Is LinkedIn an effective advertising platform for B2B tech companies? Social media platforms are a great place to advertise because they encourage engagement and referrals. For B2B Tech companies, LinkedIn is the ideal social platform for advertising because of its focus on professional connections.
By providing a forum for business networking, LinkedIn makes it easy for all kinds of tech companies, including managed service providers (MSPs), managed security service providers (MSSPs, and cloud service providers (CSPs), to promote products and services to companies, business leaders, and IT professionals.
While LinkedIn offers advice on how companies should use the platform to promote their brand, products, and services, working with a marketing agency will help your B2B tech company:
With so many social media outlets to choose from, why use LinkedIn ads?
With LinkedIn advertising, B2B tech companies can conduct outreach, raise brand awareness, generate leads, and make sales offers. LinkedIn optimizes these marketing and sales efforts through audience targeting and various ad formats.
For B2B tech companies, the type of audience you are going to reach on LinkedIn makes it an ideal choice for advertising. People visit LinkedIn to network with businesses and look for a job. This professional perspective makes LinkedIn a strong platform for B2B tech advertising.
Other social media platforms are good at inferring audiences based on their interests. LinkedIn takes the information the person puts in, such as job title and skill sets, and allows advertisers to target people according to job function and location. The information people provide on LinkedIn can get very specific, so keep in mind that this is how people are representing themselves.
Unlike broader advertising channels, such as radio and television, LinkedIn allows for precision targeting.
LinkedIn offers a range of ad formats that can provide variety, which is important in multi-touch campaigns. You can choose an ad format that best aligns with your messaging and objectives, such as brand awareness, lead generation, and sales offers, while appealing to your target audience. By using different ad types, your company can present your messaging in various ways.
Text ads are simple but versatile. These ads address the audience directly with a strong CTA. Including images in text ads drives better results.
Carousel ads tell an interactive story that is clear and visually compelling. These types of ads are good for promoting brand awareness and can inspire website visits with the right CTA.
Message ads can be used to convey different levels of authority by conducting individual outreach through thought leadership. You can create a face for a message ad that represents the person the customer will be engaging with at the bottom of the funnel.
Re-messaging and follow-up ads can be used to create more personalized messaging. Information from previous interactions allows your company to hone your message to create ads with conversational warmth that appeals to your audience.
Video ads can be used to respond on an individual basis to follow-up with audience members who have interacted with ads. Video ads use movement and sound to create an experience that feels more real and engaging than a text ad.
Follower ads are a low-cost option for baseline brand exposure. These ads allow your company to expand its audience by acquiring more followers through your LinkedIn Page.
Dynamic ads automatically personalize by drawing on profile information to engage prospects. These ads can be customized to meet your campaign objectives and scale your campaigns.
An agency will be more precise about audience targeting than LinkedIn. LinkedIn cautions against hypertargeting, recommending an audience of 50,000+ for sponsored ads and 15,000+ for Message Ads.
When targeting your audience, consider:
Demographics
Education
Size of company
Number of employees
Levels of seniority
Interests
Which people to include and exclude
Keep in mind some dos and don’ts for targeting audiences:
Do use performance metrics to narrow your targeting over time.
Do allow for some overlap when people have more than one interest.
Don’t exclude too many people.
Don’t confuse job titles with job categories.
When creating LinkedIn ad messages to target an audience, specificity helps. You don’t want to be all things to all people. Try to develop a message that resonates with a targeted audience, such as reaching out to IT security leaders in the DC area. Specificity in messaging increases your chances for success. For example, local businesses need to generate awareness in a certain geographical market.
After you launch your ads, keep a close eye on demographics. Once the campaign has launched, you can see who is engaging and if they have the right job titles. In future iterations of your ads, you can start homing in on demographics with more targeted and personalized messaging and content.
Based on ad performance, you can consider whether an audience segment is more interested in hardware or software. When analyzing performance metrics, compare engagement levels among audience members in business development, operations, and IT to identify any differences in their receptivity.
Using information gained after the campaign launch, you may explore different permutations of an ad that you can test. You can run ads that target different permutations of an audience concurrently. Where appropriate, you can:
Consider audience size and what that means for the pace of activity. Campaigns with larger audiences tend to be faster paced with more ad spend. Targeting a smaller audience segment can slow things down but generate a higher percentage of return on investment (ROI) over time.
Create parameters for your LinkedIn ad campaigns. Once a certain number of people log into the account, the bidding war over cost per click for an ad starts. Calibrate your campaign parameters on an ongoing basis. To increase exposure, you might use a news feed. A news feed can be expensive but good for exposure.
B2B tech firms need to understand the performance metrics for LinkedIn ads to track the success of ad campaigns and make adjustments. Key metrics for LinkedIn Ads are:
Engagements can also include social actions, such as likes, comments, or shares.
Some LinkedIn ad metrics are more valuable than others. For example, the number of impressions is a soft metric. Clicks are more valuable because they reflect engagement. However, awareness marketing focuses on visibility rather than clicks, so keep your objectives in mind when tracking and analyzing metrics.
If you want to drive leads and conversions during the consideration and decision stage, you need to see how many people complete a form, download, or purchase. When evaluating the lead generation performance of your LinkedIn ad campaign, focus on these metrics:
The marketing agency you work with in creating LinkedIn ad campaigns is interested in achieving the key performance indicators (KPIs) that are important to your business. An agency will work with you to understand your LinkedIn ad performance goals and advise you on which KPIs to track.
An agency has experience in what works and what doesn’t. Without the help of a marketing agency, you may need to spend a certain amount of money and run a certain number of LinkedIn campaigns before you see results. An agency will draw on a baseline of experience to get a good sense of the steps to take to reach your goals more quickly and efficiently.
LinkedIn recommends that advertisers avoid hypertargeting, suggesting audience sizes of over 50,000. For B2B tech companies that are new to advertising on the platform, LinkedIn suggests using an audience template to get started. However, working with an agency will help you create ads and ad campaigns that are more precise in their targeting.
Understand your objectives so you can align your content messaging and LinkedIn ad format with your goals. Differentiate between awareness campaigns and consideration or decision campaigns that have direct response objectives.
Awareness campaigns maximize your brand’s exposure through impressions. Consideration campaigns encourage your customers to take action to find out more about your business. At this stage, you want people to click on a link in the ad that takes them to a landing page or other engagement. Decision campaigns focus on lead generation, conversion, and the ability to track actions on your website, such as whitepaper or eBook downloads.
Understand who you are marketing to. Take an agile approach to LinkedIn advertising by keeping an eye on performance and honing in on messaging and demographics by testing different permutations of your messaging. Begin ads at the brand level but move to presenting as an individual to inject more warmth into the interaction.
Continue experimenting with and testing your LinkedIn ads. Analyzing and adjusting your ad campaigns will increase your chance of success.
An agency knows from experience what formats and messages work in terms of where thresholds are set and what results to expect. This seasoned perspective helps your company to interpret ad performance and set up tests to optimize outreach and lead generation.
Test variations in ad messaging and formats to continuously refine them. Calibrate your LinkedIn ad content before and after launch so you can better understand and interpret the results of your tests.
Pause the ads that aren’t working as well and layer in more ads based on where you are getting positive results. You can conduct A/B tests by running two campaigns with different audience criteria and comparing them against each other. Try to change only a few criteria at a time so you can gauge results more accurately.
When testing your LinkedIn ads, keep tabs on demographics such as age and gender. Determine the job titles and specific companies you want to reach. If your ads are generating unqualified traffic, exclude segments of your audience. You have the option of cherry-picking titles and companies based on initial activity.
Managed service providers (MSPs) can use LinkedIn advertising to generate leads. MSPs must decide which managed services to promote and consider creating multiple ads to promote a range of services.
While LinkedIn cautions against hypertargeting and advises casting a wide net, most MSPs may need to focus their ads on a targeted audience to be successful. Targeting a local audience will enable MSPs to promote the benefits of offering on-site services.
To develop a successful overall LinkedIn ad strategy, MSPs must determine when to use paid social, paid search, and remarketing. Paid social is effective when MSPs have a well-defined audience to which they want to advertise. As MSPs segment their audience, they can put their message in front of that audience either once or on an ongoing basis.
Managed security service providers (MSSPs) need to be careful when crafting messaging for their LinkedIn ads. When ads convey an IT security message, be careful how you reach out because it may come across as phishing.
MSSPs need to keep messaging at a high level, especially when ads promote survey offers. Try not to ask for specific information. Instead, focus on a bigger picture of how companies in general are approaching security risks, trends, and challenges. Remember that gathering business intelligence isn’t as important as getting contact information for progressing with conversations.
SaaS firms must reach a niche market segment, so precise targeting is essential for developing successful LinkedIn ad campaigns. SaaS firms should create ads that promote which problems and pain points their products are solving for.
Ads can lead to a demo of the SaaS company’s product offerings. Video ads encourage prospects to become more invested in your offerings because people get a chance to see them in action.
Cloud service providers can use LinkedIn ads to promote their unique selling proposition so they can stand out in a crowded market. To differentiate your CSP company, identify specific problems your cloud services solve better than anyone else and highlight them in your LinkedIn ads.
To target ads for your cloud services effectively, identify the size of companies in your ideal audience and the key industries you serve.
Channel Partnerships require that companies develop a joint strategy for LinkedIn advertising. Channel companies need to determine the relationship between their target audience and that of their partners.
Channel organizations and their partners must collaborate by sharing their objectives for digital advertising. LinkedIn ads may present a joint value proposition for the managed services the channel partner offers for the channel organization’s products.
LinkedIn and HubSpot play to each other’s strengths. With the LinkedIn HubSpot Integration, you can automatically bring LinkedIn leads into your HubSpot database and align your ads with the rest of your marketing activities in the HubSpot platform.
HubSpot can be used to manage your LinkedIn ad strategy. With the integration, you can use HubSpot data and segmentation to improve your LinkedIn ads and audience targeting. Contact lists in HubSpot can be used to create audiences for your LinkedIn ads. You can use the HubSpot platform to create content and messaging for your LinkedIn ads.
With LinkedIn and HubSpot are working together, your B2B tech company can optimize marketing and sales efforts and better understand the ROI of your ads and how they are attributing to your leads and conversions.
HubSpot enables your company to track leads from the first interaction with your brand on LinkedIn to a sale. Connecting HubSpot accounts and LinkedIn Campaign Manager allows you to turn on ad tracking so you can monitor the performance of your ads. With HubSpot, you can compare LinkedIn ad performance to that of other channels in your overall marketing strategy.
Working with an agency that has expertise in both LinkedIn advertising and HubSpot services will ensure that your B2B tech company gets the most value from a LinkedIn HubSpot integration.
When beginning with LinkedIn ads, it's advisable to start with modest ad budgets to minimize financial risk while you familiarize yourself with the platform's advertising features and audience targeting capabilities. Starting small allows you to experiment with different ad formats, messaging, and targeting strategies without committing a large portion of your marketing budget. This approach provides the flexibility to analyze initial results, make necessary adjustments, and optimize your campaigns for better performance over time. By gradually increasing your budget as you gain insights and confidence, you can ensure a more strategic and effective use of your advertising resources.
Teaming up with a marketing agency will empower your B2B tech company to develop a highly targeted and customized LinkedIn ad strategy that tracks the most impactful performance metrics, aligns with your key objectives, and maximizes your budget efficiency.
TSL Marketing has been partnering with B2B tech clients to manage winning LinkedIn ad campaigns for over a decade. Our seasoned LinkedIn advertising professionals will work with your firm to develop an ad strategy that attracts, engages, and converts a targeted audience.
Our LinkedIn ad services include creating ads with effective messaging and tracking their performance for an agile approach to digital advertising.
Request a Digital Advertising Assessment from a TSL expert.