Guides

B2B Advertising in 2024: The Definitive Guide

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Silvio Perez

Founder @AdConversion

Today I’m going to give you a crash course in B2B advertising.

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In this comprehensive guide I’ll cover:

What is B2B advertising?
7 ways B2B differs from B2C
20 B2B Terms and Metrics you need to know
Top 3 B2B Revenue Models
B2B ad examples by revenue model
How to create a B2B advertising strategy
The Five Stages Model
The Best B2B Ad Channels
Advice from 20 B2B Advertising Experts

So if you need to get up-to-speed on B2B as quickly as possible, you’ll love this guide.

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Let’s get started 🔥

What Is Business-to-Business Advertising?

B2B advertising is the process of any paid marketing efforts directed toward influencing multiple individuals within a company for a purchase decision (known as a buying committee) vs a single consumer.

7 Differences between B2B and B2C Advertising:

Longer sales cycles (3 - 36 months)
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Larger average deal sizes (< $1,000 - $250,000+)
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More stakeholders involved in the purchase decision (ex: c-suite, finance)
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Focus on impacting the entire buyer's journey not just the first conversion (unlike B2C).
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Smaller audiences (< 300,000) with a focus on reaching the right person and company vs B2C with broad audiences ( > 300,000) as more people can purchase your product.
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B2B requires strategic alignment between marketing and sales as you’re joining forces (inbound and outbound) to win accounts.
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B2B supports multiple revenue models, the big three being; product-led, sales-led, and hybrid. Whereas e-commerce is solely product-led.

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Check out more examples in the article: B2B vs B2C Advertising: 8 Differences & Examples You Need To Know.

20 B2B Terms and Metrics you Need to Know

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One of the first things you realize when you get into B2B is how much jargon there is! MQL, SQL, ACV, ARR, and the list goes on!

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In order to make sure you understand the language, here’s 20 B2B terms and metrics you need to know:

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Terms & Metrics	Definition
Lifecycle stages	The steps in which a person goes from expressing interest to becoming a customer. Example: Lead → MQL → SQL → Opp → Won
Lead scoring	The process of automatically scoring leads.
Lead	Someone that has expressed interest by giving their contact information (ex: email address) in exchange for the offer you provided.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)	A lead that has been marked qualified by achieving a certain amount of points based on the company's lead scoring model.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)	A lead that has been qualified by sales directly.
Opportunity (Opp)	An open deal that has the possibility of becoming a customer.
Sales Qualified Opportunity (SQO)	An open deal that has been vetted by sales directly and meets qualification criteria.
Pipeline	The total amount of potential revenue from open opportunities.
Closed Won	A deal that has been converted successfully into an existing customer.
Annual Contract Value (ACV)	The total revenue amount a contact is worth over a 12-month period.
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)	The total amount of revenue that is generated on a monthly recurring basis.
Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)	The average amount of revenue generated over the lifespan of a user.
Account Based Marketing (ABM)	A strategy focused on driving awareness and conversion from a specific list of companies.
Pipe-to-Spend	The total amount of pipeline generated for every dollar spent.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)	The total cost to acquire a customer.
Business Development Representative (BDR)	A sales rep responsible for outbound.
Sales Development Representative (SDR)	A sales rep responsible for inbound.
Net New	The acquisition of brand new customers.
Expansion	Driving more revenue from existing customers.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)	The perfect person your product can benefit.

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Unfortunately there are many more terms you’ll need throughout your B2B career 😂 and every company creates their own (it’s a constant struggle) but these 20 will give you a solid foundation. For a great list of b2b terms check out our B2B Advertising Glossary.

Top 3 B2B Revenue Models

If you’re working in B2B there are three common revenue models you’ll likely work with.
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If your job is to promote this organization, understanding the revenue model is key as it will change everything from how you approach your strategy, the offers you choose, channels, and more.

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Revenue Model	Definition	Example Offers	Example Companies
Sales-Led	A sales-led B2B organization leverages people to educate and nurture prospects throughout the buyer's journey.	This looks like a prospect requesting a demo to speak with a sales rep to learn more.	Syndio
Product-Led	A product-led B2B organization allows prospects to try their product self-serve in order to learn more.	This looks like a prospect signing up for a free trial and trying the product themselves.	Mixpanel
Hybrid	A hybrid B2B organization leverages both a sales-led and product-led approach to educate prospects.	This looks like having both a free trial option and talk to sales available for prospects depending on what their preference is.	Logikcull

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Syndio’s platform landing page example highlighting the "schedule a demo" call to action button as a sales led company example — Sales Led - Syndio

B2B Ad Examples by Revenue Model:

Sales Led

Product Led

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‍How to build a full-funnel B2B Advertising Strategy ‍

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Now that you know how B2B differs from B2C.

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How do you build a full-funnel B2B advertising strategy?

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Full-funnel refers to building a strategy that covers all touch points along the customer journey.

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This means advertising to individuals who are (e.g. Eugene's Schwartz Stages of Awareness):

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Unaware = have no clue they even have a problem in the first place (ex: blissfully mismanaging customer relationships)

Problem Aware = know they have a problem but are not sure how to solve it (ex: realize managing customer relationships is important but don't know how).

Solution Aware = need help deciding on the right solution (ex: should I use Google Sheets, a filing cabinet 😂 or a CRM?).

Product Aware = know of your brand/product but not sure if you're the best option (ex: comparing CRM software; Salesforce vs HubSpot vs Pipedrive).

Offer Aware = know of your brand and exactly how you can help but need some nudging (ex: pricing discounts, better contract terms, customer references).

Most Aware = Existing customers, familiar with your brand and working with you (ex: referral program).

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Understanding your prospects' stage of awareness allows you to create messaging, and offers that better resonate with where they are in the customer journey.

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It helps to have a model (think of it like a map) to make complicated topics simple.

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We’re going to use The Five Stages model covered in our course Building a Paid Media Program.

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Here’s how it works:
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Based on the stage; the outcome, awareness level, offers, tactics, and KPIs differ.

Outcome = the end goal you're trying to achieve in each stage.

Awareness = the familiarity level of your brand/product/solution.

Offers = what you're providing your target audience in each stage.

Tactics = how you're going to actually execute your strategy per stage.

KPIs = how you're going to measure success in each stage.

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Let's dive into examples for each stage so you really understand!

The Five Stages Model

Stage 1: Create

Outcome	Build brand affinity & trust (raving fans)
Awareness	Unaware, problem aware
Offers	Educational content & thought leadership
Tactics	Boosting content with sponsored paid social ads
KPIs	Cost per consumption, blended cost per opportunity

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Stage 2: Capture

Outcome	Convert interest from in-market buyers
Awareness	Solution aware, product aware
Offers	Demo requests, free trials
Tactics	Bidding on high intent keywords, paid listings, retargeting
KPIs	Pipe-to-spend, direct cost per opportunity, ROI

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Stage 3: Accelerate (Sales Led) / Activate (Product Led)

Outcome	Help sales close deals faster / get free users to convert
Awareness	Offer aware
Offers	Testimonials, case studies, events, webinars
Tactics	Sponsored paid social ads
KPIs	Pipeline velocity, paid signups

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Stage 4: Revive

Outcome	Restart closed lost opportunities
Awareness	Offer aware
Offers	Incentivized demo requests, guided trials
Tactics	LinkedIn conversation ads
KPIs	SQOs created, blended cpSQO

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Stage 5: Expand

Outcome	Drive revenue from existing customers
Awareness	Most aware
Offers	Referral program, Certification program
Tactics	Sponsored newsletters/partnerships
KPIs	Influenced SQOs created, Expansion revenue

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The Five Stages model allows you to plan across all the lifecycle stages past initial conversion.

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Ultimately no one knows for certain where someone is in their buyer's journey and everyone moves through it at different speeds. Use your best judgment.

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If you're confused on which stage someone would be, remember the target audience's level of awareness dictates the stage they fall under.

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Which stage should you invest in?

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Generally speaking if you want to maximize ROI in the short-term you should work from the bottom of the Five Stages and move towards the top (Expand → Create).

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Stage	Budget Required due to Audience Size	Estimated ROI Timeline	Estimated Difficulty
Create	High	> 90 days	High - requires strong content strategy and unique POV
Capture	Moderate	< 45 days	High - usually stiff competition & expensive costs
Accelerate / Active	Low	varies based on sales cycle	Low - familiar with your product and considering it
Revive	Low	< 45 days	Low - familiar with your brand and expressed interest in the past
Expand	Low	< 60 days	Medium - existing customers, hard to scale due to small audience sizes

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You don't have to build a full-funnel strategy at once, take it one stage at a time.
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Putting The Five Stages into practice

Decide on which stage you want to focus on based on the outcome you’re after. If you have a smaller budget (ex: < $5,000/month) focus exclusively on one stage first.
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Once you’ve decided on the stage fill in your budget, and leading + lagging KPIs. If you’re unsure of what KPIs to select refer to Module 5- Lesson 1 of Building a Paid Media Program.
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Next decide on which channels you’ll advertise on to reach individuals in this stage and how you’ll target them and exclude the wrong audience. If you’re unsure of what channels to advertise on, refer to Choosing the BEST channels.
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Finally decide on what offers you’re going to promote in these channels for this stage (the offers listed above are only examples to give you ideas).
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If you’re targeting multiple stages repeat steps 1-4 for each.

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Click here to become an AdConversion student and get free access to The Five Stages planning template in Module 2 - Lesson 1 where we cover how to build your paid media strategy in depth.

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gif of Silvio Perez showcasing how to use AdConversion's Paid Media Strategy template — Image: Module 2 - Lesson 1; Building a Paid Media Program

After you’ve filled in The Five Stages planning template you now have your strategy in place and can easily move into execution and start assembling your campaigns, creatives, and messaging.

What are the BEST B2B advertising channels?

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The obvious answer is where your audience hangs out online!

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But not all channels are equal, some are more effective at certain stages.

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Most channels can be grouped into these 5 primary categories ↓

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Channel Category	Channel	Description
Paid Social	YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Quora, Reddit	Advertising on social networks.
Paid Search	Google, Microsoft	Advertising on search engines.
Paid Review	Capterra, SoftwareAdvice, SelectHub	Advertising on review listing sites.
Programmatic	Display, Digital Audio, ConnectedTV, Native	Advertising on the open internet.
Sponsorships	Influencers, Newsletters, Events, Podcasts	Advertising directly with individuals or organizations.

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How to decide on the best channel?

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There's four key criteria to consider when deciding on a channel:

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Targeting options
Media cost
Reach
Policy

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Let's dive into each ↓

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Channel Criteria	Description
Targeting options	Can you reach your ICP based on the available targeting options?
Media cost	How much does it cost per click and per 1,000 impressions? (CPC & CPM)
Reach	How large is your audience size with your available targeting options?
Policy	Does this platform allow your industry to serve ads without restriction?

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If the channel you’re considering meets all four of these criteria then you should consider running a test campaign for $100 to get your real average CPC & CPM.

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Recommended Channels by Stage

Based on my experience these channels work best for each stage:

(Use this as inspiration not restriction)

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Stage	Channels
Create	YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Display, Twitter
Capture	Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Capterra, SoftwareAdvice, YouTube
Accelerate / Activate	LinkedIn, Facebook, Display
Revive	LinkedIn, Facebook
Expand	LinkedIn, Facebook

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Let this be a guide to help you get started, take what serves you and abandon the rest.

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Test what works for you until proven otherwise.

Advice from 20 B2B advertising experts

One of the best parts about being in B2B is the quality of marketers in this space.

We asked 20 B2B advertising experts:

What’s 1 tip you’d share with new marketers getting into B2B advertising?

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Once you understand the basics and set up initial campaigns, start A/B testing and experimenting. You could test many things, for example, different ad formats, creatives, messaging, campaign objectives or targeting - all of which can lead to better performance. From my experience, any significant improvement in advertising efficiency starts with a (sometimes random and "long shot") test. To make the testing process smooth and successful, I recommend starting with a hypothesis, creating a testing plan, and having clear KPIs and ways of tracking those.

Kris Wojcik

Digital Marketing Exec

#1 tip for marketers getting into B2B advertising is to have fun with it. A lot of B2B brands take themselves really seriously to appeal to Enterprise buyers, but the reality is we're all human and you're marketing to humans.

Jess Bahr

Co-Founder & CEO

People buy different, not better. So when you're advertising in B2B, it's crucial to sniff out your differentiator and explain that in a way that your buyers will clearly understand it, consume it, and resonate with it. Each of your buyers is different too so it's important to have a good mix of how you explain the difference.

Tim Davidson

Sr. Director, Digital Marketing

One valuable tip I'd offer new marketers entering the realm of B2B advertising is to prioritize understanding your target audience deeply. B2B advertising differs significantly from B2C advertising in that you're not just targeting individual consumers but engaging with businesses, often involving nuanced decision-making units.

To effectively connect with your B2B audience, invest time researching and profiling your ideal customer profile (ICP). This means identifying their industry, company size, and job roles and delving into their pain points, challenges, and aspirations – try to get in the minds of your ICP from entry-level to executive.

By going that extra mile in understanding your audience, you can craft messaging and content that resonates with them—addressing their specific needs, providing solutions, and positioning your products or services as the standout choice.

Tyler Ray

Global Demand Generation + Growth

Before you create any adverts, you need to figure out what your message is going to be. Don't rush into it until you know 'what problems you solve, how you solve them, and why your customer should solve them.' One sentence on each of those creates your elevator pitch, which should be present in some way, in all of your ads. It also represents the business case for your product. If you can't explain your story easily, how on earth do you expect your audience to remember it?

Joseph Hill

Director of Digital Strategy

You know that crazy Marketing 'funnel' everyone talks about? Always start from the bottom up. Meaning, the first place to start is to know who your customers are and how they equate to revenue. Then work yourself up the funnel to drive the most impact.

Bryttney Blanken

Demand Generation Consultant

Adopt the 'kill your darlings' mantra. You have to be ready to cut what you love if it isn't delivering results—be it an ad, keyword, or campaign. What was once a good performer might not stay that way, so never 'set and forget.' Always monitor and optimise.

Three macroeconomic principles should guide you:

1- Budget is limited.
2- Benchmark against your own metrics, not industry fluff.
3- Make trade-offs based on what performs better.

Kill the darlings that don't contribute to the revenue to make room for what does.

Canberk Beker

Group Global Head of Paid Media

Focus on the audience/ICP first, not being the best/all-in-one product. When you address the pain and call the audience out, it resonates far more than simply stating 'We're #1/the best in ... category'. No one gives a shit about fancy review badges, Gartner, or other reports (maybe just a tiny bit) & enterprise studies/research. Everyone wants to know how your product will solve their pain or problem.

The best way (for me at least) to find out the actual problem of a customer is to go to G2 and your biggest/well-known competitor and read/scrape all the 'What problems is PandaDoc solving and how is that benefiting you?' answers. You'll find out that most answers are about one/two specific cases, and so then it's your job to address it right via website/ad copy messaging.

Alex Panchuk

Performance Marketing

Shift your mindset. You'll generate leads, but it's not just about lead generation. When they convert, focus on quality and intent. To do that, you need to understand the customer and how to reach them with the right and interesting message in the right places, consistently. Make it easy for them to remember you, find you, and buy from you when they are ready. For practical advice, Go through the LinkedIn ebook 'How B2B Brands Grow", study demand generation, join communities, and ask questions there.

Roman Krs

Performance Marketer

Before you blame the channel, do the research to see if there are some other reasons why leads aren't converting to opportunities.

For example:

WEBSITE

Does the ad align with the landing page?
Is it easy to understand how it works, who it's for, how much it costs, and the outcome it drives?
Do you have relevant social proof?

CONVERSION

Is the form simple and short?
Does it offer an easy way to schedule a meeting?
Are there clear CTAs across the website?
Do you address common objections on the demo page?

LEAD HAND-OFF

How long does it take to set up a meeting with a buyer after the form is filled take?
Did we align the follow-up with the intent level?
Do we offer a demo at the first meeting?
Do we identify the core problems of the buyer and how our solution can help solve those issues?

SALES CYCLE

Did we create a close plan?
Have we gotten all key decision-makers involved?
Do we add value along the sales process?
Do we always set up the next meeting with a clear agenda?
Have we properly differentiated ourselves against competitors and keeping with the status quo?

80% of the above don't directly involve the "channel"

Jonathan Bland

Co-Founder

For someone starting with B2B advertising, I highly recommend following the right B2B content creators on LinkedIn, as well as other paid media ones - then block some time to go through their posts/videos to learn new strategies/tips, or merely understand their point-of-view. Then, find ways of testing those strategies/quick wins with your own clients to get your own insights and takeaways - plus, it's a great way of implementing what you learn

Gonçalo Prates

Performance Marketing Manager

Make sure that you nail your fundamentals before you launch your campaign. Know where your ICP spends time online and what they are searching for.

If you don't, you won't be able to nail down your targeting for paid social and you won't go after the right keywords on paid search.

Start with the understanding of your buyer (the qualitative and quantitative) insights, and then go and build your strategy based off of that. There are a lot of great resources on how to technically set up your campaign - just keep it as simple as you can to begin with.

The final part of the fundamentals is to make sure you have tracking in place in your CRM. You need to be able to know what leads came in from your paid ads, and be able to track them throughout the sales process. Otherwise you'll never be able to answer the question at the executive level, "How are our ads performing?

Blake Strozyk

Founder

Seasonality in B2B is real & should be taken into account when optimizing & experimenting with paid ads.

Here is what I mean: We have grown very rapidly over the last 1.5 years and therefore don't have reliable base data from last summer, so only this year we started to feel the summer slow down properly. Many experiments that we ran have to be pre & post (sometimes it's technically not possible to run A/B), so if you launch an experiment in June & compare results with May the results will be heavily impacted by external factors (summer period slowdown).

It's not something new, but something we faced a lot this summer. So don't disregard the importance of taking seasonality into account.

Borys Khodan

Head of Paid Media

1. When building advertising campaigns, be hyper focused on audience and targeting. Your best advertising campaign won't be successful unless you target the right people at the right time.

2. The biggest gold mine for ad copy is customer calls. If you have a tool like Gong, you should be listening to calls every day to find insights on what your customers care about.

Liam Barnes

Sr. Manager, Growth Marketing (Emerging Tech)

The B2B Buyer's journey is complex, make sure you are filling all the content gaps on your paid ad strategy.

Miguel Sánchez

Demand Generation Manager

Offers are the most underused and underappreciated lever in B2B ad performance, and it’s not even close.

People associate Offers with e-commerce style, “buy one get one free” marketing messages. But the category is so much broader than that - it’s offering different things to your audience to see what they respond best to.

In short: Everything you promote with an ad is an Offer, whether you think of it that or not. Some example Offers that B2B companies can use:

a.) Click this ad and schedule a sales call
b.) Click this ad and get access to a demo
c.) Click this ad and get an eBook
d.) Click this ad and get an incentive.

You should start with an Offer when building campaigns, don't make it an afterthought.

Kevin Lord Barry

Co-Founder

Advertising can be daunting as a new B2B marketer, when you don't have a full grasp on how the ad platforms work or you haven't spent as much money on them, you might feel like you are not ready to run ads.

But here's the thing, you will never be 100% ready till you actually take action, and as scary as this might feel, there's a great thing about this too, you are also more prepared than you actually think.

That first campaign won't be perfect, you will make mistakes, and you will lose some $$$ in the process (sad reality about advertising 😅), but as long as you see this as a learning experience, you will accelerate your knowledge about the platforms and become strong in them in no time.

Diego Oquendo

Head of Marketing

Never skip out on creative. With all the targeting features that we have access to as B2B marketers, creating content specific to the persona you're going after is important. Whether it's copy or the images you use, I recommend investing time into making sure they resonate with your ICP.

Ali Yildirim

Co-Founder & CEO

Ultimately it boils down to establishing trust. Your objective is to educate prospects from various angles and persuade them to take the desired action. Providing value upfront through various means is the most sustainable approach to accomplish this.

Rory Conroy

Growth & Performance Marketing Manager

Put a real effort into the ad creation on social channels. Create a list with the prospects’ pain points, their headaches, and how your product could solve any of these pain points, then transform it into ad copy that talks directly to your prospect in a humane language, it’s B2B but we’re talking to people, this will make ads that will stand out on the crowd. We can have the best audience and an infinite budget, but if we don’t master the message (and have a compelling design), chances are that our ads will not be noticed.

Jessica Amaral

Demand Generation Manager

‍Jumpstart Your B2B Marketing Career

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If you’re serious about mastering B2B advertising, then you definitely need to check out our free B2B Advertising Foundations course that will teach you the foundational knowledge to becoming a high-performing B2B marketer who knows how to use advertising to drive legit business and revenue impact without the fluff or wasting your time and money learning the ropes the hard way.

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Module 1: you’ll get a crash course in the B2Bverse and master terminology, sales processes, and working across teams.
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Module 2: you’ll learn how to become your customer's psychologist and understand them deeply with buyer personas that allow you to craft effective messaging.
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Module 3: you’ll master the B2B funnel and learn how to think like a CEO to identify performance bottlenecks and convert more leads into revenue.
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Module 4: you’ll learn how to put it all together and build your go-to-market strategy that gets your ad in front of your dream buyers and converts attention.

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This course was designed with absolute beginners in mind.

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10 Tips to Create B2B Ads that Convert

Joseph Hill

Read Article

If you want your ads to drive conversions, you need the right messaging, positioning, design, tone, format, offer, etc.

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This is especially true in B2B, where pushing prospects from initial awareness to conversion is extremely challenging.

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Below are my top 10 tips to maximize your chances of success, based on my own experience working with dozens of B2B clients.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Tip #1: Figure out what you want to say
Tip #2: Don't use big words or acronyms
Tip #3: Make it quick
Tip #4: Use visuals that make your ad stand out
Tip #5: Create ads that don't look like ads
Tip #6: Steal from the greats
Tip #7: Use powerful hooks
Tip #8: Take up as much space as possible
Tip #9: Speak like a human
Tip #10: Stay in tune with what your customer wants

Tip #1: Figure out what you want to say

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This might sound obvious, but before creating any ad, you should get extremely clear on the problem your company solves.

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All of your messaging should come back to this problem.

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If you’re running case study ads, the case studies should be related to this problem.

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If you’re promoting a GIF of your product, the animation should help tell the story of how you solve that problem.

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As Eugene Schwartz said: The objective of advertising is to highlight a problem and demonstrate how you can solve it.

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Here’s a template I like using with my clients to clearly articulate the problems they solve.

`‍`Tip #2: Don’t use big words or acronyms

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The more simple you keep your ads, the better they’ll perform.

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There’s no need to drop in words like CAC, ROI, or ARPU into your copy. Acronyms are poo.

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Even if you’re talking about complex topics, aim to keep your explanation simple.

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Also, keep in mind, it’s impossible to explain everything about your company in a single ad.

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To fully understand what you do, a prospect might need to see 20, 30, or 40 different ads, highlighting what you do in different ways.

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Think of the ads in your cold layer as an icebreaker.

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The idea is to communicate the basics of what you do in a simple and interesting way – not to tell your entire story.

B2B LinkedIn ad for Ledge showcasing time saved on reconciliation through automation.

Here’s an ad we made at Revenu for a client, to do exactly that.

‍Tip #3: Make it quick

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Prospects should know exactly what they’re signing up for in 3 steps or less.

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We followed that formula for this ad we made for another client.

B2B LinkedIn Ad example for Zip promoting automated invoice processing to streamline finance workflows

With very few words, you can easily understand the benefits of the product.

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And if you’re thinking: There’s no way I could explain my offer in 3 steps or less… you need to simplify your process.

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When you truly understand your product story, it’s easy to simplify it. That’s where the first tip comes in.

‍Tip #4: Use visuals that make your ad stand out

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A picture is worth a thousand words.

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Ads that are filled with words don’t grab a users attention.

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Think about what you’re trying to say, and how you can visualise it.

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You can see how we did this for Scytale below.

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It’s a fairly typical advert, but the way it’s broken out visually makes it much easier to digest.

Scytale B2B LinkedIn ad example highlighting fast SOC 2 compliance with automation and expert support.

Pro tip: If you’re only using static image ads, try GIFs. Making something move makes people click it more… simples.

‍Tip #5: Create ads that don’t look like ads

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Want to triple your CTR? Make an advert that doesn’t look like an advert.

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Once you get a ton of clicks, you can then retarget them with more product-focused messaging, but they’ve now been introduced to your brand.

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To create these types of ads, think of the things that you do on a daily basis. For example, listening to Spotify, watching Netflix, playing chess or other online games, etc. How can you incorporate these everyday concepts into your ads, so that they feel natural and less promotional?

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Also, think of the memes that make you laugh while you’re scrolling through different social platforms. Can you create versions of these that are related to the problem your company solves?

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Here are a few examples we made for inspiration:

Scytale B2B LinkedIn ad example emphasizing quick ISO 27001 compliance with expert assistance.

Scytable B2B LinkedIn ad example offering SOC 2 compliance evaluation via AI-driven questions.

Northspyre B2B LinkedIn ad example featuring Excel automation for managing real estate projects.

P.S. If you want more examples, check out my Sexy Ads Library, which contains over 300 of my favorite ads.

‍Tip #6: Steal from the greats

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As Pablo Picasso once said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

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Lately I’ve been diving into B2C ads to find inspiration for B2B, from companies like Porsche, Land Rover, McDonald’s, etc.

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It’s extremely hard to create amazing ads if you’re starting with a blank canvas.

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Here are a few great examples:

Volkswagen ad promoting the versatility and durability of the New Tiguan SUV.

DHL ad illustrating a shortcut for efficient logistics and shipping solutions.

P.S. I’ll be dropping a new library on my LinkedIn soon with tons of B2C examples, drop me a follow to be the first to see it.

‍Tip #7: Use powerful hooks

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To perform well, your ads need to have powerful hooks.

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In other words, you need to give your prospects a very specific reason to take action.

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Are you offering an incentive to take a meeting, such as a gift card, free lunch, or free coffee?

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Are you sharing a company resource, such as ad credits, a price promotion, or a software add-on?

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Are you providing knowledge, in the form of a consultation, an audit, a workshop, etc.?

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If you don’t give your prospects an obvious reason to take action, they probably won’t.

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P.S. The hooks with the highest conversion rates are typically ones related to your unique company knowledge and resources. Check out a great example from Google below…

Google Ads B2B campaign offering various ad credit promotions to attract new advertisers.

And this great visual from Cognism, making a joke about gift card ads.

Cognism B2B LinkedIn ad example offering 25 free leads instead of a traditional gift card incentive.

P.S. Don’t get discouraged if your offer isn’t working the first time around – most companies have to experiment with multiple approaches before they find one that works. And when you do, it’s your main driver of new business for the next 5 years.

‍Tip #8: Take up as much space as possible

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Ads that take up more space on the screen are more likely to stop the scroll, and typically perform better.

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On LinkedIn Ads, square images (1200X1200) usually perform much better than rectangular images (1200X628).

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Test vertical images (628X1200) that only appear on mobile too.

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This ad we made got a CTR in the 2%+ range on LinkedIn, with a CPC in the $3-6 range.

Scytale B2B LinkedIn ad example featuring a humorous meme about needing expert guidance for SOC 2 compliance.

This tip also applies to Google Ads. Make sure you’re using ad extensions to take up more space on the SERP and increase the chances of getting a click.

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P.S. If you’re curious about the ad specs you can use across different platforms, check out this comprehensive guide.

‍Tip #9: Speak like a human

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When you’re writing ads for social, make sure you don’t sound like a company.

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Be human – friendly, silly, colloquial, personable.

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You’re literally on a social media platform… be sociable.

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Influencers have all the power these days, because people want to hear from real individuals with a real personality.

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So if you want people to listen to you, you need to sound like a human.

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These ads we made follow that exact tone, and it’s much nicer to read.

B2B LinkedIn ad example by Scytale showing a Google search for easy and fast SOC 2 compliance solutions.

Ledge B2B LinkedIn ad example humorously listing things to ban in the office, including manual reconciliation.

P.S. Some companies have a more professional and corporate tone of voice, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be clear and straight to the point. There are ways of sounding human, without being cheeky.

‍Tip #10: Stay in tune with what your customer wants

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Even if you follow tips 1-9, you’ll still fail if your story is crap.

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The world is constantly changing. Over time, the problem you solve may stop being a problem. Or another company may solve it for a fraction of the cost.

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When these changes happen, you need to update your product and story in order to stay relevant.

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To verify that the problems you solve are important, talk to your customers and interview companies in your ICP that aren’t working with you.

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How much of a problem is XYZ to you?
Are you currently solving XYZ problem?
How are you solving it?
Be honest, would you use our product to solve it?
If not, why?
Do you use another company to solve this problem instead?
How much do you pay them?

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Asking these questions will help you verify that your product and story make sense.

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Pro tip: In addition to qualitative feedback from customer interviews, you can ask your G2 rep for an export of all your reviews and upload it into ChatGPT. Then, you can ask ChatGPT to identify the top pain points and benefits that are mentioned, which will help you further understand the problems your company solves.

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Hope you found this article helpful!

Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn with any questions.

‍Resources for mastering B2B advertising

If you’re serious about mastering B2B advertising then you definitely need to join 1,000+ B2B marketers leveling up their paid advertising skill sets in AdConversion.

‍Here’s 4 reasons why you should consider joining. Every one of our on-demand courses are:

✅ 100% free access.

✅ Taught by vetted industry experts.

✅ Have workbooks, resources, and templates.

✅ Less than 10 minutes per lesson.

We believe every marketer should know how to scale paid ads so they can:

Scale their ideas
Level up their careers
Make a positive impact

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Takes < 90 seconds to sign up (seriously we timed it 😂)

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10 Tips to Align Your Content and Paid Media Strategy

Justin Simon

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Over the past decade, I’ve led content marketing for multiple B2B SaaS companies, and I’ve noticed a common problem:

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Content marketers and performance marketers rarely communicate.

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This leads to inconsistent targeting, positioning, and messaging, which ultimately leads to lackluster results.

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If you want to hit your revenue targets, your content and paid media strategies need to be part of the same equation, not completely separate entities.

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Below are my top 10 tips on how to get aligned with your content team.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Tip #1: Don't Create "Ads"
Tip #2: Repurpose the content you already have
Tip #3: Use paid media to guarantee distribution
Tip #4: Have a clear POV
Tip #5: Make sure you have consistent messaging
Tip #6: Don't be afraid to be different
Tip #7: Leverage user-generated content
Tip #8: Share the right content for the right stage of the customer journey
Tip #9: Leverage retargeting
Tip #10: Be willing to adapt and change as you learn

Tip #1: Don’t Create “Ads”

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It’s easy to fall into the trap of researching the ads of your competitors and trying to mimic them. Or creating ads with a preconceived idea of what an ad should look like.

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But at this point, we’re all hardwired to scroll past the ads in our feed.

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Ironically, in order to stop the scroll, your ads have to blend in with other organic content.

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If you create great organic posts that are educational, memorable, and enjoyable, they’ll probably also perform well as ads.

Tip #2: Repurpose the content you already have

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Are there carousels, newsletters, or podcasts that have performed well for you in the past?

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Revisit this content.

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Why do you think it performed well? How can you remix it to extend its longevity?

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One caveat here: Just because something has performed well in the past doesn’t mean you should run it as an ad.

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For ads, I recommend repurposing the content that has performed well AND:

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Has a clear POV
Is consistent with your other content themes
Is related in some capacity to what your company does

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Otherwise, you may end up confusing your audience.

Tip #3: Use paid media to guarantee distribution

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We need to stop seeing paid media as something separate from content.

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Great ads are just incredible content with guaranteed distribution to the right people.

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If you’re running ads, make sure you’re constantly talking to the content marketers on your team to understand what’s working.

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What pieces of content are getting the most engagement, communicating important messages, or telling valuable stories?

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Is there an opportunity to put money behind this content?

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It’s hard to create winning ads if your team is working in silos.

Tip #4: Have a clear POV

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There are so many ads that feel and sound the same.

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Even if they're creative, they don’t feel different because they lack a unique POV.

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What’s the core idea that you want to communicate to your audience?

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How is your perspective or approach different from that of every other company?

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If you’re not communicating this, your audience will forget about you almost immediately.

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P.S. Don’t be afraid to have a slightly more controversial POV, as long as it makes sense for your brand. Sometimes, taking that risk is necessary in order to be memorable.

Tip #5: Make sure you have consistent messaging

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When it comes to messaging, you shouldn’t be throwing spaghetti at the wall.

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Instead, you should be repeating yourself constantly. Sharing your core message in different ways so that people can easily understand what you do.

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A lot of marketers are afraid of repeating themselves. But in order for you to be known, liked, and trusted at scale, repetition is essential.

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If you think of the brands that you trust, you’ve probably heard their core message millions of times, maybe without even realizing.

Tip #6: Don’t be afraid to be different

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In order to succeed, you need to be interesting, and do things that other companies aren’t doing.

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There’s so much noise these days.

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If you’re running ads, everybody else is.

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If you’re creating content, everybody else is.

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So, ask yourself, what can you do that’s different?

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Why should prospects pay attention to you instead of other companies in your space?

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Look at what everybody else is doing. Is there an opportunity for you to do the opposite?

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You have to be willing to take calculated risks in order to stand out.

Tip #7: Leverage user-generated content

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User-generated content is a powerful and underutilized tactic to build trust with your prospects.

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Do you have video testimonials or celebratory screenshots from your clients?

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This is great for both organic content and ads.

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Having testimonials from real people comes across as more authentic than the standard G2 reviews that everyone else uses.

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P.S. I know it can be nerve-wracking to ask for testimonials, but I’ve found that clients are usually happy to help – all you have to do is send a simple email or LinkedIn DM. And if you work at a larger org, you can talk to your customer advisory board, or ask your sales or CS team to make the ask.

Tip #8: Share the right content for the right stage of the customer journey

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A lot of companies make the mistake of promoting the same content to every single prospect, without considering what stage of the buyer’s journey they’re in.

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If someone’s already heard of your brand and interacted with your company multiple times, they’ll likely want to learn more about your product features, and may even be interested in a demo.

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But if someone has never heard of you before, they probably won’t be interested.

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If you’re targeting a completely cold audience, your priority should be to educate them about the problems you solve, not to generate conversions right away.

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The reality is – especially in B2B – the demos you get now are a product of the work you did 6 months ago.

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P.S. There are no shortcuts when it comes to building trust. Sure, you can use an intent provider and target people who are technically in-market, but typically, even those people need to see more content before requesting a demo.

Tip #9: Leverage retargeting

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By retargeting, I don’t mean offering a demo to every single person that has interacted with your brand.

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A lot of people in your retargeting audiences won’t be ready for a demo yet.

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But they might be interested in attending your event or joining your webinar. Or they might want to learn more about your product, hear from your thought leaders, see testimonials from similar companies, etc.

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What interactions have the people in your retargeting audience taken?

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Based on these actions, what type of content do you think they’d be most interested in seeing?

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It’s important to do this exercise to create a positive experience for your prospects.

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If all you do is offer demos they’ll get tired of you pretty quickly.

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Pro tip: Think of your retargeting audience as a newsletter that prospects didn’t opt into. Just like a newsletter, you need a mix of different content to grow the trust of your audience over time.

Tip #10: Be willing to adapt and change as you learn

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In both content and advertising, it’s important to create a strategy that’s firm but flexible.

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It’s great to have a general plan in place, but it shouldn’t be an immovable object.

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You have to be willing to adapt based on your audience’s response.

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Are there certain messages that are resonating more?

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Are there certain formats that are performing better?

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Are there certain audience segments that are expressing more interest in your product?

‍

Based on this feedback, you may have to modify your approach.

‍

Hope you found this article helpful!

Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn with any questions about content strategy or distribution.

‍

Resources for mastering B2B advertising

If you’re serious about mastering B2B advertising then you definitely need to join 1,000+ B2B marketers leveling up their paid advertising skill sets in AdConversion.

‍Here’s 4 reasons why you should consider joining. Every one of our on-demand courses are:

✅ 100% free access.

✅ Taught by vetted industry experts.

✅ Have workbooks, resources, and templates.

✅ Less than 10 minutes per lesson.

We believe every marketer should know how to scale paid ads so they can:

Scale their ideas
Level up their careers
Make a positive impact

Click Here to Join 1,000+ B2B Marketers Today and start leveling up your advertising skill set.

Takes < 90 seconds to sign up (seriously we timed it 😂)

‍

10 Tips to Make LinkedIn Ads Work for B2B SaaS

Roman Krs

Read Article

Over the past few years, I’ve helped dozens of B2B SaaS companies develop their LinkedIn Ads strategy.

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Below, I’ll be sharing ten tips that I always give to my own clients, and that will significantly increase your chances of success with LinkedIn Ads 👇

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TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Tip #1: Research Your Customers
Tip #2: Define Your Targeting
Tip #3: Distribute Your Content
Tip #4: Repurpose Your Content
Tip #5: Test Lead Gen alongside ungated content
Tip #6: Capture Demand With Retargeting
Tip #7: Use Text and Spotlight Ads
Tip #8: Leverage your SMEs for thought leader ads
Tip #9: Set up the right tracking combination
Tip #10: Make a commitment of at least 6 months

Tip #1: Research Your Customers

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As a marketer, it can be challenging to fully understand your customers, especially since you’re not in direct contact with them.

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In order to gain a better understanding, it’s a great idea to watch 3-5 sales calls, recommended to you by the Head of Sales.

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Analyze how your sales team is presenting the product to make sure your messaging is aligned.

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In addition to this, you can pull transcripts and summaries from hundreds of calls and have ChatGPT develop a content matrix and empathy map for you, summarizing the top pain points of your prospects.

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Here is a templatized example of the outcome. ChatGPT can pull it out in this format based on the call summaries and give you a good foundation of commonalities for different prospects.

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Once you’ve identified the top pain points and topics with the help of ChatGPT, send them over to a few people on your sales team to validate them. It can be very subjective but can help you to ensure that you haven’t missed any important nuances.

Tip #2: Define Your Targeting

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Next, define your targeting.

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What job titles, job functions, industries, and company sizes do you want to target?

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Once you’ve drafted your audiences, you can share and refine with your stakeholders.

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To start out, you can use a simple targeting combination such as Job titles + Company Sizes + Industries.

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If your audience is too small using only job titles, you could substitute for Job Function + Seniority + Skills.

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A few additional notes:

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1. Make sure to check the audience insights section of LinkedIn Campaign Manager to find exclusions that you could potentially make. (video walkthrough)

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2. If you have multiple personas, make sure to separate them into different campaigns so you can tailor your messaging.

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3. There is no ideal audience size on LinkedIn Ads – small audiences of 10K can work well and larger audiences of 100K can also work well. Start by targeting your ideal customers, and you can expand over time.

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Recommendation: Use a validated company list for better targeting and reporting.

Tip #3: Distribute Your Content

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Once you’ve set up your audience, the next step is to distribute content towards them.

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I highly recommend optimizing your ads for in-feed consumption – talk about the problems you solve directly in your ad copy.

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This way, even if people don’t visit your landing page right away, they’ll still be learning about your company and can be retargeted later down the line with a more bottom of funnel offer.

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Videos are a particularly great format for delivering these in-feed messages, and they also allow you to generate large retargeting pools.

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When you run these ads, look at your impressions and views to make sure that you’re reaching your ICP. And check your engagement rate and dwell time metrics to ensure that the content is resonating.

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Don’t expect demos or trials right away – the goal of these ads is to start generating some initial interest.

Tip #4: Repurpose Your Content

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Do you have any great podcast or webinar clips related to your solution?

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Has anyone on your team created a product demo walkthrough recently?

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Do you have any customer testimonials from recent events?

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This type of content can be easily repurposed for ads, and is great for both generating and capturing demand.

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Before you start creating new content, look at the content that you already have.

Tip #5: Test Lead Gen alongside ungated content

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I know lead gen is an unpopular strategy, but it can be a great approach to run lead gen campaigns alongside ungated content.

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If you’re getting leads from incredible people within your ICP, you can show that to your stakeholders as proof that you’re reaching the right audience, and this can help you get approval to run more ungated content.

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I don’t recommend lead gen as a standalone tactic, but it can be a solid way to get some initial results and build your retargeting audiences, while also validating the quality of your targeting.

Tip #6: Capture Demand With Retargeting

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On LinkedIn, lead gen forms aren’t just for content like ebooks and whitepapers.

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They’re also great for capturing demo requests.

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The benefit of using lead gen forms is that people don’t have to leave the LinkedIn platform to request a demo, so it helps to simplify the process.

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To start, I recommend running these ads to your retargeting audience, since people who have already interacted with your brand are the most likely to convert.

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Also, when it comes to these demo campaigns, don’t be discouraged if you don’t see success right away.

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In order to succeed, you need to test different types of messaging, different content, and different creatives until you find the right formula.

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Another word of advice: Make sure you refresh the creatives in your retargeting audience at least once a month. Retargeting audiences tend to be small and have very high frequencies, so you may see signs of ad fatigue if you don’t refresh your creatives consistently.

Tip #7: Use Text and Spotlight Ads

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Text and spotlight ads are an amazing and affordable way to stay top of mind with your retargeting audiences.

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They’re very small and usually appear on the right side of the feed, and they get a ton of impressions but very few clicks.

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I recommend setting these ads up with the website visits objective, so that you only pay when someone actually clicks.

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Also, I recommend setting the lowest bid you can possibly set, along with a bid cap to avoid overpaying for clicks.

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Another format to consider are follower ads, which are very similar to spotlight ads, but intended to drive more company page followers. This format is great for your colder audiences, and can help funnel your ICP into your organic audience for a longer term nurture.

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You can use this template to draft the ad copy with ad specifications. You can also use dynamic macros in follower ads.

Tip #8: Leverage your SMEs for thought leader ads

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If you have a founder or subject matter expert that’s active on LinkedIn, consider running their posts as thought leader ads.

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Thought leader ads are great because:

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1. They have high CTRs and very low CPCs compared to other formats

2. They allow you to get high-performing organic content in front of your ICP

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Customer stories and educational content related to the problem you solve typically perform well as thought leader ads.

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I’d avoid overly promotional and generic, AI-generated content – you want to distribute content that’s memorable and valuable to your ICP.

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For more thought leader ad ideas, check out 14 Powerful LinkedIn Thought Leader Ad Strategies Worth Testing.

Tip #9: Set up the right tracking combination

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There is no perfect tracking combination, but you do have to make sure that you’re collecting enough data to understand what’s happening inside your account.

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First of all, you can track online conversions, like form submissions on your website. Then, you can also set up conversion API to have a deeper understanding of which campaigns are turning into pipeline and revenue.

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Also, make sure you’re using UTM parameters — it’s much easier now because LinkedIn has dynamic UTM parameters — and pushing them into your CRM for full visibility.

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And add “How did you hear about us” into your high-intent forms to capture additional insights about the sources that indirectly influence the prospects.

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Just by having these basics in place, you should already have a solid understanding of what’s happening inside your account.

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If you want even more insights on which campaigns and ads are influencing pipeline, you could use a tool like Fibbler to look at multi-touch attribution.

Tip #10: Make a commitment of at least 6 months

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If you’re going to get started with LinkedIn Ads, make sure you make a commitment of at least 6 months.

‍

Once you have your audience, targeting, messaging, and content ready to go, you need to decide what your game plan will be and how much budget you need.

‍

How much money will you need to generate awareness within your cold layer?

‍

How will your retargeting audiences expand over time?

‍

What metrics will you look at to determine initial success? Maybe reach and engagement as leading indicators, and conversions as a lagging indicator?

‍

Present a clear plan to your stakeholders so that they know what to expect and are on the same page. Also, emphasize that success won’t happen overnight, and that it takes time and patience to start seeing results.

‍

Hope you found this article helpful!

‍

Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn with any ad-related questions.

‍

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‍

10 B2B SaaS Copywriting Tips for Better Ad Performance

Eden Bidani

Read Article

I don’t need to be the one to tell you this, but B2B tech companies have it hard when it comes to getting their advertising to perform.

‍

They’ve got complicated products. And sophisticated audiences (who are all but totally allergic to buzzwords and fluff). And together, they make communicating your company or product’s value super hard.

‍

Having helped countless B2B companies over the past 9 years I’ve learned more than a thing or two about writing copy for these companies.

‍

And today I’m sharing with you my top 10 copywriting tips – tips you can use right away (literally, try them out after you finish reading this) to evaluate your existing ad campaigns and improve their performance, stat.

‍

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Tip #1: Sell The Click, Not The Product
Tip #2: Take Something Out Of Your Ad Instead Of Putting More In
Tip #3: Write First, Edit Later
Tip #4: Remember How People Interact With Ads
Tip #5: Use The Slippery Slope
Tip #6: Don’t Be Afraid to Try Long Copy
Tip #7: Try to Use Your Voice of Customer As Much As Possible
Tip #8: Clear Before Clever
Tip #9: Tie Benefits Back to Something Realistic
Tip #10: Make Sure Your Copy Passes the “So What” Test

‍

Tip #1: Sell The Click, Not The Product

The first tip is more of a mindset shift: remind yourself that your ad is selling the click, not the product (as a whole).

‍

Prospects don’t see your ad in isolation. They see it in the context of everything else that happens throughout their day, AND in the context of everything else they see on LinkedIn, Google, Facebook or whichever platform your ad is served to them. So unlike an ecom ad, the goal of your ad here is to build excitement and anticipation. You want your prospect to be inspired enough to click on the ad and go where they can learn more about what you have to offer.

‍

This still applies even if you’re providing a free trial, or something else that is free.

‍

Because if you have an average contract value of $50,000-$100,000/year your prospect is NOT going to click on your ad and buy right away.

‍

Instead focus on giving the prospect something – a tip, an idea, an emotional twinge – that will motivate them to click.

‍

This could be through:

‍

The messaging you use (make sure you’re talking about how you solve business problems, not just “hey our product is really cool”)
The type of call-to-action (CTA) (making sure it’s not too pushy for people who didn’t know you existed until now)
The visual in your ad creative (making sure it hits an emotional soft spot)

‍

Remember: You can always go into more depth on the landing page. But that won’t happen if your prospect doesn’t click through in the first place.

Tip #2: Take Something Out Of Your Ad Instead Of Putting More In

Focus on getting one really memorable takeaway across in your ad copy.

‍

Writing copy by committee is never a great strategy and it’s easy to end up with ads that are saying so many different things that the prospect won’t take away any one thing in particular.

‍

Let’s say your product’s main value propositions are: it’s fast, it’s easy to use, and it saves money.

‍

Instead of stuffing all of that information into the same ad, I would write 3 variations:

‍

Ad Variation 1: Fast
Ad Variation 2: Easy
Ad Variation 3: Saves Money

‍

Test each message separately so you can see which performs better AND so the prospect can remember your core value proposition.

‍

Pro tip: you can say the same message 1,000 different times or more by repurposing the way you communicate that message to the market through different creatives, ad types, and copy.

Tip #3: Write First, Edit Later

There are so many times when we sit down to try to write an ad and it’s really hard.

‍

First get all your thoughts, ideas, and concepts out in a document, then let it sit for a couple of hours, and finally go back to it with fresh eyes.

‍

If you just try to write it in one session it’s going to be messy and you’ll spend forever tweaking it.

‍

The idea is that you get to write a really stupid first draft. But you KNOW that it’s going to be bad. So that gives you the chance to get the bad ideas out to make way for the good stuff. Your goal is to come back later to edit and make it better.

‍

I’ve lost count of how many times my first line in the body copy becomes my headline or other parts of my copy shift places with each other because they’re better suited for a different part of the ad. But I’m only able to make these connections with fresh eyes.

‍

Pro tip: you can use ChatGPT for brainstorming but even still you need to let the copy sit. Give yourself time to process it so you can edit it and not just run with it at face value.

Tip #4: Remember How People Interact With Ads

Each element of your ad is a part of the puzzle.

‍

People will stop the scroll because the creative caught them. Then they'll look at the headline. Then they go up and read the body copy. And finally they go back down to the headline before clicking.

‍

The prospect's eyes are going all over the place which means you can’t afford to have copy that’s disjointed.

‍

The headline leads into the body copy and should support the creative. And the body copy should support the headline. All the elements have to work together.

‍

As Eugene Schwartz once said “copy is not written, it’s assembled".

‍

Treat each element of your ad with equal importance and make sure it makes sense when you look at it from the eyes of your prospect.

‍

stepping stones metaphor showing how users interact with your b2b saas ads from creative to click

‍

Pro tip: you can’t create ads in isolation, you need your designer and copywriter working together to ensure each variable in your ad works together (headline, body copy, creative).

Tip #5: Use The Slippery Slope

Your first line of copy should get the reader excited to read the second line. The second line should motivate the reader to read the third line. And so on. Direct marketer Joseph Sugarman calls this the “slippery slope”. It makes sure your ad is interesting to read and that the ideas inside it are easy to digest.

‍

The best way to check and test your messaging for clarity and word choice is to read it out loud.

‍

If you’re in the middle of a sentence and you paused for breath, you should place a period. That will help your sentences flow more naturally one into the other.

Tip #6: Don’t Be Afraid to Try Long Copy

I have a bone to pick with people who say “nobody reads online!” Because of course they don’t – if they don’t have something interesting to read.

‍

People binge on Netflix series, video games, novel trilogies, and more for hours in one go.

‍

When you have people's attention you can keep sharing with them new details. But you have to earn their attention, first. (Which won’t happen with clickbait.)

‍

What can you give them in your ad that will make them feel they got value from this interaction, no matter how fleeting it was?

Did they learn something new?
Did you make them feel something?
Did you make them think for a second?

If you can do at least one of those three things you’ll earn their attention.

‍

It’s hard to do this in 150 characters which is why long form copy is so powerful.

‍

Don’t be afraid to push up until that 600 character limit if needed.

‍

Long copy will also lead to a greater dwell time and provide so much more context and opportunity for you to build motivation so they have a reason to click through.

‍

The takeaway here is that people will read your long form ads if it’s interesting to them. But they won’t read even short copy if it’s terrible.

‍

Side note: When writing ad copy I create 2-3 variations for the headline and the body, usually testing out different lengths (short vs long).

‍

Here’s my simple but effective copywriting template I use in Google Docs:

‍

LinkedIn ads template | Eden Bidani

‍

Pro tip: it’s easy for ads to get stuck in the same creative loops, don’t forget to brainstorm new creative concepts to test.

Tip #7: Try to Use Your Voice of Customer As Much As Possible

If no one in the product marketing or CS team is interviewing your customers do this ASAP.

‍

Get on a call with them and ask them questions such as:

‍

How do you use the product?
What is the impact of your product?

‍

The goal here isn’t to get testimonials, it’s to understand how your customers talk.

‍

You’ll walk away knowing the benefits that matter to them and challenges.

‍

I’d also recommend talking with sales and asking them what are the top customer objections that prospects say and exactly how they describe it.

‍

Using the same words and language your customers use allows you to communicate in their voice.

‍

These insights are so powerful that not even ChatGPT can brainstorm this for you.

‍

For example I used to work with a company that created $700 work bags and I interviewed a customer that mentioned she used to carry around a “mom bag”.

‍

What did she mean by that? “A shapeless, old ugly bag.”

‍

That word “mom bag” is so unique and reflective of the voice of our customers that using that in our landing page copy instantly resonated and resulted in tremendous lifts in conversion rates.

‍

Five customer interviews can be all it takes.

Tip #8: Clear Before Clever

Jay Abraham once said sometimes the easiest way to sell a horse is to say “horse for sale”.

‍

You have a fleeting moment with your prospects engaging with your ads.

‍

So even if you have to use specific, complicated terms (for your sophisticated audience) you need to focus on making your copy as clear as possible.

‍

For example, try to simplify your language as much as possible. Yes, this might result in you using less voice of customer, or using a different brand tone of voice, and other elements of your messaging. But clear will always convert best.

‍

Consider the words you are using and find synonyms that imply the same meaning with less cognitive load.

‍

John Carlton refers to these as “power words” for example:

‍

Sometimes you want to say fast but you should be saying swift.

‍

Swift implies a very different connotation than fast.

‍

It’s a whole different level of sophistication above “fast” but it’s still a simple word.

‍

How would you say this same thing to a friend? Is a great frame to have.

‍

Remember to avoid complicated and overdone words like omnichannel 🤮

Tip #9: Tie Benefits Back to Something Realistic

Everyone LOVES to talk about benefits – think: “Grow your business!”, “Transform your workplace!", “Win more customers!”, or “Optimize your life…!” 🙄

‍

It’s not that it’s not true. They are. But they’re just so high-level and vague people struggle to grasp them. You need to tie them back to something tangible – something realistic that your prospects identify with. Otherwise, they just come off as fluff.

‍

So make sure the claims you make in your ads are specific. And even better, back up your claims by connecting them to a feature or capability of your product.

‍

Take the step to connect your benefits back to something realistic.

‍

Pro tip: even better than talking about how your benefits connect to something realistic, SHOW PROSPECTS HOW this happens with supporting images or videos.

Tip #10: Make Sure Your Copy Passes the “So What” Test

You should be totally skeptical about your copy (just like prospects will be).

‍

People aren’t stupid — even if they fall victim to clickbait they will bounce from your landing pages.

‍

Every time you look at your copy ask yourself so what? And pick it apart to see where it’s fluff.

‍

Sit back and look through to see where you’re missing proof points or what can be removed.

‍

You’ll be able to find all those tiny things that will throw people off reading your ads.

‍

At the end of the day your audience will look at the total sum of your ad (headline, body copy, creative) and if there are elements out of place such as:

‍

Run on sentences
Improper formatting
Typos and obvious errors

‍

All of these details will affect whether the audience feels they can trust you with their click.

‍

So what allows you a third person frame to find what looks off, and what can be stronger.

‍

Pro tip: search for free ad mockup software on Google to find tools you can use to see what your copy will look like to your audience within the platform you’re advertising.

‍

Hope you found this article helpful! 👏

‍Connect with me on LinkedIn and let’s keep the conversation going.

And if you’re in need of copywriting assistance check us out at CAPE Agency.

‍

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‍

How to Create LinkedIn Audiences that Convert

Soroush Karimian

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Sometimes, LinkedIn Ads fail due to poor creatives, messaging, or offers.

‍

But many times — and in my experience, most of the time — the problem is actually the audience.

‍

If you aren’t reaching your ICP, it’s almost impossible to drive conversions.

‍

After running LinkedIn Ads for many hypergrowth startups, I’ve developed a methodology to ensure that I’m getting in front of the right people and minimizing wasted spend for my clients.

‍

I’ll be breaking down my entire process below 👇

‍

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Step 1: Define your ICP
Step 2: Brainstorm your targeting
Step 3: Draft your audiences in LinkedIn Campaign Manager
Step 4: Refine your audiences
Step 5: Adjust based on insights
Conclusion‍‍

`‍`‍Step 1: Define your ICP

‍

If you’re taking over a new account and don’t have any audiences yet, here’s where I recommend starting:

‍

1. Explore the website to get some initial ideas on the target job functions and industries of your personas.

‍

2. Talk to your clients. Are there certain industries, company sizes, job titles, or job functions that have historically driven more revenue?

‍

3. Listen to demo calls to gain a deeper understanding of a) what pain points their product solves and b) who resonates most with these pain points

‍Step 2: Brainstorm your targeting

‍

Once you have a strong understanding of your ICP, it’s time to look at the targeting options available within LinkedIn Ads.

‍

To do this, you can make a copy of this LinkedIn persona database sheet, which contains all the job titles and industries available within LinkedIn Campaign Manager.

‍

If you want to target IT professionals, for example, you can add the filter Text contains “Information Technology”, and you’ll find all 389 IT-related job titles that are available.

‍

Based on these results, you can determine exactly what job titles (or job function + seniority) you want to target.

‍

Also, by looking through the industries tab, you can define the industries you want to reach in your campaigns.

‍

Pro Tip: LinkedIn’s industry categorization can be a bit confusing. If you aren’t sure what industries you should be targeting, look up your best-fit customers on LinkedIn. What industries are they in? These are likely the ones you should be targeting.

Meme of Liam Neeson holding a phone with caption "You don't know who I am but I'm going to find your title and give you the solution to your problems," referencing precise LinkedIn Ads job title targeting

Step 3: Draft your audiences in LinkedIn Campaign Manager

‍

Once you have a solid understanding of your ICP and the job titles and industries you want to go after, you’re ready to go into LinkedIn Campaign Manager and create your audiences.

‍

Here’s how you do it:

‍

1. Navigate to the audiences tab, on the left hand side of LinkedIn Campaign Manager.

Screenshot of audiences tab in LinkedIn Campaign Manager

2. Go to “Saved”, and then click on “Create Audience”

Screenshot of create audience button under Saved Audiences in LinkedIn Campaign Manager

3. Click on “Edit” and input your targeting criteria.

Screenshot of a sample audience in LinkedIn Campaign Manager

4. Apply your targeting criteria (in the bottom right corner of your screen)

Screenshot highlighting how to apply changes to an audience in LinkedIn Campaign Manager

5. Save your audience so you can come back to it later. You can do this in the top right corner of your screen.

Screenshot explaining how to save an audience in LinkedIn Campaign Manager

‍

Here are the top 3 audiences that I’ve seen the most success with for capturing demand (feel free to steal or adapt to your company’s needs)

‍

1. Remarketing

90-day Website Visits + 90-day Video Views + 90-day Single Image Ad Interactions + 90-day Company Page Visitors + 90-day Content Lead Gen Form Submissions

AND

Target Locations

AND

Target Job Titles (Substitute for Job Function and Skills if audience is too small)

***Typically I like to go with a 90-day window, but you could go with a longer 180-day window if you have a longer sales cycle.

‍

2. Tier 1 & Tier 2 Accounts

Tier 1 & Tier 2 Account Lists

AND

Target Job Titles

AND

Target Company Size

AND

Target Locations

‍

3. Open opportunities

Companies in the open opportunity phase

AND

Target Job Titles

AND

Target Locations‍

Step 4: Refine your audiences

‍

Now that you’ve drafted your audience, you’re almost ready to launch, but not quite.

‍

Before going live, it’s important to refine your audiences by making exclusions.

‍

Otherwise, you’ll end up wasting money on irrelevant people.

‍

Here’s how you do it:

‍

1. Access the saved audience you already created

Screenshot explaining how to access your saved audiences in LinkedIn Campaign Manager

‍

2. Refine the Audience

‍

Look at the “Member” and “Company” sections of your audience for exclusion ideas.

‍

In the member tab, you can see what job titles, job functions, and seniorities you’re targeting.

‍

For example, if you’re aiming to target the IT job function and 21% of your audience consists of Engineering or Military, you might exclude these irrelevant functions.

Member Tab of Saved Audience in LinkedIn Campaign Manager

In the company tab, you can review what industries, company sizes, and companies you’re targeting.

‍

For example, if you’re aiming to target FinServ and realize that 13% of your audience is in Hospitals and Healthcare, you may want to exclude it from your targeting.

Company Tab of Saved Audience in LinkedIn Campaign Manager

Go through all available options in your saved audience and refine as much as possible.

‍

Once you’re happy with the exclusions you’ve made, you can add this audience to your campaigns.

‍

Here are the top exclusions that I typically make to avoid wasted spend (feel free to use as inspiration)

‍

1. Irrelevant Industries

2. Irrelevant job functions

3. Irrelevant seniorities

4. Up-to-date list of customers and competitors

5. Current employees

6. People who have visited the login or support pages

7. Poor fit titles (ie students, teachers, retired, interns, analysts)

8. Company sizes outside of ICP

9. People who have recently filled out demo forms

‍Step 5: Adjust based on insights

‍

After making exclusions and launching your campaigns, your work isn’t finished. In order to be successful with LinkedIn Ads, you need to continually check and adjust your targeting.

‍

To do this, make sure you look at your demographics report on a weekly basis.

‍

This can be found in the top right corner of LinkedIn Campaign Manager. To access it, simply select your campaign and click on “Demographics.”

How to access demographics report in LinkedIn Campaign Manager

Now, you’ll be able to see the job functions, job titles, companies, industries, seniorities, etc. that your campaigns are reaching.

Insights available in LinkedIn Campaign Manager Demographics Report

Company Industry Tab in LinkedIn Demographics Report

Job title tab in LinkedIn Demographics report

Look through all of these insights – are the people you’re reaching closely aligned with your intended targeting?

‍

Are there certain job titles, functions, companies, industries, etc. that you want to exclude?

‍

Doing this exercise may seem tedious or insignificant, but these small details are often the difference between success and failure. ‍

Conclusion

‍

To summarize, if you want to generate conversions on LinkedIn Ads:

‍

1. Make sure you get extremely clear on who you want to target.

‍

2. Consider testing proven targeting combinations, such as retargeting, tier 1 and tier 2 accounts, and open opportunities.

‍

3. Audit your audiences in LinkedIn Campaign Manager and make all the necessary exclusions to avoid wasted spend.

‍

4. After launch, consistently check your demographics report and adjust your audiences as needed.

‍

P.S. If you have any questions and would like to get in touch, feel free to send me a message on LinkedIn

‍

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⚙️ B2B LinkedIn Ads 101 - The Ultimate Crash Course for New LinkedIn Advertisers

Foundations For LinkedIn Ads Success
Measurement: Tracking & Key Principles
Targeting: Reaching Your Dream Buyers
Ads: Mastering The 9 Ad Formats

‍

🎯 B2B LinkedIn Ads 102 - The Blueprint for LinkedIn Ads Optimization

Monitoring: How To Spot Performance Trends
Auditing: How To Find The Darlings You Need To Kill
Reporting: How To Transform Data Into Insights
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How to get LinkedIn-like Targeting with YouTube Ads for B2B

Silvio Perez

Read Article

LinkedIn has hands down the BEST targeting options available for B2B marketers.

Which leads most brands to only advertising on LinkedIn and not much else for social.

If you’re looking for a new channel to scale ABM and/or reach your ideal customer.

In this article you’ll learn 3 YouTube Ads targeting methods worth testing 👇

‍

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Targeting option 1: Steal from LinkedIn
Targeting option 2: Leverage tech
Targeting option 3: Build custom audiences

Targeting option 1: Steal from LinkedIn

‍

Let’s face it LinkedIn is the BEST for account-based targeting.

The first-party company data they have is unmatched and updated regularly.

This is why 99% of B2B marketers are forced to advertise on LinkedIn.

‍

If you’re pushing a ton of site traffic from LinkedIn Ads and confident in your audience targeting.

Steal that LinkedIn Ads traffic by remarketing to them on YouTube! 🔥

‍

‍

google ads remarketing audience builder interface

Or whatever your utm_source is for your LinkedIn Ad campaigns.

You can also further filter by utm_campaign if the size is large enough.

This way you’re getting in front of the same users on YouTube for a fraction of the cost.

Targeting option 2: Leverage tech

‍

Google allows you to upload contact lists for audience targeting.

These lists can include; existing customers, sales qualified leads, leads in nurture and so much more.

‍

As long as your matched lists exceed 100 in size you can use it for targeting or exclusion on YouTube.

Depending on your CRM (ex: Salesforce, HubSpot) there are different technologies you can use to automatically import contact lists into Google Ads for targeting.

‍

Some of those tools include:

‍

Hubspot <> Google Ads Integration

‍

If you’re a Hubspot user you’re in luck!

HubSpot makes it really easy to upload dynamic audiences to Google Ads via integration.

hubspot audience builder interface, offering segments like website visitors, contact list, company list, and lookalike for B2B ads audiences on LinkedIn, Google Ads, YouTube Ads and Facebook Ads

‍

Salesforce <> Google Ads Integration

‍

If you’re using Salesforce this also can be done via direct integration with Google Ads.

Simply link the two tools together via the Data Manager in your account.

‍

Zapier

‍

Using a CRM that doesn’t have a direct integration with Google Ads?

If you’re in this bucket, I highly recommend exploring Zapier to automate your contact list uploads.

‍

Zapier will act as the bridge between your CRM and Google Ads, here’s an example of how we automated contact lists imports from ActiveCampaign:

automation flow on zapier linking activecampaign and google ads to sync new contacts with customer lists and create b2b audiences to use on YouTube Ads

Targeting option 3: Build custom audiences

‍

Fun fact! Google owns YouTube, arguably the second largest search engine in the world.

The amount of behavioural data Google has is incomprehensible 🤯

Lucky for us we can take advantage of it with custom audiences.

‍

Custom audiences allow you target based on:

What they searched on Google: reach the same Google searchers on YouTube for a fraction of the cost.
Interests or purchase intention: reach people based on relevant keyword interests or in-market behaviour.
Websites browsed: add URLs to reach people who visit similar sites.
Apps used: target users who use certain Google Play Store apps.

‍

Here’s 3 ways to use custom audiences for B2B targeting:

‍

Brand keywords of your target accounts

google ads custom segment creation interface using keywords like Zoominfo, gong, mutiny and metadata as an example of a B2B audience that can be used with YouTube Ads campaigns

Company page & LinkedIn page URLs of your target accounts

google ads custom segment creation interface using the websites of Zoominfo, gong, mutiny and metadata as an example of a B2B audience that can be used with YouTube Ads campaigns

Google Play Apps of your target accounts (if applicable)

google ads custom segment creation interface using apps like okta verify, microsoft teams and slack as an example of a B2B audience that can be used with YouTube Ads campaigns

You can also target high-intent solution keywords, and competitor names.

The opportunities are truly endless in terms of the types of keywords you can target.

Start as specific as you can and expand based on your reach.

Hope you found this article helpful!

‍

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SEO for B2B SaaS: 10 Tips to Drive Pipeline and Revenue

Sam Dunning

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Over the past five years, I’ve helped B2B SaaS companies like Clickhouse, WildSparq and EventsAir drive millions in pipeline and revenue through SEO.

‍

My lesser-known strategies have been featured by CXL, Ahrefs, The Marketing Millennials and more.

‍

Along the way, I’ve developed an SEO playbook that B2B SaaS companies can follow (step by step) to start seeing high quality inbound leads in a matter of months.

‍

I’ll be breaking down my entire process below 👇

‍

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Tip #1: Define Your Money Keywords
Tip #2: Understand What's Already Ranking
Tip #3: Build a Best-in-Class Page
Tip #4: Nail the basics
Tip #5: Build Quality Backlinks for $0
Tip #6: Publish At Scale
Tip #7: Design Pages That Convert
Tip #8: Leverage sales calls, customer success calls, and customer research
Tip #9: Keep Improving
Tip #10: Scale as you grow

Tip #1: Define Your Money Keywords

‍

Most B2B SaaS companies see SEO as a checkbox on their to-do list.

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The CMO or CRO says, “Competitors are outranking us, we need to do some SEO.”

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And marketers, who are already juggling a million different tasks, simply go to Semrush or Ahrefs, find some keywords with low difficulty and high search volume, throw them into ChatGPT, and publish a few articles.

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Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t yield inbound leads and has minimal impact on revenue.

‍

For SEO to actually drive results, you need to focus on the keywords that your dream clients are searching, or what I like to call “money keywords.”

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Here’s a matrix that you can use to identify them:

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matrix to identify SEO keywords to drive pipeline and revenue

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Column 1: Make a list of your main offers (ie calendar scheduling)

‍‍

Column 2: Make a list of the industries you serve best (ie sales, HR, marketing, etc.)

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‍Column 3: Make a list of your main competitors (ie Chili Piper, Calendly, HubSpot)

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Column 4: Make a list of the problems you solve, or jobs to be done (ie struggling to route leads efficiently)

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Now, you can use these columns to create high-intent long-tail keywords. For example:

‍

1. Best calendar scheduling software

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2. Calendar scheduling for sales teams

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3. Chili Piper alternatives

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4. How to route leads more efficiently

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Keep in mind, these “money keywords” will probably have a low search volume, and that’s okay. At the end of the day, you want traffic that will convert into pipeline, not a large number of visitors outside of your ICP.

‍

When you’re doing this exercise, make sure to involve your founder (if you’re a smaller founder-led company) or your sales team (if you’re a larger sales-led organization) – they’ll likely have great insights related to the problems you solve.

Tip #2: Understand What’s Already Ranking

‍

Now that you’ve identified those money keywords, type them into Google to see what type of content is already ranking organically.

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For example, if you type in “Chili Piper alternatives” you’ll find that the top organic search results are something along the lines of “Top 10 Chili Piper alternatives to consider”, or what is commonly referred to as a product listicle.

Search engine results page for the search Chili Piper alternatives

Look through these existing articles and think about what your company can do even better. Can you include a comparative table or social proof, and clearly demonstrate why you’re the best without sounding overly biased?

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Or, if you’re creating an article on how to speed up the lead routing process, look at the guides at the top of the SERP and think:

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How can I create similar articles that are even more helpful? How can I demonstrate greater experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness?

Search engine results page for the search how to speed up the lead routing process

Maybe it’s by going much more in-depth, or weaving in relevant videos, or highlighting screenshots of your product.

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Pro tip: Don’t be afraid of highlighting your product throughout your articles. As marketers, we often worry about sounding too promotional, but the truth is, you need to show that your product is the obvious solution to a problem in order to drive revenue.

Tip #3: Build a Best-in-Class Page

‍

Once you’ve researched what top-ranking pages are doing, it’s time to figure out how to blow them out of the water.

‍

If you’re creating a listicle, can you add better visuals, weave in your product more, or add relevant CTAs?

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If it’s a how-to article, can you link to a lead magnet or a YouTube video with more helpful context?

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If it’s a landing page, can you add a more comprehensive FAQ section that answers all of your prospect’s questions?

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Pro tip: Always consider where your prospect might be in their journey based on their search query. For a more top of funnel how-to article, you can include more subtle CTAs and connections to your product, while for a competitor comparison article, it makes more sense to include a clear demo request CTA.

Tip #4: Nail the basics

‍

Technical SEO is important for e-commerce sites with thousands of pages, but most B2B SaaS websites (which are often 50 pages or less) don’t need a ton of technical SEO to win.

‍

Sure, you still need the basics.

‍

For example, let’s say you write an article related to the keyword “Best calendar scheduling software.”

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You’d want your slug to be “best-calendar-scheduling-software”; you’d want to include your keyword in your H1, meta title, and meta description; and you’d want to incorporate the keyword naturally throughout your article.

You’d also want good UX, a clear menu nav, solid design and UI on both mobile and PC, some internal links to relevant topics throughout your website, and some other pages linking back to your article.

‍

That’s really all you need.

‍

After you have these basics in place, focus on producing a high volume of content that’s relevant to your prospects, and don’t lose sleep over technical optimizations.

Tip #5: Build Quality Backlinks for $0

‍

Even if you have the best content, ranking for your dream keywords isn’t easy, especially if your competitors have been around for decades and have extremely high domain authorities.

‍

To compete against the giants and set yourself up for success, you need high quality backlinks to your website.

‍

Here’s one of my favorite ways to get them:

‍

1. Go to Semrush or Ahrefs, whichever keyword research tool you prefer, and paste the LinkedIn profile URLs of your thought leaders (Founder or other execs) into the backlinks tab.

Backlinks tag in Semrush, used to identify articles where thought leaders have been mentioned

2. In the results, you’ll find a list of all the articles featuring your thought leaders and linking out to their LinkedIn profiles.

example of list of articles in Semrush's backlinks tab

3. Message these companies and see if they can update the articles to link to your website, not just to the LinkedIn profile URL. Even better if you can get a backlink to one of your high-intent pages.

‍

After doing this, you can go a step further and visit the podcast search engine Listen Notes, type in your niche (ie B2B ads, recruitment, sales enablement), filter by top podcasts in your space, and make a list on a Google sheet.

example search in the podcast search engine Listen Notes, used to identify guest speaking opportunities

Next, have your thought leaders reach out to the podcast hosts via LinkedIn.

‍

The message can be short and simple, such as: Hey Sam, enjoyed your recent episode on X, had an unusual idea for your show. Are you against a conversation?

‍

From my experience, around 20% of hosts will respond, and your thought leaders will start getting featured on amazing podcasts, which will eventually lead to more backlinks to the company website.

‍

Pro Tip: To start seeing results quickly, aim to send 5-10 messages per week to podcast hosts in your space.

Tip #6: Publish At Scale

‍

With SEO, quality matters, but quantity is a massive competitive advantage.

‍

Larger companies are spending a lot of money on ads, content marketing, and events, but they typically have a ton of red tape.

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They may take two weeks to approve a topic, a month to plan out the content, a month for design, a month for web development, a month to publish… Which is to say, by the time they’ve published 2 or 3 pages, you could have published 30, 40, or 50 quality articles, and started stealing some of the market share.

‍

To start seeing results, publish as much content as possible focused on your money keywords (occasionally weaving in more top of funnel content).

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Also, remember, unless you’re a super authoritative company, it’ll usually take 2-3 months for Google to crawl your pages, so the content you publish today is setting you up for success 90 days from now.

Tip #7: Design Pages That Convert

‍

If you’re investing a lot of money in content, make sure you also invest in great design. The better the user experience, the more likely you are to drive conversions.

‍

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

‍

Are your pages aesthetically pleasing?
Is your content skimmable on both mobile and PC?
Are you including screenshots, videos, or aha moments that relate to your product?
Can you add more social proof (customer quotes, guides, walkthroughs) to increase trust?
Are you sprinkling relevant CTAs throughout your content?
Can you add sticky CTAs that are aligned with the funnel stage of each article (ie subscribe to newsletter for more top of funnel articles, request a demo for more bottom of funnel content)?

Examples of strong CTAs from RevenueHero's blog page

These changes, which might seem small, can lead to massive improvements in performance.

Tip #8: Leverage sales calls, customer success calls, and customer research

‍

You can rank pages using generic AI-generated content that says things like “turbocharge your revenue” or “10X your productivity,” but prospects will immediately bounce.

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If you want them to stay on your page – and possibly even schedule a demo – you need to write in-depth content that resonates with their exact pain points.

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Looking at customer research and listening to calls is a great starting point. Even better if you can take your sales and CS teams out to lunch, walk them through the topics you’re tackling in your content, ask for additional insights, and weave these insights into your articles.

‍

This way, all the content you create will be amazing for sales enablement in addition to SEO.

Tip #9: Keep Improving

‍

As I mentioned previously, to win with SEO, you need to publish content quickly – when it’s ready, not when it’s perfect.

‍

That being said, you should always be looking for ways to improve the content you’ve already published.

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About 2 or 3 months after publication, check how your article is ranking.

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For example, let’s say you write an article, and after a few months it settles at position number 7. You could look at this article more closely, and think of ways to get it closer to number 1.

‍

Could you add a more comprehensive FAQ section, embed a relevant YouTube video, add nicer images of your product, include more customer quotes, or earn a few high quality backlinks?

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These consistent optimizations can go a long way if you want to move up in the rankings.

Tip #10: Scale as you grow

‍

SEO isn’t something you can set and forget – even if you’re an established company, there’s always room for improvement.

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Once you’ve implemented tips 1-9, think of ways you can scale your efforts even further.

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Can you increase your article production by hiring more team members or working with freelancers? Or create incredible resources (such as custom tools) that will be highly valuable to your ICP?

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Also, don’t just think about SEO – after all, SEO is only a piece of the marketing ecosystem – think of ways to improve your ads, your YouTube channel, your podcast, your LinkedIn page, etc.

‍

Improvements in all these areas will lead to greater brand awareness and trust, which will lead to more successful SEO.

‍

Hope you found this article helpful!

‍

Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn with any questions, or check out the Breaking B2B website or Breaking B2B podcast for more unusual B2B/SaaS SEO insights.

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10 Tips to Create Winning LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads

Jonathan Bland

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Since their introduction in 2023, I’ve run hundreds of LinkedIn thought leader ads, for my demand gen agency, Omni Lab, and for my clients in B2B SaaS.

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Through my experimentation with this format, I’ve developed a list of best practices to maximize the chances of success.

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I’ll be sharing all my insights below 👇

‍

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Tip #1: Remember that thought leader ads are just sponsored posts
Tip #2: Make sure your ads connect to your product
Tip #3: Create content people would pay for
Tip #4: Add Premium CTAs to your LinkedIn profile
Tip #5: Test Non-Employee Influencer Campaigns
Tip #6: Optimize your LinkedIn profile as if it were a landing page
Tip #7: Look at the right metrics
Tip #8: Give yourself a reality check
Tip #9: Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes
Tip #10: Focus on Awareness, Not Conversions

‍Tip #1: Remember that thought leader ads are just sponsored posts

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First of all, remember that thought leader ads are not a silver bullet that will save your marketing program – they’re simply sponsored organic posts that can fit into your larger content strategy.

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This isn’t to downplay the power of this format; targeting your ICP with content from your thought leaders is one of the most effective approaches to build brand awareness and mental availability.

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That being said, your thought leader ads won’t be successful if you don’t have great positioning, messaging, content, or targeting.

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The standard rules of marketing still apply.

‍Tip #2: Make sure your ads connect to your product

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If you’re putting ad dollars behind organic posts, make sure they connect back to your product in some capacity.

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I don’t mean adding a demo request CTA to every post, but the content you promote should have a core dotted line back to your product.

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For example, at Omni Lab, I could promote a post highlighting our unique POV and approach to Google Ads, which is one of the services we offer. If this POV resonates with my audience, they’ll most likely think of me when they’re looking for support with their Google Ad campaigns.

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Personal posts, such as occasional pictures of food or selfies on the beach, are okay, but they don’t deserve to be promoted.

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At best, they won’t generate significant awareness for your product, and at worst, they’ll end up confusing your audience.

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If your ICP loves you but they have no idea what you do, you probably won’t be in business for long 😬

Tip #3: Create content people would pay for

‍

No matter how great your targeting or technical setup, you won’t get very far if you don’t have amazing content that people would be willing to pay for – this is true for ads in general, and especially true for thought leader ads.

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Take some time to reflect on your offer. Are you just providing generic tips that people have heard many times? Or are you offering something unique and valuable that will pique the interest of your audience?

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To give an example, for Omni Lab, I could run thought leader ads highlighting Google Ads bidding strategies. But it would be more effective to share in-depth campaign recommendations for my target accounts.

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Or, if you’re a company like Navattic, you could run ads talking about interactive demos, but it would be more powerful to build out personalized interactive demos for your dream companies.

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Next time you run a thought leader ad campaign, focus on increasing the perceived value of your offer, and you’ll see a massive improvement in performance.

‍Tip #4: Add Premium CTAs to your LinkedIn profile

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If you’re looking to funnel people into an owned audience, such as your newsletter, consider adding a Premium CTA to your thought leader ads. This is something I do at Omni Lab, and it’s helped me generate hundreds of high quality email subscribers.

This CTA option is only available to LinkedIn Premium users: you can add CTAs such as View my newsletter, Visit my website, View my blog, etc., depending on the action you’d like your audience to take.

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If you don’t have LinkedIn Premium, consider editing your post once the organic reach has died down (usually within 72 hours), adding a CTA with a link to your website.

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Even though the primary goal of thought leader ads should not be to drive direct clicks and conversions, adding a CTA allows people to learn more about your company without having to go on a scavenger hunt.

Tip #5: Test Non-Employee Influencer Campaigns

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After running hundreds of thought leader ads, both for Omni Lab and for my clients, I’ve found that thought leader ads from non-employees consistently outperform promoted posts from employees.

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For example, at Omni Lab, we built out a media plan and campaign strategy for Navattic, and their Head of Growth and Operations (Natalie Marcotullio) made a post related to this.

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We boosted this post to our target audience, and it was one of our top performing ads of all time, significantly outperforming all the thought leaders ads from me and my cofounder.

LinkedIn thought leader ad example from a non-employee

Clay is another great example of non-employee thought leadership. Members of their creator program post about how they use the software, and Clay promotes these posts to increase awareness for their company, while simultaneously expanding the reach of their creators – they’ve created a symbiotic relationship where everybody wins.

B2B LinkedIn thought leader ad featuring external creator

If you’re working with well-known people in your industry, consider how you might be able to partner with them: this could look like an audit, a strategy, a discount, access to exclusive features, etc. in exchange for promotion on LinkedIn.

Tip #6: Optimize your LinkedIn profile as if it were a landing page

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When you’re running thought leader ads, your LinkedIn profile turns into your landing page – it’s the place where people go for more information about you and your company.

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Here are a few tips to optimize your profile that I always share with my clients:

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1. Make sure you have a banner image explaining what you do at a high level.

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Example of optimized LinkedIn banner image

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2. Make sure your profile photo is up to date, and use your primary brand color as the background.

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3. Add what you do + the category you play in to your headline

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4. Use the About section to explain why your company exists and how you approach things differently (bonus if you can also add a few testimonials)

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5. Use the featured section to highlight your core CTA + top performing posts demonstrating your expertise

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‍Tip #7: Look at the right metrics

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Let’s say you have all the fundamentals in place: an optimized profile, great content, solid targeting, etc.

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Now, the next step is to ask yourself: What metrics should we look at to understand if our content is working?

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Here’s what I recommend to my clients:

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1. First of all, check your LinkedIn demographics report to make sure that you’re actually reaching your ICP.

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2. Check in-platform metrics such as impressions, engagement, and CTR. If these metrics look healthy, you’ll know that your audience is finding value in your content.

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3. Look at smaller microconversions, such as engaged visits on your website. Are the people reading your thought leader ads eventually navigating to your site to learn more?

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4. Look at the self-reported attribution field on your demo request form. Are more people mentioning your thought leaders? If the answer is yes, you’ll know that your content is building trust with the right people.

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5. Finally, you can look at more bottom of funnel metrics, such as sign ups or meetings booked, but ultimately, DO NOT obsess over these metrics. Prioritize numbers 1-4 to understand if your content is resonating – it might take a while to see a significant impact on pipeline and revenue.

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Pro Tip: If you’re not sure what content to promote as thought leader ads, look for posts that had a 2-3% CTR organically. In my experience, these posts with a higher organic CTR are also the top performing ads. ‍

Tip #8: Give yourself a reality check

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Most people – and B2B buyers especially – aren’t making impulse decisions and can’t be pushed through a funnel.

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As the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has highlighted, if you look at how often prospects make a purchase in your category, you’ll quickly realize how few of the people you’re targeting are actually in-market.

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Even if you run the greatest ads in the world, you can’t expect people to schedule a demo if they aren’t actively looking for a solution.

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And even if they do book a demo, if you have a higher ACV, you’ll probably have an extremely long sales cycle.

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My point is, you can’t expect hundreds of demos or millions in revenue right away. ‍

Tip #9: Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes

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This is a fun exercise I like to do with my clients.

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I ask: “When you see posts on LinkedIn, what actions do you usually take?”

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Usually, the response is something along the lines of:

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“I read and keep scrolling…” or “If I like something, I might react or leave a comment…”

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Then I ask the follow-up question: “If you see a post you like from a company you’ve never heard of before, would you immediately book a demo?”

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And typically the answer is “No, of course I wouldn’t.”

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Our prospects aren’t that different than we are; if we wouldn’t buy immediately, they probably won’t either.

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If you’re getting good engagement and starting to see other signs of life (such as engaged website visits), you’re headed in the right direction, even if you’re not seeing more demos and sign ups right away. ‍

Tip #10: Focus on Awareness, Not Conversions

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Think of thought leader ads as a brand awareness play, not a direct response tactic.

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Like any good brand marketing, your thought leader ads should relate to key buying situations, or category entry points.

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For example, if I promote posts about how we help our clients improve their lead quality, prospects may think of Omni Lab if they ever run into lead quality issues.

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Or maybe I talk about how we use paid media to increase brand awareness, and prospects may think of us if they’re having a brand awareness problem.

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The key to succeeding with thought leader ads is putting the right messages in front of the right people. If you do this over a long enough period of time, the pipeline and revenue will follow.

‍

Hope you found this article helpful!

‍

Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or Omni Lab with any questions about demand gen or paid media.

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How To Create a B2B Google Ads Optimization Workflow [+Free Template]

Silvio Perez

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Hey there, B2B Marketer. If you don’t have a well-structured optimization workflow, managing just a handful of Google Ads accounts can be a struggle (been there, done that 😅)

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In this article, I’ll walk you through the Google Ads Optimization Workflow template, the exact process I used to go from barely managing five Google Ads accounts to easily managing 30+ 🚀

‍

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Google Ads Optimization Workflow Process
Daily Google Ads Optimizations
Weekly Google Ads Optimizations
Monthly Google Ads Optimizations
Quarterly Google Ads Optimizations
Free Resources to Master B2B Ads 🔥

‍

Why You Need a Google Ads Optimization Workflow Process

Without a consistent approach, managing Google Ads can feel chaotic. You may get lost in metrics that don’t matter or, worse, miss out on key optimizations that could boost your profitability.

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I developed the Google Ads Optimization Workflow Template to help me stay organized and focus on impactful daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly optimization tasks.

‍

👉 Grab your free copy of the template in Module 2, Lesson 1 from the B2B Google Ads 102 - How To Convert Clicks Into Profit course.

Google Ads optimization workflow checklist with daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly tasks, showing status and due dates.

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If you follow this approach, you’ll find yourself in control of your accounts, not the other way around.

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Now let’s dive deep into the tasks by timeframes ⏰

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Daily Google Ads Optimizations

Daily optimizations are essential for ensuring that your accounts are running smoothly. It’s your first line of defense against overspending and wasted ad spending.

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Each day, you should:

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1. Review your budget pacing

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This way, you’ll ensure that you are not overspending or underspending.

2. Check for irrelevant search terms in the Search Terms Report

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You want to add any irrelevant negative keywords. So every single day, you should review your search terms report and compare your search terms to your keywords to find the irrelevant ones and add them to your negative list.

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3. Adjust bids as needed

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If you’re using manual bidding, make sure to adjust your bids accordingly to get visibility.

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If you’re using something like maximize clicks with a bid cap, make sure that you take a look at your average cost per click in relation to your bid cap. If you notice that your average cost per click is really close to your bid cap, you could be throttling yourself.

Google Ads interface showing ad group details for a search campaign, including CPC bid settings for google Ads optimization

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If you’re using Target CPA bidding, ensure that the CPA amount you set is large enough to get enough deliverability. I recommend increasing it by 20% if you notice you’re not spending your budget.

Google Calendar event setup for daily ‘Optimization Power Hour’ focused on Google Ads optimization tasks and campaign reviews.

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By doing that, you will be proactive, and you’re going to catch things much sooner before they become potential fires.

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Weekly Google Ads Optimizations

Weekly optimizations allow you to step back and review broader trends instead of getting caught up in the day-to-day fluctuations.

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Instead of getting caught up in the day-to-day fluctuations, here you should:

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1. Review weekly performance trends (visibility, cost, volume)

‍

Every week you should look at search impression share, search lost to rank, search lost to budget, and search top impression share.

Google Ads metrics report displaying impression share, lost impressions due to rank, and budget losses for optimization

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You also want to look at how much you have spent, your cost per conversion, your cost per custom conversion, meaning the cost per SQL, converted user, or whatever that KPI is that you’re measured against.

Google Ads campaign report table showing cost, conversions, cost per conversion, and offline MQL for a google ads optimization.

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You will also want to look at volume. How many conversions are you getting? Is it trending up? Is it trending down? These are the things to keep an eye on every week.

‍

Another thing you can do is check the charts in Google Ads to map different metrics and quickly see the trend of search impression share with this graph 👇

Google Ads performance graph comparing search impression share and conversions over time for better Google Ads optimization.

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🚨Important: When you’re optimizing and looking at things weekly, don’t freak out if you see changes like 25% down search impression share. But if you see it happen consistently for two or three weeks in a row, then there’s definitely something that you need to make a decision about.

‍

Lastly, breaking down your campaigns by themes like brand, non-brand, and competitive will help you to quickly identify underperforming segments and reallocate your budget where it will be most effective.

‍

This will make the optimization process much more manageable.

‍

2. Pause underperforming keywords

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Pausing underperforming keywords is an opportunity to give more budget to the keywords with good performance.

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You can quickly go to the keyword section in your account and filter by conversions to see which keywords have no conversions. Then, you can sort by cost and understand which ones are hemorrhaging the most budget and can be paused.

Google Ads keyword filter applied to display keywords with zero conversions, aiding in keyword analysis for Google Ads optimization

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3. Add new relevant keywords

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When you check the Search Terms report, there are certain search terms that can make sense to add to your campaign as keywords.

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You can also go to the Google Ads Keyword Planner and find net new keywords that you might not be covering. This is an opportunity to expand your scope and reach, and it’s a good best practice to get into the habit.

Google Keyword Planner results for ‘LinkedIn ads agency,’ showcasing keyword volume, trends, and competition insights

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4. Pause underperforming ads and add new ads to replace underperformers (<5% CTR)

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Pausing underperforming ads is as simple as going to the ad section in your account and then pausing any ads that are not performing anymore.

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So if you notice you have some underperformers, ideally anything less than a 5% click-through rate (but always compare it with your average performance), it’s time to shut off the underperforming ad and add a new ad into the mix.

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This way you can continually improve your overall click-through rate performance to help boost your expected click-through rate and improve your quality score.

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Monthly & Quarterly Google Ads Optimizations

‍

Monthly and quarterly tasks focus on more strategic, higher-level adjustments.

‍

Monthly Optimizations

It’s crucial to ensure that your campaign settings, quality score, and budget allocation align with your overall goals and haven’t been altered unintentionally.

‍

This is also the time to assess the impact of your Google Ads efforts on your sales pipeline and to make necessary changes.

‍

So at the end of each month, you should:

‍

👉 Audit campaign settings (networks, bidding, location options)

‍

This step is crucial if you manage multiple campaigns or accounts.

‍

It’s important to double-check if you’re targeting the right network and don’t have display and search combined together.

‍

You want to make sure your bids haven’t been updated by accident, or God forbid, you have the auto recommendations still turned on, and they’re automatically updating your bids without your consent. 💀

‍

You also want to ensure that your location options are set to “presence” and that people are actually in your target location or regularly in, not people who are potentially in other areas and are interested in that location.

Google Ads campaign settings view showing network, location, budget, and bidding strategy

‍

👉 Review month-over-month pipeline impact from Google Ads

‍

We’re running ads to generate revenue, and revenue comes from initially having pipeline.

‍

So you need a dashboard to track the performance month-over-month and connect your activity to revenue.

‍

It can be as simple as having a report on a spreadsheet where you can see the evolution of your KPIs every month. You can create one from scratch or search for a template on the internet.

‍

Performance dashboard overview showing lead, pipeline, and revenue metrics by platform

‍

👉 Review performance by campaign theme (visibility, cost, volume)

‍

The same analysis we discussed in the weekly optimizations above should be done on a monthly basis too.

‍

How much are you spending per theme? What is your cost per conversion? What is your conversion rate? And what are the volumes?

‍

Are you driving more volume in a certain theme versus another? Should you move the budget around?

‍

These are the questions you should answer here.

‍

👉 Review quality score (ad relevance, landing page experience, expected CTR)

‍

How is your quality score by campaign theme? Is it increasing or decreasing month-over-month?

‍

Ideally, you should aim for a quality score of 7 or above. If it’s lower than that, optimizing your ad relevance, expected CTR and landing page experience will improve things.

‍

Check out this Quality Score Guide to learn the 80/20 of what you need to know about quality score to improve it.

Google Ads quality score report showing ratings for ad relevance, landing page experience, and expected CTR for optimization.

👉 Review geographic performance and budget allocation

‍

Here you want to go ahead and see how the campaigns you’re targeting in each region are performing so you can make the necessary adjustments.

Google Ads campaign performance table highlighting APAC region with higher conversions and lower cost per conversion for optimization insights.

‍

I also recommend checking the Locations report to have a granular view of how each country grouped into a region is performing.

‍

By doing this, you can find opportunities for new campaigns targeting a single country if it has a good performance and the campaign is limited by budget, or excluding low-performing countries to free up some budget for the top performers.

Location report in Google Ads showing conversion metrics for targeted locations including the United States and Canada, aiding in optimization.

‍

👉 Review device performance and budget allocation

‍

In B2B, desktop usually performs better than mobile and tablet, so if you’re targeting all devices you can find opportunities to maximize conversions by breaking out the campaigns into different devices.

Device performance report in Google Ads displaying conversions, cost per conversion, and average CPC across computers, mobile phones, and tablets.

‍

👉 Review keyword/match type performance and budget allocation

‍

Are there certain keywords that are doing better for you than others? Certain match types? All of these are insights that will help you optimize your Google Ads campaigns.

Google Ads keyword match type report showcasing conversions and cost per conversion, with a focus on phrase match performance for optimization.

‍

👉 Review landing page performance and experiments

‍

How are your landing pages performing? Are you running experiments? If you're not, that's definitely an opportunity.

Google Ads landing page report with conversion metrics and average CPC, helping identify high-performing pages for optimization.

‍

👉 Implement new campaign experiments

‍

If you’re not testing new experiments, this is a massive opportunity to improve performance, and you can run experiments easily in Google Ads with their campaign experiments tool.

Google Ads experiments dashboard suggesting new tests like broad match keywords for better ROI in Google Ads

‍

Quarterly Optimizations

Every quarter, take time to conduct a competitor analysis and review your goals. It’s a great practice to see what new ads and keywords your competitors are using, giving you inspiration and helping you stay ahead in the market.

‍

‍

This periodic check-in will ensure that your optimizations are aligned with your business objectives, providing a clear path for growth 🙌

‍

Stay organized with the Google Ads Optimization Workflow template

‍

If you get your free copy of our Google Ads Optimization Template, you’ll notice that we have daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly tasks discussed above on the template.

Google Ads optimization checklist categorizing tasks into daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly activities for improved campaign performance.

‍

The way this template works is very simple. We have our tasks on the left, the task title, and the different timeframes. There’s also a space for you to take notes while optimizing your account.

‍

Then you can change the status of each task, so you and your team will know if a task is done or if it’s in progress, as well as define the task owner.

Google Ads task management table displaying status, tutorial links, task owners, and due dates for structured optimization planning.

‍

There are also some formulas where, based on the timeframe, the due date will automatically update. So for example, if you set the Last Complete date of a daily task as 2/2/24, it’ll automatically say the due date for that task is 2/3/2024.

‍

In addition, if you do the same thing for a weekly task, it will add seven days to the due date, and now it will say 2/9/2024.

‍

Lastly, you’ll also find all the different tutorials covered in this guide linked to each task. The goal of these tutorials is to show you how to do each step so you can use this as a reference.

Google Ads task table with status indicators and video tutorials, showing a comprehensive plan for step-by-step campaign optimization.

By implementing these daily, weekly, and monthly optimizations, you’ll stay ahead of potential issues and make data-driven adjustments that boost your account performance.

‍

I hope this guide helps you to manage your accounts efficiently 🙌

‍

If you have any questions, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.

‍

From Clicks to Conversions: Master Google Ads for B2B 🔥

If you want to become a Google Ads pro, check out our free B2B Google Ads courses, where you'll learn how to launch, optimize, and scale your campaigns to drive pipeline and revenue.

‍

Here's what you'll learn in each course:

‍

⚙️ B2B Google Ads 101 - How to Launch Dangerously Effective Campaigns for Beginners

The Googleverse: The Game You're Playing & How To Win
Measurement: How to Make Sure You're Profitable
Targeting: How to Show Up For the Right Searcher
Planning: Putting It All Together

‍

🎯 Google Ads 102 - How to Clicks Into Profit

Visibility: How To Find the Hole Sucking Profits
Workflows: How to Optimize On a Daily, Weekly, Monthly & Quarterly Basis
Experimentation: How to Test & Automate Profitability
Troubleshooting: How To Solve Inevitable Problems

‍

🚀 Google Ads 103 - How to Scale Google Ads For Advanced Advertisers

Methodology: How to Vertically Scale Google Ads From A-Z
Campaigns: Scaling Horizontally Through Campaign Themes
Channels: Scaling Outside of Paid Search

‍

Click Here to Join 1,000+ B2B Marketers Today and start leveling up your advertising skill set.

Takes < 90 seconds to sign up (seriously we timed it 😂)

‍

Using the Jobs To Be Done Framework to Maximize Revenue in B2B Ads [+Free Template]

Bryttney Blanken

Read Article

Understanding the Jobs To Be Done framework developed by Tony Ulwick can be confusing and overwhelming because most of the information you’ll find is focused on product development.

‍

In this article, I’m going to unpack the Jobs To Be Done framework from a B2B advertising perspective.

‍

Why? Because identifying what job your customers are truly “hiring” your product or service to do will be the secret to launching a powerful ad campaign.

‍

This article is part of our B2B learning track so if you’re serious about learning B2B advertising you’re in the right place!

‍

Let’s dive into it 👏

‍

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Understand Why Customers Choose Your Product
Using the Jobs to Be Done Interview Matrix Template
Customize Your Messaging with Personality Insights
Real Use Case of the JBTB Matrix Template
Free Resources to Jumpstart Your B2B Marketing Career

‍

Understand Why Customers Choose Your Product

‍

In any industry, people don’t buy products, they invest in solutions to get a job done. It’s not just to buy another thing like your cat-hoarding grandmother. 😅🐈

‍

‍

For B2B marketers, Tony Ulwick’s Jobs to Be Done framework should be focused on why your customers “hire” your product or service, so you can put them and their needs at the heart of your advertising story.

‍

This will help you to identify what pain points you’re helping your customers solve to get to the root of what motivates them because your advertising campaign should be about them — not you.

‍

But how can you do that?

‍

You can use the Jobs To Be Done framework when you're launching a new advertising campaign or when you want to improve the conversion rates of your existing advertising campaigns (aka your ads that aren’t converting)

‍

The most impactful way to start is by identifying three to five recent customers who fit your target market (or Ideal Customer Profile - ICP).

‍

If you need help identifying your ideal customer profile, check out this article: “How to Craft B2B Buyer Personas for Ad Targeting”

‍

Select customers who either recently purchased or have the potential to represent your ideal buyer. These interviews will reveal why they chose your service and what specific pain points you helped them solve.

‍

To make your life easier, I developed a free template called Jobs to Be Done Interview Matrix 🙌

‍

You can find it in Module 2, Lesson 3 of my free B2B Advertising Foundations course, and it’s your roadmap for collecting insights during interviews.

Using the Jobs to Be Done Interview Matrix Template to Gather Actionable Insights

‍

‍

In this JTBD Interview Matrix Template, you’ll be looking for five key points that highlight your customer’s journey with your brand:

Situation and Pain Points - What challenges are they facing?
Motivation - Why did they start looking for a solution?
Trigger - What prompted them to move forward with your service?
Ideal Outcome - What result are they seeking?
Competitor Evaluation - What other options were they considering?

‍

The matrix helps you organize answers by each customer’s profile and offers a side-by-side comparison of their unique characteristics.

‍

It also offers 8 helpful interview questions you can use to uncover the right golden nuggets that will make your campaign shine. ✨

Customize Your Messaging with Personality Insights

‍

Finally, understanding your customer’s personality type is like having the key to crafting messaging that lands with confidence.

‍

Resources like Crystal can help you determine each customer’s DISC personality type (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Compliance) by scraping their LinkedIn profiles, labelling how they like and prefer to be communicated with, and their style and tone because this will ultimately influence the messaging that you can create for each of your advertising personas.

‍

Here’s a real use case for you to understand each step of the JTBD Interview Matrix

‍

Let’s take Spotify as an example. I love Spotify, so if I were doing an interview with a Spotify customer, it would look like this:

‍

‍

Situation & Pain Points

I get tired of hearing the same songs on the radio. I can’t easily listen to the exact song I want to hear.

‍

Motivation

I want to listen to specific songs when I want

‍

Trigger

I’m in the gym, and I need a song to pump me up

‍

Ideal Outcome

I want to listen to the music I choose, everywhere

‍

Other Solutions/ Products Evaluated – Competitors

Radio, XM Radio, Pandora, Apple Music, Silence

‍

Personality characteristics (DiSC type, DiSC archetype, etc)

Trailblazer - ID. Confident style, with a mix of informality and formality gets their attention.

Pace: Speak slightly fast. Sounds like a ‘gets shit done’ person.
Tone: Do not sound too eager, as if you have met a friend suddenly after a long time. Keep the tone calm but confident.
Tactics To Win: Strong words, focus on results, respectful confidence

‍

Based on the JBT Interview Matrix, here are some Spotify ad examples:

‍

‍

The main takeaway is that you can make your ad campaigns even stronger when you really know what “job” your customers are “hiring” your product or service to take care of.

‍

Use the Jobs To Be Done matrix to dig deep into what matters most to them and adjust your messaging to connect on a personal level. 🙂

‍

I hope you found this article helpful!

‍

Connect with me on LinkedIn, and let’s keep the conversation going.

You can also visit my website here for more valuable content.

Jumpstart Your B2B Marketing Career

b2b advertising course by bryttney blanken

‍

If you’re serious about mastering B2B advertising, then you definitely need to check out my free course that will teach you the foundational knowledge to becoming a high-performing B2B marketer who knows how to use advertising to drive legit business and revenue impact without the fluff or wasting your time and money learning the ropes the hard way.

‍

Module 1: you’ll get a crash course in the B2Bverse and master terminology, sales processes, and working across teams.

Module 2: you’ll learn how to become your customer's psychologist and understand them deeply with buyer personas that allow you to craft effective messaging.

Module 3: you’ll master the B2B funnel and learn how to think like a CEO to identify performance bottlenecks and convert more leads into revenue.

Module 4: you’ll learn how to put it all together and build your go-to-market strategy that gets your ad in front of your dream buyers and converts attention.

‍

This course was designed with absolute beginners in mind.

‍

Accelerate your learning curve and start the course today for free.

‍

How to Create Tracking Templates in Google Ads

Silvio Perez

Read Article

Hey there, Digital Marketer. Do you cringe a little when you hear the words “setting up tracking in an ad channel”? 😅

‍

Tracking may be the unsexy side of marketing, but I promise that Google Ads Tracking Templates are simpler than they sound.

‍

In this article, I’ll show you how to set up tracking right, capture accurate data, and see what’s really driving your conversions and revenue.

‍

Let’s dive in! 👇

‍

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

What is a Google Ads Tracking Template?
How to install Tracking Templates in Google Ads
Benefits of adding Tracking Templates to your campaigns
From clicks to conversions: Master Google Ads for B2B

‍

What is a Google Ads Tracking Template?

‍

Tracking templates allow you to streamline your link tagging process and pass static and dynamic values.

‍

I created this little cheat sheet for you here to give you an understanding of a tracking template.

Overview of a Google Ads tracking template, highlighting standard UTM, static values, ValueTrack parameters, and custom parameters.

‍

Here’s what each parameter means:

‍

{lpurl}: This is your landing page URL. So whatever the URL is in your ad, the template will automatically inherit it and then automatically append these different static and dynamic values based on these parameters.
UTMs: These are your standard UTMs, like UTM source, UTM medium, campaign, term, and content.
‍Check out our Free UTM Tagger Tool to easily create them in bulk and for more info about each parameter.
Static Values: Static means it’s always the same, it’ll remain consistent. So a static value will always be a text.

So in the image example above, we always want the UTM Source to be google, the UTM Medium to be cpc, and the UTM Campaign to be trial.
Dynamic Values: Dynamic means it changes. The values here usually have squiggly brackets like {keyword} or {matchtype}, which tell Google Ads to populate that field dynamically.

For example, with {keyword}, the UTM Term will automatically insert the keyword that drove the click, giving you granular detail on the search behavior driving each visit.
Custom Parameters: These are parameters you can create that are not part of the UTM parameters, which are your standard ones.

You’ll probably want to use custom UTM parameters if you have some sort of advanced tracking setup.

Anything that is available in the URL, you can then set up with JavaScript the ability to pass the data from those parameters into hidden fields in your form, to then be able to route and track and do all sorts of things in your backend.

In the cheat sheet above, the ad_name parameter will give you details about which ad drove the visit.
‍

So this is a tracking template, and it’s really important as this is going to allow you to get a lot better data and ultimately, better insights from your activities.

How to Install a Tracking Template in Google Ads
‍

You can install a tracking template at the campaign, ad group, or ad level. You could even do it at the account level with the tracking script, but I recommend that you start off at the campaign level.

‍

Here are the steps you need to follow in your Google Ads account 👇

‍

Open your account, then open the campaigns tab and choose one campaign. Now go into the settings by clicking on this little gear.

Google Ads campaign dashboard showing navigation to campaigns, ad groups, and the status overview for tracking template setup.

‍Scroll down to additional settings.

Settings panel for a Google Ads campaign, guiding users to ‘Additional settings’ for configuring tracking templates.

Go to the Campaign URL options and paste your tracking template in the “Tracking Template” field.

Google Ads URL options page illustrating the input fields for tracking templates and custom parameters configuration.

Here you’ll want to follow the format from the cheat sheet I shared at the beginning of this article because that is the syntax of the tracking template.
‍

To be easier, you can copy this tracking template below and just add your static values in the highlighted fields:

{lpurl}?utm_source=entersource&utm_medium=entermedium&utm_campaign=entercampaign&utm_term={keyword}_{matchtype}&ad_name=enteradname

UTM Source: People usually use Google or AdWords.
UTM Medium: People usually put CPC or paid search. This 100% depends on you and your business, your company, and how you want to track things.
UTM Campaign: You can put the name of your campaign. The downside is that you have to do this for each campaign.
UTM Term: This will dynamically push the keyword that drove the click and the match type.
Ad_Name (custom parameter): This is 100% optional, and most of the clients from our agency don’t really need custom parameters, but I just want you to be aware of it.

Once you’ve mastered basic tracking, custom parameters can add another layer of insights by capturing non-standard data. For instance, if you want to differentiate ad variations, you could set a custom parameter like ad_name=RSA1.
‍

You can also find all the Value Track Parameters Google supports here:

List of ValueTrack parameters in Google Ads with detailed descriptions for effective tracking template customization.

I usually like to set my tracking templates at the campaign level, which suffices. So, in this case, each campaign must have a unique tracking template.

‍

Another cool thing about the tracking template is once you create the tracking template at the campaign level, you no longer have to worry about tagging your ads with UTM parameters at the ad level.

‍

It'll automatically inherit the campaign URL tracking template and tag your links appropriately.

‍

If you're just putting all of the tagged URLs at the ad level, it can be really problematic sometimes and time-consuming to make changes and miss things. This helps streamline things and push those dynamic parameters.

Benefits of Adding Tracking Templates to Your Campaigns

‍

Setting up tracking templates in Google Ads is a powerful way to automate link tagging and capture high-quality data.

‍

The better data we pass through our tracking template, the more insights we can receive.

‍

With standard UTMs, dynamic parameters, and custom fields, you’ll get a clear view of what’s driving performance and find better ways to allocate budget, optimize campaigns, and ultimately boost results. 🚀

‍

Why deny yourself incredible insights such as “which keywords drive the most revenue?..” when you can capture that information at no additional cost?

‍

That’s it about tracking templates! 🎉

‍

Now go build your first one and let the data guide your ad strategies! 🤓

‍

I hope you found this article useful!

From Clicks to Conversions: Master Google Ads for B2B 🔥

‍

If you want to become a Google Ads pro, check out our free B2B Google Ads courses, where you'll learn how to launch, optimize, and scale your campaigns to drive pipeline and revenue.

‍

B2B Google Ads 101-103 course by Silvio Perez, founder of AdConversion, featuring Google Ads strategies for businesses.

‍

Here's what you'll learn in each course:

‍

⚙️ B2B Google Ads 101 - How to Launch Dangerously Effective Campaigns for Beginners

The Googleverse: The Game You're Playing & How To Win
Measurement: How to Make Sure You're Profitable
Targeting: How to Show Up For the Right Searcher
Planning: Putting It All Together

‍

🎯 Google Ads 102 - How to Clicks Into Profit

Visibility: How To Find the Hole Sucking Profits
Workflows: How to Optimize On a Daily, Weekly, Monthly & Quarterly Basis
Experimentation: How to Test & Automate Profitability
Troubleshooting: How To Solve Inevitable Problems

‍

🚀 Google Ads 103 - How to Scale Google Ads For Advanced Advertisers

Methodology: How to Vertically Scale Google Ads From A-Z
Campaigns: Scaling Horizontally Through Campaign Themes
Channels: Scaling Outside of Paid Search

‍

Click Here to Join 1,000+ B2B Marketers Today and start leveling up your advertising skill set.

Takes < 90 seconds to sign up (seriously we timed it 😂)

‍

B2B Google Ads: How To Know If Google Is The Right Channel For Your SaaS

Silvio Perez

Read Article

Hey there B2B SaaS marketer! Are you getting FOMO around Google Ads?

‍

Every day thousands of SaaS businesses are converting clicks into profitable pipeline on Google Ads, and conversely thousands are burning clicks into wasted ad budgets.

‍

After $10M in Google Ads spend management for incredible SaaS companies like ActiveCampaign, Mixpanel, and others, I’ve developed a criteria for Google Ads success.

‍

I call it the Google Ads Sweet Spot. If you want Google to be a significant driver in your pipeline generation you need to make sure your SaaS company checks these 3 criteria.

‍

After reviewing, it’ll be clear if Google is right for you, let’s dive into it 👇

‍

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Proven Concept
Existing Demand
Sufficient Margin
Master Google Ads for B2B

‍

Proven Concept

‍

The first criteria in the Google Ads Sweet Spot is a Proven Concept.

‍

You see, in order to succeed with Google Ads your product has to be built on a time-tested and proven concept.

‍

Imagine running Google ads for a generative AI product before the invention of ChatGPT.

‍

Because AI products still hadn’t gained popularity, you probably would have struggled to generate sufficient searches and clicks on your ads.

‍

If you create an innovative product in a new category that no one understands, you likely won’t see a great return on effort from Google.

‍

In this case, it’d make more sense to focus on educating the market about the problem you solve via demand gen channels such as paid and organic social.

Existing Demand

‍

The second criteria of the Google Ads Sweet Spot is Existing Demand.

‍

This is directly connected to the first criteria: you won’t generate pipeline or revenue if people aren’t actively looking for your solution.

‍

If you only have, for example, 100 people searching for your product every month, it’s going to be impossible to generate significant results from Google.

‍

For example, assuming the industry average conversion rate of 3%, and 5% clickthrough rate (CTR) you’re looking at 5 clicks from the 100 impressions, and you need a minimum of 33 clicks to generate a single lead. At 100 impressions/month it will take you six and a half months to generate ONE lead 🤯– extreme example but I hope you get the point.

‍

You need enough search volume, so you have enough clicks, and ultimately conversions.

‍

To verify that you have sufficient search volume, you can use the Google Ads keyword planner.

‍

Let’s say you want to bid on the term Google Ads courses within the United States. You can see that there are approximately 2,900 searches every month for this specific term, which validates that there’s sufficient search volume to have a chance at success.

‍

Google Ads keyword research for B2B SaaS course marketing, showing ‘Google Ads Courses’ with 2,900 monthly searches.

‍

Keep in mind monthly searches in the keyword planner are just an average and always changing – use them to inform your estimates but take them with a grain of salt.

Sufficient Margin

‍

The third criteria of the Google Ads Sweet Spot is Sufficient Margin.

‍

You SHOULD NOT run Google Ads if you don’t have enough margin, or in other words, a high enough lifetime value (LTV) to offset acquisition costs. Without a high enough LTV, Google will never become a profitable channel for your company.

‍

Here’s an example:

‍

Let’s say you have an LTV of $100 per user, and your average cost per click is $10. In this case, the likelihood of running profitable campaigns is slim – you’d have to convert 10% of your total traffic just to break even 😅 (when the industry average conv rate is 3-5%).

‍

If you’re selling a variety of products and you have a small budget (<$10K/month), I recommend running ads for the products with the highest lifetime value to maximize your chances of profitability.

‍

If your campaigns aren’t profitable right away, that’s okay, as long as you know you’ll recoup your investment 3-6 months down the line.

‍

If you want to see if the math adds up to run Google Ads profitably for your company, check out our free Google Ads Budget calculator.

‍

I hope you found this article helpful!

‍

Google Ads definitely is not for everyone but if your SaaS meets these three criteria your chances of success are far greater than not based on my experience.

‍

If you have any questions, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.

‍From Clicks to Conversions: Master Google Ads for B2B 🔥

‍

If you want to become a Google Ads pro, check out our free B2B Google Ads courses, where you'll learn how to launch, optimize, and scale your campaigns to drive pipeline and revenue.

‍

Here's what you'll learn in each course:

⚙️ B2B Google Ads 101 - How to Launch Dangerously Effective Campaigns for Beginners