Factors Blog

Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar? Who, me? No, Google!

If you’re a B2B marketer, we’re almost 99.99% sure you’ve heard that third-party cookies will soon be a thing of the past. 

The deprecation of third-party cookies has impacted conversion tracking. This increased the need for accurate feedback data to optimize campaigns, drive conversions, and prove ROI to leadership.

While LinkedIn reports that audiences who see brand and acquisition messages on the platform are 6X more likely to convert than those exposed to just one type of message - what happens when conversion tracking becomes tougher? You fall back on Factors’s LinkedIn AdPilot.
Factors' CAPI integration with "set & forget campaign" optimization solves the cookie deprecation challenge. CAPI ensures your LinkedIn ad campaigns have the necessary data, even without third-party cookies. This feature simplifies campaign optimization. It helps marketers achieve their goals despite the loss of third-party cookies.

TL;DR

Factors’ CAPI integration is a powerful feature for B2B marketers looking to enhance the performance of their LinkedIn campaigns. CAPI helps businesses overcome the challenges posed by third-party cookie deprecation by leveraging first-party data and enabling automated optimization. With CAPI, marketers can achieve more accurate tracking, seamless integration, and improved ROI, making it an essential component of any modern digital marketing strategy.

What is CAPI?

CAPI sends conversion data from websites, campaigns, CRM, and other sources directly to LinkedIn's ad platform. This data is crucial for self-optimizing campaigns, providing LinkedIn's algorithms with accurate and complete information. It works like Google's Conversion API, which effectively optimizes campaigns.

The Problem: Third-Party Cookie Deprecation

Issues with Data Loss and Campaign Optimization

The deprecation of third-party cookies has disrupted conversion tracking. These cookies have allowed marketers to track user behavior and measure conversions accurately. However, with new privacy changes in browser policies, third-party cookies are becoming less viable. This shift has caused substantial data loss. This makes it hard for marketers to gather the insights needed for effective campaign optimization.

Without accurate conversion data, LinkedIn’s self-optimizing algorithms are hampered. Campaigns that rely on third-party cookies may see a significant drop in performance due to incomplete data, resulting in underreported conversions and inefficient ad spending.

Consequences for Marketers

The broader implications of data loss resulting from the deprecation of third-party cookies can be understood in these two ways:

• Reporting limitations hinder marketers from accurately measuring campaign conversions, leading to inefficient budget allocation.
  
• Auto campaign optimization and bidding strategies suffer due to the lack of conversion data.

How CAPI Solves the Problem

Factors’ CAPI integration addresses this issue by bypassing the need for third-party cookies. Instead, it relies on first-party data from a company’s digital properties and CRM. This data is then passed back to LinkedIn, allowing for continuous and accurate tracking of conversion events.

Our CAPI integration sends conversion event data to LinkedIn. This data includes online events like website visits, clicks, and form fills, as well as offline events like MQLs, SQLs, or deal creations. CAPI removes the guesswork in optimizing ad campaigns, ensuring data-driven decisions and better performance.

Besides CAPI, we seamlessly integrate LinkedIn Ads data into your Factors dashboards through our AdPilot suite. This integration merges comprehensive LinkedIn analytics, giving insights into pipeline and revenue attribution.

Key Benefits of CAPI

1. Enhanced Accuracy: 

Using first-party data, CAPI ensures accurate tracking and reporting of all conversion events. This results in more reliable data for optimizing campaigns.

2. Send Conversion Data to LinkedIn: 

Factors’ CAPI integration allows you to send conversion data from any source to LinkedIn. We also enable you to send offline and online conversion data to LinkedIn via Factors. 

3. Automated Optimization: 

Once set up, Factor’s CAPI integration lets you optimize campaigns with a "set & forget" approach. Conversion data automatically feeds back to LinkedIn so the platform can self-optimize your campaigns without constant manual intervention.

4. Improved ROI: ‍

With precise conversion tracking, your LinkedIn campaigns become more efficient. Automated optimization further enhances their effectiveness, leading to a higher return on investment.

Use Case: B2B Marketing Campaign

Here’s how CAPI can change up your marketing campaign:

Use Cases

Accurate Conversion Event Tracking

One of CAPI's primary benefits is its ability to ensure accurate conversion event tracking. By utilizing first-party data, CAPI allows for precise and reliable conversion tracking. This improved data accuracy leads to better campaign performance and more informed decision-making.

Self-Optimizing Campaigns

CAPI enables LinkedIn’s algorithms to receive comprehensive data, enhancing self-optimization. With precise and timely conversion data, LinkedIn can automatically adjust targeting, bidding, and creative elements to maximize campaign performance.

Improved Ad Targeting and Personalization

CAPI's granular data enhances targeting strategies, creating more personalized ad experiences. Marketers can effectively tailor their targeting efforts with detailed insights into which ads drive conversions and how users interact with them.

Seamless Integration with Marketing Ecosystem

CAPI integrates with your current marketing infrastructure. This integration ensures a cohesive data strategy. It streamlines workflows and improves data accuracy across platforms.

In a nutshell

Most platforms only track basic CRM events like Marketing Qualified and Sales Qualified Leads. However, Factors identifies top-tier users early by using various upstream events, lowering LinkedIn's Customer Acquisition Cost. It supports multiple online, offline, custom, and unique product events. These events create a feedback loop, integrating data for better campaign optimization and more leads.

Ready to take your LinkedIn campaigns to the next level? Start using Factors’ CAPI feature today and experience the benefits of set-and-forget campaign optimization. Get in touch to learn more and get started.

Read more about LinkedIn Impressions here.

“I love wasting my ad budget and not getting the right ROI for my LinkedIn ads.”, said no marketer ever (hopefully).

While 70% of marketers trust LinkedIn to be a valuable channel that drives a good return on investment, many believe the platform is one of the most expensive channels.

Source: https://blog.hootsuite.com/linkedin-statistics-business/ 

With high costs per impression (CPM) and cost per click (CPC), marketers often find it hard to justify LinkedIn’s cost-benefit as a marketing channel. According to a report, LinkedIn's average CPM is around $34.00, compared to Facebook's average CPM, which is $10.61. 

Despite these relatively high costs, there's no denying that LinkedIn ads do work. A substantial 89% of B2B marketers utilize LinkedIn for lead generation and 62% report that it successfully generates leads for them. 

So, what’s the challenge?
The main challenge is accurately measuring the ROI and demonstrating its impact on the pipeline and revenue.

Where does this challenge stem from?

LinkedIn ads work as a display platform, showing ads to accounts discovering content, not researching products. This makes them a low-intent audience needing education and persuasion.

Think of it this way: you wouldn't measure the performance of billboards or TV commercials based only on click-through rates. So, why do it for LinkedIn? Click-through attribution misses the full impact of LinkedIn ads, just like it does for traditional display advertising. Factors helps marketers prove LinkedIn's true ROI.

TL;DR

We're super excited to announce LinkedIn AdPilot, a LinkedIn ads optimization platform that supports a range of functions, including LinkedIn True ROI. This article explores how and why LinkedIn True ROI is the most accurate approach to measuring the real influence of your LinkedIn ads beyond clicks and sign-ups.

Read more about LinkedIn AdPilot here:

• Introducing LinkedIn AdPilot by Factors
• Synchronize all your data across platforms and create accurate audience lists with Audience Builder.
• Control how your ads are shown to your audiences with Smart Reach.
• Let CAPI help you send accurate conversion feedback to Factors, tackling the challenge of cookie deprecation.
• Tackle inefficiencies of manual ad management with Campaign Automation.

What is ‘LinkedIn True ROI’?

LinkedIn True ROI is a method of attributing conversions or actions that were viewed but not clicked. It recognizes that these ads can still prompt the desired action without a direct click.

The Challenge

Marketers struggle to justify LinkedIn ad costs due to poor reporting. This, in turn, leads to high expenses, underestimated impact, and misguided strategies, making it hard to prove LinkedIn ads' true value to leadership.

Click-through attribution misses the broader impact of ad impressions. The click-based approach to LinkedIn ROI ignores how ad impressions influence bottom-of-the-funnel conversions.

Food for thought
💡 The click-through Rate on LinkedIn is mostly 0.5%. By relying on click-through attribution, marketers effectively say that 99.5% of the impressions that are not clicked on do not have any impact or influence on the buyers.

Two interesting concepts that draw back to this challenge:

The Subconscious Influence of Billboards and Other Display Channels

Imagine this: You're driving down a highway lined with billboards. You might not notice each one, but they leave an impression on your subconscious. Later, those billboards can influence your perceptions and decisions about a product or service. And this is even if you don't remember seeing them. Similar influences can come from sidebar ads or sponsored content in your feed.

So, why does your target audience miss your LinkedIn Ads?

• Subconscious Processing:
  
  Users don't engage with these ads during browsing. However, repeated exposure builds brand recognition. While users may not remember specific ads, they may recall the brand when they need related products or services. This influence is amplified in B2B contexts mainly because multiple decision-makers and touchpoints exist across channels. 
  
  A LinkedIn ad may not generate immediate clicks but shapes perceptions and decisions. LinkedIn and similar platforms go beyond clicks and sign-ups. Yet, GTM teams often overlook this broader impact, focusing on immediate outcomes. LinkedIn True ROI assesses ads' indirect effects, giving a comprehensive view of their performance.

Introducing LinkedIn AdPilot: LinkedIn True ROI

Our Ad Pilot introduces 'LinkedIn True ROI', effectively capturing hidden LinkedIn engagement. It recognizes the impact of ads users viewed but didn't click on. AdPilot combines this with other account actions, such as website visits and blog interactions at an account level.

This offers a broader perspective on how LinkedIn contributes to conversions and revenue.

“Even if one person from a specific account visits our website, Factors helps us target decision makers and the larger buying committee as whole to ensure that all the right people from a target account see our ads. Ultimately, this helps our LinkedIn ad budgets go that extra mile further.”  - Abhishek Iyer, Director of Marketing at Descope.

Use Cases for LinkedIn True ROI:‍

LinkedIn True ROI provides avenues for understanding and optimizing your LinkedIn ad campaigns. Here are some ways you can leverage our LinkedIn True ROI to enhance your marketing efforts:

1. Measure LinkedIn ROI Accurately

Accurately measuring LinkedIn ROI is crucial for proving the value of your ads. Click-through attribution typically undervalues LinkedIn’s impact by only counting direct interactions. However, LinkedIn True ROI captures the influence of LinkedIn ads on lead conversions.

Let’s understand this with an example:

1. Number of Opportunities
   
   Let's take Factors’ LinkedIn spending in Q1 2024 as an example. We analyzed one month of LinkedIn ads from an SME SaaS remarketing campaign group. Our analysis showed how different approaches affected deals and pipeline contributions. Click-through attribution data came from LinkedIn’s ad manager, while Factors.ai collected LinkedIn True ROI data for this campaign.
   
   The results revealed that the campaign generated only one opportunity through click-through attribution. However, LinkedIn True ROI showed that the same campaign influenced at least 11 opportunities.

2. Cost per Opportunity
   The cost per opportunity varies starkly based on the number of opportunities and the exact total spend. 
   
   Click-through attribution indicates a high $4,338 per opportunity, whereas LinkedIn True ROI shows a more reasonable $395 per opportunity. This difference, nearly 11 times higher based on clicks alone, can lead to the misconception that LinkedIn is too costly.

3. Pipeline Value
   The impact on the sales pipeline is crucial. Click-through attribution indicates LinkedIn generated $1,800 in pipeline value from one opportunity, with a cost per opportunity of $4,338. In contrast, LinkedIn True ROI reveals 11 opportunities contributing $19,440 to the pipeline at $395 each. Evaluating costs based on ad views rather than clicks provides a more realistic and favorable ROI—$19,440 in pipeline from $4,348 in spend makes far more sense than $1,800.

2. Improve LinkedIn Ads Performance

Understanding which ads drive conversions helps marketers optimize campaigns effectively. Analyzing the most effective ads influencing potential customers allows for refining ad creative, targeting, and budget allocation. This iterative process improves with more data collected.

For example, if certain LinkedIn ads are regularly viewed by target accounts but not clicked, LinkedIn True ROI can reveal their influence on actions like website visits or content engagement. Marketers can then adjust ad creatives for better resonance and increased engagement.

3. Ensure Better LinkedIn (Re)Targeting

LinkedIn True ROI helps improve retargeting strategies by understanding how ads work. Marketers use this to find accounts that see specific ads, making retargeting more personalized and avoiding ad fatigue.

Suppose an account often sees a brand ad but doesn't click. With True ROI, marketers can show them other helpful content like testimonials or product examples. This keeps the retargeting relevant and exciting, guiding prospects further along.

LinkedIn True ROI also shows which types of content work best by spotting patterns in how ads are viewed. This helps marketers plan better content strategies that match their audience's preferences.

4. Gain Granular Insights into Customer Journey

LinkedIn True ROI provides detailed insights into how LinkedIn ads affect each stage of the buying process. Marketers can see how prospects move through the funnel using data from website visits, CRM systems, and other marketing channels.

For instance, a prospect might view a LinkedIn ad, visit the website, download a whitepaper, and later request a demo. While traditional click-through attribution focuses on the final action, LinkedIn True ROI recognizes the LinkedIn ad's initial impact. This helps marketers refine strategies that effectively support the entire customer journey.

“Given that we’re not in the habit of gating our content assets, it’s valuable to understand the full range of otherwise hidden touchpoints that influence conversions.” – Abhishek Iyer, Director of Marketing at Descope
‍

5. Demonstrate Marketing Impact to Leadership

Finally, LinkedIn True ROI helps marketers demonstrate the true impact of their LinkedIn ads to leadership. Marketers can justify their ad spend and secure ongoing investment by providing a comprehensive view of ad influence and ROI.

Accurately attributing conversions to LinkedIn ads can be challenging, especially when dealing with high CPCs and CPMs. LinkedIn True ROI provides the data needed to showcase LinkedIn’s value, presenting a clearer picture of how ads contribute to the sales pipeline.

“It’s very helpful to achieve a bird’s eye view of the customer journey that leads up to a demo — even when a direct attribution isn’t explicitly present in our CRM. In many instances, we see that a lead has been viewing our LinkedIn ads for months before landing on a search ad or blog and then signing up. This helps us validate what we already know: it’s rarely a single touchpoint that leads to conversions.” – Abhishek Iyer, Director of Marketing at Descope

In a nutshell

LinkedIn True ROI is a game-changer for B2B marketers. It unlocks the value of LinkedIn ads by accurately measuring their impact. This capability helps marketers justify ad spend, optimize campaigns, and improve retargeting. It ensures LinkedIn ads are evaluated on their real influence, not just clicks.

With LinkedIn True ROI, marketers can accurately measure and optimize their LinkedIn ads, leading to better results and a higher return on investment.

Ready to uncover the true impact of your LinkedIn ads? Start using Factors.AI’s LinkedIn True ROI feature today to understand your campaign’s effectiveness better. Get in touch with us to learn more and get started.

Looking to know more about LinkedIn True ROI? Click here.

When you run an ad campaign on LinkedIn, you expect all the accounts in your audience list to view your ad, right? However, our research reveals a shocking truth: 80% of your ads are shown to only the top 10% of the accounts 🤯

The best way to avoid losing pipeline due to such uneven ad distribution is to use a tool that allows you to control how your ads are shown to your prospects and evenly distribute impressions across your target account list.  

In this article, we’ll explain how our newest feature, “Smart Reach,” can put an end to your impression distribution worries ⬇️

The Challenge

“Control is an illusion”  – a quote that most B2B marketers relate to when they launch their ad campaigns and leave it all to the algorithms to show their ads to the right people and accounts. A couple of accounts may have viewed your ad too many times, whereas many may not have seen the ad enough. 

Here’s an example to help you understand how impression frequency works on LinkedIn:

Suppose you have a target account list of 500 accounts, including SMBs and large companies, with the top 10 accounts being enterprises with 1000+ employees. Since enterprise companies have more employees that match your ICP, LinkedIn will more likely show your ads to larger companies, neglecting the rest of your account list. 

This causes a handful of issues like:

• Ad fatigue and underexposure to your ads: Since your ads aren’t evenly distributed across your account list, some prospects would face ad fatigue, whereas others may not have seen them enough.

• Losing out on potential deals: If a sufficient number of ads are not shown to the majority of your accounts, you risk missing out on high-value deals and costing your company significant opportunities.

• Wasted ad spend: If 10% of your accounts consume 80% of the impressions, there is much room for improvement in marketing efficiency.

A lack of frequency capping becomes a major problem, especially when launching brand awareness campaigns, where your main objective is to maximize reach. 

You could maneuver this issue by creating smaller audiences across different campaigns. However, the smaller the audience size for a campaign, the higher the CPMs - which again results in wasted ad spend. Not to mention, it would get increasingly tedious to manage multiple smaller campaigns. 

💡Check out our research in detail here: LinkedIn Frequency Capping: Impact Measurement

So how do you possibly win in this lose-lose situation? 2 words: Smart Reach.

“LinkedIn budgets can scale very quickly — and if you’re unsure you’re reaching the right people, you’re essentially setting your money on fire. With Smart Reach, we’ve been able to reach the largest spread of accounts visiting our website without putting too much undue weightage on larger accounts.” – Abhishek Iyer, Director of Marketing at Descope.

Introducing: Smart Reach 

Our newest feature allows you to manage the frequency with which your ads are displayed to each account, ensuring maximum reach, lower CPMs, and impact. Plus, with intent-based impression control, you can ensure that your ads are only shown to relevant and high-intent accounts. 

Here’s an example of how Descope uses Smart Reach  to improve its ad distribution:

We analyzed Descope’s LinkedIn ad metrics to examine how Smart Reach affects campaign reach and ad spend. Our research revealed that without setting a frequency cap, the ads reached 8214 accounts, and the top 25 target accounts consumed 35% of ad impressions. This led to an ad spend of approximately $4700. 

We set up a cap of 2000 impressions at an account level across all campaign groups to analyze whether there would be an impact on reach. After a month, we noticed the following improvements:

• Impressions consumed by the top 25 companies have decreased by 17% within a month.
• Descope was able to redistribute around 158,841 impressions that were earlier consumed by the top 25 companies.
• Ad spend was reduced by 22% ($1,000 less!), with CPM going down from $7 to $4
• The reach was reduced by only 6% 

This proves that Smart Reach not only saves your ad spend but also ensures that your reach remains intact. 

3 key benefits of Smart Reach 

Better reach per dollar spent 

Imagine investing a good chunk of your budget on LinkedIn ads, only to realize your ads don’t reach all the accounts in your audience list. Well, with Factors, you don’t have to imagine. Smart Reach allows you to redistribute impressions to reach more accounts per dollar spent, helping you make the most of your ad spend.

Intent-based ad distribution 

Saying that all prospects are equal sounds good in theory, but in reality, that’s not the case. Ideally, sales-ready accounts should receive more ads than others. However, after analyzing 100+ LinkedIn ad accounts, we’ve found that most ads are distributed to large companies. With Factors, you can configure Smart Reach rules so that the high-intent accounts who visit the pricing page, engage with G2 pages, open emails, etc., receive ads more frequently than others. 

Conversely, accounts that have already booked a demo or expressed negative interest in a sales email should be shown fewer ads. Factors empowers intent-based ad distribution to ensure an appropriate ad frequency for each account based on intent levels.

Avoid over and underexposure

Just like Goldilocks and the 3 Bears, there should never be too much or too little of anything, whether porridge or LinkedIn ads. Your high-intent prospects shouldn’t have to deal with seeing the same ad over and over again, but they should also see your ads enough times to consider your product for their needs. Smart Reach ensures that your impression distribution is just right – automatically showing the right frequency of ads to the right accounts. 

“Within a month of setting up our frequency capping rules with Factors, we’ve saved 216,448 ad impressions and reached the largest spread of accounts per dollar spent. We’re excited to scale this up in the future.”—Abhishek Iyer, Director of Marketing at Descope.

Join the waitlist today

Every marketer launches their campaigns, hoping their ads reach all the relevant accounts at the right time. With Smart Reach, you can make it happen. Factors AdPilot offers a comprehensive range of features that ensures you make the most of your ad spend while increasing revenue via LinkedIn ads. Contact our sales team to learn how you can use AdPilot to take your LinkedIn game to the next level.

When you think of launching an ABM campaign, it’s natural to consider running LinkedIn ads. All you need to do is build and upload an audience list of your target accounts and launch your ads… right? Unfortunately, creating audience lists isn’t a walk in the park. 

Your ability to maximize the value of your ads depends heavily on how you target them. If you want to build the perfect audience list, you need to look through mountains of data across multiple tools and Excel sheets while manually categorizing it according to your campaign goals. 

Luckily, we have “Audience Builder” to prevent you from wasting your money.

In this article, we’ll show you how using Audience Builder is an effective way for you to target your audience on LinkedIn 🎯 

Audience targeting: why the old way doesn’t work 

Marketers typically build multiple audience lists for several different marketing initiatives, such as:

• ICP lists
• ABM lists
• Retargeting lists
• Webinar lists
• Intent data lists
• SDR lists, etc. 

You might rely on LinkedIn’s native targeting filters to build your target account list. However, this comes with a set of challenges, such as: 

• LinkedIn native targeting filters don’t include intent data, making it difficult to specifically target high-intent accounts 
• LinkedIn’s job titles and industry tags are still being updated, so you might unintentionally target accounts that don’t fall under your ICP. 

Of course, you can also build target account lists outside the platform via Apollo or Zoominfo and upload them to Campaign Manager. However, building out and vetting this list while sorting through different data sets would be time-consuming. Let’s say you want to build a list excluding your existing customers or those who have already signed up for a demo. It becomes tedious to scope out and filter every single account. Plus, you also have to continuously update this list every day according to when prospects book demos. 

Now that’s A LOT ☠️

Abhishek at Descope explains why they faced a challenge when creating audience lists for their LinkedIn ad campaigns:

“Most tech companies have very complex buying groups with multiple stakeholders where the decision-maker and influencer differ. We were looking for a scalable way to craft the right message for the right buyer role at the right organization size without blowing the company’s budget.” – Abhishek Iyer, Director of Marketing at Descope.

For all these reasons, you need a tool that consolidates and integrates all your account data across multiple tools and automatically creates an audience list of accounts interested in your solution. Fortunately, your search ends here!

Introducing Audience Builder 

Audience Builder allows you to build any audience from your Factors data and automatically sync these lists directly to LinkedIn. Let’s show you how: 

Segment your audience lists based on intent data

Let’s say you want to show your ads specifically to accounts who visit your pricing page. You can use the event as a trigger to add them to a LinkedIn audience. Now, you can show ads to product-aware accounts, aiming to engage them further after they've shown interest. 

You can skip the guesswork and leverage the power of intent data to target the accounts genuinely interested in your product. You avoid wasting ad spend and can have your GTM team prioritize the right prospects to meet your pipeline targets

Sync data from multiple sources 

Every marketing team uses various tools across their tech stack, each with different capabilities. However, syncing data across these tools to create an airtight audience list can be tricky. 

Let’s say you use Salesforce. Since Salesforce doesn’t have a native sync with LinkedIn, you have to manually sort and build the list before uploading it to Campaign Manager. Plus, Salesforce doesn't offer website intent data or G2 intent data, so you cannot filter accounts that are genuinely interested in your solution. That’s where Factors comes in. 

We help you unify end-to-end B2B customer journey data from G2, Linkedin, CRMs, and MAPs, giving you insights into every customer segment, their intent signals, and how to reach them effectively.

Here’s an example of how Descope uses the Audience Builder feature to build their lists:

“Factors provides granular visibility into accounts visiting our website as well as their engagement across G2 and other channels. Accordingly, we receive tons of insight into account activity without the need for form submissions or sign-ups. 

Based on this, we’ve created 3 audience segments: Top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. These audiences are pushed into LinkedIn campaigns and served tailored ads based on their sales cycle stage.”  – Abhishek Iyer, Director of Marketing at Descope

Audience Builder use cases

Now, you can leverage every bit of GTM data to create and activate the most relevant audiences. Here are a few ways you can use this shiny new feature to supercharge your LinkedIn ads:

• US-based software companies with 500+ employees that visited the pricing page >2 times and are not in the CRM: When ICP accounts visit a high-intent page like your pricing or demo booking page, they are far more engaged than just regular website visitors. You can create a list of such accounts in your CRM and launch a retargeting campaign where you can use ads to drive consideration for your product. 

• ICP accounts that clicked on a search ad but failed to convert: Suppose a set of accounts clicked on a search ad that includes a feature keyword. You can use this data to push these accounts to a list that shows ads related to the relevant feature. Plus, you can add a condition to exclude companies who booked a demo. 

• Enterprise Software and IT services companies that engage with more than 5 pages of your G2 category: When you notice accounts engage with your G2 page, they are evaluating your solution. Create a list targeting decision-makers and launch an ad campaign highlighting your best reviews and case studies. 

• ABM target accounts that viewed LinkedIn ads and then visited the website: Prospects that visit your site after clicking an ad are likely problem-aware, so you can create an account list and add them to a sequential ad campaign to move them further down the funnel. 

Once Descope used Factors to build audience lists, they saw positive results and could easily target their ICP accounts without sifting through loads of data across their tech stack:

“Factors is already playing a key role in helping us make our LinkedIn paid spend more efficient. Even if one person from a specific account visits our website, Factors helps us target decision-makers and the larger buying committee as a whole to ensure that all the right people from a target account see our ads. Ultimately, this helps our LinkedIn ad budgets go that extra mile.”  – Abhishek Iyer, Director of Marketing at Descope.

Join the waitlist today

Building a solid audience list is key to targeting your ideal prospects. With AdPilot, you can use data-driven insights to effectively target the right accounts at the right time and double your LinkedIn ROI. Speak to our experts today to learn how AdPilot can revamp your LinkedIn ads strategy.

The current state of B2B LinkedIn advertising

LinkedIn is the place for B2B marketers to engage with key accounts and decision-makers. Unlike traditional social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn has a large user base of professional users who include precise details of job title, seniority, and department. 

Simply put, LinkedIn is the perfect place to run ABM campaigns that educate the market about the problem you solve and how you solve it best. Whether you’re a small startup looking to promote your product to a new market segment or an enterprise aiming to build brand awareness, LinkedIn is the key. 

And while there’s no doubt that LinkedIn ads can help you attract high-qualified leads, there could be a few reasons why your leadership team might be skeptical of LinkedIn as a marketing channel:

1. LinkedIn ads are expensive: As of 2024, the average CPC of LinkedIn ads ranges from $4 to $6, which is relatively pricier for SMBs looking to add LinkedIn to their marketing strategy. The CPMs could also be higher, depending on how niche your audience is. 

2. Hard to measure ROI: LinkedIn only tracks ad clicks and impressions, which doesn’t give a complete view of how your ads impact pipeline. One such example includes demo ads, where marketers typically face low conversion rates, mainly because users are less likely to sign up for a demo call while scrolling through social media. 

3. Limited control over how you show your ads: LinkedIn campaign manager allows you to upload a target account list for your ABM campaigns. However, if you want to show your ads to specific accounts showing higher intent and aren’t present in your CRM, it’s an uphill battle of scouring your tech stack and integrating data to ensure your ads are displayed to the right accounts. 

So, does this mean LinkedIn ads aren’t worth it? No, quite the opposite. ❌

Ignoring the channel altogether is a major risk, as you’ll miss out on many high-value deals. While other platforms, such as Google ads, help convert 5% of the in-market buyers, you’ll still lose out on 95% of the opportunities by not directly engaging with key stakeholders.

Source: LinkedIn

How to do LinkedIn ads the right way?

If you want to make the most bang for your buck, invest in a solution that gives you a complete view of how LinkedIn impacts your revenue and helps you optimize your spend. 

At Factors, we currently offer LinkedIn attribution, which allows you to track how LinkedIn influences pipeline, but now we've decided to take it up a notch!

Presenting: AdPilot

AdPilot finally answers every B2B marketer's long-standing question: “Are we doing LinkedIn ads right?” We’ve built out an exciting set of features that can help you generate 2x ROI from your ad campaigns: 

Audience Builder

Manually building lists across Apollo and Zoominfo is tiring, and you also tend to miss out on accounts with high buying intent. Not to mention, your data is spread out across multiple tools. With our new Audience sync feature, you can sync all your data across multiple platforms to create accurate audiences on LinkedIn and target the right accounts without the extra effort. 

Smart Reach

Naturally, your audience list will include companies of varying sizes, and some are bigger than others. We audited 100+ LinkedIn ad accounts and found that 80% of your ad impressions are taken up by the top 10% of the accounts. Why miss out on potential revenue with this lopsided distribution of impressions?

With Smart Reach, you have all the power. You can control how ads are shown to your audiences so that every account on your list has the chance to view your ads and make the right buying decisions. 

💡Learn more about our research here: Resolving LinkedIn’s Frequency Capping Paradox

Campaign Automation

Advertising is all about pitching your product to the right people, be it online or offline. Instead of displaying your ads to prospects who aren’t currently looking for a solution, use intent-based impression control and allocate your ad budget accordingly to target high-intent and in-market buyers. 

LinkedIn True ROI

Do you remember the last time you clicked on a LinkedIn ad and booked a demo straight away? Neither can we because social media channels like LinkedIn never show the complete picture of how prospects make their buying decisions. So, how do you prove LinkedIn’s true ROI to leadership?
Since every ad click doesn’t equal revenue, Factors offers view-through attribution. This gives you a granular view of how target accounts view your ads and interact with your website, giving you an accurate idea of how LinkedIn affects revenue generation.  

💡You can learn more here: Measuring LinkedIn True ROI: Click vs View-through Attribution

LinkedIn CAPI

When you’re A/B testing your ads and finally find success, you naturally want to repeat the process and continue getting positive results. 

As a LinkedIn Marketing Partner, we could always pull LinkedIn data into factors for better reporting, but with the new LinkedIn CAPI integration, you can send conversion data back to LinkedIn Campaign Manager. Now, you no longer need to rely on guesswork to scale and optimize your ad campaigns. 

Join the waitlist today

No marketer likes to see their ad budget wasted on unqualified leads. Quit letting siloed data and inaccurate audience lists get in the way of your ad performance. With AdPilot, you can use data-driven insights to effectively target the right accounts and boost your LinkedIn ROI in no time. Speak to our team today to learn how AdPilot can be a game-changer for your marketing strategy.

If you’ve landed on this article, chances are you’re looking for an intent data tool to improve your marketing efforts and drive pipeline for your company. 

While Koala is a great tool for beginners to experiment with intent-based marketing, many other platforms offer a wider set of features that can take your marketing game to the next level.
Scroll ahead to find 7 Koala alternatives that you can consider for your business ⬇️

Why look for a Koala alternative?

Koala is an AI-powered buyer intent data platform that helps businesses identify and prioritize their most promising sales prospects based on their website interactions and engagement. The tool was launched in 2022 and is relatively new compared to other lead scoring tools in the market. 

Koala offers a range of features such as:

• Visitor identification: Identify and track how prospects interact with your website by analyzing historical pageviews, events, and form-fills.
• ICP Scoring: You can assign an ICP score based on various demographic and technographic data points, such as company size, industry, ARR, among others.  
• Intent signals and engagement scoring: Capture intent data and prioritize leads based on how engaged they are with your product.
• Alerts: Get Slack alerts when an ICP account interacts with your website.
• Automations: Sync intent signals to your CRM and route high-intent leads to the assigned sales reps. 

However, since it is a new tool, it doesn’t have all the features a marketing team might need to build out their GTM motion:

Koala offers a free plan with a 250-account limit, and its paid plans begin at $350/month.

This pricing might be steep for early-stage companies, especially when other tools on the market are cost-effective and offer more features. 

4 Factors to consider when looking for a Koala alternative

Robust integration options: Since Koala only offers integrations to Hubspot, Salesforce, and Apollo, you must look for a tool that seamlessly integrates with your existing tech stack.

Custom workflow automations: Find a tool that allows you to build custom workflows that automate your sales and marketing processes across your CRMs to save time. 

AI-powered insights: Don’t just consolidate data and reports; understand the ‘why’ behind your numbers and learn how you can improve with AI-powered insights.

Extract intent data from multiple platforms: Your prospects conduct research beyond your website before they make a purchase. Invest in a solution that gives you intent signals from relevant sources such as LinkedIn, review sites, communities, and the like. 

Top 7 Koala alternatives

Want to find the right tool and boost your marketing ROI? We’ve done the research for you and compiled a list of the 7 best Koala alternatives you can browse to make the right decision.
P.S.: We’ve ranked these tools in alphabetical order to ensure impartiality. Let’s dive in 🏊

Clearbit

Clearbit is a data enrichment platform that provides businesses with intent data about their customers and prospects. The key things Clearbit does are:

• Data Enrichment: Clearbit integrates with various tools like CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and websites to automatically enrich customer and prospect data with detailed company and contact information. 
• Lead Scoring and Routing: Clearbit's data and AI-powered algorithms allow businesses to score and route leads based on fit and buying intent signals. 
• Intent Tracking: Clearbit's IP intelligence data allows businesses to identify anonymous website visitors who match their ideal customer profile and show buying intent signals.
• Dynamic Form Shortening: Clearbit can reduce form friction by automatically populating form fields with enriched data, requiring users to only provide an email address.

Why Clearbit is a good alternative to Koala

• The form-shortening feature isn’t available in Koala. 
• Clearbit has greater integration options.
• Clearbit also offers auto prospecting, a feature that’s yet to arrive in Koala.

Limitations

• Clearbit doesn’t integrate with LinkedIn, which makes it difficult to transfer data between the two platforms.
• The setup process is relatively trickier than other products.
• Users have reported that the new UX updates make the platform difficult to use. 

Pricing 

Clearbit’s pricing is currently unknown. You have to fill out a form and contact their sales team for further details. 

Factors.ai

Factors is an account intelligence and analytics platform that helps you grow pipeline by identifying sales-ready accounts and using data to create marketing campaigns that resonate with your target accounts. We have partnered with 6sense and Clearbit for industry-leading IP data, identifying up to 64% of anonymous companies.

Why Factors is a good alternative to Koala

• Factors can pull intent signals from LinkedIn and G2, which gives greater visibility into high-intent accounts considering your solution. Plus, you can unify all your account-level data from multiple sources.
• Our newest segment insights feature allows you to gain a broader understanding of how different user segments resonate with your product. 
• Factors also can help you personalize your cold outreach based on intent data, thereby taking your sales strategy to the next level.
• Use Factors to create custom workflow automations to simplify your business processes across multiple CRMs.
• The account and engagement scoring features allow you to assign a value to every interaction an ICP account has with your website. You can now prioritize accounts with high scores to close deals faster. 

Limitations

• Factors doesn’t offer information at a user level due to privacy and compliance regulations.

Pricing 

💡Learn more about our pricing here.

Leadfeeder (now Dealfront)

Leadfeeder (now known as Dealfront) is a website visitor identification tool that identifies anonymous high-intent accounts and sends them to your sales team. Combined with Echobot, Dealfront is a popular tool in the account intelligence space used by 10K+ customers worldwide. 

Why Leadfeeder is a good alternative to Koala

• If you are based in Europe, Leadfeeder is a better option for your business.
• Leadfeeder has better reporting capabilities for customers looking to go deeper into account analytics.

Limitations

• The product is limited to identifying website intent data.
• Leadfeeder does not offer funnel analytics and signal reports.
• Users have reported that they’d prefer more filters when segmenting their lead list. 

Pricing 

💡 Also read: 5 Leadfeeder Alternatives For Visitor Identification In 2024 

Lead411

Lead411 is a B2B data provider that offers buyer intent data with Bombora. They offer a set of features such as:

• Intent topics: You can classify and set between 5-25 intent topics.  
• Lead prospecting: Lead411 has an in-built prospecting tool to streamline the outbound process.
  CRM Enhancer: Automatically update your CRM with the latest data.

Why Lead411 is a good alternative to Koala

• Lead411 offers a comprehensive contact database and triple verification, a feature currently missing in Koala.
• They also offer a Chrome extension so you can identify and find phone numbers and emails in no time.
• If you’re looking for a tool to also boost your outreach, Lead411 offers multi-channel outreach and sales engagement to improve your outbound processes.

Limitations

• Users have found that even verified contacts may not be accurate at times.

• The data can be difficult to manage because the platform doesn’t have the capabilities to sort it out into multiple manageable lists.

Pricing

Snitcher

Snitcher unmasks anonymous companies visiting your website. The platform helps you understand their interests and convert them into qualified leads by tracking visitor behavior and enriching leads with details. Snitcher’s key offerings are:

• Website deanonymization: Sintcher’s “identify” turns your anonymous website traffic into actionable leads and information in real-time.
• Google Analytics enrichment: Snitcher adds context to Google Analytics data by enriching the numbers with company identifications. 
• Lead segmentation: You can segment your leads into audiences and run relevant marketing campaigns.

Why Snitcher is a good alternative to Koala

• Snitcher’s white label service is great for agencies who want to provide their clients’ sales teams with high-quality leads.
• Snithcer gives you a deeper insight into how you can optimize your ad spend across LinkedIn, Google and Facebook.
  

Limitations

• Users have reported that the filtering setup can be improved to navigate the platform easily.

• The pricing is higher than most account intelligence tools since they charge with usage-based pricing

Pricing

Warmly

Warmly is an AI-powered sales orchestration tool that offers website identification and allows you to tailor your outreach based on intent data. It offers multiple features such as:

• Autonomous Sales Orchestration: Capture buyer intent to personalize engagement across email, LinkedIn, and live chat.
• Scales Sales Capacity: Allows engaging with every target account visiting the website via multi-threaded conversations without needing to add headcount.
• Orchestrates Tech Stack: Consolidates tools, workflows, and actions to instantly capture decision-makers’ interest by integrating with Warmly.
• AI Chatbots: AI Chat automatically scrapes your account’s website information to create personalized, proactive chat messages to prospects.

Why Warmly is a good alternative to Koala

• Warmly is a better Koala alternative if your SDRs and AEs are looking to improve their sales game 
• Koala lacks the AI chatbot feature, which can play a major role in closing deals on behalf of your sales teams

Limitations

• If you’re looking for a product with more marketing-related use cases, Warmly may not be the best option. 
• The pricing is higher than most of the tools on this list. Users have stated that it’s a huge jump from the free plan

Pricing 

💡Also read: Top 10 Warmly.AI Alternatives | Compare Pros, Cons & Pricing 

Zoominfo 

Zoominfo is a comprehensive B2B contact enrichment and analytics solution that offers a suite of products for sales and marketing teams. You can use Sales OS and Marketing OS to find high-intent prospects and send personalized outbound campaigns. 

Why Zoominfo is a good alternative to Koala

• Zoominfo offers data enrichment services, a feature that’s currently missing in Koala
• They offer conversation intelligence to help sales teams analyze every demo call and refine their sales strategy accordingly.  

Limitations

• Multiple users on G2 have stated that the tool has a steep learning curve, which isn’t ideal for agile marketing teams who want to use the platform for their day-to-day activities
• The contacts provided by the tool could be outdated, thus hampering your outreach efforts

Pricing 

Since Zoominfo doesn’t publicly display its pricing, you can learn about it here: ZoomInfo Pricing, Alternatives & Overview | 2024 

Choose the best Koala alternative today

Investing in intent data software depends on your company's needs. SMBs who are new to account intelligence may prefer a slimmed-down platform like Koala. However, if you’re looking to create a well-rounded GTM strategy while aligning your sales and marketing efforts, Factors.ai is the one for you.

Speak to our team today to find out how you can best use intent data for your marketing campaigns. 

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If you still spend time randomly sending emails to prospects in your account list with a generic pitch slap, you’re selling wrong. An effective sales strategy is all about driving consideration for high-intent prospects at the right time with the right pitch, whether they’ve just signed up, completed a demo, or are suddenly showing interest in your product again. 

However, the major hurdle is the tedious process of manually finding contact data, syncing CRMs, and personalizing emails for every prospect on the list. 

Enter: Automation. 

A sales automation workflow helps busy sales teams turn prospects into pipeline by streamlining business processes and ensuring that you reach out to prospects promptly. 

In this article, we explain the different types of automation workflows we can create for your sales teams ⬇️

Creating sales automation workflows using Factors: Case Study 

At Factors, we create custom workflows for customers to simplify data transfer so that their sales teams can effectively act on the data. For this, we make these signals available in the format that the salesperson needs in the tool of their choice. Here’s an example of a workflow we set up for a CreativeOps company:

This workflow demonstrates the process of transferring Factors data to create a contact in HubSpot, which is then pushed to Apollo to be added to their email sequences. 

The Problem

Our customer wanted to ensure their salespeople could promptly act on these signals to build pipeline. Since they used HubSpot and Apollo, they requested a custom workflow that could sync new leads from the accounts that Factors identified on their website and organize this data in a specific way such that all accounts received personalized emails based on the deal stage. For example, if 50 companies visit the customer’s website, they want to automate the process of identifying their leads from each account and adding them to their outreach sequences. To accomplish this, we built a custom workflow with 4 different criteria to streamline their outbound efforts.

The Solution

We used webhooks and make.com to create multiple workflows for the following scenarios:

1. The account identified is a new company
2. The account is an existing company in the CRM that was identified as “closed lost.”
3. Existing company in the CRM but with no deal associated 
4. The contact doesn’t exist in the CRM 

💡Learn more about using Webhooks with Make.com

Here’s a detailed explanation of how each of the above workflows operates:

1. The account identified is a new company

The first branch involves identifying the new account and creating a new company on HubSpot. While Factors cannot identify user-level data due to privacy concerns, we can potentially identify the leads associated with the account via job titles. 

The brand has included 25 job titles under its ICP, so now, our customer can automatically identify relevant contact data via Apollo, add the email IDs to their CRM, and send out outreach emails based on their website activity (e.g., visited paid landing page, pricing page, etc.). 

💡Factors allows you to send personalized outreach emails to your prospects based on how they engage with your brand. 

2. The account is an existing company in the CRM 

We set up this workflow branch to identify leads who visited the website after getting marked as “closed lost” on Hubspot. Here’s how you can set up the filter on Make.com: 

The customer wanted to re-engage with closed, lost accounts older than 90 days. In this case, we again re-route to Apollo to identify and add potentially new leads associated with the account to an email sequence. The workflow also automatically adds the existing contacts from Hubspot to the sequence. 

3. Existing company in the CRM but with no deal associated

This part of the workflow follows a similar process to the one mentioned above, with the only difference being that we automate contact creation on HubSpot as an additional step.

4. No contact exists in their CRM

We set up a filter to identify accounts that visit the company’s website but aren’t associated with any contacts in HubSpot.

In this case, we automate identifying leads via Apollo and update contacts on HubSpot before pushing them to an email sequence. 

The Result

Our workflows simplified their outbound process. Instead of manually identifying accounts by deal stage and writing out emails, they could effortlessly send personalized email sequences automatically via Apollo while simultaneously identifying and updating new leads within their CRM. 

Build stellar workflow automations with Factors

Every company's sales team operates differently and has multiple tools in its tech stack. Instead of having your account data in messy and disparate systems, it’s critical to have a custom workflow that saves you the time and effort spent on sales outreach. 

Factors’ sales automation workflows are a boon for busy sales teams who want to skip tedious tasks and focus on generating revenue for the company. We create customized workflows that integrate with the right tools and use your data to its maximum potential. Speak to our team today to understand how you can automate your business processes with Factors.

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Imagine working hard for months to close the deal with a prospect, only for them to churn in less than a year. There could be several reasons, such as:

• Poor customer service
• Choosing a competitor's solution 
• Users not achieving their KPIs

Reducing customer churn is vital for businesses because it ensures customer satisfaction and boosts profitability. The best way to avoid high churn rates is to predetermine the customers at a churn risk. 

In this article, we'll detail how customer churn prediction is the key to reducing churn and keeping the cash flowing in 💸

What is Customer Churn Prediction?

Customer churn prediction involves analyzing data to detect customers likely to cancel subscriptions. SaaS businesses use this analysis to identify at-risk customers, leading to cost savings and improved customer lifetime value.

Analyzing churn through data-driven insights can help your business understand patterns and provide a roadmap for improvement. For example, if your surveys reveal that your platform has a complicated onboarding process – you can direct users to your onboarding specialist to assist them.

Why is Customer Churn Prediction important?

Losing customers is always costly. However, the costs involved go beyond the revenue lost from the customers who leave. It also includes the marketing expenses required to find new customers to replace the old ones. In many cases, the amount spent on acquiring a new customer is not covered by the amount paid during their time with the company. This means that customer acquisition is usually more expensive than customer retention.

Plus, unhappy customers share their experiences with others, impacting the company's reputation and customer acquisition budget. Businesses must predict churn and take action beforehand to prevent customers from leaving. 

Once you know a customer is going to churn, you can take actions such as:

• Providing more targeted re-engagement campaigns
• Launching incentives such as loyalty programs that encourage them to stay 
• Creating educational material that is tailored toward their specific needs
• Ensuring accessible and improved customer support 

How to Build a Customer Churn Prediction Model

Creating a churn prediction model can help businesses retain customers and sustain growth. Using data analytics and machine learning, companies can identify which customers are likely to leave and take action to prevent it. 

Here are the key steps to develop an effective churn prediction model ⬇️

1. Data collection and review

Ensure that the data is accurate by handling missing values, removing duplicates, and converting it into a suitable format for analysis. Before moving on to calculations, reviewing the data for accuracy and validity is crucial. Every piece of customer info is valuable in the upcoming churn calculations, so it's worth ensuring accuracy.

2. Model selection

Select an appropriate machine learning algorithm for churn prediction, such as logistic regression, decision trees, random forests, or gradient boosting machines. Split the data into training and testing sets, train the model, and tune hyperparameters to optimize performance. Evaluate the model using testing data and cross-validation. Deploy the model into production to make real-time predictions and prevent churn.

3. Use an automated predictive model

Do people with lower NPS scores tend to leave more? Are they evaluating competitor solutions? You can predict who might leave by spotting these signs in the data. You must use machine learning with a dataset containing all the information you have about customers who stayed and those who left. The algorithm learns from this historical data to understand how different factors relate to churn. Then, it can predict if future customers with similar behaviors might leave or stay.

💡Factors can help you identify customers evaluating competitor solutions by helping you track when they visit their G2 pages. 

4. Establish retention strategy

Optimize your retention strategy by prioritizing actions based on the probability of customer churn. When customers first sign up, use checklists and personalized help to ensure they understand and use the product. As they keep using it, watch out for signs they might leave. For instance, if they're not using a feature they need, you can send them helpful tips to get them back on track.

5. Track results regularly 

Continuously monitor the churn prediction model's performance and update it with new data periodically to ensure it remains effective as customer behavior evolves. Before introducing any further changes to your plan, collect enough data to measure the real impact of your efforts.

Your churn model will provide probabilities for various customer segments. It's essential to keep testing new strategies and recording the impact on these segments. While creating a mathematical model of churn requires time and resources from your team, each test can help you create a better model for the future. 

6 Customer churn prediction best practices

Now that you know how to build a churn prediction model, here are a few handy tips you must remember to prevent customer churn:

1. Segment Customers

After obtaining your data, it's time to shift your focus towards the users and begin segmenting them. Since users have distinct needs and usage patterns, they don't churn for the same reason. Hence, it's essential to categorize them into separate segments. You can segment them based on their:

• Demographics, such as location, region, company size, and the year they signed up for your company.
• Behavior and usage, such as how often they log in, whether they use a particular feature more or less, or whether they have completed the onboarding process.
• Contract terms include pricing plans and whether customers signed up for a monthly, quarterly, or yearly deal.

You can design retention strategies and marketing campaigns tailored to specific customer segments by segmenting customers based on their churn likelihood and characteristics. Domain knowledge or clustering techniques can help you define meaningful segments.

2. Monitor product usage data of existing customers

Product usage data captures how and when customers use your software. Important data points include feature usage, customer behavior, clicks, and other metrics such as time-to-value and product stickiness.

To build an effective model, it's important to consider some key product usage data points such as:

• Monitor feature usage data to show users' engagement with your product's features, indicating popularity and relevance.
• Observe users’ actions within your product, like when they use it, how long they use it, which features they engage with, and how they progress through it.
• Track the number of times a user clicks or interacts with a UI element, such as a button, checkbox, text area, or menu.
• Track other product usage data such as time-to-value, product stickiness, interactions, and more.

3. Keep an eye on customer success metrics

Understanding your users' success with your product is crucial in determining if they will continue using it. Surveys such as NPS and CSAT can be used to measure customer success. An NPS score of less than 7 or 8 means you may need a win-back campaign or value incentive to change their attitude towards your product. NPS measures loyalty and willingness to recommend, while CSAT measures customer satisfaction. Conduct these surveys periodically to track customer success and satisfaction.

4. Gather customer feedback regularly

Apart from gathering feedback through conventional ways, you can use various other forms of customer feedback to gain insights into their experience with your product or service. For example, in-app surveys can provide you with contextual input from users. You can use them to find out about your customer's overall satisfaction with your product, their experience with a particular feature, any issues they may have faced, or even the features they would like you to add or implement. This can be very helpful in understanding the general sentiment of users and identifying areas of improvement or strengths.

To promptly address issues and demonstrate responsiveness to user input, incorporate real-time feedback loops within your product. Acknowledge the feedback received through in-app surveys and communicate any actions taken to address user concerns.

5. Enhance customer experience

You can streamline the customer experience using automated onboarding, self-service options, and personalized support. Furthermore, you should use customer feedback to identify areas of improvement and proactively address any customer dissatisfaction rather than reacting after the fact.

6. Improve customer service

Respond promptly to inquiries and complaints, offer helpful advice, and measure performance using metrics like support tickets, call center response times, and social media interactions. Monitor these metrics to gain insights into customer service trends and effectiveness.

Wrapping up

Reducing customer churn is crucial for businesses as it directly impacts long-term revenue, customer loyalty, and overall business stability. However, understanding why customers leave requires analyzing data and tracking various metrics over time. Effective churn analysis involves monitoring overall customer turnover rates and identifying factors contributing to attrition.

Businesses can use advanced analytics and machine learning techniques to identify potential churners and implement targeted retention strategies.

There’s no doubt that paid advertising is one of the best channels for marketing teams to generate and capture demand. Plus, we're seeing the rise of paid social media, with over 66% of B2B marketers acknowledging its impact on improving ROI. By targeting specific audiences and broadcasting your message across various channels, paid advertising can help drive the success of your campaigns.

However, running a few ads at random does not get you conversions. A strong strategy is key to maximizing ROI on expensive ads.

Let's dive in and look at how paid advertising can benefit your B2B company ⬇️

Google ads vs LinkedIn ads: Which one is best for B2B?

While many businesses advertise online, only a few do it well. It's especially tough when you have heaps of options to choose from. So, Google, LinkedIn, Search, Display, or a combination of all of the above? The choice isn't that simple, as each platform has its unique features and capabilities. In some instances, using either of the channels would be enough. For example, you should use Google Ads to target people based on their search queries, location, device, and more. LinkedIn ads can help create targeted ABM campaigns.

However, if you’re running a full-funnel campaign, you must use both Google and LinkedIn ads to their fullest potential.

Let's understand the differences between these platforms, how they work, their pros and cons, and which platform is better for your unique needs.

Google Ads

Google search ads appear when users search for specific keywords related to your business. Here are their pros and cons:

Pros of Search Ads

• Access to a larger audience when bidding on high-volume keywords
• Typically attract in-market leads as they're based on search intent
• Detailed analytics allow you to track clicks, conversions, and ROI effectively

Cons of Search Ads

• Popular keywords in B2B industries can be highly competitive, leading to higher costs per click.
• Demographic targeting is limited compared to social media platforms.
• Primarily text-based, offering less opportunity for visual branding.
• Lesser segmentation opportunities

LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn ads target users based on their professional profiles, interests, and behavior. Here are their pros and cons:

Pros of LinkedIn Ads

• Extensive targeting options based on job title, company size, and industry, allowing precise audience segmentation.
• Ideal for B2B marketing.
• Access to high-value prospects and decision-makers
• Account-based marketing opportunities
• Offers various ad formats, like sponsored content, text ads, and InMail, providing flexibility in messaging and creative presentation

Cons of LinkedIn Ads

• Relatively costlier than Google search ads
• Cannot identify high-intent buyers unless they click on the ad
• Greater risk of ad fatigue and decreased engagement over time
• Lack of in-depth reporting and analytics tools

How to use Google ads and LinkedIn ads in tandem for a successful paid advertising strategy

While search ads and LinkedIn ads have distinct pros and cons, integrating them into a cohesive paid advertising strategy allows businesses to use each platform's strengths and increase their reach, engagement, and conversions. Here are a few ways to do so:

• Use search ads to capture users actively searching for solutions, and LinkedIn ads to raise awareness and nurture leads at different stages of the buyer's journey.
• Retarget users who interact with your LinkedIn ads through search ads and vice versa, reinforcing your messaging across platforms.
• Use data from both platforms to inform targeting and messaging strategies, optimizing performance across the board.
• Broaden your advertising channels and reduce reliance on a single platform to mitigate performance variations and adapt to algorithmic shifts.

💡Read: How to Measure LinkedIn True ROI With Factors

How to execute paid advertising across the funnel

When it comes to paid marketing, most people start with Google, which provides a decent number of quality leads by capturing searches that show intent. However, it's essential to create a well-structured funnel that attracts the right audience and converts them quickly. Instead of having countless uninterested users, it's better to have interested ones heading in the right direction. 

Here's where LinkedIn retargeting helps you reach a high-intent audience from Google and target them on LinkedIn.

1.  Pick the right advertising channels 

Consider where your ideal customers spend their time online and choose platforms with the potential to reach them. Before selecting the right platform, consider your budget and advertising goals for your paid advertising efforts. By thoughtfully selecting the right mix of channels, you can create a cohesive and effective B2B advertising strategy tailored to your unique business needs.

2. Get a high-quality and high-intent audience.

When reaching an audience on LinkedIn, you have two options. You can either target a new audience or retarget an existing one. If you choose the former, you'll reach out to a completely cold audience that may not be familiar with you or your brand, making it more challenging to capture their attention. However, suppose you choose to retarget your Google ads traffic. In that case, you'll reach out to an audience that has already shown interest in your brand by searching for relevant keywords on Google, clicking on your search or display ad, and visiting your website. This audience is more likely to have high intent and be receptive to your message.

Ideally, you should invest in both options if your budget allows it. However, if you have to choose between the two, it makes more sense to retarget a warm audience that has already shown interest in your product or service.

💡Also read: Build Better LinkedIn Retargeting Audiences with Factors

3. Optimize ad spend

Many clients want to establish a presence on LinkedIn but find advertising on the platform expensive. LinkedIn's cost per click (CPC) and lead (CPL) are relatively high compared to other platforms. However, the quality of leads on LinkedIn is worth the extra cost.

If you have already advertised on other channels, you can use LinkedIn to enhance your conversion rates. Different channels can add relevant leads to your LinkedIn campaigns, which can be part of your mid-funnel strategy. Proper retargeting of high-intent traffic via LinkedIn ads can lead to increased conversions.

4. Convert more by staying on top of their mind

According to the marketing rule of 7, "a prospect needs to "hear" the advertiser's message at least seven times before they'll take action to buy that product or service."

A customer's journey towards making a purchase is not always straightforward. They may come across your business through a LinkedIn Ad, search for your business on Google, visit your website, leave, and stumble upon you again on LinkedIn. They may revisit your website before deciding to reach out or make a purchase. Retargeting helps push website traffic towards purchase.

💡Also read: How to Measure the Impact of Paid Marketing Using Factors

Paid advertising best practices

Paid ad campaigns are dynamic, and the right strategies can significantly impact your brand's success. To improve your efforts at online paid advertising, consider the following best practices:

1. Establish realistic goals

Having measurable goals allows you to track your progress and stay on schedule. Define your KPIs to measure lead generation, sales conversion, or brand awareness success. This will help you make informed decisions and optimize your ad spend.

2. Create compelling paid campaigns 

Your ad creatives must grab the attention of your target audience. Keep them engaging, informative, and visually appealing. Avoid using jargon or complex language. Instead, focus on the value of your product and how it can solve a problem for your audience. Create a strong value proposition that highlights your unique benefits. Stand out from competitors and guide prospects to take action with a persuasive CTA.

Source: LinkedIn

3. Personalize your campaigns

Retargeting is a great way to personalize your marketing funnel for each campaign and tailor your message to the audience of that campaign. 

For example, you have a search ad campaign targeting your competitors' branded keywords, which generates much interest. You can use LinkedIn and launch a retargeting campaign based on how you compare against them and what you offer that they don't. Running retargeting ads helps you identify what drives people to click and then adjust your LinkedIn ads to push them toward your offerings.

💡Factors helps you identify accounts that view your LinkedIn ads and visit your website through a search ad. You can use this information to personalize your cold outreach and focus on accounts with higher intent. 

4. Measure and analyze

Track key metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, CPA, and ROAS to make data-driven decisions. By setting campaign goals such as a target cost per lead or target conversion rate, you can track performance and analyze audience data like CTR and impressions to improve your marketing. 

Rev up your paid advertising game with Factors

While search and LinkedIn ads have unique features and capacities, integrating them into a cohesive paid advertising strategy allows businesses to use each platform's strengths and increase their reach, engagement, and conversions. Companies can optimize performance across the board by using data from both platforms to inform targeting and messaging strategies.

Thanks to Factors, you can gain a comprehensive view of buyer journeys, understand how your target accounts interact with your ads and determine whether your ad strategy is increasing revenue. Speak to our team today to optimize your paid advertising strategy in 2024.

Knowing how to build buyer trust through B2B marketing content can help create lasting customer relationships, drive sales, and foster customer retention. 

A recent survey by Forrester reported that B2B buyers are twice as likely to recommend a company to a colleague if they trust it. 

In this article, we’ll share insights on how to build buyer trust through B2B marketing content. 

What is a B2B content marketing strategy?

A B2B content marketing strategy is a carefully curated roadmap outlining how a company will create and share content that attracts and engages its audience.

A great content marketing strategy results in an impressive ROI. This explains why 90% of marketers use content as their primary digital marketing tool. 

That said, 97% of these marketers admit that their content marketing efforts have been successful, as shown in the HubSpot report below. 

Content comes in various forms, including blog posts, videos, webinars, e-books, social media posts, and case studies.

A well-defined content marketing strategy provides a plethora of benefits to B2B owners. These include:

• Increased website traffic, ultimately improving your brand’s visibility and driving more visitors
• Amplified B2B sales lead generation and conversion as quality content attracts prospects and guides them through a sales funnel.
• Improved relationships with customers by offering valuable resources that address common pain points and provide solutions
• Enhanced audience engagement, resulting in meaningful discussions and interactions that help build customer loyalty
• Increased brand awareness, helping to reach a larger audience

How to build buyer trust through B2B marketing content

Engaging B2B buyers can be challenging. To build trust, your content marketing strategy must be convincing enough to move your prospects past the decision stage in the customer journey.

Here are seven effective winning strategies for building buyer trust through B2B marketing content.  

1. Defining your target audience

When you know your audience and identify who you’re connecting to, it’s easier to tailor content that engages and resonates with them.

You can conduct successful audience research through the following ways:

• Create B2B buyer personas: Identify your ideal client profile. Understand their decision-making process and the reasoning behind their decisions.
• Collaborate with sales teams: Work with your sales team to understand your customer base. They’ve interacted with your prospects firsthand, so they should have valuable insights into their demographic data.
• Follow consumer conversations: Reading conversations on social media platforms can help you gauge your prospect's age, gender, geography, and more.

2. Knowing your audience’s preferences

Empathy is crucial in learning how to build buyer trust through B2B marketing. Consumers are generally drawn to companies that are genuinely interested in their success. 

You can show this by building an emotional connection with your customers through content. Observe their behaviors and preferences. Try to understand what they could hope to achieve with your product or service. 

With proper communication with your customers, you can grow your business with minimum cost on customer acquisition.

You can leverage great customer service software like Freshdesk to help you streamline your support processes and improve your customer experience. 

But it’s also crucial to consider other great Freshdesk competitors like Zendesk to ensure you’re selecting the best software for your business needs. 

There are multiple ways to establish an emotional connection with your audience and show them you’re listening. Here are some: 

• Analyze what makes your consumers interact with your content. What type of content do they like the most? What prompts them to leave your site? How many times do they visit your site before taking an action?
• Directly ask your customers what kind of content they expect from you, including what they enjoy or dislike about your content. You can do this through feedback forms, surveys, and focus groups.
• Gather information from your sales and customer service teams on what questions your customers ask the most. Then, define their needs and pain points to address these questions on a massive scale.
• Use social media platforms to have conversations with your audience. Respond to comments, share user-generated content, and participate in discussions to show that you value their feedback and engagement. 

The key to building buyer trust through B2B marketing content is to provide tailored content they can resonate with. Through your content, you can demonstrate that you’re attentive to their needs and feedback. 

3. Create informative content

When writing for B2B audiences, you need a deeper understanding of complicated concepts and technology.

Therefore, creating educational content that breaks down complex topics into digestible formats will help your audience understand your business better. This will, in turn, cause them to trust your content as a reliable source. 

A great example is the Amazon Web Services (AWS) blog below.

Leverage content recommendations to increase awareness on your educational blogs, extending their reach and allowing you to educate more of your audience. 

Whether it’s informational videos, articles, or blog posts, recommending high-quality content demonstrates your commitment to providing valuable information. As explained in the Attrock guide, some other ways exist to insert recommended content within a website. 

Here’s an example of content recommendation by Attrock. 

4. Establish your authority and expertise

One of the factors that B2B buyers consider before making a purchase is a brand’s authority in their niche. They like knowing you have the credentials, knowledge, and experience to support your claims. 

That’s why, as a B2B owner, building trust with your audience and showcasing your skills will help you stand out from the competition.

Craft top-of-the-funnel content that positions your company as a trusted expert in your industry. Discuss top practices and address your buyers’ queries.

You can even suggest your product or services as a viable solution to help your customers. However, be sure to do it tastefully without overpromoting your brand. Simply pitch the value your customers can get from your offerings. 

Remember, your B2B buyers just want to trust that your company can solve their problems. Providing reassurance on this assumption makes your content marketing strategy effective.

Here are some of the ways to use content marketing to establish authority within your industry:

• Share success stories from real customers, demonstrating how you helped them solve their specific problems
• Participate in industry conversations via webinars, forums, and guest articles
• Include authors’ headshots and bios when publishing articles
• Partner with industry influencers and leaders to further add credibility

You can also use social proof, particularly case studies, reviews, and awards, to show how others trust and have benefited from your brand.

5. Be authentic and transparent

Authenticity plays a significant role in building buyer trust through B2B marketing content. The more authentic you are, the more your readers will trust you.

Create blogs and videos that share the rationale for critical decisions on product launches, changes, and discontinuations, if any.

Also, ensure that your audience can quickly find information about your brand. Utilize search engine optimization strategies to help your website rank higher in search engines. With ample information about your brand online, you can maintain transparency. 

Creating “About Us” pages can also help your audience learn everything about your company. These pages humanize your values, history, journey, leadership, and work culture.

The image below exemplifies a well-drafted “About Us” page.

Other ways to maintain authenticity and trustworthiness in your B2B marketing content strategy are: 

• Explaining your product or service in detail 
• Answering questions upfront with FAQs on product pages
• Displaying pricing, lead times, ratings, and details about customer support
• Openly comparing yourself with competitors and acknowledging your similarities and differences 

6. Stay consistent

B2B sales cycles are generally complex and lengthy. Earning and maintaining your customer’s trust requires consistency and commitment.

You can start by maintaining a consistent presence on social media by regularly posting valuable content, responding to messages promptly, and actively participating in industry talks.

If you’re short on time and expertise, consider outsourcing content marketing tasks. This will help ensure a steady stream of high-quality content while you work on other strategic initiatives to improve your content. 

7. Ask for feedback and improvement

B2B buyers are more likely to trust your brand if you consider their opinion. They want assurance that you value their opinions and listen to their complaints.

This is why you need to ask for their feedback and input. You can do this through surveys, reviews, focus groups, and interviews. You can even provide incentives to encourage your customers to leave feedback. 

You can also utilize marketing measuring metrics, analytics, and testing to measure your performance, determine your strengths and weaknesses, and optimize your content.

Wrapping up

There you have it—the seven best ways to build buyer trust through B2B marketing content and stay ahead of your competition. 

Remember, trust takes time to build. However, it’s worth the time and effort. Once established, trust becomes an important asset. Having your audiences’ trust sets your brand apart and creates long-term customer loyalty. This is ultimately instrumental in your sales and profitability. 

Keep pushing and using the right marketing solutions to gain customers’ trust and expand your B2B services

The following article documents Chris Perrine's excellent presentation of the same name. Chris Perrine is VP & MD, Asia Pacific at G2 — and a leading mind on all things go-to-market. Check him out on LinkedIn.

B2C leads, B2B follows

Credit card payments, customer reviews, eCommerce, affiliate programs, and self-service are but a few selling trends that B2B companies have adopted from their trailblazing B2C counterparts. Without a doubt, implementing these practices have dramatically improved what was otherwise a tedious, time-consuming experience for B2B buyers and sellers alike. In fact, purchase decisions that once took several months (if not years), now take place in under a quarter.

As part of this evolution in buying patterns, B2B customers increasingly choose to conduct their own research — evaluating features, comparing alternatives, considering customer reviews, etc. — before speaking to sales or making a purchase decision. As you might have already guessed, this makes relevant, reliable content assets all the more valuable. Ironically, however, four of the top obstacles to make good software purchase decisions revolve around insufficient content.

This article explores what Chris refers to as The Trinity of Content — a content framework to resolve these common obstacles in making good software purchasing decision

What is the Trinity of Content?

The trinity of content refers to the idea that buyers view content as one entity, but it emanates from three key sources:

• Vendor content
• Expert content
• Customer content

Before diving into the B2B context of the Trinity of Content, let’s take an easier example: buying a car. Before you purchase a shiny new car (or most other things, for that matter), you consume a range of content — product specs, expert reviews, customer feedback, and more — before arriving at a decision.

What’s more? The consumption of this content is rarely ever linear. Instead, most of us go back and forth between vendor content (company website, dealer, test drive, etc), expert content (automobile magazines, awards, etc) and customer content (customer reviews, reddit, etc) — resulting in a great big mess of a customer journey. This mess is all the more pronounced in the case of B2B deals as they typically involve lengthy sales cycles and several stakeholders atop multiple channels and touchpoints. You might first learn about a product or service via a search ad, a blog, or a social media post — either way, the next few weeks and months would involve learning more about the offering, comparing alternatives, reading reviews, and eventually, speaking with sales. The next few sections explore the influence of vendor, expert, and customer content in this journey.

I. Vendor Content 

The most important aspect with vendor content is that you are in control of it. Everything from the messaging, volume, focus, and placement is in your hands. In the B2B context, few examples of Vendor content include:

• Website
• Sales collateral 
• Case studies
• Product demo
• Trials
• Blogs
• Ads
• Events
• Thought-leadership posts

While there’s no doubt that this type of content is absolutely essential to build up a brand as an authority in its space, there are a couple of reasons why it’s insufficient to rely exclusively on vendor content:

• For one, B2B verticals are becoming increasingly competitive across the board. If everyone is pumping out high-quality vendor content, there’s not much scope to stand out. 
• More importantly, however, the trust and influence that buyers have of vendor content has never been lower. In fact, only about 38% of buyers consider the website to be the most trust-worth resource. 

II. Expert Content

To solve this issue of trust, buyers typically consult industry experts for relevant, neutral feedback on products and services. You might have experienced expert content in the form of Gartner/Forrester reports, LinkedIn influencers, or management consultant reports from McKinsey, BCG, etc. 

The benefits of expert content are that they take neutral PoVs and are typically extremely well-researched and data-driven. That being said, expert content is not without its limitations:

III. Customer Content

Finally, we arrive at customer content. When was the last time you purchased a product on Amazon without reading the reviews? If you’re like most consumers, the answer is probably never. Customer content is, by far, the most trusted type of content out there — simply because of its in the hands of (generally) unbiased users that have actually adopted the product you’re considering. 

And there you have it! A combination of Vendor, Expert, and Customer content to drive trust, and ultimately, pipeline. Here are three key takeaways from the Trinity of Content:

Paint with a broad brush: the current state of GTM analytics

Across the board, B2B companies plan their go-to-market strategy around a list of target accounts, otherwise known as segments. Regardless of whether these segments are vague, specific, broad, or focused, they’re at the heart of nearly every single go-to-market effort:

• How can we acquire our first 20 customers in this new vertical?
• How can we penetrate North America with our existing verticals?
• How can we upsell or cross-sell to existing mid-market and enterprise customers?
• How can we capture demand amongst EU-based fintech SMEs with over 100 employees?

Despite the way we typically think about GTM, however, our tooling has continued to remain lacking. Even the most popular analytics solutions (Looking at you, Google Analytics 👀) still report GTM KPIs at a channel-level, rather than at a segment-level. Sure, tools like GA4 can say a lot about your overall website performance — but how are your GTM efforts influencing your target accounts in particular? 

How does that LinkedIn ad, search campaign, website copy, blog article, thought-leadership post, newsletter, or webinar impact the niche audience you actually care about? Are the right accounts…

• Viewing your LinkedIn ads?
• Clicking on your search ads?
• Driving up website traffic?
• Responding to your emails?
• Submitting demo forms?

You may find such questions difficult to answer with run of the mill analytics and CRM tools because manually parsing aggregated data, across multiple channels by individual segments is, well, a tedious, time-consuming chore. It also tends to be free of nuance or granularity — resulting in hazy paintings with a broad brush. Additionally, while most analytics tools do a decent job of reporting high-level metrics (traffic, clicks, impressions, etc), they struggle to unify the buying journey in its entirety across:

• Cross-channel engagement
• Meetings booked
• SQL/opportunity conversions
• Pipeline value
• Win rate
• Sales cycle length
• Revenue sourced

The result? Marketers and sales folk are left with a heap of channel data, generic reports, and no real understanding of whether their efforts reached and resonated with the right audience.

Introducing Segment Insights By Factors

Establishing the segments you care about is the first step to GTM success. However, in our conversation with several B2B teams, we’ve learned that achieving granular insight into how these segments are performing is a real challenge. This is where Factors steps in to provide a robust and intuitive approach to GTM analytics with Segment Insights.

What is Segment Insights?

Segment insights is our latest product feature to help businesses measure, compare and improve segment performance for a targeted group of accounts.

What can I do with Segment Insights?

There are several use-cases powered by Segment Insights. Here, we highlight a few.

1. Segment-level measurement

It’s one thing to track generic website and campaign KPIs — but Factors helps you measure those same metrics (and more) specific to the segment of accounts you care about. This way, you eliminate irrelevant data and zero in on pertinent engagement across website, LinkedIn, G2 and more to answer burning questions such as:

• How many (and which) accounts in this segment are showing disproportionate buying intent? 
• How are accounts in this segment converting to MQL/SQL/Opportunity/etc? Is this improving?
• How many (and which) accounts from this cohort or segment have viewed LinkedIn ads?
• How many (and which) accounts from this cohort or segment visited G2 and then your website?
• How have these KPIs trended over time? How do they compare from last quarter?
• What is the health of this particular segment? How does it compare to overall health average? 

And the best part? If none of the several pre-built KPIs fit what you’re looking for, you always have the option to design custom KPIs for bespoke analysis of a particular segment. 

2. Segment-level comparison

Data-driven marketing teams are often keen to compare metrics across cohorts to better understand which efforts and touchpoints resonate with whom. For example, you may want to compare business metrics between:

• Segments of two different industry verticals (Eg: SaaS SMEs vs SaaS Mid-market) 
• Segment of accounts that attended a flagship event vs segment of account that did not
• Segment of accounts that visited a paid landing page vs segment of accounts that did not

On the other hand, you might also choose to perform an A/B test: altering a single variable (budgets, creatives, etc) from otherwise identical segments (eg: US-based software SMEs) to better gauge resonance and optimize GTM efforts.  

3. ROI-boosting lift analysis

It’s not exactly news that spending money on ads, SEO, events, and other B2B marketing activity results in increased website activity. This, in itself, doesn’t really mean much. What B2B marketers really care about is how their efforts influence their target accounts. This is where lift analysis comes in:

Say you have an ABM account list. You’re targeting these accounts with ads, emails, calls, and other tactics. But which combination of tactics work best? How are your ABM efforts influencing pipeline? And where should you reallocate budgets to improve ROI? To have a better sense of this, leverage Factors by creating two similar segments: one that receives ABM treatment and the other doesn’t. Once set up, you’ll have visibility into the impact of ABM on win rates, sales velocity, ACV, and much, much more. For instance, the first segment might show higher conversions rates and deal sizes despite the second segment showing more top of the funnel website engagement. Ultimately, learnings from this kind of analysis will result in deeper insights to prove and improve marketing impact.   

4. Organizational alignment 

Marketing, sales, and revenue leaders typically prioritize segments over channels — where the deals are coming from don’t matter as much as the quality of those deals. Accordingly, Segment Insights facilitates a similar perspective, enabling marketing teams to analyze data and make strategic decisions based on their target market, not just clicks and impressions. This fosters organizational alignment between GTM teams and leadership.

The bottom line is this: with Factors, you needn’t limit yourself to broad analytics across website engagement and marketing campaigns, and sales touchpoints. Instead, leverage Segment Insights to achieve a deeper, relevant understanding of the target accounts you actually care about. Learn more about Segment Insights over a chat with our product experts today!