LinkedIn AdVentures with Aman Gandhi

Marketers often feel confused when running LinkedIn ads, whether it’s optimizing campaigns or writing the perfect ad copy.

Well, we’re here to help you out!

We are thrilled to introduce the inaugural session of LinkedIn AdVentures, an insightful series aimed at demystifying LinkedIn ad strategies. We invited Aman Gandhi, who brings a wealth of experience managing enterprise customers at LinkedIn. Together, Praveen from Factors and Aman delve into understanding LinkedIn as a key tool for marketers, addressing 2 types of questions:

• Strategy-level questions that tackle using LinkedIn ads for specific company types.
• Tactical, quickfire questions to address specific concerns and nuances.

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Check out the video here:

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Let’s dive into the questions 🏊

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TL;DR: 

• Early-stage companies should commit to LinkedIn for 6-8 months, focusing on defining goals and understanding their sales cycle to leverage the platform for growth effectively.

• Focus on three key content areas for brand and thought leadership: company brand, founder or employee brand, and product/problem-solution branding. Both organic and paid formats are essential.

• Organic posts from individual profiles often have higher engagement than company posts. Building a strong organic presence complements paid strategies and should not be neglected.

• Balance lead generation with brand awareness for niche markets. Ensure your audience size is adequate for effective paid campaigns and complement lead gen with awareness efforts.

• Higher CTRs can lead to better placement and potentially lower CPMs, but CPMs are also influenced by audience size. Aim for a CTR of 0.4% to 0.45%, with higher rates being aspirational.

• High-quality, relevant content and contextual relevance are key to improving CTR and CPM. To maximize performance, focus on creating timely, engaging content and high-quality creatives.

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Strategy-based questions

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1. How should early-stage companies, with around $1 to $9 million in revenue and an ACV of $20k, begin testing LinkedIn as a growth channel? What budget should they allocate, and what timeframe should they consider for this strategy?

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Aman mentions that the approach should vary depending on your specific goals. 

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Companies often have different objectives around the $5 million mark—driving revenue or preparing for fundraising. Before diving into LinkedIn as a platform, it’s essential to define what you want to achieve in the short, mid, and long term and understand your sales cycle. These two factors will shape your LinkedIn strategy.

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Many companies in the $1 to $10 million range already have an organic presence on LinkedIn, driven by content from employees or the company page. However, if your primary goal is incremental revenue and you have a typical sales cycle of three to four months, you need to approach LinkedIn as a long-term experiment.

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“I recommend committing to LinkedIn for at least six to eight months. This time frame allows you to build momentum and begin seeing tangible results, particularly in revenue. While early indicators like brand recall can be measured, meaningful revenue outcomes will likely start rolling in after this period.”

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Here's how you can structure your LinkedIn strategy:

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• Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): Analyze your existing customer base. Identify the decision-makers and influencers within your target accounts.

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• Implement LinkedIn Site Tag: Install the LinkedIn site tag on your landing pages to gather demographic data. Use LinkedIn Campaign Manager to analyze the traffic and demographics of visitors to your educational and conviction-focused landing pages.

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• Segment and Nurture: Based on the traffic data, segment your audience and create tailored nurture flows through your paid LinkedIn campaigns. Complement this with your ongoing organic efforts.

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• Thought Leadership and Brand Evangelism: Layer in thought leadership and brand evangelism initiatives. Use LinkedIn to position your company as an industry leader and build trust with your target audience.

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This strategic approach will allow you to maximize LinkedIn's potential and align it with your broader business goals.

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2. Can you elaborate on how to scale investment into brand and thought leadership? Considering that brand and thought leadership can take many forms—like Gartner or Forrester-style reports, founder stories, and more—what types of content have you seen work best in this area?

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When it comes to brand and thought leadership content on LinkedIn, it's crucial to approach it strategically across multiple tracks. Aman advises companies to focus on three key areas:

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• Company Brand: This is about establishing and amplifying your company’s presence. Your company’s narrative should be strong, consistent, and resonate with your target audience. This includes sharing industry insights company milestones, and showcasing your mission and values.

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• Founder or Employee Brand: Personal branding is increasingly important in today’s business world. Founders and key employees need to be seen as thought leaders in their space. This involves sharing personal insights, lessons learned, and their vision for the industry. The authenticity of these posts often drives higher engagement and builds trust with your audience.

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• Product or Problem-Solution Branding: The third track focuses on the core problem your product solves. This is where you showcase your product's value through direct promotion and by educating the market on the challenges you address. Thought leadership in this area can include case studies, problem-solving content, and industry trend analyses.

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All three of these tracks should operate in both organic and paid formats. Organic content is essential, but it’s limited by your existing network. Paid content, on the other hand, acts as fuel to the fire. It allows you to reach a much broader audience, extending the impact of your message far beyond those who already follow you.

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Furthermore, user-generated content (UGC) or partner content can be incredibly powerful. Companies like Clay have done this exceptionally well by encouraging partners and users to share their experiences with the product, effectively turning them into brand ambassadors. This builds credibility and leverages the networks of your partners and customers.

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Finally, paid promotion amplifies your reach. For example, founder stories and other personal content often perform well organically. Still, paid campaigns can take that content to the next level by targeting specific audiences who may not yet be in your network. Over time, as these audiences engage with your content, they become followers, reducing the need for ongoing paid promotion.

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3. Many companies focus primarily on LinkedIn from a paid perspective, with minimal investment in organic content—often limited to occasional posts from the company handle, like promoting an ebook. Why do you believe organic content is important, and what would your advice be to companies currently neglecting their organic presence on LinkedIn?

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Regarding organic content on LinkedIn, it's essential to understand the dynamics between individual and company posts. Organic content from individual profiles often resonates more with audiences due to the authenticity and personal connection they provide. People are more likely to engage with content from individuals they know, have heard of, or have been recommended by friends. This personal touch makes the content feel more genuine, leading to higher engagement than company page posts.

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However, this doesn’t diminish the importance of company posts. While individual posts may garner more immediate attention, company posts are a consistent touchpoint for your audience. This is particularly valuable for B2B companies aiming to build long-term relationships with their target market. It's crucial to cultivate an audience on your company page that aligns with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This audience may not be ready to buy immediately but can become potential customers or influencers in the future.

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A strategic approach is to aim for 0.1% to 1% of your ICP as followers on your company page or key employee profiles. 

For example, if you’re targeting demand generation managers and ABM marketers in the U.S. and identify 100,000 such professionals on LinkedIn, you should aim to have 1,000 of them as followers. This ensures that your content consistently reaches a relevant audience, amplifying your message through their networks.

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To accelerate this growth, LinkedIn offers paid strategies like follower ads and engagement ads. Follower ads, a subtype of spotlight ads, are specifically designed to help you gain followers by displaying a follow button in the ad. Engagement ads also include a follow option as a secondary call to action (CTA), appearing next to the company name in the ad.

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For companies performing at the highest level, follower numbers often reach around 10% of their ICP. These companies frequently use additional tactics such as LinkedIn newsletters and LinkedIn Live sessions to drive traffic and attract followers. As you scale, it becomes increasingly important to diversify your approach to maintain growth while achieving broader business objectives.

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4. How can we effectively generate leads for a niche market on LinkedIn, particularly when targeting working professionals? Should a LinkedIn ad campaign be run continuously to achieve the desired results, or are there alternative strategies that might be more effective? Additionally, when starting a paid program on LinkedIn, is it better to focus solely on generating leads through lead-generation content, or should other approaches be considered as well?

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When targeting a niche market on LinkedIn, especially one focused on professional programs, it's crucial to balance your strategy between immediate lead generation and long-term brand visibility.

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First, ensure that your audience size meets LinkedIn's platform benchmarks—ideally, at least 5,000 potential prospects. This ensures that your paid campaigns have sufficient reach and impact. Running a continuous paid program might not yield the best results for smaller audiences. If your audience is too small, you could quickly exhaust your leads and face diminishing returns on your ad spend.

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When it comes to campaign strategy, it's important not to rely solely on lead generation. While lead-gen campaigns are valuable for capturing the immediate interest of those ready to convert, they will only target a small percentage of your total audience. If your target audience is 10,000 professionals, you might only be able to capture 1-2% of that group in the short term.

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To build a sustainable pipeline, you should complement your lead gen efforts with awareness campaigns that ensure you're always in front of your audience. This way, your brand is top of mind when they are ready to decide. Being present throughout the buyer's journey is crucial for professional programs, which often involve significant investment and decision-making.

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This dual approach—using lead gen campaigns to capture immediate interest while running awareness campaigns to maintain visibility—ensures that you maximize your conversion chances over time. By targeting both the end-users and their decision-makers, like managers or corporate sponsors, you can build a more comprehensive strategy that addresses the needs of all stakeholders involved in the purchasing process.

Tactical questions 

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1. How is campaign quality score calculated, and why is it important?

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A campaign's quality score on LinkedIn is a crucial metric determining how prominently your content will appear in users' feeds. It's calculated based on several factors, but three key elements under your control are:

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• Content Relevance: Ensure your content is contextually aligned with your target audience. For example, if your content is about marketing, it should be aimed at marketing professionals, not operational staff.

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• Bid Amount: LinkedIn operates in an auction environment, so your bid amount impacts your campaign's competitiveness.

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• Content Quality: High-quality, relevant content that's timely and specific to your audience performs better. For instance, addressing hot topics like AI can boost your score if relevant to your audience.

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LinkedIn evaluates engagement levels and topic relevance to assess how appealing your content is. A higher quality score, ideally between 7 and 10, increases the likelihood of your content appearing early in users' feeds, leading to better visibility and engagement.

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2. What is the difference between predictive and lookalike audiences?

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Predictive audiences on LinkedIn are an advanced version of lookalike audiences, offering more control and precision. Unlike traditional lookalike audiences, predictive audiences allow you to adjust the audience size, ensuring higher relevance. LinkedIn's improved algorithms generate these audiences from a highly relevant seed list—such as visitors to your landing page, contacts, or lead-gen form submissions—making the resulting audience more aligned with your target.

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For brand awareness campaigns where you need to expand beyond a core audience, predictive audiences can be highly beneficial. However, if your goal is focused on conversions from an already engaged audience—like those who have visited a specific landing page—predictive audiences may be unnecessary, as your messaging will be more targeted and specific to those already in the buying process.

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Using predictive audiences depends on your campaign objectives and the scale of your desired reach.

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3. What is the difference between the "recent" and "permanent" location targeting options on LinkedIn, and how do you advise clients on when to use each?

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LinkedIn offers two location targeting options: "recent or permanent" and "permanent." The distinction exists because many professionals frequently travel, and their relevance to your campaign may vary based on their location at a given time.

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For example, if you're promoting an offline event in Bangalore, you should target residents and those temporarily in the area for the event. In this case, using the "recent or permanent" option ensures you reach both groups. On the other hand, for more focused targeting or other objectives, "permanent" targeting is recommended, as it focuses on individuals who consistently reside in a specific location.

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The difference in audience size between the two options is generally not significant; it's more about the recency of the location signals than the overall audience size.

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4. If your ads have higher engagement rates, such as a higher CTR, does LinkedIn reward you by lowering your CPM? Is that true, and how exactly does that work? Additionally, what CTR benchmarks should advertisers aim for to achieve this?

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If your ads have a higher CTR (Click-Through Rate), LinkedIn tends to reward you by pushing your content higher in the feed, which can sometimes lead to lower CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions). However, while a higher CTR is beneficial, it’s important to note that CPMs are influenced by multiple factors, with audience size being significant.

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As Aman pointed out, "CPM is not just a factor of CTR. It is also a factor of the audience size that you're going after." 

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For instance, a smaller, more targeted audience—like in a retargeting campaign—might have a higher CTR because the content is highly relevant to that specific audience. Yet, the CPM might still be higher because you’re competing more intensely for those impressions.

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A good CTR benchmark for LinkedIn is around 0.4% to 0.45%. While 0.5% or more would be aspirational, it's not uncommon for well-executed campaigns to achieve this. Aman emphasized that achieving a higher CTR is often about two key strategies:

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Contextual Relevance: “Put out content relevant to that particular period in time or that particular event happening,” Aman suggests. For example, a campaign themed around Halloween in the U.S. market can drive higher engagement if executed well.

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High-Quality Creatives: “I can't say this enough: a high-quality creative will always receive more attention than a low-quality creative.” The better your creative execution, the more likely you are to engage your audience effectively.

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So, to optimize both CTR and CPM, focus on creating timely, relevant content with high-quality visuals and messaging that resonate with your audience.

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​Annd that’s a wrap! 

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If you want your questions featured in our next session, feel free to contact us on LinkedIn while you stay tuned for the next AdVenture!

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