People rarely act on something that they see for the first time.
They need a little more convincing.
A little more persuasion.
And, a little more action from your end.
This is why we love LinkedIn retargeting ads. You get to be efficient with your ad budget, hit up people that you’ve made an impression on in the past, and nurture leads through your pipeline.
Making one statement is not enough, you’ve got to stick with your leads.
Let’s show you how.
The Benefits of LinkedIn Retargeting
In most cases, people aren’t going to convert the first time.
Think about it.
When was the last time you bought into something on impulse?
It’s the same thing with people landing on your website or page for the first time.
Here’s how the human psyche sometimes works.
You like something, but you still haven’t had the time to consider it, then you eventually tend to forget it unless you’re reminded of it.
Retargeting is the fix to that problem.
It tracks people who have interacted with your material before and shows them an ad to either spark brand awareness or brand recall so that your prospects will be reminded of you.
In fact, it saves you a lot of money in the long run.
You’re technically showing people the benefits of your brand again to people who have already seen it the first time. You don’t have to go out of your way to create a “new market” again.
You’re working on prospects you’ve worked on in the past.
Why LinkedIn and Not Somewhere Else?
LinkedIn is the largest professional social media network.
This means if you’re selling B2B solutions, SaaS applications, and professional services, you’re much better served if you target your prospects again in a space that you’re sure they’re in.
But, there’s more.
Since people are mostly on the network to connect professionally, they’re already in the business mindset.
This makes them more receptive to your message
…provided that it’s compelling.
You wouldn’t want to retarget people with abandoned shopping carts on LinkedIn – you could do that on Facebook, but you do want to retarget prospects who were halfway into filling up a signup form on your website on LinkedIn.
Use Cases
The most obvious use case for retargeting is getting people to see your brand again, but there are more ways than you can use LinkedIn retargeting.
Lost Leads
Got leads in the pipeline that you’ve lost for some reason?
Then, retargeting is for you.
All you have to do is to grab a list of their emails and stick them into the system, and now you’ve got ads being targeted specifically to them.
Now there are a lot of strategies that you can employ to reach out to them. You could go with basic brand awareness to get them to remember you, you could offer them a discount or a reward for coming back – this is the strategy we all use with shopping carts, or you can send them a compelling call-to-action.
But, they’re not just for lost leads.
You can use them for leads that have gone cold.
Pre-suasion
Everyone’s heard of persuasion, but how about pre-suasion?
“Pre-suasion” is a term that was coined by psychologist Robert Cialdini in his book “Pre-suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade”
It deals with the concept of convincing people before you even get them to say “yes” to what you’re offering them.
Here’s how it works.
Say you’ve got a list of leads that you’ve generated and fully segmented, and all that’s left for you to do is to send a personalized message out to them.
You can use Linked retargeting ads to get your brand in front of them before you even reach out to them.
This way they’re already familiar with what you have to offer and the start of their “persuasion” to buy into what you’re offering has already started before they’ve even gotten any direct communication from your end.
It’s much easier to get people to “listen” if they already know what you’re talking about.
B2B Lead Nurturing
LinkedIn retargeting is also great for products with long sales cycles.
B2B products and services usually take weeks or even months from the first point of contact to negotiating a sale, and a lot can happen during this time.
A competitor could come up and snag the deal, they could look for someone else, or worse, they could just simply lose interest in buying from you.
In this case, ad retargeting – not only LinkedIn – becomes a must to keep your products and services relevant to the people who will eventually make a purchase from your company.
Here’s why?
You want to remind them – not constantly though – of the benefits of buying from you rather than someone else. It keeps the idea fresh in their mind while they make the purchase decision.
This is especially helpful for industries such as B2B healthcare where major purchase decisions are typically made once per year.
How to Create LinkedIn Retargeting Ads
Your first step is to head over to LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager site. You can either navigate to it manually, or you could click on this link.
Click on the “Work” icon on the upper right-hand side of your feed and head over to “Advertise”, and that should take you to the Campaign Manager window.
Specific Email Lists
Personally, targeting specific email lists is one of our favorite tools for retargeting.
It allows you a very precise degree of control, as long as you have a list of email addresses that you can point LinkedIn to.
You can use it to prop up existing lead nurturing campaigns and coax people who are already in your pipeline to engage with your company.
You can easily integrate it with B2B strategies such as account=based marketing.
Once you’re logged into LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager, go to “Account Assets” and then click on “Matched Audiences”.
Once you’re done with that, go ahead and click on “Create Audience” and under the “Upload a list” section click on “Company / Contact”.
This will open a new window where you can upload a list of up to 300,000 emails.
That’s plenty if you ask us.
Name your list, e.g. “Retargeting Cold Leads Landing Page G”
And, click on “Select list” to grab the list that you have to upload to the platform.
Once you’re done, click on “Upload” and you’re good to go.
Notes:
- There are specific templates that LinkedIn requires you use when you upload. So, clean that data up to their specifications.
- If you’ve got more than one email address for a person, make sure you upload them all, you don’t know which one of those emails they use for LinkedIn.
- It needs 300 verified emails to get going.
- Max upload size is 300,000 records.
Now give it about 24 to 48 hours to get cooking before launching your first retargeting ad.
Retargeting Website Vistors Using LinkedIn Insights Tag
Are you familiar with Facebook’s Pixel?
Well, LinkedIn has its LinkedIn Insight Tag that you can use.
It’s a piece of code that you can put in your global footer on your website that lets LinkedIn track the prospects that happen to land on your website. It’s useful if you want to set up particular retargeting campaigns without having to upload any list on LinkedIn Campaign Manager.
It automatically gets to work once you start an ad campaign targeting say, a specific landing page on your website.
Every time someone lands on the page, they automatically get shown a retargeting ad when they’re on LinkedIn.
All you have to do is to access “Account Assets” on LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager and navigate to “Insight Tag”.
You have three options for installing the tag, you could do it yourself via the global footer, send it to your dev via email, or use one of those tag managers.
Once you’re done with that you can create audiences out of your website visitors.
You want to click on “Create an audience” as we did earlier. Place in a name.
Now, provided that you’ve downloaded the Linked Insights Tag earlier, you can simply input the URLs on your website that you want it to track.
Once you get 300 visitors on the URL(s) that you’ve placed in, LinkedIn will start retargeting them with an ad of your choice.
Other Targeting Options for LinkedIn Retargeting
You don’t even have to be limited by the lists that you have and the LinkedIn Insights Tag on your website.
LinkedIn Campaign Manager has other options for retargeting that you can make use of.
You can retarget by:
- Event – these are people who RSVP’d for an event that you’re having. It’s great to build up a buzz for the event and keep it fresh in their minds. (Since, we’re down to the new normal, we’re looking at webinars for now.)
- Lead gen form – sick of people not going through with forms on your lead generation campaign. Now you can get them back provided they had some form of interaction on your lead gen form.
- Company Page – for people who went to your company page on LinkedIn
- Video – this is to hit up people with ads again after they’ve checked out your video ad.
Whatever option you eventually pick. Make sure you don’t stop at tapping your prospects once.
You need to guide them through your pipeline and remind them that you’re there for them.
Creating Lookalike Audiences To Grow Your Existing Seedlist
Say, you’re done with retargeting but you want more.
You want to grow your seed list into a bigger audience of the same interests and demographics.
LinkedIn Campaign Manager lets you do this easily by reading your current list of prospects and applying its algorithm on it to get you a bigger audience of similar tastes.
This supercharges the list that you already have and leverages it to gain more traction for your LinkedIn ads lead generation efforts.
Think about it.
Doubling up on your ad effort without having to look for a new audience or spend time tweaking a campaign?
Pretty neat.
However, don’t mess up your lookalike audiences by putting in emails from another demographic that you are targeting.
LinkedIn Ad Ideas
We could dedicate an entire guide to this, but here’s what.
It depends.
There are plenty of ad ideas that you can go for, you can use different mediums and play around with your ad copy, but it’s all going to be dependent on what you’re trying to achieve.
If you’re working a long sales cycle, you can get away with compelling ad copy that highlights your brand without being obnoxious and aiming for a hard sell.
For abandoned forms, you could stick in a freebie in your ad or a lead magnet that will get people to go back to the form and fill it up for sure the second time around.
You can even target people who are interested in your content with exclusive pieces depending on which piece of content they land on your blog.
For growth hackers who are interested in nurturing leads, the type of content you release is dependent on where the prospect is in your pipeline. This is why it is critical to really segment your list beforehand.
Make Sure You’re Tracking Your LinkedIn Retargeting
We always say.
“You can’t growth hack if you can’t track,” and that’s exactly what you should be doing anytime you run any type of retargeting campaign.
LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager should give you some important statistics on how your campaign has been running.
If you find that you’re not making a difference or getting any engagement with a particular ad, then it’s probably time to switch it out.
You don’t want to waste valuable marketing dollars on campaigns that don’t work.
Check out the number of clicks you’re getting, your impressions, and of course, the average engagement. You want to know that your targeted audience is looking at the stuff that you’re putting out.
Here’s a tip that every growth hacker should be using regularly.
Always A/B test.
Not everything you release is perfect.
There are going to be many times where you’ll fail at ad copy, and that’s perfectly fine.
What’s important is that you have something ready just in case you run into a problem like that – which you will. In this way, you don’t get caught empty-handed while running critical lead nurturing campaigns.
This doesn’t just work with your ads.
You can use them with optimization, your posts, and even everything else that you do online.
Keep testing.
Keep tweaking.
Takeaways
LinkedIn retargeting is – and should – not be your last line of lead nurturing.
It’s effective in its own right, but for proper lead nurturing, having a real human – or great nurturing automation – is still the best way to guide your prospect down your pipeline.
However, it is a critical addition to any growth hacking toolset if you have the budget for it.
Also, make sure you track and A/B test, you’re not going to have the best ad in the beginning.
There are plenty of things that you can do with LinkedIn retargeting, you can use it with existing email lists, increase brand awareness, and recall, and be more efficient with your marketing dollar.
So, the question becomes is it really necessary.
The answer is: yes.
If your marketing budget can spare it.
In growth hacking, you want to use every tool at your disposal. It’s only after you’ve fully exhausted your efforts that you can call it a day.
We’ve been there before.
