3 Steps to Warm Up Your LinkedIn Ads Campaign & Next Actions

LinkedIn Ads can be (and should be) a critical part of your digital marketing strategy.

By nature, LinkedIn Ad campaigns are essentially a “cold” outreach. However, you can take 3 simple steps to start a little bit “warmer” than just selecting random criteria provided by LinkedIn during campaign setup. These are:

1. Use Your Contact/Company Lists: Use all of your internal email lists (leads, customers, etc.) for creating audiences inside of LinkedIn’s campaign manager.
2. Create "Look Alike" Lists: Further, you can use your internal e-mail lists to create"look alike" lists within LinkedIn. This widens the base for your campaign. One thing to note, though; "Look-alike" lists are not always completely accurate. So, you may still have to apply certain criteria to the list to ensure quality. Starting your campaign with "look alike" lists, as well as utilizing your internal lists (rather than absolutely cold audiences) will ensure quality prospects are clicking through to your website.
3. Make Sure Your Audience is Large Enough to Achieve Your Goals: Make sure your overall audience in your campaign is large enough. If it is too small, you will have an incredibly high cost per click without great results. For example, if you have a highly focused campaign with an audience of 50k-100k you will generally be paying a higher cost per click than if you're dealing with an audience of 300k-500k. When in doubt, test it out. After a few weeks of advertising, you will get a pretty good idea of what your CPC is going to be. Once you understand that, you can alter your audience size by adding or subtracting targeting criteria to better fit your budgetary requirements, or vice versa.

One More Thing. . .

Once the initial stage of your "warmed up" LinkedIn advertising is complete, you should set up retargeting campaign(s) to target anyone who has shown interest (clicked) on one of your ads. This new campaign can be set up as a stand alone campaign, or it can be layered in with other campaigns based on your budget. LinkedIn has published a study that indicates a 56% increase in conversion rate and 33% decrease in cost per conversion for campaigns that utilize website retargeting. Oh, and chances are that the more times each of these prospects come to your website, the higher the likelihood will be of them submitting a form to book a meeting, demo, etc.

If you'd like to learn more ways to leverage LinkedIn to increase sales conversations for your business, contact us. We'd love to talk!