This is the series where we explore signal-based sales plays that drive real results using real-world examples. Namely, ours!
More than 2 million brands advertise on LinkedIn (including 75%-plus of B2B marketers). That includes us.
Why? Because it’s where economic buyers live. Even if your product’s end users aren’t part of the LinkedIn crowd, chances are the decision-makers with budget authority are.
We use LinkedIn advertisements to generate and identify signals our SDRs can use to outbound high-fit accounts.
Similar to our other LinkedIn sales plays, our LinkedIn ad plays see 21% or higher reply rates and nearly 10% booked meeting rates.
And now we’re opening our playbook wide open.
Social ad plays
LinkedIn ads come in multiple flavors—single image ads, video ads, carousel ads, document ads.
But for our purposes, we can break it down into two buckets: traditional paid ads (that is, those that are clearly identifiable as advertisements) and thought leader ads.
Traditional paid ads
The what
These are similar to the ads you’d find across any social channel.
We like to use traditional paid ads on LinkedIn for solution-aware audiences—people we’re confident are familiar with our product or at least our category. It allows us to craft clear messaging that’s highly relevant for our ideal customers.
The why
Odds are economic buyers from the accounts you care about are active on LinkedIn (it’s a social networking site built for business, after all).
Plus, thanks to LinkedIn’s ad targeting capabilities, you can be 100% sure that the right accounts see your stuff (whether those accounts are in-market is another story).
And here’s a bonus: LinkedIn makes it incredibly easy to attribute ad performance. You can very easily tie ad budget to meetings booked—no form fills or gated content necessary.
Zero-click content is critical to modern product evaluation. Buyers don't want to be whisked away to your website and forced to fill out a form.
Still, marketers are under pressure to push out more “lead magnet” content that doesn’t perform as well because it allows them to track engagements.
We like to have our cake and eat it, too. With Common Room, we can publish zero-click ads, track engagement, and pass prospects along to our SDR team (and our retargeting lists).
The how
Since we’re only showing ads to accounts that match our ideal customer profile, we want to know whenever someone engages with our content.
More to the point: We want to make it as easy as possible for our SDRs to follow up with them.
Step 1: Capture LinkedIn signals at scale with Common Room
Common Room comes complete with dozens of natively built and fully managed integrations—including LinkedIn.
IntegrationsCommon Room’s integrations with dozens of data sources—including popular digital channels, CRMs, data warehouses, sales engagement platforms, and more—allow you to organize and access all your data in one place. This makes it easy to take action on buying signals fast.
And our API makes it easy to add new contacts to Common Room and update existing contact profiles based on any data source, such as LinkedIn ad engagements.
Once contacts are added to Common Room, our identity resolution and waterfall enrichment engine—Person360™—reveals contact information (like email address and phone number) as well as any other buying signals or firmographic details uncovered by our automated signal capture.
Person360Common Room’s Person360 feature allows you to automatically collect, deanonymize, enrich, and match signals to a unified profile for individuals and organizations. This makes it easy to connect with the people and companies behind buying signals with full context.
Step 2: Automatically segment contacts
We use segments in Common Room to create custom (and auto-replenishing!) burndown lists based on any combination of actions and attributes.
SegmentsCommon Room’s segments feature allows you to automatically add individuals or organizations to auto-replenishing lists based on customizable criteria. This makes it easy to quickly surface, monitor, and engage specific people and companies at scale.
In this case, we have them set up to automatically add the contacts behind LinkedIn ad engagements to segments tailored to our SDRs’ books of business in Salesforce.
By tweaking a few filters and tags within Common Room, we can make sure our SDRs are served up non-customers with economic buying power only.
Step 3: Add contacts to preconfigured outbound sequences
Our SDRs log in each morning and get a view of all contacts from target accounts who reacted to or commented on one of our ads. Between LinkedIn’s targeting features and Common Room’s Person360, we can be confident these individuals fit squarely within our ICP.
Depending on the ad content and the person’s role at the company, SDRs can then add them directly to a customized outbound sequence in Outreach.
Sales engagement platform integrationsFor instance, if a contact engaged with one of our ads about job-change tracking, an SDR can drop them into a prebuilt job-change sequence that’s ready to send.
Pro tipMake sure you have ad-specific messaging locked and loaded. Creating templates in advance is crucial to increasing speed to lead. Plus, it ensures reps always reach out with relevance. Since you’ll know in advance exactly what the ad says—and which value propositions or pain points it’s referencing—there’s no excuse not to give reps a head start.
The result is fast, on-message outbound practically on autopilot.
Outbound template for social ad (traditional paid ad) playsSubject: {{!topic of ad}}
{{first_name}}—I couldn’t help but notice you {{!reference action taken on ad (e.g., liked, commented).}}
{{!topic of the ad}} is something we can help you out with.
How? {{!explanation of solution mapped to topic].}}
Wdyt?
P.S. {{!insert additional org-level signal that ties back to why you're reaching out to their account and not just them.}}
Thought leader ads
The what
Thought leader ads are sponsored posts from your company (or, more likely, the people on your payroll).
Using LinkedIn’s audience targeting, you can essentially turn any LinkedIn post into a stealth ad.
The why
Thought Leader Ads look like regular LinkedIn posts (because that’s what they are). This helps them rack up engagement from people who might otherwise avoid traditional paid ads.
We’ve seen thought leader ads routinely get up to 20x more engagement than other ad types.
And since they’re based on regular LinkedIn posts with 3,000-character limits, they open up the door to experimenting with different types of content.
Thought leader ads are especially helpful for boosting content from internal influencers.
If a company-affiliated influencer already has solid organic engagement, it may inspire others to engage with the post when you sponsor it and push it into prospects’ feeds. And if they don’t have a high organic following, thought leader ads are pretty much the only way to get posts seen.
The how
LinkedIn limits ad engagement capture via API to ads from an owned company handle only.
So if you’re pushing out thought leader ads from individuals (and you should be—both the LinkedIn algorithm and other human beings prefer content from flesh-and-blood people instead of brands), you need another way to track them.
Enter Common Room’s Chrome Extension for LinkedIn.
Step 1: Capture LinkedIn signals at scale with the Common Room Chrome extension
We use our Chrome extension to instantly capture the people behind thought leader ad reactions and comments.
Any person who engages with a post is automatically added to Common Room and enriched via Person360.
Chrome extensionCommon Room’s Chrome Extension for LinkedIn allows you to capture and enrich any public LinkedIn signal. This makes it easy to add and action on the people behind LinkedIn posts, reactions, and comments.
Step 2: Automatically segment contacts
Since we can target thought leader ads to specific audiences, we treat them very similarly to traditional paid ads.
We auto-segment contacts based on our SDRs’ books of business in Salesforce, ICP, and ideal persona match.
Step 3: Outbound based on prospect research
Thought leader ads tend to be less product-centric than traditional LinkedIn ads. And since they’re technically published by individuals (individuals with friends, family, and co-workers on LinkedIn), not every engagement will be a sign of intent.
Our reps use Common Room to quickly separate in-market prospects from also-rans.
Pro tipConnect as many data sources as possible—product, website, social channels, you name it—to Common Room. This will help you see beyond prospect activity on LinkedIn and get a look at signals across all your owned and unowned channels. The more data you have to work with, the easier it will be to find, qualify, prioritize, and personalize.
Things like recent job changes, hiring trends, and relevant news stories are particularly helpful for deciding who to go after first—and how.
Outbound template for social ad (thought leader ad) playsSubject: {{!internal author of post}}
{{first_name}}—saw you {{!reference action taken on post (e.g., liked, commented, reposted)}} {{!of our 'what persona of our leader' leader, 'name (e.g., Kevin)'.}}
{{!topic of the post}} is something we can help you out with. Specifically, we {{!list the capability of how the product works (e.g., capture signals into a single pane of glass and make them actionable for your teams).}}
Wdyt?
P.S. {{!case study customer name}} saw a {{!percentage lift (link to customer story)}} with this approach.
LinkedIn ads make it easy to draw a direct line between money spent and pipeline generated (not to mention craft more relevant messaging).
Our social ad plays drive:
- 40% higher open rates
- 3x higher reply rates
- 2x higher booked meeting rates
They’re part of the reason LinkedIn is now our top pipe gen source.
Keep an eye out for the next edition of Plays that pay. Got a specific signal you want us to cover? Let us know.
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