Unlocking LinkedIn's Power: A Performance Playbook
“Taste the whip of shiny, shiny leather
Oh, shiny leather in the dark
Tongue of thongs, the belt that does await you
Strike, dear mistress, cure his heart”
-Venus in Furs, The Velvet Underground
Intro
The relationship between B2B marketers and LinkedIn can feel positively torturous. We all know that our ideal customers (ICPs) are lurking in plain daylight, cavorting on LinkedIn, learning new insights, and networking away without a care in the world. We know that it’s the most powerful channel to generate engagement, and begin the process of driving our next customer through the funnel to glorious conversion.
So what’s the problem? Why is it so painful?
Ah, sigh, it’s complicated. I mean, first off should we be buying engagement or earning it (did you hear that LI just changed their algorithm, again, yep less and longer comments drive virality now)? And if we’re going to buy media, it’s so damn expensive. I mean, we’re not on Facebook here – and the CPMs remind you of that. No, when it comes right down to it, LinkedIn is a complicated platform… or at least it was!
Read on for a simple playbook that will help you unlock the full potential of LinkedIn as a B2B marketing powerhouse. LinkedIn offers a powerful channel to connect with your target audience. In fact, 82% of B2B marketers find their greatest successes on this platform compared to others.
At The Imaginarium we’re undaunted by challenging relationships with platforms that drive performance for our clients. Even moreso, when it’s a foundational part of the Account-Based Marketing approach that we help our clients build and manage. Keep reading to get a great overview of how you can efficiently unlock LinkedIn as a channel, and if you’d like to read more, take a look at our LinkedIn Performance Playbook to help you establish a triumphant performance strategy on LinkedIn.
🎯 Unlocking the Power of Performance Marketing on LinkedIn
The potential for B2B marketers to utilize a performance playbook to reshape their brand's trajectory originates from a fundamental truth: your potential buyers are actively present on LinkedIn. They are using the platform to discover insights on enhancing their businesses, and LinkedIn enables precise targeting based on various attributes. This is why the investment in LinkedIn is justifiable; it serves as the bedrock of your growth strategy. It's the hub where your customers congregate, exploring opportunities that you offer – even if they're not aware of it yet. Once you engage them on LinkedIn, other engaging methods become available to guide them towards conversion.
📚 What Gets Measured Gets Managed
Before you start building your audience and campaign strategy, developing creative and activating on LinkedIn, it’s crucial to align what success looks like to your organization, so that you’ll know if your campaigns are performing. So, start by defining your objectives and KPIs and codifying them, so that you always have a source of truth for your campaigns and you can quickly adjust if you’re not hitting your targets.
It’s worth noting that LinkedIn requires you to have an objective for each campaign, and uses algorithms to automatically optimize for and engage sub-segments of your audience based on the data. At the Imaginarium, we more often than not suggest these three objectives above any others:
By clearly defining your objectives and understanding what success looks like, you can then be thoughtful in giving each creative a specific job-to-be-done that can be measured so that you are able to create fast, predictable growth.
I’ll leave you with this additional piece of insight: the crux of success lies in tailoring a funnel for your business and aligning it with LinkedIn's capabilities. A basic sample funnel, outlined as a Campaign Strategy framework, can serve as a guiding example:
OK, now we can get into some of the more gritty components of building your LinkedIn marketing strategy including data and targeting.
🚀 Mastering the Art of Targeting
An essential piece of your LinkedIn marketing approach is getting to know your audience. Specifically, audience testing, sizing, and precise targeting. It helps you navigate the intricacies of audience segmentation, allowing you to reach the right people with the right message at the right time. Sounds pretty ideal, huh?
Whether you're targeting C-suite executives, decision-makers, or industry professionals, LinkedIn provides the insights you need to tailor your approach! You’ll have access to rich personal attributes attributes that will provide you with numerous adjustable factors (job title, function, seniority, etc.) when constructing your audiences. To attain an optimal balance between precision and scale, check out the following grid.
Another potent strategy when it comes to LinkedIn involves retargeting potential customers, responding to their behavioral cues. This starts with installing the LinkedIn Insight Tag. This tag, harnessing cookie-derived data, enables capturing website interactions and actions on both your website and LinkedIn, enhancing the precision of retargeting efforts.
🎨 Get Creative with Distinctive Ads
Having clarified our audience and LinkedIn's role in guiding them, it’s time to get creative – and start building your actual ads. Creativity lies at the core of impactful advertising. The pivotal choice is how your ads will fulfill their mission. The ultimate objective is to crystallize your brand into distinctive, unforgettable assets and weave them into compelling ads that forge an emotional bond with prospective customers. It’s that emotional connection that generates the “Mental Availability” for your brand to be remembered, and considered.
📊 Data-Driven Decision Making
As highlighted earlier, LinkedIn's unique strength lies in its audience data and the contextual relevance of the content that people are consuming on the platform. Integrating a funnel framework with LinkedIn's targeting and analytics tools to personalize ads for each stage of the funnel ensures precise delivery of the appropriate creative to prompt the desired response from the right audience.
The LinkedIn Campaign Manager provides diverse data views, including 'Performance' highlighting vital metrics like impressions, CPM, clicks, CTR, and CPC. Specific ad unit views like 'Video' delve into metrics such as completions and view rates. Customizing views to incorporate tailored metrics, even those with custom formulas, is also possible. With this wealth of information, navigating effective data analysis and presentation for timely optimizations can be challenging. If you’re looking for more detailed analysis strategies to address this centered around website and campaign demographics, our LinkedIn Performance Playbook covers this in more depth.
The primary objective of scrutinizing the data collected through LinkedIn Ads' tools is to pinpoint the most potent strategies. As campaigns progress, LinkedIn accumulates more evidence to determine their relevance and effectiveness, and, in turn, help you optimize efficient campaigns for performance.
As you navigate the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, the LinkedIn Performance Marketing Playbook should act as your guiding light. Whether you're a marketing professional striving to elevate your skill set or a business leader aiming to optimize your ROI, we trust that this guide will illuminate a clear, and simple path to success.
Thank you for this.
Senior Managing Director
1yVery insightful. Thank you for sharing.
Founder & CEO of Pressto | Previously Co-Founder and CEO of Northside Media (acquired) and Brooklyn Magazine (acquired). Leader in Applying AI in Education.
1yI spy some Lou Reed in here :)