Sarah Murray 9:04
Sorry. Um, hello, my name is Sarah. I work for a company called Luquillo LUCAM. And we are a software software company that focuses on two sides of the business. There's the b2c side or marketplace side, which is kind of like the likes of Uber or just eat where we post jobs and then healthcare workers then apply for them. Then we also have a b2b side of the business where we actually sell full workforce management software to healthcare providers, namely pharmacies, up opticians and then also now under the care home market. as well. And we would use LinkedIn quite a lot. And we use a lot of LinkedIn events. We have do some personal branding from our SEO on LinkedIn as well, which always tends to work quite well. And then also would do some LinkedIn ads or LinkedIn ads. Probably aren't as developed as what they could be. And but we finally do quite well, particularly because we've got such a strong retargeting audience from our events. Yeah, no, definitely. You're just to get more tips and tricks from everybody here.

Tom Gatten 10:09
Awesome. Thanks. Okay, Alex, I think possibly, I mean, I was I was looking through lots of your ads earlier on Alex and

Thomas Gatten 10:17
yeah, obviously, clearly very highly focused. There's there was quite a lot of like, jargon, I wouldn't be able to understand so PFA s testing and parts per quadrillion, which I thought was very impressive. It may be variants, you know, this is clearly targeted at a very specific audience. But you're also have got the largest number of unique creatives from anyone on this on this panel. I think so. You've clearly been use LinkedIn with with some sophistication for a really decent period of time.

Speaker 2 10:47
Yeah, yeah. It's I'm the senior digital specialist at sai X. And interesting, I don't understand the jargon either background. So I leave that content writing to other people that actually understand that. But yeah, we run quite a lot of ads. But as you said, they've got to be extremely targeted because our sort of target group of accounts is very small, because it's very specific people who will take our products so yeah, I'd be interested to know maybe how we can target them better.

Tom Gatten 11:21
Alright, so why don't we start with I'll ask you some questions. So I think I'm going to start with

Thomas Gatten 11:28
Okay, I'd like to get to if we wanted to create the most efficient LinkedIn campaign we possibly could, what would be the characteristics of it, but perhaps, it would be easier given that lots of people are learning and have maybe tried things that haven't worked to try and come up with the characteristics of a LinkedIn campaign that is destined to lose a lot of money. Hit and I'm sure you've never done a campaign that has ever been less than spectacularly efficient, but I wondered if you might be able to share some of the learnings from your test and learn that's been going on over the last year to try and see if we can work out one of the characteristics of LinkedIn campaigns that don't provide

Hiten Patel 12:03
sure why it's very kind of easy to assume that but yeah, I've had my share of failed LinkedIn campaigns before. One of the things I think, was the feedback because I think what are important to a successful campaign and one of the things I'd say, is the budgeting side of things of data in the past where I've set a lifetime, I've forgotten to set a lifetime budget and you set a daily budget and then you kind of need the campaign to run in the background as it is your focus is elsewhere. And you end up coming back and seeing that you've spent 1000 pound per lead which is definitely not the right ratio to have. So setting budgets, setting a daily and lifetime budget has always been really important. I think it's especially when you go away on holiday, you have someone else looking after their campaigns for you. You need to be able to track and monitor that budget over time. So budgeting is one of the things and the thing is the audience size. So at the moment, the minimum audience size you can have a LinkedIn is 300, I believe, which is pretty poor. I'd say if you were to have 300 people in your list and you try and set a targeted adding advertising campaign to them you're very unlikely to actually get any good leads back. Even if you set a very specific target of like accounts of job titles and things like that. The minimum I'd say is at least 1000 definitely higher than that is best. LinkedIn recommends 100,000 In your audience. So there's a lot you can do. But yeah, I would say that I've set campaigns in the past with really low audience numbers and met and got nothing back for it. So that's definitely been a learning curve for me as well.

Thomas Gatten 13:45
LinkedIn is very keen for you to have large audiences and my suspicion is always that because they charge per either per impression or per click, and their interests are not always perfectly aligned with with ours. How do you deal with that Alex? You know, clearly you've got quite specialized lenses. LinkedIn is always pushing you to expand the audience or use the

Tom Gatten 14:06
use the Audience Network, which sometimes makes the matching slightly fuzzier, I think. Yeah. How do you deal with that?

Speaker 2 14:14
Yeah, I mean, one test that we've been doing this year, and something that we'll be continuing into next year is we've been using separate tools where we're analyzing what companies have been visiting particular pages on our website. So for some of our ads, especially, sort of the broader ads that cover sort of our fundamental series, which is a key campaign this year. At times we were running tests, but we were only targeting companies in locations where we'd seen engagement. So instead of targeting like a mirror as a region, I'd be targeting Pfizer rush, whoever, only maybe in specific cities at time, so we've taken hundreds of companies and hundreds of locations. It was quite long to set up but in some instances the tests provided like a tenfold increase in engagement and leads compared to just doing a mere as a whole.

Thomas Gatten 15:11
How do you find how do you create your audiences beyond geography? Because I can't imagine that the LinkedIn like industry, categorization, is this good enough for you? Yeah, we really

Speaker 2 15:25
struggle with job function and that was one of my keys or goals or this is I want to avoid getting the lower level job functions, but I don't want them to stop seeing our content because they will progress into being those higher end jobs. But my main focus is that decision makers and, you know, when it comes down to targeting scientists, I think there's only two options on LinkedIn. So I do it on the higher job functions and try and break it down from there. But we've never been overly like completely successful and not targeting students, for example.

Thomas Gatten 16:00
Was that something that you mentioned to me as well, someone I spoke to in the last two days, forgive me, said that they get lots of operations managers or you know, even when they're specifying job titles on LinkedIn. They end up getting leads from people that are clearly not part of that group. Now, it wasn't,

Unknown Speaker 16:19
that wasn't me. Okay, forgive me.

Tom Gatten 16:23
Okay. Okay, so what have you so what have you ended up doing Alex like what has what has worked for you? To combat that challenge

Speaker 2 16:33
is just a trial and error of the high sort of high level job functions and then the job titles and we now just sort of built a set audience of where we believe these are the ones that work. I'd like to keep testing it, but it's quite limited.

Thomas Gatten 16:52
Yeah, I mean, one of the advantages, I think, as you've highlighted is that you can see where the impressions have gone. And so at least after you've wasted the money, you can go back and specify, I then want to strip out this company, strip out that company that always in my experiences is the same eight companies that come up like again, and again, Ernst and Young KPMG, like national rail or whatever, like these massive organizations who that have 1000s of people that are sitting on LinkedIn all day. LinkedIn just loves to shove your ads in front of them and get loads of impressions and clicks from people that never gonna buy. Whatever, whatever criteria you put in your audience definition. So yeah, you can go then through and look at the demographics by company name and strip out those companies. It's a pretty crappy way of doing it because you're kind of you're bolting the door after the horses bolted or whatever. But

Speaker 2 17:46
yeah, I guess we're at I don't know compared to everyone else, but because our products and topics are so niche, we can search those interests as well. You know, whether or not they've been mentioned because we've been stung a few times on if it's acronyms, but for example, LC MS is one of our like mass spec sort of terms. It's not really anywhere else. So if someone's got that on their profile, there's an interest to us.

Thomas Gatten 18:15
Yeah, that would be really good. I can imagine the interests when it comes to scientists can be really really specific. And if Yeah, if someone's got an interest in a specific aspect of mass spectrometry, you can be pretty sure that they're going to be a certain sort of job title.

Okay, anyone got any other ideas? Phillip, anything that you've seen that, you know, has led a campaign to spend more money than it's generated.

Speaker 8 18:48
I don't think we're even like mature enough in our ads to like, be having those kinds of insights. We're still in a bit of like, this one was successful, and this one wasn't, and we have no idea why. But we're getting better at doing a B testing with like an actual plan. Because before we were doing a B testing, but it wasn't a B testing. You're just doing two versions, but there was no like criteria for what it was actually comparing. So like, I mean, we say we're very beginner at it. But trying,

Thomas Gatten 19:19
do you use that so there's new a new feature in LinkedIn campaign manager this year that allows you to, in theory, run a B tests within the platform. The limitation is that it requires an audience like a massive audience size of 100,000 or something which is sort of a bit unrealistic so I tend to find most people end up still just running to trying to make them as similar as possible changing one thing and but have you ever used like the built in a be testing functionality and campaign manager or not ready?

Speaker 8 19:46
No, I think because our audiences are too small because we target specific job titles with specific industries in specific regions. So yeah, they are quite a lot smaller than that.

Thomas Gatten 20:02
What about creative Philippi? You mentioned that you sometimes got involved a bit in design. If you have you come across any kind of creative techniques that work better or

Speaker 8 20:13
we're actually only just like this week starting our first one where we're trying out like really different creative so we've got like, for example, like one with like an illustration in it one like a photo of a person one without a picture of anything. So like that, again, like obviously this is super basic, but like I think it will be interesting to see what what resonates with people.

Thomas Gatten 20:36
Okay, what about learning centers if we try and think through, transitioning from what doesn't work to what has worked really well? What have people seen over the last year or so that has made a really big difference to improve the return on investment from campaigns?

Speaker 8 20:54
For us, one thing that we have seen is like animations being much more interesting to people than like still imagery. I don't know if that's,

Speaker 3 21:02
I don't know if other people have seen that.

Speaker 7 21:09
It's for sports. What's the I haven't really use animations before but what I have seen work better once in images is when you have a statistic and you have a percentage, for example, and you show that in a big way other than using words you use these as one stat or something that and then you ask a question. When you put it you put a question in the text, you tend to get a lot of people even like commenting on it, which is good because most ads you're not going to get a lot of comments on so if you raise a question you raise an interesting stat, I find that that has helped increase the conversion rate of ads that don't have that

Speaker 8 21:47
end with a slap so one thing that I found interesting was I'm sorry. Is that we like a kind of seen a few things recently advising against using stats in like email subject lines, but that towards using them a lot in ads, so things like that can get a bit confusing, especially if you've got the same people trying to do lots of things and you're getting completely different like advice.

Tom Gatten 22:14
Or something I thought was that's quite interesting hidden there is that

Thomas Gatten 22:18
it would seem logical that because LinkedIn wants to view ads as other forms of useful content. The things that work great in organic LinkedIn, like asking a question would also work well on an ad but I have to say, I've never even thought of using an ad to try and start a conversation on LinkedIn directly, but it makes perfect sense, I think.

Speaker 6 22:40
I think that email like spam, I think that's why it's so it's probably effective, but spam filters are picked up that it's too effective. So that's such a good tip. Because obviously LinkedIn

Speaker 6 22:57
sends an email, you know, a normal business to business email with a standard subject line with a sales email. So that'll show actually works as well. It's interesting. I've written that one down

Thomas Gatten 23:11
anything you've you've you've changed over the last year Alex and your techniques apart from you know the test and learn around the geographies and the job titles.

Speaker 2 23:23
I guess visually, I now very much push for a lot of our ads. We didn't have like a we had a CTA but we now build the images to have almost like the block kind of CTA with the color background and text like you would in an email and we find that those do tend to work better. Sort of enticing people to click. But I think one thing we've changed the most is just the volume of different types of images and texts that we use. Before we might do an ad and only have one type of image. We have five different types of texts but we're probably now do in five or six types of images with five or six types of text. Wow.

Unknown Speaker 24:08
And what's the advantage of that, Alex?

Speaker 2 24:11
At least for me, it just stops people. Let me personally if I see the same out several times, I'm not going to click on more than one so I might not even click on it once but in in like the nicest possible way is trying to make I feel like I'm trying to make them think like it's a different part. I'm not trying to make them think I'm like sending them or serving them the same topic. Maybe the first one has a work but the second image might, you know, it's just that reoccurring kind of thing.

Thomas Gatten 24:39
I think it's worth bearing in mind as well that LinkedIn has a built in frequency cap and you can get around that by having different images and different texts. So that might be what's working really well for you Alex, if you have a relatively limited audience in each campaign, which is perfectly, you know, makes perfect sense for you.

Tom Gatten 24:58
LinkedIn, you can see this really well by looking at the number of unique

Thomas Gatten 25:03
accounts that have been served at least one impression. If you're getting a number that is below one and a half. That's generally pretty bad. And you need to increase the number of bits of content. In my experience, you should be aiming for three. And I think it's very similar to again, other channels, the number of the average number of calls to get hold of somebody per account the average number of emails it takes to get a response. An average of three, I think gets you a really good exposure and penetration into the audience if you're getting like one of our clients is currently achieving 1.2 Which tells us the audience is too big. The content is too limited like there aren't enough variations of it, or the budget is too small, or some combination of those things.

Tom Gatten 25:56
Because I think you do need a number of different touch points and maybe that's also affecting it Alex

Unknown Speaker 26:03
makes sense.

Thomas Gatten 26:06
Sarah, you mentioned retargeting. This commonly held up as, you know, a really important way to improve and get dramatically higher click through rates and dramatically lower cost per lead. I think you mentioned it in terms of you know, you're really you're interested in it but but I'm not sure whether you've actually had experience of retargeting and audiences may be engaged on your website or via email or with another LinkedIn campaign or retargeting people that have engaged on LinkedIn on Google or Facebook or something else. Have you ever done it? Or is it something you were you interested in for another reason?

Speaker 10 26:41
We've started it. So we do it in a couple of different ways. So we're quite fortunate in that we have quite a large database of particularly well, it's more we do more so for our b2c audience and our b2b audience, we do it slightly different. So for our b2b audience, we would run monthly webinars, and our webinars are probably 100 attendees at each one on average. And because we were quite good at getting the audiences there, one of the things that we then do is if you attend, so we sort of have them grouped into different markets and everything like that. Once you've got the audience of your events, they tend to be quite strong retargeting audiences we find, and particularly because, like Alex was talking about, you have really niche clients, like for example, in the UK, there's a finite number of pharmacies or pharmacy companies. And so they are quite niche and it's sort of getting the me and people into those webinars, which we do through a number of different mediums such as email invites. We do some ABM marketing and stuff like that as well. And then once they're driven then to LinkedIn, we then would retarget and we've started using, say, for example, different formats of ads, and one that we tend to find works quite well would be the new document ad is working quite well for us, and then lead gen to then download a PDF of we run a study quarterly and and as I say, it's not really niche content. That is relative to some of the webinars and events that we're running on LinkedIn, so much your retargeting there, and it tends to work quite well for us.

Tom Gatten 28:28
Really interesting, I have to say I haven't come across the document and that's something I need to look at.

Speaker 10 28:33
Yeah, it's quite new. It's quite, it's quite sexy. You're able to put up your PDF. And so it's not fully gated content, which is why I think it's working quite well so you can actually decide to sort of tease your audience with say, two to three pages. Obviously, it depends on how long your study or your white paper would be. But if it's only if it's like, say greater than 10 pages, I would open it up say for the first three or so pages, and then if they want full access to the document, they then get fill in the lead gen form, but we've already got them really hooked on the content that you're trying to serve them.

Thomas Gatten 29:12
Yeah, I think that's really clever, because I think it kind of hits a number of different points at the same time. You're able to start a tangential conversation with them that isn't salesy. You're able to retarget the audience that is interested in this with some other form of content. And then you can track their intent by their engagement. And if you just get someone signing up to one thing, and then never again, you know, it's probably not very interesting, but as soon as you get someone who's download who's who's read one thing that's going to be on gated and then downloaded another one or two things that were gated you can be pretty darn sure that

Tom Gatten 29:52
yeah, that that right for you. Exactly. Let's, let's move on to uh, yeah, I've got a lever. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I really appreciate you being here. Thank you. Thank you

Thomas Gatten 30:14
Okay, yeah, so I was gonna say let's, let's move on to structures of follow up. Because, again, from what I've seen recently, this is where people have been struggling as in

Tom Gatten 30:28
reasonably good click through rates, reasonably low cost per click, and then really low form fill rates or

Thomas Gatten 30:36
to get a form filled out and then it's hard to then follow up and

Tom Gatten 30:43
you know, when someone when SDR then follows up, it's to kind of cold.

Thomas Gatten 30:50
Has anyone got experience creating a sort of community of people that, you know, relatively interested in related topics through LinkedIn ads, maybe giving away I mean, Sarah has given an example of that already, by giving away the document ads and giving away some of the content for free that is then re targetable Has anyone done anything similar? Great,

Speaker 7 31:17
white paper campaigns on LinkedIn, which are then followed up using a marketing platform like product, for example. And in a sense, we kind of only provide them with an email content that is relevant to the white paper they downloaded. So, for example, a white paper that they would have downloaded around monetization. If they've done that on LinkedIn, we then add them into our marketing database and then put them into a flow that is around crud, generating, revenue generating, looking looking at different ways you can monetize your website. And then what we have in our website is a calculator to kind of generates revenue, which shows you how much revenue we can generate if you partner with our company. So we know that's very relevant to the white paper. So we'll send them an email just saying, hey, look, check out our calculator. And if they click on that link to do that, we now know that they've engaged with us a bit more. And we just give them a lead score, give them more points through that. And that kind of generates a list of people that sales could then go after and it's a little bit warmer in the funnel. So definitely had experience doing that. Way before.

Thomas Gatten 32:25
I've had experience doing the opposite. So this is I realized, this is a stupid question, but why wouldn't you go onto LinkedIn and put a form put an ad that simply directed people to a form on the website, which was requested demo or become a legal you know, some other kind of bottom of funnel thing? I sometimes do that as well. But

Speaker 7 32:48
yeah, I've seen less conversion rates do that. I find that if you're doing an ad for brand awareness, and yeah, absolutely. You can send them to the website to download form or to put form on there, but I find a much higher conversion rate when you have the form directly on LinkedIn, when you have that lead gen form because that's already pre populated with their job title and company and all of that. So they just need to literally click the submit button and I find that if you're targeting people on advertising, you want to make it as simple as possible for them to get get the content

Tom Gatten 33:20
how many, how many fields do you aim for?

Speaker 7 33:23
I'd say about four, I think no more than four. But because it's populated, you could probably get away with more but I just find that if you've got the information already down for more than more than you need. Really it's a job title, company email and your phone number if you really need it, but yeah, and with all of the information you've once you've gotten that you can just easily pop back into your marketing database. So I find that is still a fine way to do it rather than get them to come on to the website and hope that the landing page is enough for them to convert.

Thomas Gatten 33:59
How do you feel about that? Philippa and Alex and Sarah, do you have a similar strategy with do you use forms on LinkedIn? And if so, what do you use on the website and if so, what's the characteristics and the forms that gets you the highest form fill rate?

Speaker 10 34:13
I would agree with hidden as well. We in my previous role in my last company, we trialed out and send them to a form fill on a landing page. And then just to test we then did it on LinkedIn. And the conversion comparison was crazy. Like it was insane one was just not performing while the others we were getting a lot more performances. The only thing with some of the form fills and my previous rule, then that we had the issue with was what you're sort of talking about at the start was your more relevant job titles and started to filter through and which at that time sort of lost some of the confidence of our STRS and our sales team.

Thomas Gatten 34:55
So it was clear basically was too easy, right? So although the conversion rate was high, it was probably too high. Maybe once they hit your website, they then realized, Oh, God, I'm the wrong person. Whereas on the form, they don't have that opportunity.

Speaker 6 35:07
Double checking the phone was the one that created it was crazy high conversion.

Unknown Speaker 35:12
The form on the LinkedIn ad Yes. Thank you.

Tom Gatten 35:20
What do you guys do Philip and Alex, do you have forms on your website or do you have forms on LinkedIn or both?

Speaker 2 35:27
We did the same test this year we've tried landing page thinking there's there's more contact?

Thomas Gatten 35:42
Well, Alex, I'm so sorry. But I think I think we I think you're breaking up a bit

Speaker 2 35:48
in for completions, almost down to then we've also found that we don't ask me I agree. And we found that we don't include mobile number. We get more phone completions to

Thomas Gatten 36:01
Alex. I'm so sorry. But I think I think we may have missed quite a lot of what you just said. I'm so sorry. We broke up a little bit we we cut in when you were talking about not including mobile number being a good way to increase conversion rates. But could you can you just repeat what you said Alex, sorry about that.

Speaker 2 36:17
Yeah, of course. We basically did. The same test driving people to a landing page and we sort of dropped in form completions. So we use LinkedIn forms. Yeah. And as I said, we try to not ask for mobile number or business phone or whatever. Because we see a drop in phone completions then as well

Speaker 8 36:40
um, yeah, we had a similar situation to Sarah where we had like higher conversions but lower quality leads we also have like, which kind of trying to overcome it, but we've we asked for quite a lot of data because of the way it gets routed, like around depending on the country and appending all these things and making sure it's GDPR compliant and this kind of stuff. We're like, still a bit behind and like how kind of extreme we are with that kind of thing. So actually putting them on LinkedIn. Like we know that our forms and what we asked for as a deterrent anyway so like we kind of need to get that fixed before we worry about like where the form is. I think that yeah, we did have a similar situation where like the the leads were lower quality

Thomas Gatten 37:29
Okay, so I think if I'm if I'm designing the perfect LinkedIn campaign, one of the things that we've got to consider, I think everyone is in agreement here that we need to make the form as minimal as possible. But we also there's potentially a risk if we put the form on LinkedIn, that there's less context that allows people to qualify themselves out. Now in some ways. That's good. Because you get more leads. But in some ways, that's bad if you are then putting expensive resource against that lead. But maybe one of the other things that I've heard from from a number of you, and who was it? Oh, yeah. Sarah, you were talking about personal branding of your co working quite well on LinkedIn. And we're also talking about asking questions on LinkedIn. So starting conversations in the thoughts of techniques that work well in organic LinkedIn, organic social.

Tom Gatten 38:23
So maybe a perfect campaign is yeah, really thin form. Pretend potentially on LinkedIn or not, depending on what we subsequently do with the lead.

Thomas Gatten 38:34
multiple touch points we've talked about retargeting. So if you're able to, perhaps not pounce on someone straight away, but start a conversation with them. Get them reading a document ad or, or other kind of ungated content or even gated don't feel the need to immediately jump on them, but then retarget them with slightly lower funnel content like it and you're talking about your email sequence and then Alex, you're talking about the forms, fill up all your forms on the website. And then yeah, creating some sort of process that they can go through and be scored as you were saying it ends so that you can talk to them at the right time. Maybe trying to open a funnel at the top end by making the form as simple as possible. But also maybe trying to then measure their progress through additional bits of content consumption, so that you can kind of target them at the right time.

Tom Gatten 39:34
As soon as you've got someone to engage, even if you're just retargeting them, you know more than you did, if we've got as a click

Unknown Speaker 39:49
Yeah, all right.

Thomas Gatten 39:52
Can anyone talk about their favorite LinkedIn campaign? It's something that's worked really, really well something you're really proud of. I know he 10 You've got some ones that you're that you've been really pleased about. And you're looking to then scale it up next year. So So what's the one that's been most convincing to your boss so far?

Speaker 7 40:08
Yeah, it's quite hard when you're trying to impress the boss. I think one of the things I found is that I had a link with all the marketing Walmart people here we have to establish a good relationship with the sales team. And if we do there's, there's a lot of benefits to that as opposed to not doing that. So one of the things was having a list of target accounts from sales to actually instead of kind of blindly generating leads or looking at job titles, things like that you might actually be it'd be more valuable for the sales team if the pipeline is full of leads that they want. So I got a work with a lot of retailers and ecommerce businesses and one of the ones we're currently working with is delivery. And the one of the STRS is already having a conversation through someone that he's found on LinkedIn Sales Navigator, so he's done his research and found that but he asked me to pop deliver as a targeted company on an ad and I did and we got a download and someone who was part of the conversation that he was on so it actually helped him to add this extra person to the conversation that a car already had. And he was really impressed. He was really happy with it. So he if I'm from a sales perspective, they can't really cold contact those kinds of people, especially the C suite people, the directors, because they'll just get ignored with emails. So to get them to download content and then to go to a colleague of theirs and say, hey, look, your colleague Asana content, you want to add them into this conversation, and they were added so yeah, I think that's when been one of the most successful for me is actually contributing to a common ongoing conversation for sales. Interesting.

Thomas Gatten 41:52
Sara, would you would you tell us a bit about your events. I think that's really interesting to me. I mean, clearly because partly what we do is events and getting getting people to come into some sort of conversation in general, and get over some think lots of b2b relationships have to get over a trust hurdle. And you have to do that anyway. And you can start to break down some of the barriers to a sale by just having any kind of conversation about literally anything. Presumably that's part of the rationale Sarah for these events, because you're getting a group of people who then you can just generally have a human style relationship with. Yeah, no,

Speaker 10 42:35
exactly. So our events that we run, and they all sort of tend to follow the same theme, particularly for our SaaS product, whatever it is. So our SaaS product offers a way for different healthcare organizations to cut agency fees essentially, by building their own pool of temporary workforce, not temporary workers. We're in the middle of a bit of a workforce crisis and healthcare. So it's a really hot topic. So anytime you do an event with that kind of a title. There's always attendees that tend to go to it there. And in terms of getting the attendance to the events, because that's usually the most challenging part. And we use a couple of different things. So we would then again, use our own database that we have on our CRM invite people who potentially are currently having conversations with or for example, we have a free version of our product that we are marketplace product will be free. And then so if we have particularly big clients that are on our marketplace product that we think would search our SaaS based software, we would then invite them along to Webinar. Another thing we use is there's a really cool, slightly sleazy, sneaky automation platform called prospect Labs, which automates direct mail to nice check which to different people. And again, that uses your different searches. So whether you're scraping lists from other people's events, or since navigator or anything like that as well or you can again upload your own list. It really just as you were saying there, Thomas, which adds that real personal touch point in that you actually send in a connection and then that person feels like they are invited to the event themselves. And the nice thing about that but a software is it's not the same as LinkedIn and meal ads where they could potentially go to the message request filter, I get filtered out by spam. And it really puts people front and center. And

Thomas Gatten 44:33
so sorry. So just to be clear, when you see this prospect labs sending LinkedIn messages because I thought initially you were sending like, letters,

Speaker 10 44:43
no. See it sending connection requests. And also then LinkedIn messages. And so then once you then actually the people who then attend the webinar, they're actually nearly a third touch point, actually just attending the webinar themselves. So then once it then gets to they've attended the webinar, you do your typical email follow up that you always do. And then actually after that, you're then also then able to do the document ads, and then use the legs to say to similar lists and everything there as well. And as I say, once you they then get to fill in the form at that point, they could have had an on in the perfect scenario they will have had say seven touch points before they ever come to download in that form. So that whenever that eventually does land on the sales team desk gets really hot.

Thomas Gatten 45:35
Yeah. I mean, I love that I mean, that's really great. You're absolutely right, sir, about almost sometimes manufacturing reasons to have another touch point as long as it adds value and doesn't annoy them. You know, it's it's, it's having another another point in which they're thinking about you and it's another opportunity for them to look at you as a human being and, you know, a real person. And it's just, you know, another point for them to qualify themselves out. You know, so often marketing we're dealing with such thin data on we on each account or they've downloaded a white paper once you know. So if you Sarah, what you've done, I think it's Yeah, an automated connection requests happening at scale gives you a very, very, very subtle touch point, which is an exchange of value. It's I want to connect with you it's not please do this. The follow up is a semi personalized message presumably which is not doesn't appear as an ad and is therefore can be seen as you know, inviting someone to something that is of value to them. So but it's not, again, it's not salesy at all. Then you've got the registration for the event. Then you've got the event itself, then you've got the follow up to the event. Then you've got the emails that might come after the event. Maybe that's the same thing. But there's, that's in as one bit of content the event. But as you say, Sarah, like six or seven different potential touch points, each of which might help you break down a psychological barrier. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we we do a similar thing when we run a series of collaborative content creation programs with a business called Network Sunday. They may be similar to prospect labs, or I'm sure but anyway, they do a similar thing, Sara so we define an audience for them by company name, they reach out to them on LinkedIn through our LinkedIn accounts. It's not as come across a paid ad and then we invite them to participate in not at an event put in a white paper.

Joaquin Dominguez 47:36
That yeah, we can we can show you that later. On. The example and the screen were developed together with all these companies. Yeah.

Thomas Gatten 47:52
Yes, this is this is people we've reached out to on LinkedIn, both paid and unpaid, to ads, but also these connection requests followed up by a personal invitation. And then in an interview with me, and some people write it up and then we have a follow up where we look at what they've written. And get them to say that's okay, that quotes Okay, can you change that etc. And it's all really, it's all focused on them, which is quite nice. Anyway, Conrad, I'm so sorry. I haven't really come to you and asked for your kind of experiences, because I know you're just at the beginning of this. But was there any questions specifically, you wanted to ask the guys who have more experience?

Speaker 6 48:34
Things I just said a few reflections I guess which is first I'm feeling fairly upbeat. So we do have a target market of hundreds of 1000s. So which means that AP testing is well within the scope. And actually I was more than happy to pay 1000 pounds for a lead as long as it was the right lead with an average customer value is 10s of 1000s. Right so if it's a motivated real customer, we would happily back down and then some so some of the challenges I've heard you got some it looks like you guys are if we were if we were miners, it looks like you're going after a very small seam of gold and we were we're going after a big shovel out of the ground. I'd love to hear when you guys find me. Because it sounds like this is very achievable. Super interesting to hear the discussion around LinkedIn forms versus sending people to a web page because I've been bollocking, my team about this because we've been sending to a web page. It's not a very good web page. And has a

Unknown Speaker 49:33
lot of fields. Yeah, I

Speaker 6 49:34
mean, I'm, you know, I'm a senior senior leader in a medium sized business. They believed in me I get hit by a lot of marketing efforts. And what we've been doing doesn't seem to align to what okay with on a multiple daily basis, which has been causing some ire from my side. That's been super, super interesting and useful. I did have one very specific question that I missed the name of the direct mail provider. I think it was used there at the mentioned that

Tom Gatten 49:59
I wrote down prospect labs. Is that right? So

Speaker 10 50:01
yeah, prospect labs. And if you want Conrad, if you link up with me on LinkedIn, I could do an introduction for you.

Unknown Speaker 50:07
I voted Thank you very much.

Thomas Gatten 50:12
All right. So we're just we're sort of coming to the end now. But is there anything I've missed? I've I've tried to do a couple of angles on this so that we can try and work out what what ends up wasting money. What ends up being quite accurate. And, you know, ways of getting more efficient. We haven't really talked about retargeting outside LinkedIn. I don't know whether it's a big issue for anyone but has anyone tried capturing an audience on LinkedIn and then so we have one client that does this very successfully? They say, LinkedIn is great for starting a conversation, but it's useless for generating leads too expensive. So they do sort of open ish conversation, starting content on LinkedIn, to get people to go through to their website. They do put the content on the website, but then they retarget that audience on Facebook and Google

Speaker 3 51:03
and other channels,

Thomas Gatten 51:06
because they say it's far cheaper per click and per lead. But those platforms don't get me where to find any audience of it. Find the audience on LinkedIn, capture it and then basically, say screw you LinkedIn. I'm going to go and generate the actual leads. through Google Display ads. Has anyone done anything like that? Or? Um,

Speaker 8 51:28
we use demand base for a little bit. But I think I don't know if this is really a relevant answer to your question, but we've one thing I found that when it's like own when the tools are owned by marketing, and the journey is owned by marketing, and we've really mapped out like, you know, the next steps like what happens when they fill in the form and all of this kind of thing, like ongoing and it's much easier for us to sort of like go and tell people what they need to be doing to follow up and that kind of thing. Demand base we kind of struggled with because it kind of was meant to be a sales tool and didn't get the OP take and like no one used it. So like, I know that doesn't answer your question at all, but it is kind of like in the sense of whether it's sort of like marketing, doing all of the things or like whether it is a tool that falls into sales hands, I think has made a difference for us.

Thomas Gatten 52:21
You know, anytime you're using two channels in coordination with one another, the potential for just mess ups and one thing leads falling down black holes and whatever is really high. I mean, that would be the case whether you're retargeting LinkedIn audience on Google or whether you're asking the sales team to follow up on engaged high intent leads through successful demand base or terminals or something like that.

Speaker 8 52:43
Yeah, we were doing all of our like retargeting and stuff through the platform, but yeah, it just sort of didn't know. Nothing really came of it in the end.

Thomas Gatten 52:55
Are there any other things that I've missed? Like just head smacking kind of obvious things that we've that you've done or you've seen other people do that you think this is just so stupid? LinkedIn is not designed for this? Why do people do like this? Or equally things that are like so amazing? Anything? Wow, I'd love to do.

Speaker 8 53:16
I don't know necessarily, but like kind of like the difference between what the objective of the campaign is because I think like, I like this discussion has been really helpful because it's been a lot about sort of content, I guess. And then obviously, Sarah talked a little bit about events, but there's like, you know, like brand awareness. Like, I don't know, demand gen. And like event signups I guess a different things. And I think that there's probably quite different like strategies that work. For different ones. So I don't know whether that that's a no, we've got six minutes. I don't remember. That's something we can touch on.

Thomas Gatten 53:54
So you mean, basically the platform is supposedly I mean, I think I think everyone would probably agree if you've ever used Facebook or Google, like the kind of the sophistication of of LinkedIn campaign manager is pretty basic, as in, you know, so much more basic and early stage. It feels like, you know, Google campaign manager from 10 years ago, it's very, very kind of limited in what it allows you to do, but it does have these options where you're able to set objectives. There are clearly five or six different ad formats. Has anyone got experience using has anyone even played with anything other than bid per click? Has anyone got into manual bidding? Or getting away from the standard objectives?

Speaker 7 54:45
I did, I did. Try the manual bidding, because when you click it, you get an estimate around what the lower end and the higher end is. What you should bid. And it didn't turn out great. So for example, if the no amount was like nine pounds, you put nine pounds in there, thinking Oh, that's great. That's a minimum amount. But you'd end up actually spending money on nothing and you wouldn't actually generate any conversions. And I think I don't know if LinkedIn does that on purpose to make you go and bid for higher amount. So I ended up just reverting back to the default. And going back to what LinkedIn do but it'd be great if I mean, if other people have experience of actually using more manual bidding.

Tom Gatten 55:30
You're getting a high click through rate, it can be really beneficial to do manual bidding. If you're getting a click through rate of above half a percent. I mean, if you get like a super killer bit of content and you're getting a click through rate of 1% One and a half percent you know it does happen sometimes.

Thomas Gatten 55:47
Then it should be it should make more sense to to specify the number of impressions you want to specify the amount you'd bid per impression and pit that way. But it just needs a lot of attention as you say hit him like if you go on leave or you go away for the weekend, or you're not looking at it every day. There's definitely fat in the algorithm, because that's how LinkedIn makes money. But to try and use it just needs a bit more attention, isn't it otherwise you end up just not getting anything for a whole week because they decide that other people have a bit more than you and they don't have enough eventually and they

Speaker 7 56:26
also, I've also found that LinkedIn have a sneaky little checkbox that says enable audience expansion. Yeah. Always and to get because

Thomas Gatten 56:37
always seems to tick itself again, like everything else on the page stays the same. If you go back to the audience builder. It retakes itself. You got hoardings expansion just means Can I waste your money please? Can

Tom Gatten 56:47
I? What a load of rubbish days. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you all so much for for attending today.

Thomas Gatten 57:00
What we will do now this, this protest event today is being recorded. So our writer is going to go and listen to this and then write up a little document based on what we've what we've kind of discussed. So we'll send it to all of you and then I will have a personal call with you to make sure that you're perfectly happy with everything we put in there. Just in case anyone wants to say actually, can you take that out? Or I didn't quite mean that I meant something else. Yeah, so that'll give you something to take away a record of what we discussed. And then we'll publish that on LinkedIn. Once you're all perfectly happy with what we're going to write. We have a series of these events. We have another one on LinkedIn on the 30th of November. So if anyone feels like they want more of this, we'd be delighted to have you again. So anyone else have any final thoughts?

Tom Gatten 57:50
All right, well, thank you all so much. We'll see you again soon. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Bye

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