Leverage LinkedIn marketing to generate awareness, consideration, and event sign-up conversions

The average LinkedIn user may not know the sophistication of the advertising management engine behind it. Not as advanced as Facebook Ads Manager, for example, but much more sophisticated than XING, which is why it’s our favorite business networking platform.

The advanced targeting capabilities of LinkedIn Marketing via LinkedIn Campaign Manager allowed us to take a phased approach during the six-week campaign period, creating both visibility and engagement through a carefully planned and regularly optimized awareness, consideration, and conversion strategy.

The first phase of the LinkedIn marketing strategy was about creating visibility among highly relevant audiences – people who would find the content really useful; CTOs, CEOs, startups, people working in business development, IT, operations and projects, as well as audiences and lists generated from internal sources.

tikitaka Tip: You don’t know who to address? Ask your employees! Instead of racking your brain about who is most likely to answer, talk to the people in the call center or on the sales team – the people who really know your customers. Your employees can provide truly valuable business insights that give you an edge in targeting.

These individuals were shown a polished, engaging, 30-second video asset that informed them about the event, with a direct “sign up” call to action. To maximize video views and signups, we tested two Sponsored Post variations: a short one that focused on the networking opportunity for innovation and startups, and a longer post that focused on the more educational, thought leadership aspects of the event.

The Consideration Phase is where things got interesting. First, we used a new version of the video asset to avoid creative fatigue and increase ‘reason to believe’ by focusing on different elements of the event. We also created new text variants that included a time-based push to increase sign-up readiness. Creative versioning is not particularly new or interesting, but it works. While it’s important to make sure that the core messages are consistent in order to anchor the information with the consumer (the golden ‘rule of 7’!), we always need to make sure that the creative doesn’t get boring or repetitive.

Apart from the creative and textual aspects, it is the intelligence of the advertising management and the great emphasis on rigor and attention to detail that distinguish tikitaka. After taking a close look at the users in the Awareness phase of the LinkedIn marketing campaign and their behavior, we decided to focus the Consideration phase on those who had engaged with our client’s video or profile. Video viewers were further divided into two categories: those who watched 50% of the video and those who watched 75% – these were our “hot leads.”

Creative targeting was further tested in the Consideration phase with the production of creative materials specific to men and women. The results were interesting and warrant further investigation: CTR was 10% higher and view rate 5% higher in the female-targeted cohort. It would have been interesting if we had tested the increase in performance (or not) between male and female targeted assets within cohorts – do females respond better to creative material that features females? We should definitely test that in the future.

tikitaka tip: You are not convinced of the awareness-consideration phase? They should be. The CTR of our Consideration cohort was 200% higher than that of our Awareness cohort. You want results? Talk to the right people in the right way. Or as Claire tikitaka says, “fish where the fish are”.

Finally, the conversion phase of the campaign started with another new video and targeting focused on those who had watched 75% and 97% of the previous video. Interestingly, the 75% cohort did better than the 97% cohort! We are still racking our brains over this question! Comparing CTR across the three phases provides further evidence of the targeting applied: conversion CTR was a whopping 250% higher than in the awareness phase and 17% higher than in the consideration phase.