If you’re wondering how to create a Linkedin retargeting campaign, this article identifies the different Linkedin retargeting strategies, and shows you everything you need to know to create killer ads to retarget old leads.
LinkedIn Ads Retargeting: Is It Right for Your Brand?
B2B brands who rely on lead conversion benefit heavily from retargeting campaigns, so if this is you – read on.
Leads can often be one-off, so it’s important to keep a narrative with previously converted clients to ensure they keep returning again and again. Also, retargeting campaigns can help target “cold” leads and hone in on your mid/bottom-funnel channels to maximise your conversions.
Retargeting Strategies for LinkedIn
When it comes to drawing your marketing focus back on previous audiences, you will need an airtight strategy to ensure your campaign is a success – and some of the best strategies include:
(Lost) Lead Generation
In other words, retargeting leads that didn’t quite go the full way with completing a lead gen form.
Your LinkedIn data will inform you when audiences began filling in a lead gen form – even if they didn’t submit it for whatever reason (it could be they were interrupted, or a more pressing issue arose – and not necessarily because they changed their mind about engaging with your brand). By retargeting them, they may then get the chance they need to complete the form submission.
There are two scenarios here: either the lead opened but did not complete the form on the LinkedIn ad, or they opened but did not complete the form on your website. Here’s how to build a strategy to tackle both scenarios:
Separate your audience into two categories: the targets (those who aimed to complete the form via LinkedIn) and the exclusions (those who did complete the form). Here’s what to do next:
- Create your audience list based on excluding those who didn’t aim to complete the form via LinkedIn.
- Go to ‘Create Audience’ > ‘Lead Gen Forms’.
- Name your audiences after choosing each: “Anyone who opened your lead gen form,” and “Only people who submitted your lead gen form.”
- Start creating your campaign and include the appropriate audience.
- Go to ‘Campaign Manager’ > ‘Create Campaign’ > ‘Audience’ > ‘Retargeting’ > ‘Lead Gen Form’.
- Choose the audience who opened the form.
- Click ‘Exclude’ via ‘Audience Selector’.
You will now be able to see another tool which allows you to select another audience to be excluded from being able to see your ad.
- Create your excluded audience (those who did submit the form) and then click ‘Retargeting’ > ‘Lead Gen Form’. This will allow you to pick/exclude those members who do not need to be targeted.
Website
Hopefully you included an Insight Tag to monitor the engagement of your audience once they landed on your website via your LinkedIn ad campaign. If you haven’t, you won’t be able to create a retargeting campaign for those who clicked on but did not submit a lead gen form on your website, because LinkedIn has no way of tracking data on non-native sites without this Tag.
So, assuming you do indeed have your Tag, you will then have a list of would-be leads. Here’s what to do next:
- Head to ‘Create Audiences’ on LinkedIn and then ‘Websites’ and again, create two audiences as per the above instructions. You will be using the URL from your lead gen form to create your target audience. To create your excluded list, you will gather the data from the URL on the “Thank You For Submitting” page of those who completed the form.
- Create a new campaign. For the target audience for this campaign, go to ‘Retargeting’ > ‘Website’ > choose the lead gen form URL audience you just created.
- Click on ‘Exclude’ > ‘Retargeting’ > ‘Website’ and click the ‘Thank You’ page URL audience.
Your campaign should now be good to go and ready to target the right audience.
Abandoned Cart
Naturally, this strategy focuses on leads who abandoned their cart on your website without making any purchases, making them an ideal market to retarget.
As with above, you’ll need to create two audiences. The target audience is the users who added items to their cart but did not purchase them, and naturally, your excluded audience is those who did make a purchase. Here’s what to do:
- Create your two audiences: the targets and the excluded individuals. The URLs needed are the ‘add to cart’ page and the ‘Thank You For Shopping’ (or whatever is the variant) page.
- Create your campaign, first focusing on your target audience by going to ‘Retarget’ > ‘Website’ and adding your “add to cart” URL folks.
- To input your excluded audience, head to ‘Exclude’ > ‘Retarget’ > ‘Website’ and add your “Thank You” URL folks.
Your campaign is ready to be launched.
Blog Readers & Downloads
If your website features a blog (which it should) you can dangle a carrot in the form of some kind of downloadable content (such as a newsletter or eBook) in order to convert a blog reader into a customer.
This content must be relative to your brand and, of course, the customer. Ergo, the customer should want to download it because it will benefit them in some way. Once they’ve done that, you can then aim to convert.
And again – you’ll need to create your two audiences. Your target audience will be those who read your blog (but do not spend any money) and your excluded audience will be those who have already been converted.
- Click on ‘Create Audience’ on LinkedIn and then ‘Website’. You will now be able to create a Matched Audience via your blog URL.
- Head back to ‘Create Audiences’ and click on ‘Upload’ to input your target audience list.
- Start building your campaign, focusing on your blog URL audience, and then click on ‘Exclude’ to input the data of your current leads.
- Click ‘Save’.
Retargeting with Better Offers
This strategy focuses on previously converted members and entices them to convert once again for something bigger and better (AKA, to spend more money).
Because you have already convinced these customers to invest in your brand, you have the advantage of not needing to go in with heavy marketing for “cold” audiences. You’ve converted them once, and you can do it again. The focus here is that there are more excellent investments that they need to get their hands on.
And it’s a super easy strategy:
- Create a Matched Audience via uploading a list of current/previous customers.
- Start building your campaign.
Utilise Google Ads To Target Site Visitors
You can use both LinkedIn and Google Ads to work in unison with each other, so if you’re considering harnessing PPC (pay-per-click) ads via Google Ads, you can use your LinkedIn Insight Tag to track your lead engagements and segment your traffic into audiences, which will be an invaluable tool for all LinkedIn retargeting campaigns. It will also mean you can profit from both advertising methods.
When building your audiences, you can play around with various combinations, e.g.: an audience who has visited your site via a PPC ad on Google and a lead gen form non-completer from your LinkedIn campaign.
How to Create a Killer Remarketing Campaign
Before building your LinkedIn remarketing campaign, it is important you focus on advertising via the right option for your specific campaign. Based on our experience as a LinkedIn advertising agency Here are your options:
Sponsored InMail
These ads appear in LinkedIn users’ (your audience – not just random members!) inboxes in the guise of a message. They are personalised, so they don’t come across as spammy, meaning your readers are more likely to give it some attention and (hopefully) interact.
They also aren’t sent from your brand’s LinkedIn page; they will be from a member of your company (e.g.: the CEO or head of marketing, etc.). This is extremely effective because it often grabs the reader’s attention better than standard advertising.
Lead Gen Forms
We mentioned these earlier. These are designed to garner leads’ information in a way that is quick and easy for them to do (LinkedIn autofills the info) and gives you the data you need to create audiences in future.
Mid-Funnel Retargeting
This area is specifically designed for retargeting because it allows you to hone in on previous leads and create content that will entice them to convert. You can create any content here (videos, testimonials, whitepapers, – anything that is considered ‘engaging’) to focus on reigning in previous leads.
You will need to ensure you set this as ‘sponsored content’, as it is ‘native content’.
Contact Targeting
This method allows you to upload your company’s contacts (such as an email list) to create a specific audience to tailor your campaign to. This is ideal for brands who have a large contact list, or whose campaign target audience is going to be larger. It also has a really good click-through rate on the platform.
Conclusion
Once you’ve identified whether a retargeting ad campaign can help elevate your brand (and ROI) by keeping a healthy, happy, profitable narrative with current or former leads, you can achieve maximum conversion success.
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 team.
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