Did you know? 80% of social media leads for B2B businesses are generated through LinkedIn. With over 950 million members and millions of companies listed, LinkedIn is considered the world's most trusted social media platform. It also stands as one of the most popular platforms for B2B lead generation.
Compared to other mainstream channels, B2B marketers predominantly leverage LinkedIn ads for lead generation. As for SaaS businesses, advertising through LinkedIn helps generate and convert more leads. It enables you to reach a wide range of audiences, including key decision-makers, as most B2B buyers use this platform for product research and decision-making.
Being an effective advertising channel, LinkedIn stands out to portray your services, their specifications, features, and answers to all the clients' queries.
What next? Build a fortress of your growth by incorporating these winning strategies for LinkedIn Ads for your SaaS business.
Why does every SaaS brand need LinkedIn Ads?
Most people keep it light on other social media marketing platforms like Facebook or Instagram, avoiding delving into technical topics. They would be more curious to know about their friend's trip than to ponder over some automation software. Priorities. Right?
Among the many social media platforms, LinkedIn may not be your first choice for marketing your products. But the fact is, advertising on LinkedIn is essential for all SaaS companies!
Marketers experience 2x higher conversion rates on LinkedIn than on other ad platforms.
With a wide array of audiences and precise targeting capabilities, LinkedIn ads for SaaS companies offer tremendous opportunities to connect with professional networks in the B2B space. With its core feature of sharing in-depth technical information, you can create invaluable content about the product and do industry-specific marketing. It helps reach the target users precisely based on many factors. So, utilising this platform to advertise SaaS products will generate more relevant and potential leads.
LinkedIn Ads for SaaS: How to make them work?
LinkedIn Ads are a great way to reach your intended market. Businesses can ensure that the right people see their ads with various targeting options. It can be a great way to generate leads and grow your business. As a marketing tool, it connects you with potential clients in industries that may benefit from your services. A well-designed LinkedIn marketing strategy can help SaaS companies increase initial involvement and interest.
We've compiled a list of SaaS marketing strategies that help you deliver results on LinkedIn:
Strategy #1: Account-Based Marketing on LinkedIn
Not everyone is the right fit for your product or service. So, spending your sales and marketing resources on a customer less likely to convert is unnecessary. So, what should you do? Well, that's where account-based marketing comes into play!
Account-based marketing is an advertising strategy for B2B companies where a company can create hyper-targeted campaigns aiming to market directly to specific customers or businesses with whom the company prefers to work. So, rather than targeting a vast pool of prospects, you are paying to reach actual businesses or stakeholders likely to become high-value customers.
What are the benefits of ABM?
- Personalisation: With ABM as a strategy, you can personalise your content and campaigns according to your highly prioritised accounts. This helps to address their pain points, more specifically, enhancing your company's relevance among these accounts.
- Long-term Results: ABM is a long-term process that lets you invest more time and effort into your ad campaigns. Providing consistent, personalised experiences leads to significantly better results.
- Measurable ROI: ABM lets you measure the ROI for each account you've invested in. Thus, you can decide whether the strategies implemented for the selected accounts are working.
- Streamlined Sales Goals: Engaging with the most qualified leads saves time, effort, and resources. ABM strategy helps optimise the sales cycle, increasing the chances of converting accounts over the long term.
How do I create an ABM strategy on LinkedIn?
Are you thinking of creating ABM? Well, it's not a difficult task. ABM works similarly to LinkedIn's advertising features.
Identify the target audience
How do you get your content to reach the right audience? The way is precise targeting. Identify the companies you want to work with, and then target the relevant high-value accounts with personalised marketing campaigns. Know your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), which helps you identify the type of customer representing your company's best value. Filter the target audience by characteristics like industry, domain, company size, location, and other factors.
Align the marketing team and sales team
The marketing and sales teams should work hand in hand to create workflows for engaging with the targeted high-value customers.
Create personalised content
ABM is all about personalised targeting at your target organisations. Create hyper-personalised content tailored to each prospect's pain points or needs at your target organisations. It should be valuable enough to convince them to engage with your brand. Since you're informed of the precise details about your target audience, you can create tailored long-form or short-form content like
- Personalised emails
- Product-specific content posts and videos
- Detailed guides
- Thought leadership articles
- Case studies, testimonials
- White papers
These types of content will help you target customers on their different journeys, right from the awareness stage to the conversion stage.
Measure the results
Usually, B2B sales cycles are long, ranging from months to even years! However, monitoring the campaigns regularly and measuring the results using the right analytical tools helps you stay on track. You could realign if the targeting is not yielding the expected results. With ABM, the focus is on quality leads over the numbers.
CASE STUDY - TRIPLE DART's CLIENT
Multiplier, a leading global employment platform, faced challenges in expanding into the mid-market segment despite success in the EOR space. Partnering with us at TripleDart, they embraced strategic Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and improved sales and marketing alignment.
Here are the achieved metrics:
- 100% SOM penetration via ABM in less than a quarter
- 14 Sales Qualified Opportunities (SQOs) secured in under two months
- Secured several high-value contracts with $30,000 Annual Contract Value (ACV) through ABM intent mapping
- Generated $400k pipeline at a $20k spend within 2 months
Read the full story here.
Strategy #2: Air Cover Strategy
You've probably watched TV commercials streaming in between your favourite shows. That's how an air cover strategy works. Just as commercials fill the 'in-between' in televisions or radios, air cover acts as the in-between for programmatic advertising. The main difference here is that you focus only on prospects who are likely to buy.
Aircover is another marketing strategy used in LinkedIn ads for SaaS companies. The Aircover marketing strategy helps build brand awareness about your product before or while the sales team tries reaching out to your target customers. This is done using the TOFU method.
TOFU, or the Top Of the Funnel content, is the first stage in the sales funnel. This is the Awareness Stage. You will not make a sales pitch here; instead, TOFU content aims to create brand awareness by educating prospects with valuable information. This helps create awareness about your SaaS product's features, specifications, and usage among the audience.
Creating compelling content increases the impressions you get through the air cover. Addressing their pain points, needs, and challenges through various forms of content builds trust in your brand and gives a sense of brand recall, establishing a prominent space in the minds of decision-makers. While the decision-makers may not buy right away, your company will be at the top of their mind when they plan to buy.
The primary goals of TOFU campaigns are to:
- Build brand awareness.
- Build brand recall.
- Foster trust and expertise.
- Engage prospective customers.
By implementing this Aircover strategy, your SaaS company gradually earns the trust and recognition of your potential decision-makers.
So, combining personalisation with data yields better insights into consumer behaviour, which in turn helps your customers achieve their goals. It's a win-win, right?
Strategy #3: Remarketing
Did you know that only 2% of website traffic will convert into customers after a first visit? That's sad! Still, the remaining 98% of users who interact with your ads may not convert the first time, but with some effort, they might!
LinkedIn Retargeting, also known as Remarketing Ads, is a promising strategy for LinkedIn ads for SaaS companies. An average 30% increase in click-through rates is achieved using website retargeting. This allows you to reach users who have previously interacted with your brand but haven't made a purchase yet.
The previously run LinkedIn ad campaign would have brought some website traffic to your company. Running a LinkedIn retargeting ad campaign will serve as a reminder to previous visitors to engage with your website to fulfil their needs.
How? The algorithm keeps track of previous ad campaign impressions from various sources and retargets them.
How to create retargeting campaigns in LinkedIn Ads for SaaS companies?
Set up a LinkedIn Pixel
The step involves installing the LinkedIn Inside tag on your website. This JavaScript code acts as a backbone for Remarketing campaigns to track user behaviour, demographics, and conversions on your website. This helps create specific audience segments based on their interactions.
Build Retargeting Audiences
Using the Inside tag data, create the Matched Audiences within the LinkedIn campaign manager. With 'Website Audiences' selected, you can define audience segments based on the sources they come from.
Also, you can target your audience by defining them based on their actions on your website, like pages they visited, the duration of the visit, or people who've abandoned their carts. You can further narrow down the selection by considering other options with demographic factors like job title, company size, industry, etc. This creates the most relevant audience segments for hyper-targeting.
Craft Compelling Ads
Ad creatives are crucial for the success of any campaign. Among the wide range of ad formats, like sponsored content, mail, or display ads, crafting visually compelling ads that capture the audience's attention is essential. Tailor the copies and ads to the specific actions or products your users are engaged with on your website. Addressing their unique needs and pain points enhances your company's relevance to their needs and increases the conversion rate.
Track and Optimise
Monitor the campaign closely and adjust the budget or strategy according to its performance. LinkedIn's campaign manager gives golden data like cost per click (CPC), click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, engagement rates, and return on investment (ROI). Analysing these data helps you optimise the ads by allocating a high budget to the well-performing ads and campaigns. This way, you can refine your targeting strategies for high impact.
Strategy #4: Reach Decision-makers
Strategising ads to find and target decision-makers allows you to optimise and advertise to more specific groups. One of the most common ways marketers conduct research and promote is by utilising filter options like job title, company industry, and job seniority. But guess what? The results aren't always accurate.
Based on these attributes, LinkedIn tries to match what it considers the right audience; however, it might sometimes not work when the audience is large. A poorly optimised targeting approach will lead to wasted spending. By excluding irrelevant attributes, you can narrow your search, reach potential customers, and maximise your ad budget.
Here are three ways to optimise your targeting: Delivering valuable content to the right audience can shape buying decisions across the decision-makers or stakeholders of a company.
- Being Specific: SaaS products are technical, so being very niche with your audience segmentation and content is okay. Because these people know their requirements, your ads should speak their language to address their challenges and needs.
- Find the Right Decision Maker: After choosing the target accounts, it would be a great starting point if you could engage with the most influential person within the company. LinkedIn sales navigator helps you find the right decision maker and recommends the relevant contacts.
- Offer Real Value: Trying to offer a service to your target audience without any real value makes no results. Instead, showcase the value or benefits to decision-makers upfront through various forms of content showing how your service adds value to them.
Elevating Your LinkedIn Ads Game for SaaS Excellence: Key Secrets
A LinkedIn Ad strategy for SaaS companies involves using sponsored LinkedIn posts to reach and connect with their target audience. The ultimate goal is to get views of the ads and convert them into leads. This can be done using various advertising strategies.
A single LinkedIn ad can reach 14.6% of the world's population.
When done right, this advertising method is proven effective in building brand awareness, increasing conversions, and resulting in a high ROI.
Allocate Budget Strategically
First things first! When it comes to SaaS marketing, budgeting is like a foundation for the structure. This is the place where you will invest a lot of money. LinkedIn allows you to set a daily budget and a lifetime budget. This can be chosen separately or in combination. There are several budgeting options available on LinkedIn to choose from.
- Cost Per Click increases engagement with sponsored content or textual ads.
- Cost Per Impression is used to increase brand awareness.
LinkedIn advises markets to split their marketing budget ratio as 70:30, meaning 70% goes to increasing conversion rates and 30% towards brand awareness and engagement.
Once the campaign is set up and goes live, monitor how fast the ads consume your budget by analysing the reach, impressions, and corresponding money spent. The whole point is to react instantly as the campaign unfolds. See what's working and what's not, and adjust accordingly.
Define your Target Audience clearly
Targeting plays a crucial role in LinkedIn ads for SaaS companies. LinkedIn advertising provides numerous options for targeting based on professional criteria and interests. The more precise your audience is, the more relevant your ads are, leading to high engagement and conversion rates. Here are some of the primary targeting options:
- Job title
- Seniority
- Industry
- Company name
- Company size
- Skills
- Years of experience
- Demography
These accounts filtered using these options should ideally align with what you offer. Build a funnel around these accounts and slowly draw them in with your compelling content. Every interaction counts, which paves the way for your prospects to become your valued clients.
Create Valuable Content
Now comes the content creation process. This is the place where creativity takes the spotlight. The key? Create value.
The content, apart from being informative, should also be transformative. Share insights, dive into the depths of your SaaS products, and show your expertise.
The content could be blog posts, videos, podcasts, or webinars. Whichever you choose, make sure it resonates with your audience, making them curious to learn more.
- Ad formats
LinkedIn offers a variety of ad formats designed to meet the market's diverse needs. Each ad format is used for a specific purpose to attain various marketing objectives. Try multiple ad formats to analyse which works best for your audience. There are different types of ad formats, like text ads, carousel ads, dynamic ads, sponsored in-mail ads, and conversation ads. Whichever your ad format may be, use a clear call to action. This guides your audience to the next step in the process.
- Lead-gen forms
These are designed to simplify the lead-generation process for users. When a user clicks on this ad, a pre-filled form with their LinkedIn profile information appears, making it more effortless for your prospects to submit their information. This generates high-quality leads, which also helps to drive more engagement, increase content downloads, and drive registrations, all without requiring users to leave the LinkedIn platform.
- A/B Tests
Optimising campaigns for LinkedIn ads for Sass accounts helps maximise the effectiveness of ads and ensures the best ROI. Regularly review the engagement reports to gain insights into the companies interacting with your content. This helps refine the marketing strategy, identify potential leads, and tailor messages according to them.
Key Takeaways
LinkedIn ads are a powerful tool to elevate your SaaS business. With a large number of professional audiences, they offer unparalleled targeting options and strategies. As mentioned above, understanding the usage of various advertising campaigns and optimising campaigns based on data-driven insights can help attain better growth.
In this ever-evolving digital world, embracing LinkedIn ads for SaaS companies helps you better position your service or product in terms of leads, value, and trust, ultimately driving business success!
Having that said, are you ready to supercharge your SaaS marketing game? Connect with our TripleDart's expert team today to guide you hand in hand to reach unparalleled results. Let's transform your vision into reality!
