More than 1 billion people are members of LinkedIn. Few actually log in regularly, but marketers and people at mid-sized professional services firms frequent the social network to connect, learn and build our pipelines. After revamping our positioning this summer, we turned to LinkedIn to promote an eBook tailored to our newly refined ideal customer profile. Since marketing firms are professional services firms themselves, we know that what we’ve learned so far applies to the marketing work you’re doing too. Here are our tips on running a successful campaign.
Create actionable, helpful content that’s laser-focused on your audience
Working in professional services marketing is tough because what you’re selling is your expertise, not a product. You can’t talk about features; what you’re selling is how you can develop a bespoke solution to someone’s problems.
In order to sell that, you have to show your audience how your brain works—how your firm thinks and what you know. Each sale is a little bit different.
Every good marketing campaign starts with great, compelling content. Our goal was to create an eBook that showcased our way of thinking and what we believe in. We came up with the neon fingerprint concept and wrote and designed an actionable eBook that not only included some core beliefs we have about marketing, but also included some steps for differentiation in a saturated market.
Humbly, we believe the Neon Fingerprint eBook:
- Is a great, unignorable concept
- Had arresting visuals that jump off your LinkedIn feed
- Serves as a workbook for firms to use to differentiate themselves
To promote the eBook, we created ads, tied them to a form and followed up with a series of emails that included links to PDFs and blog posts. If at any point a contact does not click on a link in a follow-up email, they are dropped into our newsletter list (where some of you may be reading this).
This is not novel, but it does take time to set up and a commitment to the process. Messages have to be consistent and enticing from every ad that you create to each email in the nurture campaign. If and when contacts stop opening emails your job is to adjust and figure out why.
Try different ad types, but move on if it’s not working
Committing to our biggest campaign ever meant we could experiment with different ad types—honestly, we were excited. We tried single-image ads, a carousel ad, a video ad and a document ad. We knew the single-image ads performed well historically, and this campaign was no different. We thought a document ad—where you tease viewers with the first couple of pages of an eBook—would perform well. We also thought video would outperform single-image ads. But single-image ads consistently outperformed every other ad type.
Each time we launched a new ad type, we let it run for 3-4 days and pulled it if it didn’t start bringing in leads at the same rate as single-image ads. It’s important to try different ad types but don’t be afraid to pull them if they don’t begin delivering leads.
Know that “lead gen” is not actually lead generation
Our ads drew our audience in (more on that in a minute), but what made the campaign work was using “lead gen” forms on LinkedIn, where users can click a button, a form auto-fills (with their work email address), and voilà! they get access to our eBook. We get to market to them; they get some useful content. Are these people who downloaded our eBook leads? Hell no. They’re not leads, or sales qualified leads. They are marketing contacts. Marketing qualified leads? Sure, if you want to define them that way.
Our goal is to educate folks on what we believe (and that we exist) so that when they jump from the 95% to the 5%, we are top of mind. If you are a professional services marketer hoping to use lead gen forms on LinkedIn, that should also be your expectation. The people who respond to your advertisement and download your content will most likely not be ready to buy—but they may be eventually.
Niche down, and keep narrowing
When it comes to developing content and choosing your audience, you can’t niche down enough. The better you can articulate a specific problem and how to solve it, or appeal to a very specific audience with an ad, the more success you’ll have.
One of the last steps we completed before launching the campaign was a painstaking review of our LinkedIn audience. We spent a good chunk of time reviewing all the demographic criteria to ensure we were reaching the right audience—partly because LinkedIn doesn’t necessarily label industries and titles consistently. Spend the time and when in doubt, niche down until you have a large enough audience (more than 100,000 people) that meets a very specific profile.
Spend money
Compared to other digital marketing platforms, LinkedIn is expensive. However, it’s the best place to reach folks in professional services and narrow your audience to specific job titles, locations and industries. If you launch a LinkedIn advertising campaign and find it’s not yielding new contacts, the first lever to pull is your budget. To be successful, you should plan to spend at least $100/day. Look for leads to cost between $80 and $150 each.
One of the most valuable parts of the campaign is that we can specify that contacts who fill out our lead forms use their work email addresses, which yielded more high-quality contacts.
Our results
Creating LinkedIn campaigns can be time-consuming and moderately expensive, but if you focus on your audience, they do work. In three months, we’ve spent $12,957.34, added 108 new contacts to our pipeline, 40 new LinkedIn page followers and converted one to a new client. Our client roster is typically capped at 12, so winning a new client is not a small deal.