If you own or manage a SaaS company, chances are you’ve heard of LinkedIn Ads. They’re quite well known, however, there are quite a few misconceptions regarding their mechanics and their results.
Is it true that all LinkedIn campaigns have an expensive cost per click? How should you use targeting? We’ll answer those questions and go through other important themes in the following sections.
1 – Best practices you should know before starting
LinkedIn Ads for SaaS can be highly efficient for you when done right. We’ve generated more than 100 sales qualified leads for the SaaS company Emdesk in two months.
However, before you dive in, there are a few things you should know.
In this first section, we’ll go through the basics: the most common questions, how to avoid frequent issues, and so on.
As usual, we take into account the kind of business that we’re looking for: in this case, SaaS companies. When selling SaaS subscriptions, there are common mistakes that might end up jeopardizing your whole LinkedIn Ads campaign. We’ll go through those as well.
1.1 – The Cost of LinkedIn Ads for SaaS
LinkedIn Ads campaigns can often be seen as expensive, with advertisers saying that the cost per click is too high for the results the platform provides.
However, high costs per click or CPM (cost per thousand impressions) can be averted by improving the quality of your ads. If your ad media is only one picture, and the copy is not optimized, surely there will be a high CPC on LinkedIn, same as it would on any other advertising platform.
To avoid this, use videos on your ads, and test out different combinations of video and text. Testing will help you improve your results substantially and decrease your cost per click. Considering hiring a Linkedin ads agency can help you to setup the right campaigns and tests.
Also, now it’s easier to retarget users that have watched over 75% of your video. Retargeting tools on LinkedIn allow you to reach out to these users that have a higher chance of being interested in your service.
So, in short: use videos and retargeting. This will lower your costs and increase the conversion rate on your LinkedIn Ads for SaaS. These tactics are adapted to SaaS, as it is a highly competitive market. LinkedIn Ads are ideal for SaaS advertising campaigns, as they tend to have a B2B business model.
1.2 – Targeting the Right People
A lot of marketers that are starting out in LinkedIn Ads create their campaigns as if they were on Facebook.
However, the restrictions you add on Facebook, when used on LinkedIn, overly narrow your audience on LinkedIn, which will result in much higher costs. In order to keep your CPC low, make sure your audience is big enough.
We recommend avoiding restrictions such as blocking out specific industries or roles, because that’s not needed on LinkedIn.
To improve your targeting, we have a few tips in this section you can try out.
First of all, focus on your buyer persona. What is their profile? Are they young, middle-aged? Do they have children? What is their business about? These questions will allow you to understand targeting better and make sure that you’re not missing out on any group you should target.
Also, it’s not always a good idea to target CEOs. They might have the power to decide, but most of the time they have a lot on their plate. Reach out for VPs or managers, which should be able to assess your SaaS and forward their conclusions to the CEOs.
When writing your ad copy, make sure you speak to your ideal customer. Which problem does your product solve? Who is suffering with that problem? How do they pose their issues?
You must speak to your customers as they speak. Forget about the business jargon – your users most likely would have no idea what you are talking about.
Write conversationally and reach for the pain points your SaaS can fix.
1.3 – Spending Enough on LinkedIn Ads for SaaS
When it comes to your budget for LinkedIn ads, you have to spend money to make money.
What does this mean?
Well, when starting out, don’t cheap out on your budget. Having a higher amount to spend helps you test all possibilities (videos, copy, targeting) until you find the combination that is right for you. With a very low budget, you’ll end up wasting your money for nothing.
So, if your budget is quite low to begin with, maybe you should wait a bit longer before investing in LinkedIn Ads. Invest in SEO (as an example) and raise that capital you need, or bootstrap your way for a higher budget.
1.4 – Using LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms
LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms are great to get some hot leads in your funnel. This is how they work.
Once you create the form, it is going to be shown to users on your ads. If a user is interested, the lead gen form will populate with data from their LinkedIn profile, making it extremely easy to send their relevant information into your sales funnel.
You must be aware that having a pre-populated lead gen form makes it very easy to just send it and forget it. So, there is a high chance that when you contact those users, they won’t remember you or will not be interested in your SaaS anymore. That’s a common risk, but the number of leads you get will pay off.
Also, you need to have a marketing or sales team member that reaches out for those hot leads before they go cold. Don’t leave these prospects waiting! If you don’t have enough time to answer every single filled form, maybe this technique could wait a bit.
2 – Step by step Strategy to win with Linkedin ads for Saas
Now, we have given you the basics, but that’s not all. In this section, you’ll find a step by step strategy to create the perfect LinkedIn Ads for SaaS campaign. If you follow these tips, you’ll find LinkedIn Ads are not expensive, nor boring, nor hard to rank for.
Let’s dive in.
2.1. Create valuable content that specifically addresses the prospects’ pain points
When using LinkedIn, we want to grow our business network, see business news, and reach out for possible collaborations.
This makes an ad feel like an intrusion. I didn’t ask for this product, why am I getting an ad from them?
However, there is a way to make your ad feel welcome: creating content that addresses your prospects’ pain points. These resources can take the shape of white papers, ebooks, cheatsheets, or anything else your prospects would find valuable.
Offering this sponsored content creates a new relationship between your brand and your prospects: by showing you are knowledgeable, your prospects are most likely to trust you when they need a SaaS like yours.
So, before offering a trial (even if it’s free!) or a demo, make sure you have created a previous relationship with your prospects.
This improves your chances of getting conversions, and it also makes prospects more open to get ads from you. If you have offered them something previously, they’re more likely to listen to what you have to say now.
2.2 – Design and develop a landing page funnel
Your LinkedIn campaign will usually consist of several different optin flows according to the ad and the service offered. These will ask different questions in order to segment your prospects properly. This involves a few choices when setting up this kind of campaign. Let’s go through them.
First of all, you need to know if you should use a lead ad form (like we mentioned previously) or a separate landing page.
There are a few considerations we should take into account when it comes to this choice. LinkedIn lead gen forms are usually cheaper to create, since they are hosted on LinkedIn. So, you simply create the questions on LinkedIn, design the form and get the leads in your inbox.
It’s more expensive to start with separate landing pages because they’re hosted on your website (if you have one) and need graphic design work.. The thing is, self-hosted landing pages get a lot more qualified leads. This is due to the effort required: on LinkedIn, your form will be automatically populated, so the effort is very low.
When it comes to a landing page on your website, the extra effort your prospects will go through makes them more likely to convert when you reach out for these leads.
Now, the thank you page. You should always include a thank you page on every form you create, no matter where it is hosted.
We recommend adding an offer for the trial in your thank you page – or a link to schedule a demo, or a video with a short demo. Don’t overdo it, though. It needs to be clear for the prospect which action they should take, so only have one CTA (call to action).
2.3 – Nurture leads with follow up email automation
When some prospect fills in your form to get a freebie, or information about your service, or other valuable content (see section 2.1), that doesn’t mean that the user will convert immediately.
Actually, that is very unlikely. The common user requires 8 touch points with a brand or business before deciding to buy. That takes a while, and it’s difficult to maintain if you don’t follow up with the leads you got from the LinkedIn lead gen form.
The best way to nurture these leads is by creating a follow up email sequence – i. e. using email marketing automation.
Marketing automation is not easy to set up, but once you do it, it’s an awesome way to get sales.
First of all, write (and design) a welcome email. After your lead magnet has worked and you have a new email in your list, you should welcome them into your list and establish expectations, such as the number of emails per week or month, and other specificities.
Now, using marketing automation, you can define what happens according to the reaction your prospect had to your email. Did they click any links you had? If yes, then they are ready to move down the sales funnel.
If they didn’t respond, maybe they need an icebreaker. Ask them about what lead to them being interested in your brand, a useful feature, an interesting offer (such as a coupon code or a discount)… and so on.
What you need to know when automating your email marketing is that the ultimate goal is the conversion. Nurture your leads using email automation and you’ll find results improve.
2.4 – Set up your targeting approach
There are three ways to set your targeting approach on LinkedIn:
- Warm traffic targeting
- Cold traffic targeting
- Account-based marketing targeting
We’ll explain what each of these means in this section. Let’s go.
Warm traffic targeting means to contact users that had been in touch with you previously but didn’t convert. Add the LinkedIn Insight Tag to the most important pages on your website (such as the pricing page, products page… avoid using the homepage, as those leads are not as likely to convert). Afterwards, set up LinkedIn’s Website Retargeting in order to show ads to users that visited those pages you tagged.
Cold traffic targeting approaches users that do not know of your product yet. We recommend targeting users through Job Title – as we mentioned previously, aim for VPs and managers, not CEOs. According to LinkedIn itself, your target audience shouldn’t be under 50000 users, as that might get too specific and increase CPC (cost per click) and CPM (cost per one thousand impressions).
Account-based marketing targeting goes after specific companies or profiles that you think would be the right users for your SaaS. To make it work, you should use LinkedIn’s Account Targeting tool.
2.5 – Test your ads
We cannot stress this enough: testing is essential for LinkedIn Ads campaigns. We recommend starting out with 2 to 4 different variations in your first sponsored message or content campaign . Alternate between copy, call to action text, and your video (or image).
Then, as your best ad is shown more often, you can switch the low performance ones off. These ones can be used for further testing: change something on each of them, and test again, and again.
Your best strategy is to always iterate, which means continuous testing.
2.6 – Monitoring LinkedIn Ad Performance and Remarketing
Without monitoring and reporting, you cannot improve your results. If you want to be successful in your LinkedIn Ads for SaaS, you need to make sure you’re not barking at the wrong tree with your campaign. These are things we recommend monitoring:
- Is the CPA (cost per acquisition) affordable for you? (Ask yourself how much you are willing to pay.)
- Which campaigns or ads perform the best when it comes to cost? (Evaluate your budget for each ad)
- Is the targeting correct? Should you change your targeting to make it more precise or less narrow?
Reporting allows for improvement. Without measuring results, you’ll never know if you’re doing the right thing or if there are some things that should be changed.
Now that you have acquired the basic knowledge to create a linkedin ads strategy for saas, let’s see more advanced techniques and strategies.
3 – Advanced-Level Strategies: Leveraging Messaging and Audience targeting
3.1 – Linkedin Ads Funnel Strategies Focused on Consumption over Conversion
We all know that most SaaS products require multiple touchpoints, and the buyer journey isn’t linear. The old playbook that focuses solely on conversion at every stage of the funnel is now irrelevant. B2B SaaS marketing results take time and it’s a patient game. In today’s digital landscape potential buyers engage with content in various ways and at different stages of their decision-making process.
Conversions are what you want, not what your buyers want. People who download content do not want to talk to sales or are not ready to buy your solution. Instead of expecting a straightforward path to conversion, you should focus on provide buyers with the information they need.
→ Provide value for free continuously
→ Educated your audience
→ Build your Brand authority
So instead of focusing on promoting content that converts, start by thinking:
– What would “wow” my audience?
– What would be useful for them?
– How do we get the market to know who we are?
– Who do we ensure our buyers know the main benefits of our product?
– How do we give our buyers more ‘reasons to believe’ that we are a subject matter expert in our space?
– How do we get more people to come to us ready to buy?
How can you shift your focus from direct conversion to driving content consumption that nurtures and educates your audience throughout their decision-making process?
Firstly, forget about using linkedin ads for demo campaigns only. Your whole Linkedin ads campaign strategy must include some foundational campaigns always on with the goal of consumption of product and company to aid research. These campaigns should talk about:
1. Your primary offer – why you exist and who for
2. Specific use cases of your product
3. How you stack up against your top competitors
4. *Relevant* testimonials from customers
5. How you’re priced (transparently)
6. What can they expect if they do meet with you
That’s basically why demand gen is for. It is not easy and takes time – that is why most don’t do it.
What kind of ads to use for these foundational campaigns?
The best formats are the one that are oriented to engagement like:
- Sponsored post ad for Case studies, product marketing focused on capabilities, problems, or benefits
- Videos that can be founder led video, product tour
Expert Tip: Videos are the fastest way to build a retargeting audience. Retargeting audiences based on video viewers can be collected more quickly than those based on website visits or engagement. Not only faster but also less expensive because the cost per view is much cheaper than the cost per click for a single image. Make sure to choose the “video views” campaigns and build your retargeting audience from video viewers.
Unlike for the foundationals campaigns your conversion and retargeting campaigns will use these formats.
- Sponsored post
- Thought leads ads
- Spotlight ads
- Text ads
Expert Tip: If you have a high-ticket size product and/or long sales cycles one of your primary focuses should be creating first-party intent data of the companies that showed interest. Because you can’t sell with just a couple of touchpoints, what you need is to leverage your exposure to all relevant stakeholders throughout the buyer’s journey. You can create these first-party intent data audiences directly in LinkedIn Ads Campaign Manager using the demographics reports to identify the ICP companies that are most engaged with your ads.
3.2 – Accurate Targeting
A common mistake we have seen over the years with the audience targeting is focusing their targeting 100% on the decision makers and not on the people that feel the problems.
The issue with this approach is that all good decision maker will trust their team to advise them on the best product/vendor. You will first need to convince the end users which is the problem or has been delegated to solve the problem.
The smaller the company, the more the decision-maker is deeply involved in daily operations. They often experience the challenges firsthand and are actively seeking solutions. Adjust your targeting strategy accordingly when reaching out to SMBs.
The bigger the company or/and the longer the sales cycles, end users are the ones who introduce these products to the decision makers.This is why you should add “manager” or “senior” to your seniority audience attributes because they only want to target managers and above. However, this is a big mistake.
Expert Tip: Test different audience criteria separated into different campaigns to target the same audience: [campaign 1 – interests] , [campaign 2 – job titles], [campaign 3 – job functions], etc. Sometimes you can get totally different results depending on the audience criteria you’re using. Maybe the job titles are missing some members of your ideal audience that you can capture with skills or functions criteria.
3.3 – The Art of LinkedIn Ads Copywriting for SaaS Businesses
The SaaS industry is highly competitive, making it challenging to break through and establish your brand. Don’t just create more content and ads randomly to see what works.Instead, make sure your content and messaging align with a bigger theme or narrative. Most of the time teams work separately trying different things without a clear direction, which can confuse your ideal customers.
Everything you do—events, website, ads, content—should follow a consistent theme or narrative. This should be guided by the CMO, CEO, or Product Marketing team.
Using ClickCease as an example:
Identify Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): Focus on a segment that fits your product well now, like marketing managers at B2B SaaS companies in the U.S. with 50-200 employees who spend $10k+/month on ads.
Establish a Theme: Create a central narrative to address, such as “40% of clicks are fake—bots, click farms, and competitors are wasting your money. Protect your ads with ClickCease.”
Create Core Messages: Develop specific messages that support the overall theme.
Once you have the narrative ready, you need to create different ad copy angles. Whenever you write a LinkedIn ad, it’s your job to remove all psychological barriers that might prevent a potential customer from making a purchase. Put yourself in the user’s shoes and start answering some of the questions below to generate ideas.
– What does the product do?
– What outcome does it drive?
– How do I show them what it does?
– How can I show how others use it?
– Why is the problem important now?
– What data do I have to prove it works?
– How does it compare to how I do things today?
– How does it solve the problem in a different way?
Then you’ll be able to quickly come up with repeatable ideas.
Let’s take a look at some introductory text templates and formulas we use for our SaaS clients.
1) {What the buyer persona will learn/discover}. {Outcomes of the content}
2) {Pain point question to your buyer persona}.{ solution/benefits}
3) Hey {persona} + {question they want answered}. {how your content answers it}
4) { Impactful Stat or number} {how your content answers it}
4 – Common Setup Mistakes to Avoid
Grouping all targeted countries together in one campaign.
You should regularly monitor campaign performance by country. Check the demographics report to see which countries are generating the most clicks and impressions. Often, you’ll find that certain countries with more engaged populations consume most of your budget leading to higher CPCs and insufficient exposure for your top-priority regions. To avoid wasting budget consider separating countries into different campaigns to better control spending and target the regions that matter most to you.
Using the wrong campaign objective
If you want to generate conversion on a landing page never use ” website conversions” as objective for Linkedin ads, especially if you don’t already have an account with tons of conversions. Your cost per click and cost per conversion will likely be much higher on website conversions than it would be for just traditional website visits objective.
If your goal is to get maximize exposure for your target audience without increasing website visits we recommend combining the “brand awareness” objective with the ” reach ” bidding optimization.
Audience expansion enabled
Enabling Audience Expansion on LinkedIn allows the platform to extend your reach beyond the specific targeting parameters you’ve set for your campaign, potentially reaching an audience that doesn’t match your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
Audience network enabled
The LinkedIn Audience Network is a display network of partner websites and applications that shows your ads outside of LinkedIn. This results in low-quality traffic and spam bots that can quickly consume a huge portion of your budget. It’s recommended to disable this feature every time.
Using “maximum delivery” bidding strategy
Avoid automatic bidding, choose Manual CPC & start bidding lower, if you don’t spend your daily budget, increase the CPC gradually until you spend your daily budget everyday. If you’re able to fill your whole daily budget with the lowest recommend bid, you’ve set it at the cheapest cost per click for your ideal audience.
Targeting a Too Large Audience Size
Keep your audience on LinkedIn tight. There’s no reason to target more people than necessary. We like to keep our audiences between about 20,000 and 80,000. There’s no reason to make that broader if they’re not a good fit.
Running Too Many Ads in the Same Campaign
Better to test 4 or ads 5 at the same time per campaign. You’ll see quicker the winners and also avoid to get ads without impressions. Use square images for both mobile and desktop.
Wrapping Up
There are many ways to create a LinkedIn Ads campaign. However, not all of them work when it comes to advertising SaaS.
In this article, we explained a few of the common misconceptions about LinkedIn Ads and offered a step by step guide to get big wins on this platform.
Are you ready to start collecting those leads? Let’s go for it!
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Even if Facebook and Twitter ads are way cheaper than LinkedIn ads, this platform is worth the money. You can still create successful advertsising campaigns with small budgets. … LinkedIn Sponsored Content is the best way to generate qualified leads without breaking the bank.
Create valuable content targeting the prospects’ pain points and nurturing leads with follow up email automation is the winning strategy to use.
If you’d like to learn more about how we help B2B SaaS and Tech companies grow their MRR through LinkedIn advertising, contact us online or send us an email today at info@getuplead.com to speak with someone on our SaaS PPC agency team.
Related articles
- Linkedin advertising services: All you need to know before hiring an agency
- Linkedin Ads Expert: How to choose the best one?
- How to Use LinkedIn Ads for Account-Based Marketing
- How Much Do LinkedIn Ads Cost in 2022?
- How to Run an Effective LinkedIn Ad Campaign: A Step-By-Step Guide
- The Complete Guide to LinkedIn Ad Types & Formats
- The 18 Most Important LinkedIn Ads Metrics for Measuring ROI
- LinkedIn Ads International: Tips and Best Practices
- How to Promote a Webinar on LinkedIn: An Easy Guide
