LinkedIn Marketing Tips for B2B SaaS Companies
LinkedIn Ads – B2B SaaS companies can benefit from LinkedIn advertising in a variety of ways, including generating more qualified leads and exposing their brand to the proper audience. The LinkedIn ad platform is simple to use and effective.
You may always hire a reliable LinkedIn ad firm to help you achieve your goals. Alternatively, you can use the LinkedIn ad platform hacks outlined in this blog to get started.
There’s no better channel these days for targeting corporate and mid-market prospects than LinkedIn Ads if you’re a B2B SaaS marketer wanting to drive a fresh pipeline from these target customers.
That is, if you know how to use it properly.
Let’s get one thing straight: LinkedIn Ads is a pricey platform. If you A) aren’t a suitable candidate for the service or B) don’t know how to utilise it properly, it’s simple to burn through a lot of money rapidly.
In this tutorial, I’ll go over everything you need to know about maximising your LinkedIn Ads campaign investment. But, in general, I only offer them to customers who have a customer lifetime value (CLV) of $15,000 or more and who are willing to invest at least $5,000 in a test campaign up front.
Don’t worry if you don’t meet these requirements; simply bookmark this page and return when you’re ready!
Three places where B2B SaaS businesses go wrong with LinkedIn ads have been identified:
- Budgeting: They don’t allocate enough money to LinkedIn ads to make them successful.
- Targeting: They establish up targeting that is far too detailed (e.g. targeting a single job title).
- Content: When they use LinkedIn, they send content that doesn’t fit the thinking of their target clients.
Even firms that have tried and failed with LinkedIn advertisements can obtain results by fine-tuning their budgeting, targeting, and content, according to our experience.
1. Creating a budget
To be successful, LinkedIn necessitates a larger spend than other networks. If you give it the same budget as your BOTF Google ad campaigns, you’re not going to get the same number of leads—but it doesn’t imply LinkedIn won’t work for you.
When you consider the “larger picture,” you’ll notice that you’re getting fewer leads, but they’re often of higher quality. At the end of the day, your cost per acquisition can be the same, if not better. This is why, when it comes to LinkedIn advertising, measuring lead quality (rather than number) is crucial.
2. Selection of a target
When it comes to targeting, one of the most common mistakes we find is companies becoming overly particular. If you want to target landscape designers, for example, you may instruct LinkedIn to only show your ad to those who have that professional description.
What about the term “landscape architects”? Or “landscape architects”? There are a plethora of different job titles that could fit into the area of your target client in many circumstances.
Give LinkedIn a broad title to work with in order to cast a wide net. This causes LinkedIn to show your advertising in a particular space to a variety of job titles or levels of employment seniority.
You want to point LinkedIn in the right path and keep an eye on the results. Then you can observe which LinkedIn users are clicking and converting, as well as their job titles, industries, and company names, and use that information to fine-tune your targeting as time goes on.
3. Ad content
We frequently see organisations adopt a too direct approach to ad content by hard-selling a product trial or demo. Your ad’s content should reflect your target consumers’ mindset when they’re on LinkedIn, which is typically one of browsing or networking (not a purchasing mindset).
B2B marketers who get this incorrect believe that because this is a professional social media network and individuals are on there for a business-related reason, they can get “down to business” by offering a trial or demo of their SaaS right away.
This technique of going straight for the offer can work if your SaaS involves a minor investment and you offer a free trial with no credit card. However, we’ve found that a gentler trust-building strategy works better in many circumstances, especially when the aim is demos and your SaaS demands a large investment from a consumer.
How to Make a Successful LinkedIn Ad Offer
The particular offer you make in your LinkedIn Ads will be influenced to some extent by the sort of ad you plan to run and the audience you’re targeting. However, because your offer can make or break the success of your campaign, this step in the process demands special attention.
Select the Correct Asset
The majority of LinkedIn Ad offerings are based on a resource, such as a case study, white paper, or webinar. Others concentrate on sales messaging, such as a demo sign-up or a free trial offer.
Ask yourself why you’re placing it in front of people, regardless of what you plan to deliver. Did you select it because you believe it is a topic that will be beneficial to your audience? Or are you utilising it because it’s the only option you have?
This is something I see a lot with organisations looking to expand into LinkedIn Ads. When it’s time to write their ad content, they pull up a white paper that the marketing team wrote six months ago because it’s already out there and can be simply incorporated into a fresh campaign.
They get lucky now and then. They may have genuinely chosen an item or a topic that appeals to their target audience. Choosing by default, on the other hand, nearly always puts you at a disadvantage to competitors who take a more deliberate approach to the issue.
Before you spend money on ads, take the effort to learn about your target audience’s needs (and how your campaign may help them).
Create a Survey
Start with a survey if you’re not sure if you’ve chosen the proper offer or topic.
Inquire with your sales reps about the pain points that recent ideal customers you’ve brought aboard are experiencing. Their suggestions for additional material that can be developed to complement your LinkedIn Ads campaigns can be really useful.
Examine the Data
The numbers in your marketing automation system are another excellent source of information.
Which of your content assets has the most number of opt-ins? Which of your email messages receives the most opens? This information can not only help you decide which assets to promote in your campaign, but it can also help you come up with specific headlines for your advertising.
Make assumptions based on your data, and then test them in your LinkedIn Ads. Don’t slap up whatever is most convenient for your team as a last-minute choice. Consider what kind of content you want to share.
Best Practices for LinkedIn Advertising
1. Create a free company page to help your business succeed.
It’s critical to create a solid foundation for your organisation on LinkedIn before you begin your LinkedIn advertising strategy. Create a free LinkedIn company page for your B2B SaaS company to get started. This will help you establish your brand on LinkedIn. It’s also essential for some ad types, therefore it’s the first thing you should do!
Create a LinkedIn campaign manager account in addition to a company page. This account gives you access to the advertisements platform and allows you to handle it appropriately. Signing in allows you to create ad accounts, conduct campaigns, and manage your budget.
2. Produce engaging content
Before you start developing LinkedIn advertising, educate yourself with the different ad styles to see which one is ideal for your objectives. LinkedIn advertising are available in three different formats:
Sponsored InMail Text Ads Sponsored Content (pay-per-click)
The majority of LinkedIn users use it to acquire unique insights into their sector or interests. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes and think about what format would most appeal to you. Choose language that will resonate with this demographic, as well as clear, appealing text that encourages leads to take action.
Additionally, we recommend that you use the following best practises while creating your ads:
- Include an image that is related to the ad.
- Provide a link to a landing page that corresponds to the message.
- “Are you a social media marketer?” ask your target audience directly.
- Make a powerful call to action.
- Change the wording or graphics in your adverts at least once a month.
3. Specific audience segments should be targeted.
The most effective LinkedIn advertising are relevant to a certain target population. The LinkedIn advertisements platform is unique in that it allows you to target people based on their professional interests, ensuring that you’re only spending money on the best prospects.
Filtering can be done on the following targets:
- Seniority in seniority in seniority in seniority in seniority in seniority in senior
- Name of the business
- Degrees \sSkills
- Years of experience…as well as a lot more
You have a lot of targeting choices with LinkedIn advertising, but you have to use the location field, whether it’s a specific city or a larger area.
Filtering by at least one or two extra fields based on your target demographic is a good idea. Keep in mind that hypertargeting or selecting too many fields may harm your initial campaign. According to LinkedIn advertising specialists, the ideal audience size for optimum outcomes is between 20,000 and 80,000 people.
You have additional methods for reaching your target demographic on LinkedIn besides employing LinkedIn ads:
- Retargeting allows you to re-engage website visitors.
- Contact Targeting can help you nurture prospects.
- Company Targeting allows you to run account-based marketing campaigns.
- ACC Blog body imagery-01-1
4. Put your advertising to the test
Your goal with LinkedIn advertising is to provide the material that your audience is looking for, but how can you do that? For each campaign, we recommend producing at least 2–4 ad variations. This can be accomplished by experimenting with alternative ad wording, call-to-action buttons, and graphics. Making these minor adjustments can have a tremendous impact, allowing you to see what types of material your audience responds to the most.
As your LinkedIn advertisements begin to receive clicks, the best-performing ad will appear more frequently, and you can pause the ads with lower click-through rates. You don’t have to get rid of these adverts entirely. Show them some tender loving care instead to make them more desirable. Then test once more.
5. Make a competitive offer
When it comes to budgeting and bids, there isn’t a set formula for success. It takes time and trial and error to figure out what’s best for your company. However, there are some basic bidding best practises for LinkedIn advertisements that you may follow.
Setting SMART goals for why you want to use LinkedIn advertising is a wonderful place to start. Decide what you want to achieve, then set and track your budget to achieve it.
You want to create a firm basis for a long-term strategy when you’re ready to set your budget. LinkedIn suggests starting with a budget of at least $100 per day, or $5,000 in total. However, that price is a bit excessive for most SaaS firms we work with, so we recommend starting with $200 per week.
You’ll choose a payment method and a bid for each campaign. The bid is the utmost amount you’re ready to spend for those clicks or impressions, and the payment mechanism might be either pay per click (PPC) or pay per 1,000 impressions (PPM).
If you want to be competitive, you should make a bid that is towards the top of the advised bid range. This range is an approximation of other marketers’ current competing bids. Your click or impression bid will be discounted by LinkedIn so that you only spend the bare minimum to outbid the following advertiser.
Keep in mind that if you don’t bid within the stated range, your ad will have a lower chance of succeeding.
6. Examine the results of your campaign.
If you want to increase views and attention, you should focus more on clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and average engagement. If your goal is to generate leads, you’ll want to keep track of conversion rates, leads, and costs.
You’re ready to assess and optimise after establishing your priorities. LinkedIn advertising gives you access to professional demographic information that you can use to find and target new audiences. You can alter your audience for more efficient reach once you’ve identified your most responding demographic.
Furthermore, LinkedIn campaign insights make it simple to evaluate how well your advertisements are performing and offers suggestions for improving bids and budgets, allowing you to boost your ROI. To consistently enhance your LinkedIn advertising approach, you can test several variations of your ad and alter your ads based on your findings.
The Troubleshooting Guide for Typical LinkedIn Ads Scenarios
Some of the following scenarios may apply to you if you’re still not certain that LinkedIn Ads are the correct choice for you – or if you’re currently testing them but aren’t seeing what you expected:
Scenario #1: Suppose you want to experiment with LinkedIn Ads but you only have a limited budget to work with.
So let’s be clear: even a “modest budget” requires at the very least a $3K investment. If you don’t have that kind of budget, LinkedIn is probably not the best option for you right now.
If you’re dealing with a budget of $3K-$5K, your best bet is to begin with retargeting advertisements. Rather than attempting to attract the attention of those who aren’t familiar with your brand (and who have no real reason to care), you may focus on the 97-98 percent of visitors that didn’t convert right away in this manner.
Another strategy to get the most of your budget is to make investments in your complete marketing funnel as well as campaign follow-up and analysis. Check to see that you’ve closed as many funnel stage leaks as possible on your site, and that your follow-up campaigns are both timely and effective in their performance.
Take steps to prepare your home in order to ensure that you are maximising the impact of the lesser number of visitors who may arrive on your website in the near future.
Scenario #2: Your major LinkedIn Ads aim is to reach a large number of people.
Budget is obviously important in this situation, both in terms of the overall budget and the daily spending limit you set for your campaign. Removing the daily restriction totally, for example, can result in faster results, but will limit your capacity to test and change your strategy as needed.
However, if you’re attempting to reach as many people as possible as rapidly as possible, lookalike audiences are a LinkedIn feature that’s worth exploring.
Create a lookalike audience requires the use of an existing matched audiences segment; however, once this segment is in place, LinkedIn believes that establishing a doppelganger audience can increase the reach of your ads by 15X over the reach of your original audience.
Other options include dispensing with all of the targeted guidelines that I discussed above. If you want to extend your business, think more broadly — for example, instead of utilizing job titles and seniority, consider employing job functions and seniority. This will broaden your audience, but it may also reduce the likelihood of contacting the proper folks. If you want to take this way, pay close attention to your performance measures.
Suppose you are producing leads, but none of them are converting into sales qualified leads (Scenario #3). (SQLs)
Identifying and refining your sales process will be your first order of business if you find yourself in this predicament. Pay close attention to your key performance indicators (KPIs) later in the funnel. Are you converting leads into SQLs from any other higher-intent paid channels that you’re utilising? If so, what are they?
If this is the case, experiment with increasing the speed at which you follow up on leads. Using Zapier, you can automate the process of putting a note into Slack that notifies sales representatives when a qualified lead comes through. Instead of emailing them 1-2 days later to confirm and plan their demo, you can call them right away to confirm and arrange their demo.
Scenario #4: You’re generating leads, but your per-lead costs are prohibitively expensive, making it impossible to earn a positive return on investment.
In the previous paragraph, I stated that your CPL should be less than $100. However, you should always believe your own data. These projections are based on what we’ve seen to be successful for Single Grain’s clients in previous years. If your figures indicate that you should increase the cost of your efforts (or that you should decrease the cost of your campaigns), you can safely operate outside of these estimates.
Even after your $5K test, if your lead cost is still too high, it may be time to reallocate your resources or bring in an expert partner who can look at your campaigns more closely and discover areas for improvement that you may be overlooking.
Wrapping Up
A LinkedIn Ads campaign may be created in a variety of ways. When it comes to advertising SaaS, though, not all of them work.
In this article, we debunked a few popular myths about LinkedIn Ads and provided a step-by-step guide to achieving large results on the site.
For over half of our B2B SaaS clients, LinkedIn is the primary route of distribution. If you’re in the B2B SaaS industry and haven’t yet experimented with advertising, you could be missing out on a huge chance to reach the proper audience and generate leads.
If you have tried LinkedIn ads and have not received the results you were hoping for, we hope that the procedure outlined above will serve as a guide for you to give it another go.
