You’re spending time, energy and money on LinkedIn ads.
But how do you know if LinkedIn is really influencing your pipeline?
Let’s learn some tips in this episode of Closing Time.
Thanks for tuning in to Closing Time, the show for go to market Leaders.
I’m Val Riley, VP of marketing for Unbounce and Insightly.
Today I am joined by Deivis Rupslaukis.
He is the founder of Deru Digital, a B2B paid media agency.
Deivis, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
Excited to, to talk today.
Well, let’s jump right into LinkedIn because honestly,
in the B2B space, LinkedIn just reigns supreme.
These stats always blow my mind.
There’s over a billion users and nearly 135 million of them log in every day.
You can’t argue with those numbers and the power of LinkedIn right? No.
Especially in B2B.
I mean, there is no better place to to advertise or even post.
If your industry is B2B and I think it’s going to keep on growing.
So I’m personally in the B2B space, and I’ve always been a B2B marketer,
and I would say we spend about 10 to 15% of
our advertising budget specifically on LinkedIn.
So we know it works, but we also know we have
we also know we have to be there, but we do have trouble tracking
those results, like knowing when we can credit LinkedIn for at least
getting us into the consideration set for a B2B SaaS purchase.
And you’re not alone.
one thing to note is also that,. I think more and more advertisers
are shifting the budgets from, let’s say, paid search to LinkedIn,
mainly because of the targeting, possibilities.
But, I think a lot of companies are still not convinced
that they want to do that because of what you just described.
How can we still make sure that LinkedIn works?
How do we know?
The short answer is, well, you kind of don’t know 100%,
but at least you can have some indication if it’s working.
Right.
So I prefer to look at LinkedIn, not about not like
you look at, Google ads from demand capture perspective,
if we can use that term, because LinkedIn is more about generating demand.
Well, even that term again, maybe is not the greatest to use,
but basically making aware that you exist and making aware of your product.
So obviously majority of the people
to whom you expose your ads to are not ready to buy.
And that’s why you have LinkedIn for the read, for the, for the other,
big percentage of the market that are not ready to buy.
But then, of course, still everybody wants the ROI,
everybody wants to see the same sort of influence.
And exactly that influence is something that you can,
try and measure by one way or the other.
I do agree with you wholeheartedly about LinkedIn’s targeting.
It just.
It lets you get so much more granular, for instance, with, like, employee
size of a company than Google does.
So it really does make it appealing for marketers to jump in there.
And, well, you have some practical ideas for really finding out
if LinkedIn is doing its job, and one of them is simply
having your sales reps just ask right?
Yeah.
So either sales ask or you just add it in your forms.
So, you know, just another field of how did you hear about us?
We had the clients where we literally don’t see
any conversions happening within LinkedIn’s interface.
But when we look at their CRM and we see people mentioning LinkedIn, either
from sales conversations or people filled out that, themselves.
So, and I think some companies are still not using that
specifically in the, in the forums because they are scare scared
that the conversion rates are going to go down.
But I think there was, some agency already
did the research or some sort of analysis based on their clients.
And actually the conversion rates improved, oddly enough.
So, I don’t think people need to be scared,
about conversion rates going down.
It’s just going to be
additional data point for you to evaluate the effectiveness of.
Yeah, it’s LinkedIn, basically.
I love this next tip.
It’s a little manual, but even if you’re just cross-referencing your inbound leads
with your LinkedIn target demographics, you might find some gold there.
Right. Exactly.
So we do it on multiple levels.
One is on lead on contact level.
So we basically look at a certain period of time,
you know CRM which leads came in.
And companies extract that basically download
go to LinkedIn, look at company view and then either
look at the same time period or add the extra look back window.
Maybe let’s say if we exported last three months from the CRM,
then we look at let’s say six months, on on LinkedIn
to see if we have shown ads to these, accounts to these companies.
It’s not ideal by any means, but it is kind of like,
a little bit
of workaround to just prove that at least you’re targeting the right accounts.
They are coming in now, and we are showing them, the ads.
And in some cases you can also see if they clicked or not.
So that’s one way to just to try and talk about the yeah.
Influence of LinkedIn.
I love that because, marketers,
we all wish we had another person, another set of hands, another agency.
More help.
I mean, it’s manual,
but if you’re really
looking to double down and know if your investments are paying off,
it’s a it’s a really great way to do it, even if not all the time.
Maybe just periodically.. So that’s a great tip.
Another idea is investing in a full blown marketing attribution tool.
There’s a lot out there.
Wicked reports, Heap.
I shamelessly will plug Leads Rx because they are owned by our parent
company, Unbounce. So, that’s another good one.
But, how do you feel about just in general attribution tools?
I think it’s great.
that takes out all of the manual work that I need to do.
Plus it it plugs in not only to LinkedIn, but all of your sources.
Granted, there’s going to be a lot of the things are happening
before, that you’re not able to track.
I’m not disputing that by any means.
But at least with the touch points that you can track, it can picture
can make you, yeah, create you a better picture of what is influencing what.
And then I particularly like the, the, the kind of opportunity journey views
that, a lot of these attribution tools have is where we can see
when they saw what,
when was so when, when sales called, when email was sent, all of these things.
Now, of course, we cannot say that, you know, just because they saw
on LinkedIn, that doesn’t mean that LinkedIn influenced at all.
Of course not. But it’s part of it.
That’s one.
And then you can also try to do some analysis by
look at all your deals for,. I don’t know, last two years, for example,
that had a certain touch point versus the ones that didn’t.
And then you can look at different things, maybe somebody close fast
or maybe somebody close at a better rate, with having some sort of touch point
versus not.
So I think having these attribution tools are amazing.
I literally had a meeting yesterday with, with a client and their team,
and they decided to use one of the attribution tools.
And this guy was like, oh my God, this is amazing.
So he was super happy with, with this.
So I think it’s it’s definitely a great, great thing to use.
Granted, not everybody can afford them.
it’s a cheat code, but it requires, you know, investment and
of time and resources to get it set up.
So with that in mind, let’s talk about the revenue attribution
report that you get from LinkedIn.
Anything that’s supplied by a vendor always worries me a little bit,
but you can get some value from that report.
Yes, 100%.
So, this is something that LinkedIn basically rolled out
kind of quite recently.
And it’s only available on the business manager level.
So in order for you to you leverage it, you need to create business manager.
Everybody has campaign manager.
You need business manager for that.
And there you can connect your CRM.
It takes around three days where it, you know,
gets all the information from your CRM and then connects to get over to
your LinkedIn.
And kind of does that
influence the report in a way that we did, we used to do manually.
So now that we have that option,. I’m not doing it manually anymore.
Of course.
But, it’s not the greatest overview.
It shows you like how many contacts you had.
How many? You know,. I’m not even. I’m close.
I think, but opportunities and closed once.
It’s super duper simple.
And in that view, you don’t really see which accounts were influenced.
And also the pipeline, the revenue and everything that is attributed.
It’s not distributed.
It basically, you know,
it takes the value from the CRM and attaches it to that report
as if LinkedIn was the one influencing it all, which you know, is not the case.
But again, LinkedIn doesn’t have information about anything else.
They only know their information.
And what’s happening in your CRM.
So they basically I’m not saying they taking all of the,
credit for it, but it kind of looks like it.
So I’m not even evaluating based on, on on revenues.
Mainly looking at which accounts. I’ve reached to opportunity stage
and there we can now again, as a recent literally download
that report where we see in the Excel your Salesforce account name,
the account name or company name from LinkedIn and LinkedIn URL,
and everything else, like when it was closed, when it was opened.
And then we see way better view of which accounts specifically
we’ve reached, on LinkedIn.
And then they have different attribution
to kind of measurements based on impressions and, and clicks.
Still, it’s not great.
But you can see something finally,
at least on on what is, you know, what is working or what is not,
which accounts are going to, to your CRM with the LinkedIn influence.
So again, the more we have to to prove that
LinkedIn is bringing us something, yeah.
The easier it is to convince to spend more. Basically.
Right. Yeah.
Just another tool for the detective work that is, you know,
marketing attribution, right?
I wanted to chat with you a little bit about impression capping,
because LinkedIn doesn’t do impression capping.
And for those who aren’t familiar, it’s it’s
basically defined
as an advertising strategy that limits the number of times a unique ad
is shown to a specific user account or geography over a time period.
So as a consumer,. I think I kind of like this.
As an advertiser, I’m not so sure.
Talk me through it.
All right.
So what we’ve noticed is that a lot of accounts are that
we manage are reaching the same accounts over and over again.
So let’s say you have 1000 accounts in your target account list.
You are reaching
like 70% of that, meaning that 30% don’t see any ads from you at all.
And then out of that 70%, there’s going to be like
10% that are eating up majority of your budget.
So the distribution is not equal between the accounts.
And, you know, it’s important to reach as many accounts as possible
as frequently as possible, especially considering the 95 and and five rule.
So we’ve noticed that, and we started to think, okay,
how can we, you know, equalize the distribution because you can do it by,
you know,
changing the objective on your campaigns, and then you can set everything to reach.
But that’s going to be quite expensive based on, on, on our experience,
if you put for engagement
again, it’s going to show to the same accounts all the time.
So how do you do that?
And we have a we basically managed to create our own workaround for it
with, with, with what we call impression capping.
So we basically go into the companies, you and look at the companies
who have gotten more impressions than a certain threshold.
So let’s say, I don’t know, 200 impressions in the last, I don’t know, 60
days.
We create a list of that, then we exclude that
list from the campaign, and we create another campaign,
where we target just those with smaller budgets.
So then we distribute, let’s say we spend $200 for this one campaign.
Now we’re spending 150 and 50.
So now we give these companies that never seen the ads
a chance to actually see them.
And we actually for what we did is one client and we actually saw quarter
over quarter growth in the company’s reached so it clearly is working.
And then secondary things that worked really good is that we decreased
CPC and we decreased increased impressions and reach.
So we spend the same.
But the results are way, way better now.
Because again, if you constantly show your ads of the same people,
same accounts, they’re not engaging anymore.
So everything seems to go works.
Your CTRs, your your CPCs, everything starts to perform, a little bit worse.
So, yeah, that’s something people need to really, really pay attention to.
And I think not a lot of people are talking about this.
I mean, that’s a really amazing tactic you’ve got there.
Is that something that, you just decided to try on your own?
Because it feels like it should be something you should.
You should be sharing with everyone out there.
Yeah.
I mean, I am trying to share this
with everyone, but but the reason why we came up with this.
Because I looked at our own agency ads, and I just spotted it,
that our ads are reaching the same accounts all the time.
So we had to figure out, okay, what we
what could we do to reach these other ones.
And then we implemented this for ourselves.
And then we started to implement it for for others as well.
And then we could clearly see the effects of it.
So yeah.
But speaking of impression capping,
I just saw today a post where there is some beta version or beta version
where you will be able to set some sort of impression capping or frequency capping.
I can’t remember now, if you are running brand awareness campaigns,
let’s see when they roll out, if they roll out.
But I think that’s the feature that
is is, is something that everybody really wants to have.
But then the question is, is it going to be on the user level or account level.
Because that’s also a little bit of a difference. Right.
So but but interesting that, LinkedIn is listening
to some of the feedback that we’re giving and, implementing some of the changes.
sounds like LinkedIn’s catching up with you, so that’s great.
Yeah, yeah.
Deivis, if our audience wants to follow you, learn more about your agency.
Where should they go?
Most likely. LinkedIn is going to be the biggest one.
My profile.
And then the other one is there’s that Derudigital.com.
You can learn more about the agency and how we do our stuff.
And proof that you practice what you preach.
Right? You say, go find me on LinkedIn.. I love it.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, thanks so much for joining us on Closing Time.
And thanks to all of you for tuning in.
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We’ll see you next week.
