Incorporating Linkedin Into Your Journey-Based Advertising Strategy

Ads are an essential component of inbound marketing. They’re one of the best tools you have to provide your customers with helpful, relevant content at every stage of the buyer’s journey. But to find success with your journey-based advertising strategy, you need to make sure you're present on every platform your target audience is active on. 

For many, this means running ads on LinkedIn.

As the world’s largest professional network, LinkedIn Ads allows you to reach decision makers with your content offers and see a strong return on your ad spend. For these reasons, HubSpot now supports LinkedIn Ads within the HubSpot ads tool.

So with this new functionality, it's time to start planning your ads strategy. You need to ensure that you're getting your targeting, narrative, objectives, and measurement right as you craft that strategy. Let’s take a look at the LinkedIn ads tool in HubSpot and walk through how you can create alignment across each component of journey-based advertising to create a consistent experience for your customers.  

Targeting the Right People

Targeting people who are interested in your brand is the first step to finding success with your LinkedIn Ads strategy.

On LinkedIn, you’ll be put directly in front of decision makers — four out of every five LinkedIn members drive business decisions at their organization. But getting in front of decision makers is only the first step. To really find success, you need to make sure you’re reaching those decision makers that are uniquely interested in what your brand has to offer.

LinkedIn has a number of targeting options, too. You can target employees of a specific company, people with a specific job title, and people within a specific region along with a slew of other options. 

With HubSpot, you can even go one level deeper to reach decision makers and move them towards a purchase decision. After connecting your ads account, begin by applying your LinkedIn Insight Tag, or pixel, to your site. Once applied, you can create a website traffic audience that will serve ads on LinkedIn to anyone that visits your website or a specific group of pages within a specific period of time.

For example, you could create an audience of everyone that visited your pricing page within the past two weeks, and layer on targeting based on job title so that you are only reaching people who are uniquely qualified for your content offer.

You can also create an audience off a list of contacts within HubSpot CRM. Create an audience off a list using any CRM data point, and these audiences will automatically sync between HubSpot and LinkedIn. Use these audiences to target an ad at recent webinar attendees or anyone who opened one of your recent marketing emails.

Creating a Consistent Narrative

When advertising on LinkedIn, deciding your ad type and creative is only the first step. To really find success on LinkedIn, you want to ensure that your ads seamlessly fit with every other touch point someone has with your brand. This means aligning your audience with your content offer, and ensuring that any follow up you do with your customers makes sense in the context of the ad they interacted with. 

Let’s say you're creating an ad for an ebook that you recently created. You’ll be targeting blog subscribers with this content offer, so they're already familiar with your brand and what you have to offer. Your ad creative should make it obvious what value someone will get out of the ebook, and who the content offer is for.

For example, if your blog subscribers are primarily comprised of marketing professionals, your ad creative could include the tagline, “Find out how marketing professionals like you are generating 40% more leads at scale.” When someone interacts with your LinkedIn ad by either filling out a lead generation form or clicking on an ad to be brought to your landing page, they should also be able to easily acquire your ebook — the experience should be seamless.

Using your HubSpot automation tools, you can easily deliver your ebook to people that interact with your ad, and continue to nurture them into paying customers. Set up enrollment triggers so that anyone who fills out your lead generation form is entered into your workflow, and immediately send them an email that delivers your ebook. After a few days, deliver separate emails to those who downloaded your ebook and those who never opened your email to deliver a personalized experience to your leads. 

Choosing the Right Objective

When creating LinkedIn ads, it’s important to keep in mind what stage in the buyer’s journey your target audience is in. It doesn’t make sense to optimize your ads for conversions and target people who have no idea who you are and what you have to offer. Similarly, you’re not optimizing your advertising dollars if you’re targeting people in the decision stage of the buyer’s journey with brand awareness ads.

LinkedIn has a number of objectives for you to choose from when creating your ads. Keep in mind who you’re targeting and what your content offer is when selecting the best objective for your campaign.

In HubSpot, use the attribution reporting tool to understand how people are interacting with your LinkedIn ads. From your ads dashboard in HubSpot, you can filter your data according to a number of different attribution models.

For example, you can see which ads led to someone’s first website visit, which ads led to a form submission, and even which ads someone interacted with after they became a contact. With this information, you can identify moments in the buyer’s journey where you can better support your customers with LinkedIn ads — moving them from the awareness stage, all the way to the conversion stage. 

  

Measuring the Return on Your Ad Spend

Finally, when measuring the success of your ads strategy, always keep in mind how your selected objective ties back to your bottom line. For example, you might be running an ad campaign on LinkedIn that's optimized for website visits — but how do clicks on that ad that brings visitors to your website influence your bottom line?

With the ROI calculator in HubSpot’s ads tool, you’ll be able to see the exact ROI of your ad spend. The tool will show you how impressions led to clicks, how clicks led to contacts in HubSpot CRM, and how many of those contacts became customers. Use this information to better understand what’s working and where you can best allocate your advertising budget.

HubSpot’s ads tool helps you easily align your LinkedIn ads with the rest of your marketing efforts. Connect your account, create your audiences, and understand exactly how advertising on LinkedIn can help you generate high- quality leads that positively impact your bottom line.