Imagine yourself being a Founder or Marketing Manager at a small B2B tech company. And you have a 1000 USD budget per month to spend running ads on LinkedIn. What would you do?
Look; you’re certainly not the only one. Many SMB businesses between 5 and 25 employees work with such a budget on their campaigns.
Which can totally work. However, you need to make sure you have a well thought out marketing strategy in order to see results.
After all, companies with 10K+ USD per month can test pretty much whatever they want. You gotta make sure that your first campaign(s) perform right out of the gate.
The dangers of not doing so are firstly wasted Ad Budget. But secondly, you might conclude after 1 or 2 months that LinkedIn Ads is not worth it, while results could literally be waiting around the corner.
So how would we go about with a 1000 USD Monthly budget on LinkedIn?
In my opinion you need to look into three things before even creating your campaigns!
- Monthly website visitors: Have a fair amount of people coming to your website? That’s great, you can retarget all your website visitors using the Insights Tag (not just those that go to your website from LinkedIn!). Now layer on Filters to only show up to your ICP.
- Well-defined ICP: Cliche but very true. If you don’t have this, then it is probably best not to use this channel. In our opinion it is more important to think of an ICP in company terms (Sector, Company Size, Growing X%). So if you’re a Founder who just started a month ago working out your idea, this could be costly. Unless you see it as data gathering and perhaps proofing your MVP.
- Assets: We always look for any particular assets that would do well on LinkedIn. Think of videos, case studies or thought leader articles. Why? People come to the platform to be educated, not to be sold to. So aligning with this leads to the best results possible.
Once you check these boxes; it becomes much easier to set up your campaigns such that they perform.
For accounts we work with we usually go with the following 3 campaigns given the budget.
- We would start with Text Ads as a 30 Day Retargeting Layer in order to get impressions of your logo, brand and solution.
- Secondly, a campaign focusing on Social Proof & Costs of now working with you.
- Finally, the 90 day retargeting layer will focus on Thought Leader Ads. This way you can stay in front of them over time and build trust that you’re the expert in the field. Which will build trust by sharing about events, your customers or stories you come across.
Of course these campaigns can be tweaked a bit. No one size fits all. Adding a very targeted cold campaign could be a viable option. Or if you don’t have a dedicated ‘thought leader’ within your company active here, perhaps double down on Social Proof with Case Studies, reviews or video testimonials.
Some additional thoughts on this for Founders looking to grow instantly: Don’t focus your ads solely on conversion. It’s tempting of course since we all want instant results. But that’s not gonna be the main outcome on LinkedIn.
Positioning yourself as a thought leader & expert in your field are far more effective over the long run leading to more ROI on your marketing budget. This strategy above does so, allowing you to grow your reach over time and increasing your results.
Want to learn more about the strategy we use for our clients? Discover all of our strategy guidelines in our Aligned room.
For more insights into LinkedIn Advertising strategies for start & scale-ups, follow me @Colin!
