Efficient LinkedIn lead generation at scale can be the cornerstone of any successful B2B digital sales and marketing strategy. No matter what the size of your business, or your industry, LinkedIn is the best channel to connect with B2B customers directly.
It’s worked for me, it works for my clients and I’m confident it will work for you too.
Over the past few months, I’ve been writing about my journey to develop a LinkedIn B2B lead generation managed service. If you missed those blogs, you can catch up here:
- How COVID + LinkedIn Transformed My Business (And Yours, Too)
- LinkedIn For B2B Lead Generation: 5 Features To Look For
- Higher Ranking’s LinkedIn Managed Service Helped Me Grow My Business, And My Confidence
There’s a bit to catch up on, so if you want the summary version:
- It’s getting much harder to generate results from the digital channels we’ve been relying on over the past decade or so – SEO, Google Ads, social media and EDMs. While these tactics are still important and must be considered as part of the overall digital marketing mix, we often need a little extra something to support them.
- LinkedIn has emerged as the digital channel of choice for B2B sales and marketing activity, because it allows you to create the buyer perfect avatar/person and connect with them directly. However, consistent lead generation at scale on LinkedIn is time consuming, when done properly.
- Higher Ranking has developed a unique and ground-breaking managed service that takes away much of the time and effort for our customers, and they are seeing some amazing results.
Is LinkedIn all I need to support my B2B sales cycle?
As much as I love LinkedIn for lead generation, sadly, the answer to this question is: not really. I have a couple of clients who rely heavily on our managed service for the bulk of their B2B lead generation activities, but these are generally very small businesses (typically sole operators) with limited budget for marketing and sales. And for their purposes, LinkedIn is enough.
If you want to get serious about nurturing your audience – particularly through a long sales cycle – it pays to make the investment in some other digital strategies. After LinkedIn, my top five include:
- Digital remarketing
- Paid social media Run quite cheaply, support trust factor around long complex
- EDMs
- Google Ads
- SEO
These are listed in no particular order, because my recommendations on which channels to use will always depend on your situation and budget. You may not be able to invest in all five from the outset, and that’s fine – you can always scale up down the track.
What really matters is selecting the right mix of tactics to support the LinkedIn lead generation process in the most cost-effective way, and that is always as unique as the business itself.
Over the next few months I’ll be talking about each of these five in a little more detail, and how they can help you. Let’s start with remarketing.
What is digital remarketing?
Remarketing (also known as retargeting) involves targeting anyone who has already interacted with your business in some way, but hasn’t yet converted to a sale. Unless you’re using the world’s most effective ad blockers and have no presence on social media, you’re being remarketed to every single day – and you may not have realised it.
When done well, remarketing increases brand awareness and recall by presenting the prospect with a certain number of reminders (ideally, around three or four) of your brand each day. It does this using cookies and other tracking methods to display ads on websites and social media platforms. The best retargeting ads aren’t pushy – they act as a subtle reminder of your previous interaction with the business, with the intention of nurturing the customer throughout a longer sales cycle.
On the other hand, remarketing campaigns done badly can be an absolute disaster. Think of a time you realised a particular brand was “following” you around online, with multiple pop-up ads served each day. For most people, this results in frustration and disengagement with the brand.
In short, when it comes to remarketing, more is definitely not better.
Why is remarketing so important to the B2B mix?
There are several reasons why remarketing is an effective part of the B2B mix:
- Cost-effective: Remarketing can be very cost-effective because your target audience is already “qualified” (i.e., has already interacted with your business) and is therefore smaller. If you’re on a limited budget, this is a great tool to nurture the leads you’ve opened through LinkedIn.
- Long-term brand awareness: Good remarketing is subtle, so it’s perfect for longer-term brand awareness, even after the customer has left the conversation on LinkedIn, or your website.
- Personalisation:It’s much easier to personalise remarketing ads based on the behaviour of the prospect – again, because the audience is small and qualified. This creates a better experience for the user, and makes them more favourably inclined towards your business.
Australian SMB generates 120,000 impressions for $380 and pulls 150 return visitors per month through remarketing.
Our client, a Melbourne-based marketing agency, spends a significant amount of time, money and energy to drive visitors to the website every month. The site is the cornerstone of their B2B sales process – the virtual shop front of the agency.
When we started working with this client, their primary challenge was staying front-of-mind with the target audience after they leave the website, for the duration of a long and complex sales cycle
Our recommendation was to run remarketing display ads that follow the prospect around during their day. We wanted to keep this very subtle, with no more than five ads served in one day, to avoid alienating the prospect.
We also made sure the ads appeared next to brands the prospect already trusts, reinforcing the brand message at a time when they are more likely to be in a positive and open frame of mind.
The campaign runs at cost-per-click rather than cost-per-thousand impressions, which creates more impact, more cost effectively.
Our results?
- More than 600+ visitors to the website every month
- $380 spent on media every month
- 120,000 impressions per month
- 150 prospects return to the site each month from the remarketing display campaign.
These are great results, and we can help you achieve similar.
How can we help?
Higher Ranking is an Australian digital marketing agency that supports Australian businesses of all sizes to drive quality leads which generate revenue for your business.
We are proud to bring our LinkedIn Lead Generation tool to the market. It’s a one-of-a-kind solution that takes away most of the ‘heavy lifting’ of the traditional methods of LinkedIn lead generation, without compromising on the quality of the leads. We can also help with the other digital channels to support the sales cycle, including remarketing, paid social media, EDMs, Google Ads and SEO.
We’d love to show you how it works – you can book a demo using the link below.
