CXL Growth Marketing Review (Week 10)

Hey there!

Welcome back to the CXL Growth Marketing course review.

To give you a brief, I am taking this course on Growth Marketing by CXL. Every week, I publish my review on what I have learned from this course.

In this blog, I am going to walk you through Linkedin Ads.

LinkedIn can help you tap into a specialized and high-quality professional audience. Brands that advertise on LinkedIn are perceived to be 92% more professional than competitors, too.

But it’s not the right choice for everyone. Done wrong, you’ll blow through your budget and waste time. Looking professional doesn’t matter if your ad doesn’t reach your target audience and drive conversions.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to make your ads budget go further, whether your products are right for LinkedIn, and how to measure your success. We’ll also look at some examples of LinkedIn ads that get it right and how you can emulate them.

A LinkedIn Ads strategy for better ROI: Advertise high-value products and services

According to LinkedIn advertising expert, AJ Wilcox, you can expect to pay $7-$11 per click. For comparison, the average CPC on Facebook is $1.72 (across all industries) and $2.52 for B2B specifically.

If you don’t take the higher cost into account, it can be harder to generate a positive ROI from the first transaction. The upside is that LinkedIn is associated with some of the world’s top-performing businesses.

72% of the Fortune 1000 are B2B companies. That means that there’s plenty of business to be won — even if LinkedIn views come at a higher cost.

What will this course teach you?

• Know how to craft an offer that stands out
• Be able to create & manage killer ads and audiences on LinkedIn
• Scale your audience, avoid your competition, and build wildly effective retargeting audiences
• Troubleshoot & test your funnel for optimal performance and efficient management — so you waste zero time
• Craft irresistible offers that drive high-volume clicks & conversions
• How to select optimal audience sizes — which is crucial to generate the right mix of hyper-targeted data
• The types of offers that drive interest and conversion — without appearing sleazy or scammy
• How to systematically test offer variations — so you’re always improving performance
• How to renew interest in your offers over time — to avoid fatiguing your prospects & continually generate results

Types of Linkedin ads

Sponsored Content (these show up in your news feed, just like posts, and can be delivered as static images, videos, or carousels)

Text Ads (copy that appears either above or on the right-hand side of the news feed. These ads are only visible on desktop)

Sponsored Messaging (come in two forms — message ads that look like an email or LinkedIn message, or conversation ads that look like a chatbot and give people action choices)

Dynamic Ads (appear on the right-hand side of the news feed like text ads, but feature creative elements (like images and GIFs). These are also only visible on desktop)

The products or services that do (and don’t) work for LinkedIn Ads

Before you dive into a high-budget strategy, think about whether your product or service is suited for LinkedIn ads. A high CPC means that only high-value products and services (that appeal to LinkedIn’s professional members) will produce a fast ROI.

But a higher CPC can be prohibitive for smaller businesses and lower-priced products and services. For example, advertising a $200 product or service is only practical if you are happy to get your return over the long term.

Also, consider the benchmark conversion rate. On LinkedIn, it sits somewhere between 5%-15%.

A high CPC followed by a conversion rate of ~10% may not make your business its money back on a campaign. That’s the cold hard truth.

Still, a LinkedIn ad strategy can pay back dividends if your products or services produce a high monthly recurring revenue or you sell high-ticket items.

Lead generation forms

· Lead gen forms are a very important part of advertising and collecting target audience’s response and information. LinkedIn provides us with this. The lead gen form can be added to a sponsored content ad or a sponsored InMail ad.

· Used to bypass the landing page and increase conversion rates — 10–30% higher than other ad types. However, the quality of leads sharply decreases because with lower engagement, users do not recall what they have filled out or engaged with.

· Although there are integrations available, like Eloqua, Marketo, Liveramp, it is really difficult to work with, in the background.

Content-Type

Now that we have seen the different types of ads that LinkedIn provides, we will have a short look at what type of content works best. This is explained with the help of the friction funnel.

As the time and effort required to engage with the ad increases, so does the friction to interact. For example, it will be easier to just show a promotional message versus getting an email address from your target audience. In the same way, asking your audience to register for a webinar is much difficult than asking them to read a blog post that will help them.

That doesn’t mean we cannot use the high friction content at all. What one needs to do is, start with the low friction content when targeting users for the first time. Use the high friction content down the funnel, when users have already engaged with some content.