Today I’m going to show you exactly how my agency generated 1,872 demos for our sales team at an average cost of $76.87 per call.

Those 1,872 demos turned into 449 paying clients (24%), making our cost per acquisition $320.

We have since achieved similar results for 10+ other companies.

So many companies are sleeping on LinkedIn Ads, which is making it a gold mine for the rest of us.

Why Listen To Me?

My agency has used LinkedIn to generate over 250,000 booked sales calls for 2,000+ companies in 62 industries across 20+ countries.

We have 15 certified LinkedIn Marketing experts on our team. One of them used to work for LinkedIn in the Ads department.

Few people are more experienced in LinkedIn marketing than us.

The Process

There are 5 keys to running a successful LinkedIn Ads campaign:

• Knowing your target audience

• Using the Right Bid Strategy

• Don’t Sleep on Retargeting

• Content is KING

• Stat-based hooks are your best creative assets

1. Knowing your target audience

LinkedIn ads do not often offer a direct translation of your prospect list (SalesNav, Ocean, Apollo etc) into Campaign Manager - it requires an understanding of LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities to target specifically your core audience - otherwise, you will end up spending loads of ad budget on reaching users who are not relevant to your business.

At Linked Hacker Ads, when we work with clients who have run LinkedIn ads before, we offer an audit of their previous/ current campaigns and find that over 90% of them are not reaching their core audience with their ads. This is because of one of the following reasons:

• Audience Expansion/ Audience Network turned on: Audience Expansion is essentially a feature that tells LinkedIn to forget about your targeting and deliver impressions wherever possible, while Audience Network enables ads to be delivered outside of LinkedIn which negates any targeting criteria you have input and welcomes a lot of bot traffic.

• Use of Member Interests: Member interests on LinkedIn are defined by what kind of content a user engages with - so they could be engaging with content that has little to do with their job role and should we target based on these interests, chances are we would reach users totally outside our core audience

• Use of “OR” instead of “AND” separator: Our audits have found that a lot of companies get these two confused and have targeting set up a little like this:

In this scenario, we are telling the system to deliver impressions to any user that has a minimum seniority level of Director (OR) to anyone that works in a company that has between 1 and 200 employees - essentially negating the seniority criteria. You would want your targeting to be set up something like this:

The use of “AND” separators helps you to add additional criteria to targeting, ensuring that ads are delivered to the most qualified prospects. The key is to maximise both audience relevance as well as reach (keeping the relevance intact of course).

2. Using the Right Bid Strategy

Bid strategy essentially defines how you want to compete for impressions in the auction. LinkedIn’s default option is something called “maximum delivery”, which is a fully automated bidding system giving LinkedIn the autonomy to decide the bid.

What you want to choose instead, in most contexts, is the manual bidding option - this gives you more control over your budget and helps you get better control of your CPC’s and CPM’s. Here’s an example of how you can use it:

LinkedIn provides a benchmark of what other advertisers are bidding. We usually start by bidding around 20% less than the minimum, and if impressions are not being delivered as frequently, the bid can slowly be increased through increments of 10% till impressions become more consistent - this way, we spend the bare minimum for impressions, thereby keeping our costs down while also delivering meaningful results.

3. Don’t Sleep on Retargeting

Retargeting is one of LinkedIn’s most powerful tools, giving advertisers the ability to retarget anyone who has visited their website, their company page, watched a certain percentage of video content, engaged with a single image ad etc. Additionally, there’s also the capability to combine all of these in a single in a campaign using the “OR” separator so we are delivering ads to warm prospects who are more likely to take action. See example below:

We use retargeting heavily for bottom-funnel campaigns -  where campaigns are based on user actions like booking a meeting, submitting an enquiry and so on.

4. Content is KING

If your company has marketing material like eBooks, Guides, Whitepapers etc - you are in the best position to run lead-generation ads on LinkedIn. This ad format enables you to give your prospects the ability to access this material by sharing their contact information - similar to how it’s done on your website

But what makes doing it on LinkedIn a better option? Ease of submission. Because LinkedIn already has all the contact info of the prospect, they are able to simply consent to the sharing of this information in a one-click process as opposed to filling up a lengthy form manually.

What makes this an even more effective strategy is the fact that it is possible to integrate LinkedIn lead forms with your CRM - meaning that as soon as a prospect shares their contact information, they can go automatically into your sales cadences - thereby filling your sales pipeline with qualified leads.

5. Stat-based hooks are your best creative assets

If you are advertising on LinkedIn, chances are you are doing so to reach key decision-makers in your target industry - and there’s nothing that grabs their attention more than numbers. So if your ads include a stat that’s based on their pain point, chances are you have their attention.

For example, if you’re a company that sells sales software and you are targeting business owners or heads of sales, your ad probably needs to say: “Close 25% more sales every month for just £249/ mo” - just make sure that these numbers are realistic and can be backed up on demos.

Bonus Tip - Patience, patience, patience

It’s a cliche, but patience is really important when it comes to LinkedIn Ads. We didn’t see a single conversion for our first 8 days of advertising, then we saw a few the next week, and then they started flying in.

LinkedIn ads are more often a marathon than a 100-yard dash - it might take a month or two (possibly more) to find your sweet spot with respect to target audience, bids, creative strategy (what message is resonating best with your target audience) and so on. But if you’re a business that’s looking to generate a long-term, self-feeding sales pipeline, it is well worth the time and investment.

Our Secret

In early 2023, our ads were doing well and converting at around $150 per sales call booked. Then hired a guy who was, at the time, working for LinkedIn in their ads department. He was able to half our cost per conversion, and dramatically improve our client’s campaigns.

If you have been running LinkedIn ads and want him to take a look and offer some advice, email me and I’ll ask him to run a free audit for you :-)

Thanks again for reading!

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Lee