Your offer (i.e. the thing you’re promoting combined with your CTA, or what you’re asking your target audience to do) is absolutely, positively THE MOST important aspect of your LinkedIn Ads.

Regardless of whether your ad copy is eloquently written and compelling or your audience targeting is set up with pinpoint accuracy, if your offer doesn’t provide enough value to your audience or is too high in friction, chances are your ads will flop (meaning high costs and low lead volume).

A few months ago, we wrote an article detailing which offers tend to work well on LinkedIn Ads. If you haven’t yet, check that out first, as selecting your offer is critical to finding LinkedIn Ad success and will make more sense in tandem with the rest of this article.

This time around, we’re talking about how your offers fit into a full-funnel strategy. Note that there is no cookie-cutter solution when it comes to ad strategy. What works for us may not make sense for you and your business.

That said, the strategy we outline here is one we’ve tested time and time again, to which we’ve seen great success. We’re confident that this strategy can be helpful to you, too, in finding success on LinkedIn Ads.

Start with a Lead Magnet

We’ve heard the argument that lead magnets are “old school”, “dead”, or “don’t work like they used to”. In our experience, we say otherwise.

The purpose of a lead magnet is to generate leads. That’s it. Leads do not automatically equal business. That’s why this is the first step in our LinkedIn Ad strategy–it’s one piece of the puzzle.

A lead magnet can be something like gated content, such as an eBook, guide, or webinar. We would just recommend that whatever lead magnet (or offer as a whole) you promote is high in value and has as little friction as possible.

If you offer an eBook but ask for 8 fields of information in your lead gen form, that adds a lot of friction and could potentially result in you losing the lead. The greater the perceived value than the perceived friction of your offer, the greater chance you have at generating leads.

The reason why this step is critical in your LinkedIn Ad strategy is because (assuming targeting is spot on and your ad messaging is clear and compelling) it allows you to generate a high volume of leads at a low cost.

If your offer is right, you can expect leads between $85 – $100 per on the high end. We’ve personally seen leads come in as low as $30 – $50. That’s pretty spectacular for as expensive of a platform as LinkedIn.

Nurture

Just as important as generating leads with your offer is how you follow up with those leads once you have them. This is where many argue that “lead magnets are dead”. The reason is because leads often still come on very cold.

Very rarely is a lead ready to hop on a Sales call after hearing of your brand once because they downloaded an eBook from you or attended a past webinar. Leads need further nurturing, or warming up, before they’re ready to fully invest in your product or services.

Remember, promoting a low-funnel offer, like a Demo Request or Free Trial, to a cold audience is like proposing marriage on the first date. But promoting a low-funnel offer to a new lead is pretty much like proposing marriage on the second date. It’s still likely to get you dumped.

Instead, keep regular contact with your leads by continuing to share valuable tips, insights, updates, etc related to your business or services. Continue to demonstrate that you have value to give them. The more you warm up your audience, the more they begin to better know, like, and trust you, and the more likely they are to buy in later down the road.

Email still remains to this day an effective channel at accomplishing this. Check out this post from HubSpot on successful email follow-up sequences as a resource.

Retarget

In addition to nurturing leads via channels like email, consider retargeting them with ads promoting lower-funnel offers. This still doesn’t mean you should go straight for the throat by promoting a Demo (though it’s worth testing to see how your audience responds).

Instead, you might promote something like a case study or another eBook, guide, or webinar. The purpose behind this is the same as nurturing–to continue warming up your audience until they’re ready to do business with you.

LinkedIn has a host of different retargeting options, each with their own unique capabilities and use-cases. We won’t go into all of them here, but check out this podcast episode,  if you’d like to learn more about LinkedIn Ad retargeting strategy.

It’s also worth mentioning that this is a great step to leverage other digital ad platforms. Feeding LinkedIn leads into Facebook’s retargeting, for example, is a drastically cheaper option than relying on LinkedIn retargeting alone.

In addition, consider using other ad types to retarget. Because LinkedIn Sponsored Content, Text Ads, and Message Ads all occupy different inventory (or spaces) on the platform, you can run each to your retargeting audience simultaneously to increase brand visibility.

The Bottom Line

In our experience, lead magnets are not “dead”. They’re just a single piece to the full LinkedIn Ads strategy puzzle.

But what’s been your experience? Which offers have worked well for you? What’s been your LinkedIn Ads strategy? We want to hear from you, so feel free to comment below!

Also, if you can’t already tell, we really dig this stuff. 😉 In the 8 years we’ve run LinkedIn Ads, we’ve spent $150M+ on the platform, are official LinkedIn Marketing Partners, and have managed some of the largest LinkedIn Ad accounts in the world.

B2Linked increases your lead quality while lowering costs at the same time. Say goodbye to wasted ad spend! If you want to ramp up your LinkedIn Ad efforts, apply to work with our team of experts.

Thanks for reading and happy advertising!

Written by Eric Jones