Reaching buyers through social media advertising is a part of every marketer's strategy, and for B2B buyers, the most popular social network to advertise on is LinkedIn. But companies are struggling to get their ads to work. A LinkedIn study found that 82% of B2B ads fail to gain attention and drive recall. And it's no wonder, with the amount of content you can see and read on LinkedIn daily. So, how can LinkedIn help marketers get their ads to rise above the noise?
The question is, what kind of content are buying group members looking for to help them get the information they need to make good decisions? The answer - they attend events (virtual and in person), watch videos, and look for expert voices.
That's why LinkedIn is adding new capabilities to its advertising products to help B2B companies reach buying groups through these exact options.
LinkedIn's first announcement concerns Accelerate, its AI-powered campaign type. Accelerate was launched in beta last October for lead generation and website visit ads.
You only have to give the AI a URL to a product you want to advertise. The AI will analyze the website page, your company page, and prior LinkedIn ads and recommend an end-to-end campaign. It builds the creatives, the audience, and the messaging, all of which you can adjust to your liking. Once launched, the AI will automatically optimize the campaign to ensure it reaches the right audience by adjusting bids and shifting budget to the best-performing placements and creatives.
LinkedIn is expanding Accelerate's capabilities by allowing marketers to include a video or document ad, such as an ebook, a whitepaper, or a customer testimonial. In addition, new campaign objectives, including brand awareness, engagement, website conversions, and video views, are being slowly rolled out globally over the next few months.
LinkedIn campaigns run by Accelerate show up to 42% lower costs per action than a classic campaign (based on a LinkedIn analysis of 67 A/B tests run between October 2023 and September 2024), so they're worth testing.
In April, LinkedIn launched Live Event Ads so companies could promote their LinkedIn Live events. The ads can run before, during, and after the events, dynamically adjusting based on when the ad occurs. This isn't a new ad format; it is part of the sponsored content event ad format and includes new features specific to live events hosted on LinkedIn. For example, you can create different target audiences for each event stage.
But LinkedIn is not stopping here. According to LinkedIn, Live Events have increased by 14.4% in the past year and thought leader ads generate 2.3 times higher click-through rates than single-image ads. So, LinkedIn added some new features to take advantage of.
First, you can promote a member's (a company employee) post about your LinkedIn live event. The post becomes a thought leader ad that links directly to the event. You can also now offer a 30-second sneak peek video that can run during or after an event to drive more registrations, views, and engagement. And finally, when you are setting up the event, you can regionally target who you want to invite to the event.
Salesforce is a great example of how LinkedIn Live Event ads can drive both engagement and sales revenue. It was one of the first companies to test the new Live Event ads and thought leader ads, creating a five-event test plan in CY23 for its Dreamforce Conference.
The LinkedIn Live Event ads primarily pointed to Salesforce's LinkedIn livestream experience page, prominently displaying the website for the annual Dreamforce conference Erin Oles, SVP of Strategic Events, Salesforce, explains the intent behind the ads:
The goal for these ads was to expand our event beyond our customer base and into an ecosystem of new prospects. We used Salesforce Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud to identify profiles and target LinkedIn subscribers who had a high probability of finding our event content relevant to their role, industry, or business.
The integration between LinkedIn and Salesforce Data Cloud was mostly manual during this campaign, but the process is now streamlined and automated. Oles explains that during the Dreamforce 2023 campaign, the company was testing the integration's efficacy; now, they can leverage evergreen segments built-in Data Cloud within LinkedIn. This connector is something all Salesforce customers can use going forward.
Oles also notes that each stage of the Live Event Ads was designed to achieve different goals, but all worked together to deliver the overall view goals of the main keynote for the event:
Pre-event, we were focused on driving awareness of Dreamforce and RSVPs to the live stream and saw good traction which was a strong indicator of live and post-stream performance. During the event we drove directly to the live main keynote and post-event we drove to replays that ran consistently allowing for a global audience to view.
The results from the campaign included 3.4 million views and 2.5 million scroll views. Which stage of ads performed better? Ole says:
What we anticipated and we saw, was the post-event ads drove the most engagement and views as it had a longer tail campaign.
The ads were also successful from a Sales perspective. Connection acceptance requests increased by 24%, and InMail acceptance increased by 52%. How did Salesforce determine these numbers? Oles said they looked at members exposed to the live event ads whom the Salesforce sales team had reached out to on LinkedIn using LinkedIn Sales Navigator. The LinkedIn team calculated these numbers using internal data.
Salesforce also saw a 30% cost reduction for 5-minute+ viewers.Oles comments:
We ran tests with some of our events prior to Dreamforce 2023 and were able to establish a spend baseline. With each event, we refined our approach, and we did anticipate cost efficiencies, though the 30% did come as a positive result.
LinkedIn has become the go-to advertising platform for B2B marketers. For many, it's more successful than running Google Ads, primarily because you can target your desired audiences closely. Those LinkedIn ad audiences can become even more targeted with the Salesforce connector. It's interesting to see how the Live Event Ads and Thought Leadership Ads are evolving to support events throughout their entire lifecycle.
With the enhancements to Accelerate, more brands may use AI to help them build smarter campaigns. I haven't heard much about how good Accelerate is yet, so I look forward to seeing some good case studies.
