With so many ways to generate leads on LinkedIn, how do you ensure your tactics and budget focus on the right areas?
In our on-demand webinar ‘LinkedIn Lead Gen Tips and Tricks’, we share tips and tricks on how to be successful with LinkedIn lead gen. We cover:
- Organic posting
- Engaging organically with contacts
- LinkedIn automation tools
- How to be successful with InMails
- Using advertising to generate leads (tips and tricks)
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘LinkedIn Lead Gen Tips and Tricks’ Transcript
Speakers:Â Mike Maynard
Hi, everyone, and welcome to our latest Napier Webinar. Today’s webinars can cover LinkedIn and talk about LinkedIn lead generation tips and tricks. I would ask if anybody has any questions or anything they’d like to ask. If during the webinar, you can just put that into the chat, put it in public is probably easiest. And I’ll try and answer those questions at the end. Okay, so we’re going to start the webinar and look at how we can generate leads on LinkedIn.
So I have to say, I mean, one of the things that really struck me when we first started putting this webinar together was really the range of opportunities you’ve got on LinkedIn for lead generation. So, you know, LinkedIn is well known as a source of leads for a lot of b2b companies. And so we want to talk about why LinkedIn is so good for b2b lead generation. And then talk about really the two main ways there’s organic ways to generate leads, and there’s paid. And obviously, inevitably, the paid gives you a lot more in terms of things like reach and also features. But we don’t want to roll out these organic lead generation tools as well. We’ll go through we’ll look at you know, some of the key ways that you can generate leads with both these, these approaches. And then we’ll follow up with just a couple of tips and tricks and ideas that hopefully will help you make your lead generation campaigns a little bit more effective.
We’ll also talk a little bit about how maybe you can help and summarise the webinar, and then obviously, cover your questions. So what I’m going to do is I’m gonna go straight into this and start talking about why LinkedIn is so good for b2b lead generation. Well, one of the primary reasons that LinkedIn is so good for b2b generation is It’s big. It’s really big 900 million accounts 100 and 80 million in the US. So great penetration into the workforce in the US, and covering globally, about 58 million different organisations.
So LinkedIn has got great penetration, both for small and also large accounts. LinkedIn supports 26 languages, which helps make it truly go global, and claims that about 16% of us users actually log into the platform every day. That’s a very high percentage for something that’s really a business tool. Having said that, I mean LinkedIn is around, it’s been around for a long time. And private message conversations are still growing very rapidly 25%, year on year, in 1922, sorry, 2022 versus 2021. So we can see that actually, the engagement on LinkedIn seems to be going up, as well as the usage of the number of subscribers.
There’s various claims from LinkedIn as well in terms of performance. So you know, one of the things they claim is that sponsored content is typically twice the performance of email. I think one of the things we will talk about here is is that as we go through the webinar, we’ll see that results can be very different depending upon what you’re trying to do and who you’re trying to target. And so, trying to take broad metrics can be dangerous on LinkedIn, it can either lull you into a false sense of security thinking you’re doing amazing, where there’s opportunity to improve.
Alternatively, it can make you think the campaign’s terrible. And actually, in practice, it’s targeting a very tricky audience to reach. So I think, you know, looking at benchmarks is going to be difficult. But we’ll talk about this as we go through each of the different activities. One of the things that LinkedIn has also done recently, is its launch newsletter subscriptions. They’ve been around for a little while now. But they’re still generating a lot of subscriptions. So 150 million subscriptions to newsletters in the first quarter of 2023. Newsletters are a great way to drive engagement, but they do require quite a lot of work and effort from your side. So we’re not actually going to talk too much about newsletters. But again, in terms of building a database, sometimes users are a great way to do that. So LinkedIn is great. And actually, you know, one of the things that quite often you hear about LinkedIn is Oh, no one in Germany uses LinkedIn. It’s not true, it’s certainly the case that the level of engagement in Germany is lower than some countries.
But actually, there are more LinkedIn users and there are users of zing, the other popular business networking platform, the users on zing, probably a still more engaged than LinkedIn. But definitely LinkedIn is doing very well in Germany. So don’t imagine that LinkedIn doesn’t reach globally. However, it is true that LinkedIn has very different levels of penetration. In different countries, I talked about the US being very strong. But maybe Japan, for example, is much weaker in terms of penetration. And in fact, there are some issues with LinkedIn. One of the competition. So next year 2024. The forecast is that LinkedIn will do just over $9 billion in display advertising, which represents about 50% of all business to business display advertising spend next year. So a huge amount of competition. There’s also some requirements as well for audience size. So you can run campaigns with just 300 people. But LinkedIn recommends 50,000 people to allow the the algorithm to work efficiently.
Now, if you’re producing something that has a very large audience, this is clearly not an issue, you’ll be very keen to reach as many people as possible. But if you’re targeting a very small and niche audience, then quite often you’ll find that hitting a large number is difficult. So you either have to compromise on the targeting, or you have to accept that the algorithm is not going to be working as effectively as it could be, because you don’t have that large audience size. And honestly, LinkedIn generates on average, about seven minutes a day per sorry, so minutes per visit, on average, seven minutes is not bad, it’s a reasonable amount of engagement. But that just, you know, looks pretty poor when you compare it to something like Tik Tok or Instagram, where people are spending, you know, roughly an hour and a half an hour on each of those platforms. So LinkedIn has some great engagement, but it’s not quite the same as you know, something like a tick tock today. The real thing though, about LinkedIn, I’m sure everyone listening to this webinar is going to be familiar with it is the targeting. And so the targeting can actually pick a huge number of different activities. So you can target people through Sales Navigator and also through advertising. And you can target you know, things from location, through to company to industry, job roles, seniority, job title, you know, groups that people are members of, and you can also do retargeting on LinkedIn. And this ability to target particularly around firma graphics and demographics.
So details of the company they work for, and details of their job role is super, super powerful. You know, if you’ve got a product that you know, sells to retailers that employ over 1000 people, and is bought by IT managers and IT directors, you can build that audience within LinkedIn. And I think this is what’s really driving LinkedIn and making it you know, more and more, the place where people choose to spend their advertising budgets. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to start off and we’re going to look at organic lead generation. So this is how he generate leads without actually spending money on advertising. Now, clearly, the cynical amongst us, and perhaps the more realistic are gonna say, Well, you know, LinkedIn is not going to want you to do this. It’s not going to be a great approach. But actually there are some things you can do that are very effective. One of the most common things is create Seeing connections. And you probably see this a lot with people reaching out to you, and offering to connect, and you look at them and you go, I don’t know who you are.
And actually, if I look at, you know, my recent connections, I just pulled this off my personal LinkedIn fi nominee who does growth and marketing, I’ve got somebody that helps growth hungry agencies, I’ve got somebody who’s doing some health, and I’ve got someone who’s going to cycle 30,000 35,000 kilometres around the world in February. I mean, Ben respects you absolutely amazing. But I know you’re probably trying to approach me for sponsorship, I mean, it’s probably not something that’s really a business opportunity. And I think this is one of the issues with these organic connection requests, is that people do actually look at them. And if they don’t personally know the, the person that’s approaching, they can feel a bit spammy.
So if you do that, you do need to write a great message. And I’ve not dug into these messages, most of the messages I think you receive, you know, along the lines of, we’re both interested in an extra we connect. And it’s something very vague, like, we’re both interested in agencies or marketing or something, it’s not really very compelling. So if you want to create connections, I would certainly recommend making things as personal as possible. Another way to generate leads is look at who you who viewed your profile. So if you have the premium accounts, so paid accounts, you can actually have a look at who’s come along and looked at your profile. And, you know, this can be good, it can actually identify people who could be relevant customers. But you know, more and more, it’s people who are likely to pitch you to try and sell their services. So as you can see here, I mean, I’ve had a few profile views over the last week. But actually, you know, the main people viewing my profile, are people looking to sell me things. So Daniel is back again, you know, he’s a copywriter, he clearly wants to find agencies that he can sell his services to. So it’s not always a good source. But certainly, if you have a premium account, it’s definitely worth checking in, you know, on a fairly regular basis, just to see if there are any interesting visitors looking your profile.
And lastly, posts are really important, you can post on both your own personal page and company page. And those posts can link to pages off of LinkedIn. So here we see something where Schneider has posted on to their company page, and the link through is to a webinar. And so what they’re trying to do is get people to sign up for the webinar. So very simple lead gen campaign. Very straightforward. I pictured either for a couple of examples, because I think a lot of people on the webinar will actually know Schneider. And hopefully, there’s nobody on the webinar from Schneider. So if I say anything negative, they won’t get upset. So posting is really simple. Couple of things you need to be aware of, in general, the algorithm fail favours posts on personal pages over company pages.
So you’ll almost always see a higher number of impressions, if you post on an individual’s page, rather than a company page. So if you’re you’re posting on the company page, it’s really good idea to encourage your sales team to amplify your posts by posting either something of their own word, or at least at minimum reposting your company page post. The one thing I would warn people here is there are some platforms available that are designed to give you know pre prepared posts. So basically text an image, people can just click and it gets uploaded into their LinkedIn or other social platforms. These can be effective, but they can also be disastrous. And one of the problems is, is if you have multiple people in your company connected to a customer or prospect, which is very likely that customer or prospect sees these individuals in your company supposedly posting their personal views, but they’re word for word the same. And it then begins to start looking very inauthentic and becomes less effective. So I would say that trying to automate this can be kind of difficult on a company wide scale.
Events. I think events are possibly one of the most underrated things on LinkedIn. Anyone can listen to event. And that event doesn’t even have to run on the LinkedIn platform. LinkedIn has a great platform if you want to run a live event. It works really well. But you know, absolutely. events don’t have to run there. So we can promote our webinars for example, on to which are held on our own webinar platform. We use something called webinar gate But actually, we can promote that on LinkedIn, you can see here, there’s a couple of promotions of one of our previous webinars that I’ve cut and pasted from, from my own LinkedIn feed as well as other webinars I’ve visited. And of course with events, you can actually share them organically as well. So you don’t have to pay for promotion. So it can be a purely organic, so completely free way to generate leads. And certainly, if people are not using events on LinkedIn, this is I think, one of the great secrets and definitely well worth looking at.
And lastly, their emails. And again, like looking at the people who view your profile is a little bit of a cheat, because you do need to investigate, invest in a paid account. So like a Sales Navigator account. But when you have very highly targeted campaigns, one of the most effective ways to reach people can be through personal LinkedIn, in mail messages. So this is very much like creating sales, emails, writing one to one emails, or taking a template and tweaking it for each person. And we’re talking here in the you know, 10s of contacts, typically, that make this work worthwhile. But having an email that’s personal, that’s not standard that comes from an individual can actually be a very effective way, we’ve run a number of campaigns for clients, where we’ve, you know, effectively hand crafted emails out to contacts and had some very, very good response rates, the one thing you do need to do is you need to consider whose account you’re going to use. And obviously, what you want to use is use the appropriate accounts. So if this is a, an email that is highly technical, you might want to use same engineers account on apps engineers account. If it’s something that’s much more obviously sales, then perhaps one of the sales team would be better or the, you know, account manager for that particular customer. But obviously, if we’re doing that, and we’re having either a marketing team or agency, that individual has to be prepared to give up their LinkedIn credentials and control of their account, which can always be an issue. So that can be a challenge with these accounts, these these campaigns.
But it’s certainly something worth looking at in mails can be very effective, particularly if they’re personal and genuine. Now, one thing worth mentioning is LinkedIn automation tools. And so you know, here we have a tool called expanding, which basically reaches out automatically to engage people, and that’s through contact requests and messages. But as you can see here, there are lots of these systems. And these systems all claim to allow you to automate and make your LinkedIn outreach more effective. And they do.
There is however, an issue that people need to be aware of using automation on LinkedIn is actually against the terms of service. So if you actually run an automated campaign, you can end up ultimately having your accounts closed down and banned. And I’m talking for experience because we did some testing of LinkedIn automation tools. And I received a message basically saying, If you don’t stop using the tools, we’re going to close your accounts. So you do have to be very careful on that. There are two key types of tools in terms of automating the outreach. So one will work in the cloud. So that will sit there and run it, it’s great. It’s very easy to use. It’s not anything that’s intrusive, the other work in your browser. And so literally, it will be automating things in your browser. The ones running in your browser are much less likely to be detected by LinkedIn as automation, but obviously require you to open up LinkedIn run the add in etc, etc. So they can be more of a pain to run, really down to you to choose. But I think these tools are getting smarter and smarter. And we’re getting better at avoiding LinkedIn penalties. The last one to mention is tools like LEM pod, and LEM pod is really focused around trying to get more likes and comments on your posts. We again tried LEM pod and what happened was we got way more likes and comments on our posts, and virtually no increase in views or genuine engagement. So if you want to have a lot of you know, fairly bland and meaningless comments, getting involved in one of these, and they tend to be called pod pods, these group of people where people automatically comment on each other’s posts.
You know, they do look good, they do make it look like your posts are engaging. Although if you dig a bit deeper, you realise that actually a lot of people are posting exactly the same thing. And it’s not very exciting. But it’s unlikely to actually improve your results or certainly from our testing. We didn’t feel that So we got any more genuine engagement or genuine reach. So those are the options when we look at organic. So several different things you can do. And as I say, you know, don’t underestimate things like if you have very targeted campaigns using InMails. And certainly my recommendation for everyone is, if you have webinars and events, make sure you use the LinkedIn events page will now move on to paid lead generation. So obviously, this is what LinkedIn wants to do. LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft would love a bit more money. As we saw, Microsoft stands to get about 9.2 billion. In terms of display advertising on LinkedIn, that’s a huge sum. But actually, there’s many more ways you can spend your money on LinkedIn. So the first option is sponsored posts and other forms of sponsored content doesn’t have to be a post.
And that’s really the simplest option. You take something you post normally, you pay to promote it, you get a little promoted tag. And you can reach people who are outside of your followers. Now, the first thing to say is that when you post organically on LinkedIn, it doesn’t necessarily mean that only the people who are followers or connected to you will see it. So when he posts a standard post organically on LinkedIn, if it gets a lot of engagement, LinkedIn will actually show it to people outside of your direct network. So straight to second degree connections, and potentially further. So actually, you know, using organic doesn’t stop you reaching a new audience. But obviously, organic tends to focus, and tends to be shown to people who are your first degree connection, so either people following the company, or connected to or following the individual. And that can be crudely seen as basically talking to your own fan club. So the results might look good. But whether it’s actually making a material difference to your business, clearly is a questionable. And so there’s a number of other paid options we’re going to talk about when we talk about lead gen ads, document ads, and InMails. So the first one is a lead gen ad. And it’s really simple, we have a post that can look just like a standard post. And when someone clicks on it, rather than going to a landing page, this post will then route through to a lead gen form that is actually embedded within LinkedIn. So it will pre fill all your details.
So you can see here, it’s prefilled. With my details, interestingly, picking up the last thing I added to my my CV on LinkedIn, which is my role at Eurocom, rather than my Napier row, but it will pre fill all those contact details. And it will also allow you to ask additional questions. And you can see here, I mean, I know this is in French, but obviously you can, for example, you can talk about what role you’re in, what industry you’re in. And whether you’d like to receiving those, you can get some explicit opt in as well. So it gives you a lot of flexibility. And the idea is because you’re in this, you know, gated or walled garden, where you stay within LinkedIn. And also everything’s auto filled. The idea behind lead gen ads is that will be much more effective than running a sponsored post that routes people to an external landing page outside of LinkedIn. So the theory is that this should generate a higher conversion rate than a standard landing page. Document ads are very similar, but what you do is you basically tease a document. And at some point, you actually ask the person to register it. So here you can see a document ad we’ve run, we get to a point where it says Click the button to learn more to unlock the document, you click the button, and you go through to a lead gen form again. And so this is a very simple way to teach people with a couple of pages of content, and then hopefully persuade them to register, because they’ve seen some of the document. If you had a standard, you know, PDF behind a lead gen form, the person who’s filling the form has no idea of the quality or the usefulness of that document until they actually fill in the form. And so the theory behind this is that people when they’ve had a taste of a document, if it’s good quality, there’ll be more likely to give up their contact details. And in practice, it seems to typically work you know when we’ve seen this, in general document ads can generate is a better conversion rate than standard lead gen ads.
But one of the things I will say is, with all LinkedIn campaigns, there is a caveat that it depends on your audience. And it depends on what you’re trying to do and what you’re offering. Message ads are interesting message ads are basically sending an InMail. And LinkedIn stats say that that’s in mail is likely to be open about 38% of the time. So typically, you know, as good as some of the best email mailing lists. But the problem is, is a lot of quite spammy services use in mails. So the message ads can feel or be seen as a bit spammy. And also, we have the focus and other inbox. And a lot of the paid message ads will actually sit in the other inbox, and basically go there and die and not be seen. So it can be, you know, an effective way. But in general, we see the performance has been quite poor. And it’s the cost per message is quite high, certainly compared to email, it typically isn’t something we see a lot of clients running campaigns with. Conversation ads are a lot more fun. And this shows someone building up a conversation ad. And you can hopefully see on the right hand side in the image, you create a message that’s put in as a message to an individual that feels much more like a typical LinkedIn message. And I think one of the the issues with message ads is people make them you know, much more pitchy, and much more salesy, whereas actually having a conversation being much more relaxed. So you can insert, you know, various fields in so for example, the individuals company name, who put in or job title, whatever. And what it allows you to do is basically create a conversation sequence. So you can have responses to click on, the person clicks on the response, you then send a follow up message, they can then click so you get this conversation, conversation out ads work in general, way better, the message ads, the people who click on them tend to engage, it tends to be a much more flexible way of doing things.
Because you don’t have to do that complete sell in the first message, you can walk people into the process very gently. And so they tend to be much more effective. And that’s fantastic news. Unless you’re running campaigns in the EU. LinkedIn restricts a number of features in the EU. And one of the things it doesn’t allow you to do is run a conversation ad in the EU. And this is around GDPR legislation. So unfortunately, you know anyone targeting Europe is going to have to find a different tactic. But if you’re out there targeting America, or many other countries around the world, we’d absolutely recommend playing around with conversation ads. They’re very, very effective. So when we run all these ads, we actually have to build an audience to reach reach people. And this is, I think, one of the most critical things about LinkedIn advertising. Its LinkedIn superpower, the way you can build the audience. But it’s also one of the challenges. So if we look at how we build an audience, there’s lots of different ways we can do that we can actually save audiences and reload them. We can use LinkedIn standard audiences. So we can say, Yeah, we just want to reach HR professionals. We can target people by location. We can target people by language. Note that you need to actually generate local language ads if you’re targeting different languages other than English. So if you’re running a French targeted campaign, the ad should be in French. You can target based on saved audiences.
So things like retargeting and look alike audiences. You can use, of course the firma graphics and demographics, that key LinkedIn superpower. And you can also use something called Audience expansion. Audience expansion, I always think of the most controversial feature on LinkedIn. It’s really interesting. What LinkedIn does is it takes the audience you define, and it tries to find more people like that audience. So there’s several things you got to think about. The first is, how does your budget match the size of audience. So if your budget is much, much smaller than LinkedIn is telling you you’re likely to spend, then clearly expanding the audience probably makes no sense. But you also need to think about how important it is to be specific about the audience. So if you’re looking to target a very, very specific audience, you know, your product is for example, only bought by CEOs because it’s a CEO membership club, for example. And so, people have to be a CEO, and they have to be in a particular industry, then clicking audience expansion is probably not a good idea, because almost certainly what’s going to happen is LinkedIn might try and target, for example, other roles within the C suite, or people in different industries, neither of which you’d accept into your CEO club. So you need to think about whether it makes sense. In general, we see a lot of clients not ticking audience expansion, because they want to be specific about the audience. They know who they want to target, they don’t want anyone else. But equally, we see some campaigns where all this expansion has been used, and actually has generated really, really good results. So it’s one of those things where you absolutely need to test to find out whether it works or not for your particular campaign. You can also optimise an audience. So once you’ve created your audience, you’ve created your campaign.
And you’ll notice I’m skipping over the details on how to do a lot of this, your campaigns running and here you can see a simple document ad test that we ran,you can click on something called demographics. And this is an awesome thing to do in LinkedIn, this was a test that we did, and deliberately put some things in that revealed some very interesting results from LinkedIn. So we ran this campaign. And I should just go back one, it was all about developing a marketing plan. So developing a better marketing plan in less time. And if you look at the demographics, you look by job function, and there’s a range of other options, but generally speaking, job function is is one of the bigger ones. Company is another big one. There’s geographic ones as well. If you look at what we’ve got, we’ve got a lot of people in engineering, a lot of people in sales. And actually, this is really interesting, because this is a marketing plan, how many engineers really write marketing plans. And so what this revealed was that, actually, LinkedIn doesn’t exact match job titles. So we had sales engineering as a target. And that also matched against people who had engineer as a job title, clearly not what he intended. So when you’re optimising an audience, you need to look at the demographics. And then you need to go and typically make exclusions. So a great example here would be, you know, where we were targeting people, we obviously wanted sales, we don’t want engineering, so we can target that as an excluded job function. We didn’t want operations, so we can exclude that. We didn’t want it so we can exclude that. So you can see it’s very easy to pick and choose what you want, based upon what you see actually happening. And it’s important, because LinkedIn, when you build an audience doesn’t necessarily deliver exactly the audience you expect. And that can be for a number of reasons, you know, it can partly be the propensity of people to log on and use LinkedIn in different roles. It could be the way LinkedIn does some matching and job titles a great example. Or it can simply be that your know your job, your your audience specification is broad, and it’s therefore bringing in people that you didn’t intend to, or don’t want in your audience. And I think, you know, to this, it’s really interesting to think about how you measure performance. And we talked about audiences. And one of the things about audiences is very crudely, the more precise you are about the audience, the more you’re going to pay.
So a simple example is if you specify a job function, typically your cost per click is going to be less than if you specify a job title. And this is a very crude rule. But it definitely seems to be borne out fairly consistently in practice. And so if you want to be super precise, then you’re actually going to pay more to reach that audience than if you’re going to be broad. But the question is, is what you need in terms of leads. So if you really need people who fit this very precise definition, and anyone outside of it is never going to be a good quality lead, then you should be paying more. However, if you can broaden your audience and still receive good leads, then making it broader will probably give you a better ROI. But the most important thing to say is the only way you can really measure your lead generation campaigns, is by looking at how many good leads whether you define that as an SQL and MQL or have some other qualification. It’s important to look at the primary measurement of being a lead because it’s so easy to move the cost per 1000 the cost per lead cost per click. And do that by reducing the quality of leads or increasing the quality of leads. And so you look at the number the number is going down but the quality is going up. So, absolutely. It’s all about what leads you’re getting, how good they are, and whether you believe they’re ultimately going to convert to customers. You know, the CPM CPC, they’re useful but they only tell you part of this or, and that is really due to the fact that you can be very precise on LinkedIn and get exactly what you want. Or you can be broad and get, you know, something that’s close ish, but not always what you really need, but at a lower cost.
And one thing to mention about this is, we see quite a lot of clients doing very targeted campaigns, you know, they’ve got 500 people in the world 2000 people in the world that they really care about, because they want to sell something to a very specific person. And this is made more difficult if you actually run geographic campaigns or language campaigns. And when you have small campaigns, it does mean it can be very, very hard to optimise, because you’re only generating a small number of leads, you might be generating a lot more clicks and a lot more impressions. But you’re generating a small number of leads. And so it’s hard to get that data. So sometimes it is very hard to optimise campaigns. But you shouldn’t feel alone, because one of the reasons LinkedIn says you need to target 50,000 people is because that’s really where it needs to get to, to make its own internal algorithm effective.
So again, you know, larger audiences will get more effective targeting, because LinkedIn will learn better, the sort of person that clicks and engages and fills in a form. But it does need a reasonable volume of people, and therefore it needs a very large budget. So again, if you’re super targeted, the LinkedIn algorithm probably isn’t gonna do a lot to help you, it’s really not gonna be able to learn based on a few 100, or a couple of 1000. Contacts. So that’s a very quick whistlestop tour of things you can do to generate leads on LinkedIn, hopefully, it’s produced some great ideas, we’ve got a couple of tips and tricks, some of the things we’ve we’ve learned through, you know, some painful experiences that we think are really useful sharing. So the first thing is, is LinkedIn offers something called the LinkedIn Audience Network. Now, this sounds great, and it sounds like it must be a really business orientated network. What it is, is LinkedIn is going to run ads on other sites to people, it believes that interested in your in your ads. So that’s either through your targeting, or through audience extension. But actually, if you have a look, and I’ve downloaded the list, and you have a look at where these ads are placed, they’re not necessarily placed on sites where people are thinking about business. So Rotten Tomatoes, you know, Natasha’s kitchen, apartment therapy, I’m sure they’re all great sites. But it’s a very different situation to someone being on LinkedIn and being in a business frame of mind, versus, you know, wanting some apartment therapy and wants to do up their apartments. So you need to think carefully, whether you want to hit that audience network or not.
The reality is, is again, because those impressions are quite cheap, and they’re targeting your audience, it can be quite effective. So you might see things like the click through rate go down, but the cost per click go down as well. Because the overall cost of saying, so it’s really worth, you know, experimenting, if you have the budget to see if LinkedIn Audience Network will help. And one of the things you can do is you can go to the LinkedIn brand safety section in the LinkedIn advertising tool. And that will actually let you control where ads on the audience network is shared. So if you want to be a bit more specific, you can actually get some control over where ads are shared. And certainly, you know, if you have a very small audience and and significant budget, then audience network can be great because it will take you a long time to spend that money on the LinkedIn platform, because you’re waiting for people to come back. And actually there’s a small audience, you might see that, you know, some of those very rarely visit LinkedIn. So your niche network can be a good tool. But test it, find out and make sure you monitor it. And be aware it’s probably not appearing on necessarily the site you’d expect your ads to appear on. My next step is don’t bid the recommended amount.
So typically, people click on the maximum delivery. And it’s basically saying Knock yourself out LinkedIn user algorithm give me the best results. And that can be quite effective. It does need a significant amount of data to really optimise those. So again, for very small campaigns. It might be worth considering cost cap on manual bidding. They might produce worse results they might produce better. But the trick here is when you click on something, so manual bidding for example, it will give you a recommended bid. In our testing, we found that actually changing that bid and just bidding you know, as low as you can $1 or something. It was then tell you what the minimum bid is, in many situations, putting the minimum bid in, will give you the same kind of results, but at a much lower cost. So don’t always feel like you’ve got to go into manual bidding and use the recommended, we will absolutely say, if you don’t want to use maximum delivery, and that is something you might want to consider on small campaigns to test, then when you go to manual bidding or cost cap, make sure that you put the lowest value in first, just to test it if you’re not spending a budget, and you’d like greater reach. So LinkedIn is not showing your ads, because it feels you’re not bidding enough, then obviously move that bid up. But as a first step, you know, putting in that lower amount, you might find you can get a bargain.
I alluded to this before, but I think it’s really important. Job Titles are not matched exactly, or in some cases even closely on LinkedIn. And this is obviously necessarily think about it, people typing their own job title, they can put whatever they want. There’s a huge range of titles. But problems exist. And so engineer can match as a job title with people who have sales engineer, for example, that’s not good, you don’t necessarily want that. So you may be targeting technical engineering decision makers and get loads of salespeople and vice versa. And the way to do this, as I mentioned before, is to use the demographics, and then use exclusions to eliminate any spurious matches. I lost last tip, and I think you know, one of the best is to build retargeting audiences. So using engagement to build an audience. And you can actually create some really good retargeting audiences with relatively little budget. You know, one of the best uses is if you know roughly who you want to target, but you’re not sure. So let’s say for example, you know, it’s it’s in engineering, and it’s in this industry, but we’re not quite sure what sort of engineers, you don’t want to spend all your money on lead gen, which is inherently an expensive form of advertising on LinkedIn. So one of the ways you can do it, and one of the very effective approaches is to run some kind of engagement ads, so maybe a content ad to see if people will click on it and engage with it. The people who click them become your audience. They’re your retargeting, and it’s because they’ve been interested in the content you’ve offered for free. And you can then offer them some more content, using Lead Generation ads. And this two step approach, particularly where you’re not exactly sure of you know, who’s in your audience.
So you can use the engagement to find out who’s interested. And that can actually ultimately result in lower cost per lead than just running a single lead gen. You can also retarget on a number of other things as well, not least on people who visited your website. So if you have LinkedIn tracking, you can actually run LinkedIn ads to people who visited pages on your website. So I would always look at building an audience. The one caveat to that is you have to build an audience of at least 300 people to run it may not be an issue on your website may be an issue if you’ve got limited budget, and you’re trying to run content ads, and then lead gen ads. So just be be mindful that you need a significant budget to run that two step process on LinkedIn.
So hopefully, this has been helpful. It’s been slightly longer than normal for one of our webinars. And I think I’ve covered quite a lot of different lead gen opportunities. One of the issues I know is people are going to say, well, this is just too much, or I haven’t got the resources, or I really need more information. So we actually have, you know, three levels of service to help people out and help clients with LinkedIn. We run bespoke training. So we sit teams down, and actually run through how they can build LinkedIn campaigns in house. We obviously do campaign reviews, where clients are running campaigns, and want to know how they can improve them. And we also offer lead gen campaigns or service as well as all other LinkedIn campaigns. So if there is something you want to know, or to find out, you know, do feel free to contact me.
So lastly, let’s look at what we see. You know, the key messages from this, I mean, the first thing to say and I’ll get back to this is, there’s a reason why half the display advertising budget is being spent on LinkedIn is a great source of leads is a great, great place to advertise. It can be expensive, but it can also generate very good quality leads. And so measuring the quality of the lead is super important. We mentioned that there are many different ways to generate leads, and depending on what you’re doing, and if it’s a content offer, for example, what that content offer looks like, you know, one or other of the different approaches might make more sense. Audiences are clearly critical. But ultimately, you know, you need to Keep testing. And I think this is super important with LinkedIn is there’s so many options and so many variables that if you’re not testing, you won’t be optimising. So you will be missing out.
And lastly, I think this is the most important thing is in LinkedIn, particularly, I think you have to measure what matters, which is the leads and the leads that are actually of good quality. Rather than trying to measure it, you know, some of them are vanity metrics, like click through rates, they’re an indication of whether things work and whether the ads engaging. But ultimately, what you care about is the cost per high quality lead. And you have to be pretty ruthless about focusing on that, that and just measuring that metric, if you really want to understand what’s working, what isn’t. So thank you very much for listening. I appreciate your time, we do have a little bit of time that we can actually cover some questions.
So I’m gonna check with questions. Okay, so Okay, we have a question here about LinkedIn events, which is great question actually love this. So if you use LinkedIn events presuming the registration process is handling outside of your website, and CRM? And the answer is no. So LinkedIn live webinar, basically, if you’re running that, that’s on LinkedIn, but as soon as you promote a webinar, or anything else, where you manage it with your own platform. So for example, this webinar here, as it says, managed on webinar geek, and then you run your LinkedIn events, promotion, but that event links through to your registration page. So it’s only if you’re using the LinkedIn live feature, that you’d need to actually upload data from LinkedIn into your system. Otherwise, it will almost certainly feed in directly, just as you’d normally do for any other event. Okay, if anyone’s got any other questions, please feel free to ask. I do have one here, actually, which is about lead gen ads, which a great question.
So somebody has asked about lead gen ads. And they’ve asked whether the lead gen is always better than rooting people to a landing page. I mentioned that, you know, it should be better it usually is. The answer is it’s not always better. And it’s a very interesting situation where every so often we see, generally, because there’s a reason for having a much more detailed landing page. So you’re putting content on there that people care about, then sometimes the landing page can be more effective than a LinkedIn lead gen ad. So certainly don’t feel if you’re generating leads on LinkedIn, everything has to lead lead to one of the LinkedIn forms, it can lead to your own landing page. But I would think about, you know, whether it’s important that you have that that landing page with the extra information, or whether the campaign is likely to work better if you have a much more simpler and straightforward process. So, again, you know, I think the answer is it’s really something you want to test. But it’s a great question there. We have another question here, which is another fantastic one. So I understand it does depend on budget and audience. But how long would you recommend running a paid lead gen campaign for?
So obviously, the issue here is that people have different habits and how they use LinkedIn. So some people will be going back and checking LinkedIn, you know, depending on their role, maybe daily, certainly a lot of people in marketing or on LinkedIn daily. Whereas perhaps if you look at the, you know, engineering sector, you know, some of those engineers, if they’re not looking for a job, they may only be on LinkedIn, once a month, for example. So I think it’s really important to understand your audience, and monitor the results. And generally, what we see is if people run lead gen campaign, or indeed any LinkedIn campaign for a longer period of time, then what happens is the results tend to drop off as people tend to see the same ad over and over again. So you can then look at either refreshing the ads, or doing another campaign. But typically, what we see is clients running campaigns for generally the one to two month timeframe. Anything more than two months, you’re almost certainly going to see the people who are frequently on LinkedIn seeing too many of those ads, and dropping out. You can also do things with exclusions so you can build audiences around people who’ve engaged with your ad, and then exclude them from seeing the ad in the future. So that helps a little bit with the drop off but it’s not super useful. Um, but generally speaking, there is definitely a timeframe.
The other thing to mention is, of course, it depends on budget. So if you, you know, if you have the campaign that targets, you know, 100,000 people, and you’ve got a $5 a day budget, you’re gonna run that campaign for a very long time before you see it starting to drop off. But if you’ve got $100 A day budget, and you’re targeting 300 people, that campaign is probably going to drop off very, very quickly in terms of performance, you’re actually almost certainly not going to spend the budget, but it’s going to, you know, saturate, and it’s not going to be as effective. So I think it’s a real balance.
So thank you very much for all your questions for listening to the webinar. If anybody does think of a question afterwards, or they just want more advice on LinkedIn, my email address is on the screen. So it’s Mike at Napier b2b dot com. And I’d welcome a chance to have a chat with you about LinkedIn and how you can use it. Thank you very much and have a wonderful Christmas.