As LinkedIn has made a name for itself as a social media platform for professionals, it has simultaneously become an excellent platform for advertising to those professionals. Its professional user base and highly precise targeting ability makes LinkedIn a social media channel that is uniquely suited for B2B SaaS brands, since you can reach decision-makers with unprecedented ease than ever before.
Investing in LinkedIn Ads for a B2B SaaS business, therefore, is a no-brainer, especially given the long lifecycles of B2B marketing. It can drive measurable growth for your business, but only if you understand how to do it well.
In this blog, we’ll break down how to master LinkedIn for B2B marketing, especially for SaaS companies – and how you can scale and grow.
Why LinkedIn Ads for B2B SaaS Work
There are a number of routes for B2B SaaS marketing in digital spaces. Using search and display ads through Google, Microsoft Bing, and AWS is a tried-and-true method. Social media advertising on platforms that are more consumer-oriented is another one; just because Facebook is historically more of a B2C platform doesn’t mean that you can’t advertise for your B2B brand on it. After all, stakeholders are people, and they use these platforms in their free time just like anyone else.
But LinkedIn is special. When you advertise for a B2B brand on Facebook, you can target people based on quite a few aspects – but there’s always the risk that you’re spending money showing ads to targets who really don’t matter as much.
With LinkedIn, you know that you are marketing directly to a high concentration of professionals and decision-makers, especially in industries you’re targeting. LinkedIn ads for SaaS and other businesses can be directly targeted to users based on things like industry, company size, job title, or seniority.
The B2B SaaS marketing cycle is long and can be tricky to manage with multiple stakeholders needing to weigh in. LinkedIn lets you target those stakeholders – directly.
An Ideal Platform for Long B2B Sales Cycles
Unlike B2C brands, which can really benefit from a consumer purchasing on a whim, the B2B sales cycle tends to be much longer, requiring buy-in from many different parties and the approval of people at multiple levels.
LinkedIn is a perfect platform for these extended sales cycles for a number of reasons. The advanced targeting features we discussed in the above section mean that you can closely nurture relationships through multiple touchpoints and different types of ads.
You can also publish your own content on your own LinkedIn channels. Imagine that a key stakeholder at a company you’re targeting sees one of your ads. Curious, they venture over to your own LinkedIn account, where they see excellent, thought-provoking content that suggests that your team isn’t just great at delivering what you say you will – you’re also a source of interesting thought leadership.
LinkedIn also offers a robust suite of ad formats that mean you can keep your brand front and center in front of your target audience without feeling repetitive or doing the same thing over and over again. Sponsored content, InMail, and other forms of advertising are great to create multiple touch points that eventually lead your audience to make a purchase.
How to Start – and Scale – Your B2B LinkedIn Ads Campaign
When you’re putting together your LinkedIn marketing strategy for a B2B SaaS brand, there are ways to get started in a way that will let you continue to grow your campaign at scale.
Build a Strong Foundation
To paraphrase an idiom – would you build a castle on sand?
Any LinkedIn campaign, whether your business is SaaS or otherwise, must start with a robust, solid foundation. This includes:
- Defining clear goals (e.g., lead generation, brand awareness, or demo requests)
- Setting up tracking and analytics
- LinkedIn Insight Tag
- Any integrations with the CRM of your brand’s choice
- Designing your campaigns so that they can be set up to use A/B testing to find what works and what doesn’t
Who are your target personas? What are the pain points that your audience experiences that your solution can help them solve? What are the unique selling points that differentiate your solution from your competitors’ – are you more affordable, are you easier to use, do you solve other problems?
If these sound like the same sorts of questions you should ask yourself before you start any B2B SaaS ad campaign, well, it’s because they are. But these questions are standard because they are important – and even if you’ve already executed great ad campaigns on platforms like Google, they’re worth revisiting for LinkedIn due to the unique nature of the platform.
In other words, you know that your personas might include people at different levels of seniority – decision-makers in the C-suite as well as managers and workers beneath them who might be able to bring awareness of your solution up the chain of command – but how will you target them with B2B LinkedIn Ads?
Optimize Your Ad Targeting
…and speaking of which, that brings us to your ad targeting.
Start by refining your audience segments. You should be able to determine your ideal audience on the basis of:
- Industry (if you sell tool-tracking software for construction businesses, you probably don’t need to target retail or software companies, in other words)
- Company size (are you looking for SMBs or international enterprises?)
- What seniority are you marketing to? Are you targeting high-level stakeholders who might be more expensive to get in front of but who will be more relevant to purchase decisions, or people lower on the totem pole?
You can segment out different campaigns to target different audiences, so don’t worry about finding the single perfect audience to carry your entire B2B SaaS LinkedIn ad campaign. By targeting your campaigns to the right ad – for instance, imagine less senior workers enjoy collaboration tools that make it easier to get their jobs done, while more senior executives would be won over by messaging about how much money you save the business – you’ll be more effective at designing efficient LinkedIn ad campaigns that scale.
Create Engaging Ad Creatives
When you’re coming up with copy and visuals for your B2B LinkedIn ads, follow general best practices for effective, compelling ads.
Emphasize the pain points that individuals and businesses might face. Use emotionally charged language here – it’s very effective!
Think about: Why was your solution created? What frustration did its original creators have that they went, “right, we need something to address this.” Looking at positive customer reviews is a great way to pull messaging from real-world people your brand has helped, because you can find people talking about the frustrations they were dealing with that they have left in the past thanks to your SaaS.
Once you’ve nailed the emotional connection, emphasize how your solution is, well, a solution – it will take their pain points and ameliorate or eliminate them entirely. These are great ways to connect to workers at all levels of seniority, who all probably have experienced frustration dealing with the things you’re talking about.
Pair emotionally engaging copy with appealing, eye-catching visuals and an effective, clear CTA (“Download our Free Guide” or “Start the Conversation”), and you’re on your way to having effective, engaging B2B LinkedIn Ads.
Scale your Campaign Budgets – Strategically
You’ve got your LinkedIn ad campaign all set up and ready to go. Should you just dump your entire budget into it all at once?
Well, no. You can, but we wouldn’t really recommend it. Instead, start more slowly, and incrementally increase budgets based on performance metrics. This is a great time to A/B test the parts of your campaign from ad copy to landing page design, because it lets you figure out, very early on, what is more effective and what needs a little tweaking.
Based on CPL (cost per lead) benchmarks, you can adjust your campaigns accordingly. Scale up those that are performing well, and put those that need adjustment on the backburner. (We’ll discuss some valuable metrics to use in a moment).
Note that LinkedIn actually has some very powerful automated bidding features, so if you’re new to running LinkedIn Ads for a B2B SaaS brand, or anything else really, you can use those to start. They may not perform as well as a dedicated veteran full-time LinkedIn ads expert will, but they’ll do solidly if you don’t already have one of those on your team.
Harness the Power of Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
We haven’t even touched on one of the best things about B2B advertising on LinkedIn: It makes ABM – marketing specifically to individuals from target businesses you’ve identified as potential customers – extremely effective.
We’ve previously written about how you can supercharge your LinkedIn ABM, so we won’t go into it in too much detail in this post. If you want to learn more about using ABM on LinkedIn, check out our other blog post! The “too long; didn’t read” version goes something like this:
- Add a list of target accounts identified by your sales team; you can upload a list of up to 300,000 companies and LinkedIn recommends 1,000 at minimum.
- Define your target audience; this is what we discussed before – locations, job titles, seniorities, etc.
- Choose ad types that best fit with your audience, like Sponsored Content ads, InMail message ads, and more.
- Consider the stages of the sales funnel. Don’t always offer BoFu (bottom of the funnel) offers designed to convert; you may need to have longer sales cycles and nurture prospects through the stages of purchasing, from awareness to consideration and so on.
- Set up your ads – you can follow the steps we’ve outlined before, or use some other handy guide.
- Nurture and convert the leads that come in.
- Optimize for better future results.
ABM is a very potent, very powerful marketing tool that LinkedIn enables extremely well. Read the blog linked above for more information on how to use ABM as part of your B2B SaaS LinkedIn Ad Campaigns.
How to Measure the Success of your LinkedIn for B2B Marketing Campaigns
So, your campaigns are off and rolling. Great!
How do you know if they worked?
You should know the most important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you should watch for to determine your campaign’s success. Here are some of the most common KPIs that you should track and assess – and while they are certainly worth looking at, we’ll also dissect some less-common, but arguably more important, KPIs:
- Conversion rate. This one is very simple. What percentage of people click on your ad and then, after going to your landing page, take the desired action (downloading an ebook, signing up for a demo, or becoming a customer)?
- Engagement metrics. These represent how well your ad is reaching the audience. What were the impressions (how many people saw your ad), and what was the click-through rate (CTR)? A low CTR means that your ads aren’t doing the job of convincing people to learn more about your solution – and while it usually isn’t directly impactful to your bottom line, since most ads are pay-per-click, so you only pay for clicks rather than impressions, it can still indicate a weakness in need of shoring up.
- Cost per lead (CPL) and cost per customer (CPC). How much money, on average, does it take for you to get someone to sign up for a demo or download gated content like an ebook? How much money, on average, does it take for someone to become a full paying customer?
- Return on ad spend (ROAS). At the end of the day, if you spend $1 in marketing, and it doesn’t lead, somewhere down the line, to $1 in revenue, your marketing is failing you. You need to spend money to make money, yes, but you need to be ultimately making money. Calculating the overall ROAS is critical to evaluating your marketing metrics… but how can you do that?
Let’s look at two underused metrics that are very helpful at understanding the big picture of your advertising costs.
LTV (Lifetime Value) and CAC (Cost of Acquisition)
These are ways to understand both your expenses and your revenues in aggregate, so that you can get a good sense of how your B2B LinkedIn ad campaigns are performing.
Lifetime Value, or LTV, represents the total value of any one given account, on average. If your average account pays $10,000 a year for your SaaS service, and stays with you for about 5 years before moving on, the LTV of an average account is $50,000.
- Formula: LTV = Average Revenue per Customer x Customer Lifespan.
Given that SaaS brands, by their nature, use recurring revenue, it is important to understand how long your clients stay with you. Obviously, we’d all want our customers to be with us until the heat death of the universe, but that’s probably not realistic. So, look at the median.
Cost of Acquisition, or CAC, represents the opposite: How much money does it take, on average, to acquire a customer from beginning or end?
This isn’t CPL, or even CPC, both of which are typically calculated monthly and may not accurately reflect the complete cost. For instance, CPC is typically calculated by measuring that month’s budget vs. that month’s total won opps, but in the B2B SaaS world, the sales cycle takes longer than a month, usually!
Consequently, to get a better sense of your average CAC, you should evaluate it on a quarterly or even annual basis, which will give you a more accurate sense of total spending vs. total revenue. Furthermore, you should also evaluate any other sales or marketing costs, like total team wages and budget, to get the most accurate measurement possible.
- Formula: CAC = Total Ad Spend + Sales/Marketing Costs ÷ Number of New Customers Acquired.
If your LTV is higher than your CAC, your company is profiting and growing. If it isn’t, you’re falling behind and need to adjust things, pronto.
What’s the Ideal LTV:CAC Ratio for SaaS?
This, of course, depends on your business and your expenditures. No two businesses are identical, and therefore, there isn’t a 100% foolproof answer to this question. However, in general, a LTV:CAC ratio of 3:1 for SaaS companies is something to shoot for if you really want to be growing your business. Below this, and you’ll grow slowly or not at all.
LinkedIn Advertising for B2B SaaS Brands: A No-Brainer
LinkedIn is a powerful platform when it comes to advertising, and if you’re a B2B SaaS company, you should be working out your LinkedIn marketing strategy yesterday. But, while the best time to start was yesterday, as the saying goes, the second-best time to start is tomorrow.
Do you want to start excelling with B2B LinkedIn ads but don’t have the time or expertise to put together a winning LinkedIn ads strategy for B2B? Why not work with the experts?
SevenAtoms is a proven B2B and SaaS LinkedIn marketing and advertising agency that knows how to help you precisely target your ideal clients – and convert them into paying customers. Give us a call today for a free consultation on your LinkedIn marketing strategy and campaigns!
