The big trick on LinkedIn is to get people through the cold (new) targeting layer to retargeting. At which point, costs decrease and results improve.
This guide will help you get to grips with using Snitcher data to power LinkedIn campaigns that decrease the cost of the cold layer and get straight to retargeting.
It also offers a few of strategies we used to achieve a high ROI. Plus a bonus tactic that combines Google Ads with LinkedIn Ads.
Keep volume requirements in mind
👉 LinkedIn requires a minimum audience size of 300.
We recommend more than 300 to take advantage of economies of scale and drive costs down.
An audience size of 10000 is a good starting point, improving cost performance and reducing the risk of saturating your audience with ads. As a rule of thumb, the number of people from each company matching your persona filters will determine how many companies are needed. For example, 10 people = 1000 companies.
If you don't have 10000 companies in Snitcher to target, you can supplement what you have with new companies in LinkedIn to get started.
Smaller audience sizes work well too and you will gain deeper insights from smaller more segmented audiences. The results do take a little longer to generate though and you will face higher costs per impression (CPM) and click (CPC).
💡 With a small audience, you may see declining results and increasing costs go when campaigns are run for a long time. The cause is 'saturation' from the audience seeing your ads so many times they are no longer triggered. It helps to run multiple ads per campaign along with supplementing in new companies.
Some of the more advanced strategies might not be applicable if you have a relatively low volume of target company identifications each month.
If you find yourself in this situation, we recommend getting started with broader strategies that require lower identification volumes. Continue collecting identification data as you run your first campaigns so you can collect enough identifications to implement higher volume strategies.
Information in Snitcher used to power LinkedIn campaign
1️⃣ Company information
LinkedIn is a powerful channel, you can target specific company verticals, sizes and locations. Right down to individual companies and target job roles.
In Snitcher, you can filter identifications (companies) by the same attributes, or use Lead Scoring to build lists of companies that you would like to retarget. Except with Snitcher, they've actually visited your website.
If you make use of Lead Management, it's possible to support sales teams and configure campaigns based on lead stage. In other words, put your budget behind company's sales is already pursuing or about to enrol in outreach flows. Who doesn't like two bites at the apple?
2️⃣ Behavior
Part of the problem with LinkedIn is the lack of insights into behavior or intent of companies before targeting them.
💡 Essentially, you have no idea if the organisations in your audiences are in market. This is what makes the cold advertising layer so expensive, as many targeted organisations simply aren't problem aware or in need of your offering.
Snitcher on the other hand supplies the behavior of each company on your website, which enables a clear understanding of interests and intent. Enabling the composition of far more relevant audiences that are actively looking at your offering. Leading to higher conversion rates right through to becoming customers and lower costs.
The simple (low volume) strategy
👉 build an audience from all of the companies on your website within your target market.
1️⃣ Select the Segment that contains all of the companies matching your ideal customer profile.
2️⃣ Export the Segment using the LinkedIn campaigns format.
3️⃣ Add the campaign export to LinkedIn
4️⃣ Wait for your audience to build.
LinkedIn will add a match rate to your list so you can see the percentage of companies accurately matched to LinkedIn's database. Typically 90% or more.
5️⃣ Add your audience to an existing campaign or create a new one.
Keep the number of companies you've built your audience from in mind. Low numbers? It might better to add them to an existing campaign.
6️⃣ Add the job roles or titles you would like to target from the companies.
We prefer using job roles as titles can vary across organisations. Plus it helps to drive more awareness at the organisation.
Company vertical/size/technology strategy
If you address different problems or pain points within different industries, technologies or company sizes. It's valuable to further segment your audiences to build more relevant advertising campaigns on LinkedIn.
Use Segments or Lead Scoring to filter for the the right company attributes and then follow the steps above for each audience.
Design your campaign and ad copy to be specific to each audience group.
💡 We've seen customers effectively run email marketing campaigns at the same time or have their SDR's enrol the target companies within outreach flows.
Job role or title strategy
Rather than adding multiple job roles or titles from the company list, consider building multiple audiences from the same list by using different job roles.
For example, we build two audiences from the same group of companies.
The first is based on sales roles and the second on marketing.
💡 This allows us to run separate campaigns that really speak to the specific roles as they have different goals, pain points and triggers.
Google ads strategy
The traffic coming through search ads typically shows intent (depending on the term). After all, people literally needed to make a specific search to find your ad.
So how do we use this in combination with Snitcher and LinkedIn ads?
1️⃣ Split your search terms into related groups.
For example:
👉 Group A search terms = Marketing automation software + automated advertising campaigns
👉 Group B search terms = Marketing analytics + website reporting + marketing attribution
If you have a sufficient volume of identifications, these groups can be further segment or enriched by behaviour on the website.
For instance, a company comes through a search term in group A and then proceeds to spend 10 minutes looking at case studies and Linked campaigns. By extension, it would be logical to run an ad about using marketing automation to for LinkedIn campaigns to achieve a 25% increase in qualified conversions (with a link on the Landing Page to a relevant case study).
2️⃣ Filter for identified companies in Snitcher that came through each search term group.
Easy peasy 💪
3️⃣ Create your audiences.
4️⃣ Build the campaigns around the search term groups.
💡 There are a few advantages to this strategy
improved LinkedIn conversion rates
increased conversion to revenue/customer rates
less waste on Google Ads spend
Behaviour strategy
Yes, you guessed it, segment your identified companies by their behaviour and create relevant audiences.
Typically, we break behavior up by 2-3 user journeys. We know if a company has consumed a number of pieces of content and found the site via an ad, they are on one of the user journey tracks.
We have created campaigns for each user journey. If we had the scale, we would run campaigns for each stage of the journey and segment our identifications by the stage to match.
💡Interestingly, we find that the type of companies on each user journey track generally fall into specific verticals and sizes. For instances our technical user journey track is filled with companies in software, IT, marketing and advertising + above 50 employees. Plus the associated job roles are technical (no surprises there).
This has made it much easier for us to combine the behaviour strategy with company type and job role strategies to deploy highly relevant campaigns that convert and more importantly create customers.
On a last note, with our Google Analytics integration, you can track your campaigns, build dashboards and report on the results.
🚀 Plus build the same audiences for retargeting in Google Ads.
As always, feel free to drop us a message if you need a hand, would like to say hello or brainstorm. Team Snitcher signing off 👋