LinkedIn is comfortably the world's largest professional social media network, roughly 950 million members from more than 200 countries around the world. That’s a lot of people, and therefore it’s a lot of opportunities to get your message across. However, it’s key that you are targeted in your approach, and not just casting as wide a net as possible in your attempts to generate leads.
Luckily, LinkedIn provides a host of native campaign and lead generation tools that can help your company, and your message stand out in the crowded cyber security market. But before you dive head first into LinkedIn advertising, here are some top tips to make sure you're moving in the right direction.
No amount of marketing will sell a bad product - This is a phrase we repeatedly hear. But it couldn't ring more true in the cyber security field. Before you begin advertising on Linkedin, you MUST ensure that the content you create actually resonates with your target audience and will interest them. Too many times, we see company ads on LinkedIn promoting poor content. While it may initially generate clicks, it will do little to generate leads or sales, and may even have an adverse effect on sales. It’s also important to consider that if you produce poor content and don't share anything new or important to the prospect (or worse is inaccurate), what does that say about your product? The answer - Nothing good.
Only by providing valuable content that resonates with your audience can you initiate the customer journey on the right path. This process often starts with the creation of a customer persona(s). This will help you identify what your audience's pain points are, in order to understand how to position your product and what you should communicate to them. You may discover that you have several personas - They could be the CISO, DevOps Manager or DevOps Engineer to name a few. Each of these will require different content and have different goals. Only by tailoring your message and content as such can you hope to have any success on LinkedIn.
You will also need to ensure that you create content at all stages of the buyers funnel - a cold lead who has no awareness of you or your company is unlikely to wish to book a demo of your product or service (no matter how awesome it may be!). Instead they need to be nurtured, and guided through the funnel by being shown relevant content based on their lifecycle stages.
For example - At top of funnel stages you may want to show blogs or ‘how to’ videos; at middle of funnel stages you may want to show comparisons, eBooks or on-demand webinars etc, and at lower funnel stages you may want to give a book a demo or free trial options.
See how to build your B2B messaging for success!
Before we look at some specific best practices you should implement across your LinkedIn campaigns, let’s take a look at the most common advertisement formats you can employ.
We’ve run our fair share of LinkedIn campaigns over the years - Some worked, some didn’t. But we’ve continually refined our approach and have distilled some best practices that you can apply today to achieve maximum results.
Here are 2 examples of advertisements we like from cybersecurity company, BrandShield.
These advertisements really caught our eye as great of examples well-crafted LinkedIn advertisements - But why? There are many reasons for this, here are our top 3:
When building out your LinkedIn campaign, one of the first things to consider is your conversion objective - In other words, lead generation forms or website conversions. Let’s explore the key differences.
LinkedIn leadgen forms allow people to input their information directly on LinkedIn in exchange for whatever content piece (eBook, Webinar etc) you are promoting. The form fields can be customized to whatever information you require such as name, business email address, company, industry, job title etc (but keep in mind that the more fields you add, the more work is required on the users behalf). However, as the process is usually automated (and therefore frictionless), in the sense that LinkedIn autofills the information, you’ll *usually* be able to generate a higher number of leads.
On the other hand, landing pages are used to direct people to your website, where they can see additional information on the offer and sign up there. Of course, this adds an extra step and external navigation to the process, however you will be able to provide additional information compared to LinkedIn, and people who navigate are potentially more interested in your product/service.
We could debate which of these is better until the cows come home, but from our experience, leadgen forms usually generate a higher number of initial leads, but landing pages have a higher overall conversion rate of prospects into paying clients.
You should of course A/B test both options to see which works best for you!
Read: Cyber Security Benchmarks: Are You Paying Too Much For Your MQLs?
As we mentioned in the introduction, there are more than 800 million users on LinkedIn - Clearly not all of these are relevant or in your audience. Despite this - You will undoubtedly have a large number of relevant industry personnel to target. A great benefit LinkedIn holds over other channels is the ability to be hyper focused in targeting specific user accounts or companies - AKA, Account Based Marketing (ABM).
ABM is a marketers dream as it ensures greater alignment between sales and marketing… No more conversations like:
Sound familiar?
We’ve been running ABM campaigns for several years, but only in the last 1-2 years has the potential, and popularity of it really taken off. A major benefit of ABM on LinkedIn in particular is that it reduces the time and budget you’ll spend on irrelevant accounts, and maximizes the amount you’ll spend on high value accounts. This is because the content is hyper-personalized, meaning the leads experience is better which results in greater overall efficiency and performance. The success ABM can provide is evident in the data also - With 30% of marketers reporting a greater than 100% engagement increase with their C-Level target accounts compared to regular campaigns.
LinkedIn advertising, when done right, has the potential to be a goldmine for businesses, particularly in the B2B space. However, where many brands fall short is going for bottom of the funnel content, without warming the lead up first. Would you be surprised if we told you that it requires an average of 7 LinkedIn touches (ads, videos, blogs etc) before you can expect to gain a lead?. So making sure you have the right content, the right campaign type, and the right objectives are all crucial to success - Only then can you have a high likelihood of success.
To learn how to maximize your LinkedIn advertising strategy or to discuss whether the platform is right for you, book some time with us here!