Before creating your paid marketing ads it is important to strategize a plan of action. The secret to success lies within timing, specific goals, desired outcomes, and understanding your buyer persona - all of which need to be identified before you launch your campaign.
It can be tempting to dive straight into the creative side of marketing, but any reputable LinkedIn Ads agency will tell you that the planning is just as important as the execution.
As a B2B organization, no doubt you’re already familiar with the wonders of LinkedIn as a marketing platform. But depending on where your brand is in its life stage, timing is everything. We look at the 5 best techniques to market your products via LinkedIn Ads.
When Should You Market Your Products on LinkedIn?
Before building your lead-gen or product-focused content, your audience needs to understand two simple factors: who you are and what you do.
This means approaching your marketing with brand awareness in mind. A common mistake many startups make is:
- “We need an e-book”
- “We need more content”
- “We need to build the top-of-funnel”
Although this content may lead to some (or even a lot of) engagement, and possibly some top-of-funnel leads, it’s likely that these prospects will be scratching their heads saying, “I’m still not sure what they do.” To avoid this, start by building a clear picture of your audience. Tools like Sales Navigator to get emails, CRM integration softwares, or Google Analytics for audience insights can help you target the right people and ensure your content speaks directly to their needs
When you are an early-stage SaaS brand (series A-B), you should be focusing on product marketing: What your product does, how it works, and the outcome it produces (many brands make the mistake of pushing gated top-of-funnel content only - avoid this).
Instead, before you begin creating your content, ask yourself the following questions:
- What is the product & how does it work?
- What result does it generate?
- How do we demonstrate this result?
- How do we demonstrate how to use it?
- What problem is the audience experiencing
- How do we prove the product works sufficiently?
- How is it superior to current problem-solving methods?
Once you have these answers, you'll find that you can continually generate consistent and lucrative ideas that you can channel with your marketing.
What Content Can You Create First?
Let’s look at the type of content you should be creating as a startup SaaS brand. Some reputable ideas include:
- Creating a product tour
- Building abstractions of the product
- Having influencers show how they use it/benefit from it
- Sharing proprietary data from your product
- Showing plenty of use cases on how can you use it
- Creating product marketing pages (use case, persona, industry, etc.)
6 Ways to Leverage LinkedIn Ads For Your Product Marketing
By implementing these 5 proven tactics, you can create LinkedIn ads that successfully market your products to an audience that can benefit from what you have to offer.
- Create ‘Product Capability’ Ads
Resist the urge to lead with ‘benefit only’ content in your ads’ message. If you saw an ad that said, “Unlock better decisions," could you tell what the company does? Probably not.
Many SaaS brands spend too much time pushing the benefit or outcome of what their product drives in their ads, which isn’t always the best approach, because it doesn’t identify a problem your audience is experiencing and how the product can remedy it.
The ‘benefit only’ approach is typically designed to target the C-suite users only, as opposed to the audience who will actually book a demo to learn more (which is rarely C-suite LinkedIn users).
While benefit messaging is important, it will not serve you until later in the sales cycle or after the buyer has a full understanding of what your product does.
When you are targeting a cold audience on LinkedIn, you need to focus on the capability of what your product does first. You need to show your audience the problem they can solve with your product.
Focus on outlining your product's core capabilities when targeting cold audiences and be specific with the headlines: the more differentiated the capability/the better-perceived need of the capability, the better.
- Demonstrate How You Can Problem-Solve With Your Product
Capability ads are extremely powerful for SaaS startups because they highlight the reasons and motivations for using a product over outdated tools or methods to solve a problem.
The core promise of most SaaS solutions is their technology that solves issues more easily and efficiently than existing older products could (e.g.: Excel). The simplicity and direct comparison in the "before/after" ad format make these messages resonate better and are particularly convincing.
You can nail these ads by identifying the problem your product is going to solve and presenting the solution in a simpler way. By doing this you allow the user to see immediately the benefits.
- Present a Key Question - Then Answer it With Your Product
Present a question that is on the mind of your buyer and then answer with your product. This kind of ad is a classic example of how to grab your reader’s attention and demonstrate you understand their needs.
The best questions are always about the lead, not the product: focus on their problems and their desired remedy. You might want them to learn more about your new product, but your questions should be about the solutions/improvements your product provides.
- Reveal a Problem They Aren't Aware of - Then Explain How Your Product Solves it
Identify the challenges your leads face. Knowing the pain points of your audience is the golden ticket to creating compelling and successful LinkedIn ads.
Once you’ve outlined this, you can then introduce your product as the solution to their problem. Yes, you can briefly touch on the benefits and value, etc., but the core focus should be that your product will eliminate a vexation of theirs.
Bonus Tips:
Keep it factual: Consider using statistics and facts to differentiate your product, emphasize quality, and back up your claims.
Keep it simple: Stick to the key points and don’t over-elaborate. Over-explained messaging turns prospects off. Also, avoid hyperbole.
- Look Into Thought Leader Ads
Thought Leader Ads allow members to post and promote ads from their employees’ personal LinkedIn profiles, as opposed to from the brand’s own page exclusively. These ads look similar to organic posts, except they will say, "Promoted by {company name}" below the employee's name. By promoting content directly from employees' profiles, Thought Leader Ads add a layer of authenticity to your whole paid marketing strategy.
- Use Influencers to Demonstrate Your Products
LinkedIn is in the process of launching non-employee-focused thought leader ads. Up until now, users can only promote the content of an employer/employee. However, you are now able to promote posts of unassociated users of your company that are relevant in some way.
For example:
- Investors
- Influencers
- Customers
- Partners
- Affiliates
These open the gate to B2B-using influencers to put their relevance and popularity at the service of your product. To find influencer contacts, you can use the LinkedIn email finder tool. Similar to Instagram, an influencer can show the product to your audience and explain the benefits of it.
Conclusion
LinkedIn ads are a crucial tool for SaaS brands - especially in their infancy - but it is important to understand what you should be marketing, how you should be marketing it, and when.
By honing these 5 invaluable ads tactics, you will create content that is in keeping with your strategy, and overall goals, and with your customers’ needs in mind.
