Ian Robson

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How to win at LinkedIn Marketing – or get better results for less money!

LinkedIn is undoubtedly one of the most powerful B2B marketing platforms in your digital arsenal. But it is also the most expensive. Are your current results worth the investment? What if you could do better AND spend less money doing so? What if you could:

  • Reach audiences with a greater propensity for conversion

  • Automatically pre-qualify potential leads

  • Beat the average cost per lead for any market sector

Various independent studies converge on an average cost per lead on LinkedIn at anything from $80 for the Retail sector, through $100 for Finance and up to $150 for IT Hardware. Of course, people often overlook the high cost of advertising and high cost per lead on LinkedIn by citing the high-quality of the leads generated. This argument has some merit, as you are more likely to connect with highly relevant people in a smaller pool of 310 million monthly active users on LinkedIn compared with 2.7 billion users on Facebook (as of 2021).

 

However, you are still faced with the age-old challenge from your target audience – are they ready to consider purchasing? To understand how to win at LinkedIn Marketing, you must first understand the reasons why you can do so much better.

The problem with LinkedIn

For B2B audience marketing, LinkedIn is a captive audience of people socialising in a predominantly work context. Nearly everyone active on LinkedIn accurately lists their job role and the company they work for, with their work-related interests captured by what they read, comment on and share, and the groups they engage with. Coupled with the pre-approved notion that to be on LinkedIn means you can be targeted by relevant business communications; this level of business intelligence is a goldmine. So, where’s the problem?

The problem with LinkedIn Marketing rears its ugly head when you apply audience targeting tactics purely through LinkedIn. When you advertise on LinkedIn, the audience targeting mechanisms are dictated by the data that people choose to enter. If you are a Procurement Manager at an events business, for example, all and every type of conference servicing company will want to target you – and LinkedIn enables you to do that quite accurately. But it also enables every one of your competitors to do the same, in an open market which drives up the cost of a click on your ad.

That Media Thing’s approach enables us to connect with people based on authentic and highly specific interests.

On top of its high costs, using just LinkedIn for lead targeting is the digital equivalent of “cold calling” – you are often trying to sell to an audience that has not yet been made aware of your proposition or its relevance to them. LinkedIn uses a rudimentary but well-oiled targeting mechanism that levels the playing field, so that everyone has the same opportunity to advertise to the right people. Yes, there are some clever on-platform tactics you can implement to optimise for increased click-through rates. But if your ad targets are not yet aware of your brand or proposition, how many of these people are going to follow through on the actions that you want them to take?

There’s a better way

At That Media Thing we recognise LinkedIn as an essential B2B marketing tool, but we use it strategically. We combine the power of LinkedIn with other social media marketing platforms where each has a specific part to play in acquiring and nurturing people through a highly optimised marketing funnel. Content and promotional narratives are created that are specific to the level of relationship each audience segment currently has with the client company and/or its solutions. Is the company new to this audience and has the audience engaged with them before? And so on…

This approach enables us to connect with people based on authentic and highly specific interests, using cost-effective Facebook and Twitter targeting mechanisms. The click-throughs from these campaigns build up remarketing audiences with a greater propensity for conversion. Target audience research ensures that our narratives are on point, while a high level of data analysis and optimisation enables us to focus on quality results that improve over time.

It is only after having built up these remarketing audiences that we then use LinkedIn. Connecting with these audiences is no longer cold as they have already engaged with the company in question. This means that they are much more likely to engage again and move further through the marketing funnel towards purchase.

We call this Smart Audience Targeting and applying it to That Media Thing’s Social Media Marketing campaigns is why we consistently beat the average cost per lead for any market sector our clients operate in – often by as much as 50%. And perhaps more importantly, the leads we do acquire are pre-qualified by our strategic communications, giving you a higher percentage of truly interested potential customers.

If you want to discuss how we can capture high-quality leads for your business, delivering a clear and efficient ROI, email contact@thatmediathing.com