Plays that pay: how we use LinkedIn ads to power pipe gen

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.

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.

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.

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.

For 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.

The result is fast, on-message outbound practically on autopilot.

Playbook

Turn social content engagement into meetings booked

Personalize buyer outreach using recent social interactions.

Explore playbook

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.

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.

Things like recent job changes, hiring trends, and relevant news stories are particularly helpful for deciding who to go after first—and how.

Playbook

Prospect from any LinkedIn post

Capture the people behind posts, reactions, and comments with a click.

Explore playbook

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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