Editor's note this guest post was contributed by Meghan Keaney Anderson, VP-Marketing at HubSpot.
At HubSpot, our customers use LinkedIn ads to grow their businesses, and we asked some of our best and brightest to share their strategies with you. Learn the lessons that took them months to figure out so you can reach success faster:
Create content offers that your audience finds valuable
Making sure you’re creating the offers that your audience finds valuable is an excellent way to get on your prospects’ radar. Ask yourself—what problem is most pressing for your audience today? How can you help to solve their problem with a content offer?
RJ Hedges and Associates, a client of PI Consulting, needed to reach a specific job function in a niche industry—pharmacy owners and managers. Their first step was to understand what pharmacy owners and managers cared about. This process is crucial—your cost per lead can be lower if you write about something that is important to your audience. They tapped into their customer network to learn about the problems they currently face.
Then, they brainstormed content offers that would solve a clear need for their audience. Eventually, they landed on a timely content offer—a free pharmacy compliance guide. This guide helped pharmacy owners understand how to work with auditors during a critical part of the year.
“By using LinkedIn ads, we were able to identify the audience and offer valuable gated content that pharmacy professionals would exchange their contact information to receive,” says Robb Luther, VP of Business Development at PI Consulting. Using email nurturing capabilities within HubSpot, they acquired 122 leads at a cost of just $11.76 per lead—a big win for their industry.
Think of running LinkedIn ads as experiments
When getting started with LinkedIn ads, you can expect to improve performance metrics over time. Aeris eventually increased their lead form submission rates by 25% with a click through rate 2 times higher than the LinkedIn B2B Tech industry benchmark.
“Think of running LinkedIn ads as an experiment. Make sure that you group and isolate the most important variables for your business so you can understand what works. Develop a clear and user-friendly naming convention so it’s easy to understand the winning ad messages that drive the top quality leads,” says Jaime Bañuelos, Sr. Digital Marketing Manager at Aeris.
Aeris uses LinkedIn Sponsored Content and Lead Gen Forms types to zero-in on the firmographics and job titles that yield the best quality leads at a competitive cost per lead (CPL). After setting up his ad plan and tracker, Jaime saw the LinkedIn leads coming into his HubSpot CRM, appended with the ad campaign, group names, and conversion metrics, such as ROI. This let him determine which targeting combinations worked, which ones failed, and most importantly, which ad messages generated the best leads. It took rounds of testing and optimization to get to 25% submission rates—keep iterating and you’ll see results.
Leverage your data to engage those who are already interested in your products or services
G2’s marketers needed to nail the target audience on LinkedIn in order to decrease their CPL. In order to do that, they used the contact information in their HubSpot CRM, decreasing their CPL by 25% while still getting quality leads.
Adam Goyette’s team found people who’ve previously shown interest in their product-related content, which translates to contacts who’ve viewed specific pages. Then, using the audiences from LinkedIn, they added a filter to target demand generation marketers at companies with more than 200 employees. The information from their CRM and LinkedIn let G2 target the ideal audience for their campaign, eventually leading to a landing page conversion rate of 45% and generating 138 highly qualified leads that they could nurture and pass off to their sales team.
“We loved the ability to easily create campaign assets, coordinate execution across channels, and measure impact during and after the campaign. Hubspot is the brain to our marketing operations at G2.” - Adam Goyette, VP of Demand Generation at G2.
Using these tactics will help you see success with LinkedIn ads, but that’s not all you can do. Learn more about running successful LinkedIn ads with our new guide, and set yourself up with the powerful HubSpot <> LinkedIn ads integration.
Get started with LinkedIn Ads right away.
