Do Thought Leadership Ads Work?

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Do Thought Leadership Ads Work?

The notion that LinkedIn ads are expensive compared to other channels still rings true. But when you measure Thought Leadership Ads against other formats in the LinkedIn Ads Manager, they are the cheapest - not for long though.

With my recent upskilling on LinkedIn Ads Certification, I have been in the weeds gathering proven examples of thought leadership ads.

As from last year since the launch of this Ad format, several example results worth noting are emerging on the platform.

3 Strategies to Activecampaign’s $250m Arr Growth

The current Senior Marketing Manager, Casey Hill recently hopped on Nathan Latka’s show to share some key strategies they are executing to scale the marketing automation software.

At the heart of LinkedIn's growth ( team-led) is the promotion of the most engaged organic content posts using thought leadership ads.

There are several ways the team approaches LinkedIn organic content. First, the team has a ‘Slack’ channel where they challenge each to hit weekly impression milestones with LikedIn posts [ at 300k total reach as of the chat ].

Second, they work with existing customers in their platform in the form of reciprocity. That is, if the customer shares a value-based post as relates to Activecampaign, the team will reciprocate with engagement, or even listen to their podcasts and leave a review.

The template for guest podcasting

Casey shared his guest podcasting motion template they are using to build Activecampaign brand awareness. The catch is; that you have to commit to doing at least 20-30 guest episodes in one month to build the awareness lift off.

1/ Search for the relevant podcasts on Listennotes and build a list

2/Obtain the cold outreach hook by listening to a couple of their episodes.

3/Reveiw a 5-star review on the podcast

4/Give a reason why you are relevant to their podcast audience by sharing your expertise

5/Suggest 2-3 topics in detail on what you would discuss on the episode

The rise of branded newsletters

A couple of months ago, I wrote about Exploding Topics being valued at $73m. The co-founder recently announced they were acquired by Semrush.

When I wrote about them, their branded newsletter - Exploding Topics Tuesday was generating over 25% of the revenue backing the massive SEO investment.

Casey shared that Activecampaign has recently launched a branded newsletter - SaaS Steps, where they analyze the growth from $0 to $100m+ ARR of some of the biggest SaaS out here. See the example above.

Other example SaaS that have branded newsletters include: Monday and Recorde

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God’s speed.

 Okerosi