LinkedIn Ads

Introduction

Hi everyone,

I am Emir- co-founder and CRO at HockeyStack.

I built our marketing engine in the very early days, built my audience to 22K followers in a year on LinkedIn, oversaw many iterations of our paid ads strategy, and spent $2M on LinkedIn this year.

We failed a lot, brought 353 qualified meetings with a $50K ACV, and learned a lot along the way.

This playbook outlines our strategy, shows top performing ads, the biggest mistakes we have made, and more.

We also collaborated with our agency partner Understory to give a better perspective.

Let me know if you have any feedback on LinkedIn or send me an email at emir@hockeystack.com.

HockeyStack is the #1 revenue attribution platform for B2B companies. We integrate with all of your platforms, track the entire buyer journey, and show you what’s generating pipeline.

Here is our interactive demo.

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Strategy

We have 5 main pillars:

• Product Value: 16% of budget
• Thought Leadership: 10% of budget
• Social Proof: 14% of budget
• ABM: 17% of budget
• Content: 10% of budget
• Retargeting: 27% of budget
• Tests: 6%

We have this structure for our marketing reporting product, and actively building the same structure for our sales intelligence product at the moment.

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Product Value

Our main goal with the product value campaigns is to show our product with a simple message as clearly as possible.

We tested a lot of different creatives for this campaign group, and found that the best ads have a title with 6 or fewer words, a screenshot, and a clear CTA.

Some examples:

P.S: We report on all of our ads using HockeyStack, using engagement, impressions, and clicks:

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Thought Leadership

I post every week day on LinkedIn and on average get a Million impressions on my personal profile. Our CEO, Bugra,  posts 3x a week, and we are also working with a lot of influencers every month.

We are getting all these posts and running the top performing ones as thought leadership ads. We let these posts max out organically by letting them cook for a week or so before add spend behind them. We also go back and edit the posts adding a conversion point like a link to a demo at the bottom so we can maximize conversion tracking.

-Ali Yildirim, co-founder & CEO at Understory

From there, we use the engagement on these ads to retarget with social proof ads and lead gen forms.

This strategy works extremely well if you pair it with evergreen content. For example, our collab with Exit5 was very powerful because we built a core asset: Dave Gerhardt's CMO Dashboard

Then distributed this asset using posts from my profile, Dave’s profile, our company page, and a webinar.

Then Dave recorded a short walkthrough video, and we started running his posts and the video in our thought leadership layer, and they are working very well.

Building core assets like this one that you can distribute forever is the most important factor for influencer partnerships and thought leadership campaigns.

We have tried everything from one off posts to webinars to podcasts to individual shows with influencers.

And this is the only strategy in influencer marketing and thought leadership that worked for us.

You can learn more about our influencer strategy here.

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Social Proof

Social proof ads are all case studies, testimonials, and ROI numbers.

The most helpful upgrade for our social proof strategy has been investing in high-production videos like these:

https://youtu.be/GEbfuhjL8KU?si=XaYCN5RWWGEmz-G1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPq4UEJULv8

We used to do the usual Zoom case studies like many other B2B SaaS companies do.

Now, we do in-person recordings with 2 cameras in our customers’ office. This sets us apart from the rest, helps us build a better relationship with our customer, and have much more material to repurpose.

Video content is currently the best performing type of content in terms of engagement (paid and organic) and extremely efficient in creating a retargeting audience from 50% - 75% video viewers, no click needed!

-Charles Murillon, LinkedIn Ads specialist at Understory & our account manager

Here are some of the assets we use:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:sponsoredContentV2:(urn:li:share:7275493737005277184,urn:li:sponsoredCreative:610397336)/?actorCompanyId=0&viewContext=REVIEWER

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:sponsoredContentV2:(urn:li:share:7198724401192714242,urn:li:sponsoredCreative:453658066)/?actorCompanyId=0&viewContext=REVIEWER

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:sponsoredContentV2:(urn:li:ugcPost:7224103697474093057,urn:li:sponsoredCreative:494666176)/?actorCompanyId=0&viewContext=REVIEWER

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/devinreed_as-a-b2b-marketing-leader-ive-felt-the-activity-7260339813306744834-2bZt/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/melissarosenthal5_want-to-take-your-brand-growth-to-the-next-activity-7264661262574247936-tZOR/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

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ABM

We do 1:1 targeting for our target accounts using as much personalization as we can. I wouldn’t say these campaigns are working 100% right now, but we drove a lot of pipeline from these.

Here is what we do:

1. Pick accounts based on ICP fit and signals like recent senior leadership change, 1st party data, and dream accounts.
2. 1-1 creatives for each company
3. Different campaigns for each company
4. Measuring account-level engagement
5. Sales outreach & Connections from different profiles

Creatives look like this:

Then we report on these campaigns using HockeyStack;

And target the most engaged accounts with outbound.

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3 Biggest Mistakes

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1. Heavily Increasing Budget Without Other GTM Changes

We increased our LinkedIn ads budget heavily (almost 4x over 3 months to 7-figures) as we saw a lot of success with it.

But one thing we missed was LinkedIn, same with any other advertisement platform, works in an ecosystem with other channels and tactics.

We saw 0 increase in pipeline with the increased spend.

Then we decreased our budget, built an outbound motion to capture the demand we created, invested more on search and events, and we started driving much more pipeline with less spend on the platform.

This was a painful and very expensive lesson that showed all platforms work together and over-investment in one doesn’t help anything.

We also had a webinar about the same topic with Sam Kuehnle. You can watch it here.

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2. Too much in retargeting without enough in brand awareness

Another investment mistake we did was investing heavily in retargeting as we had more and more engagement inside and outside the platform.

Retargeting layer converts way better, but if you don’t balance the investment on retargeting and brand awareness, you end up with a really small retargeting audience or start hitting the same audience over and over again.

Here are a few of the retargeting layers we built:

• People who visit high-intent pages like pricing or demo requests.
• Anyone who clicked or interacted with our ads.
• Viewers who watched 50% or more of our video ads.
• Recent visitors to our LinkedIn company page.
• Past webinar or event attendees.
• CRM data like Closed-Lost deals or No-Shows synced from HubSpot or Salesforce.

While the 60/40 rule is a strong starting point for us, your exact split will depend on factors like your TAM, traffic from other sources, and conversion rates. Test and adjust to find what works best for your audience.

-Charles Murillon and Ali Yildirim from Understory

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3. Too Narrow Account Lists

We use Zoominfo for our account lists, but just like any other contact/company data provider, Zoominfo’s filters are not 100% accurate.

I want to spend all of our money on campaigns and audiences that are most likely to turn into $$$, but a very limited audience made our CPCs skyrocket.

One of the first things Understory did when they took over our account was to expand our lists with native targeting, and we saw a 30% decrease in CPC, 19.2% decrease in CPM, and a 14.3% increase in CTR.

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4. Not using Lead Gen Forms in retargeting campaigns

They remove all potential friction in the form submitting process (leads stay on LinkedIn, form is pre-filled with their profile data, and tracking is as accurate as it can be when monitoring CPL)

-Charles Murillon, LinkedIn Ads specialist at Understory & our account manager