LinkedIn Ads Questions & Answers

LinkedIn can be very expensive as a platform (I'm talking $20+ CPC's depending on audience) so you have to be very strategic with your approach - here's what I'd do....

Run TOF video content, that feels like native in-feed value driven content. This is absolutely critical... most LinkedIn ads have an extremely low CTR because they feel like ads. If on the other hand, it feels like native content that someone would naturally CHOOSE to consume, you can easily get 2%+ CTR and 90% view rates on videos

Make sure the video is captioned and has a headline at the top (use a cloud editing platform like Kapwing or any video editor to do this) that specifically calls out your audience with a challenge they're facing right now. For example, when targeting HR Directors and Chief People Officers for a client in the employee wellness space, we would repurpose snippets of zoom webinars, find a clip where they're dropping some real value bombs, then use a contextual headline relevant to that clip which also calls out our audience on a specific problem we know our product can also solve, ie "Don't make this mistake with employee recognition".

At this stage, we don't even necessarily want to mention our product/service yet, as we just want to get our ideal customer to raise their hand.

Aim to make this content around 2-3 mins in length - might sound long but I'll explain why in a sec...

We're then going to be retargeting the most engaged viewers (50-75% video completion rate) with a traffic campaign driving them to more value-driven content on our website to build further trust/credibility with our brand whilst also now exposing them to our products/services.

The reason we make the video long, is because a 50%+ view of a 2 minute video (about your specific topic/niche) shows a very high level of intent, or at least resonance with that particular problem.

This way we know we've got the right audience, as anyone who isn't serious about solving this issue would have scrolled on long before then.

We've done this with clients in a huge range of industries now and seen typical CPC's come down from that $10/20 mark I mentioned earlier down to $0.5 - $0.7 here, because we're now only hitting the most engaged portion of our audience and also pre-warmed them before optimising for clicks.

The other reason to use the video views objective in TOF is that's it's the most underpriced medium on LinkedIn ads right now and when done right, you can get CPV's of around $0.01 which is comparative to a platform like Facebook and allows us to build very targeted audiences for a relatively small budget

Finally for BOF, I'd build a retargeting audience to hit those website visitors, with case studies, testimonials or more sales-enablement style content to warm people up and eventually bring them into a buying cycle. You obviously can't force this as people are always moving in and out of a market at any given time, but this kind of journey will make us the first people they think of in whatever category/industry you're serving, and over the long-term will cut your CPA's in half.

Here's what not to do...

Blow $12,000 on some stupid PDF lead gen campaign that generates 100 MQL's - about 2 genuine email addresses, and $0 revenue or pipeline. (this is most of LinkedIn right now...)