- Internal SME promotion
- Many LinkedIn company accounts underperform in terms of engagement (especially while they’re still slowly building an audience)
- Having internal SMEs promote company content is one way to increase reach (if they are the authors, that’s a no-brainer)
- Going deep on the Founder Brand concept is effective with the right founder - what are founders, if not the strongest subject matter expert in the business?
- Employee sharing across the org - in the early days of Gong, marketing ran lunch-and-learns to educate people on how to share company content on social - the sales team are your best friends here, because they’ll have more success building trust with buyers if they are active in this way
Build a Mini-funnel with LinkedIn Ads to Get More Efficient Spend More people are talking about this today than last summer - though it’s by no means common knowledge. LinkedIn gives marketers the ability to create a mini marketing funnel on the platform. When done well, this drives more success and increased efficiency of spend. The cold audience gets a top-of funnel offer (thought leadership or tactical case study that can teach your audience something), and the retargeting audience will be set up to drive the most engaged people to demo requests. The funnel exists for a reason. You provide value first (at the cold layer) to get value in return (at the retargeting layer). Asking someone who’s never heard of you to take a demo just isn’t a compelling ask. And you’d waste thousands in program spend convincing a cold audience to enter a sales cycle. Companies need to introduce themselves and provide value before they pop the question. The best way to do this on LinkedIn Ads is: Cold audience (start w 60% spend, optimize over time):
- Target them with multiple different (top-of-funnel!!) offers to see what performs best
- Can use a target account list, or various firmographic filtering options
- If target account list - make sure you only have the right titles in there - otherwise one account can soak up all your spend
- Either push them to your site, share a video they can watch, or promote thought leadership with lead gen forms
- Engagements here can all be used for retargeting later
- With any of these cold engagements, make sure your sales team is following up with an offer that’s aligned with the action they’ve taken
Retargeting audience (the rest of the spend):
- These folks are more primed to get the demo request CTA
- People who visited your website or company Linkedin page
- People who watched video ads or clicked into/filled the LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms
As always, it can be infinitely more complicated than this. Throw a layer in the middle, etc. The most important takeaways here are:
- Build layers into your LinkedIn ad strategy based on level of engagement, and make sure the offers at each layer are appropriate for the level of engagement you’ve had with the person behind the screen. And
- The best long term strategy is to build an audience of your own through really great content.
|
