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How to Build an Effective Automated Outreach Strategy on LinkedIn
Author: Heather Timmerman Moller
Blasting a generic and often irrelevant message to a huge, indiscriminately selected audience isn’t an effective technique anywhere—and on LinkedIn it’s a great way to earn a bad reputation among your most qualified audience.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a beneficial way to automate outreach on LinkedIn – rather, it’s an opportunity to rethink which parts of the process we’re automating.
It is possible to conduct efficient outreach at scale while maintaining a customer-focused, personalized approach. When done correctly, an automated outreach strategy helps you create your campaigns faster and more effectively, and provides a standardized process to keep making those campaigns better. Here’s how to make it happen:
Become an Ace with Ad Targeting
Effective ad targeting is the foundation of any successful outreach strategy, and LinkedIn has the tools to make it happen.
Whenever LinkedIn members interact with the platform, they’re providing valuable information on their preferences. When you use LinkedIn ad targeting, you leverage that information to target your audience with a higher degree of accuracy and specificity than you can achieve virtually anywhere else.
Use these targeting capabilities, along with LinkedIn’s objective-based marketing approach, to automate your target selection process by defining a set of specific personas in advance. You can target audiences using any of the following options:
Job experience
Education
Demographics
Company
Interests and Traits
Zip Code / Geo
Make a new, separate campaign for each of these target audiences, even if you’re using the same ad messaging. Running separate campaigns allows you to track the performance of your campaigns with each audience and see who’s most responsive to your content.
Who Can Help
LinkedIn Marketing Partners provide third-party solutions that can boost your audience building strategies by giving you even more robust tools for identification and tracking:
LiveRamp enables advertisers to onboard and segment their first-party data to be used for targeting (or suppression) in LinkedIn ad campaigns
Acxiom provides 3rd party data segments that can be combined with LinkedIn native targeting to ensure customers are reaching their key audiences on LinkedIn
- Zapier automatically transfers all data between LinkedIn and any apps you use
Define Success on the Most Relevant Terms
After you’ve defined your audience, it’s time to define what success looks like for you. On LinkedIn, you define conversions, whether that means downloading, signing-up, purchasing, clicking, or viewing your ad.
Install the LinkedIn Insight Tag on your website to allow LinkedIn’s conversion tracking to work for all current and future campaigns that use your site as a destination. LinkedIn ad conversion tracking is important for your automation strategy as it helps you measure results and tailor your campaigns.
Using demographic reporting information in conjunction with your personas can tell you exactly what’s working and what isn’t for audience segments. This provides a built-in roadmap both for what you should do to optimize and how you should build the next campaign.
Who Can Help
Deeper insights and analytics can help you hone in on campaign performance and LinkedIn has marketing partners focused on reporting and ROI that can provide trusted solutions.
If spending too much time pulling reports that aren’t providing the right KPIs for B2B insight sounds familiar, then leveraging reporting templates could be right for you.
The following partners offer B2B reporting templates that enable marketers with the flexibility, simplicity, speed, relevant performance insights needed for campaign analysis. They also offer 14-day free trials so you can test the templates for free!
Supermetrics has a LinkedIn template gallery for standard metrics and ABM reporting
- Gox offers a LinkedIn Ads campaign performance, standard metrics, ABM and more
Test & Reach Out
You’ve identified your audience. You’ve defined success. You’ve developed your creative advertising based on the guidance of both. You have all the information you need to begin a new, more informed outreach campaign. It’s time to put it all together.
To maximize conversion and reduce friction, we strongly recommend considering Lead Gen Forms. Auto-filled by a member’s profile information, they offer a seamless user experience and provide you with the data you need to move forward. Use LinkedIn conversion tracking to optimize your impact based on outcomes.
This serves to provide a wealth of information for retargeting. Wait 48 hours after starting a campaign to let your audience interact with your ads and provide data. Then you can begin checking your conversion tracking campaign to see who is and is not interacting with your content, and whether they are taking desired steps.
When you reach out, tailor your messaging to the audience you’ve identified with this feedback. Use LinkedIn’s built-in messaging tool to drive engagement and conversation.
You can also use LinkedIn partners to make this process even more seamless and automatic. Specialized integrations can help you understand, locate, and engage the most relevant users based on your own data. In fact, 58% of leads that come from LinkedIn are currently automated by a partner solution.
Review & Retarget
Your automation journey isn’t finished, even after you’ve targeted and messaged your audience. There’s still the matter of optimizing the process that will lead you to the next, even better outreach campaign. There are ways to automate this process, too.
First, you can use LinkedIn Matched Audiences to automatically retarget anyone who:
Visited a page on your website
Viewed your video ad
Opened or submitted a lead gen form
Engaged with your company page
RSVP’d for your LinkedIn event
You can even use Matched Audiences to create a lookalike audience as a future persona template. Retarget audience members to speak to them more directly, capitalize on brand familiarity, and drive the pipeline forward.
Finally, be sure to A/B test every aspect of your campaign. LinkedIn makes this easy: just create two identical campaigns and then alter the variation you want to test in one of them.
Once you have identified a winning campaign strategy, consider expanding your audience to boost campaign performance on both the LinkedIn feed and our network.
Who Can Help
LinkedIn marketing partners can help with campaign optimization and demonstrate ROI:
HubSpot provides an integration with LinkedIn allowing you to target customers with highly relevant content
- Adverity is an intelligence marketing analytics platform designed to improve campaign performance
By following each of these steps, you will have created your own streamlined process for orchestrating and optimizing outreach. Use this process to build future campaigns, and you’ll target more accurately, produce better creative, and, ultimately, drive better response rates and conversions.
For more ways to improve and automate your outreach, check out the LinkedIn Marketing Partner Directory and sort by specialty, service type and region to find the right solution for you.
Talk to a specialist now
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