The Campainless Blog
So you’re an avid B2B marketer – raring to go and ready to make noise for your business. LinkedIn Ads is likely one important channel in your mix.
Did you used to get solid results through the LinkedIn platform that have slowed down recently? Are you struggling to achieve the quality of leads you’re aiming for? Have you seen generally positive outcomes but want to double down on them?
Regardless of the specifics of your situation, there’s likely a LinkedIn tool or a combination of tools that can help you get more out of your LinkedIn marketing spend.
In this expert roundup compiled for 2023, we run through the main tools we’d recommend using to enhance performance and efficiency. We categorise them by area (Reporting, Automation, Audience & Optimisation) to make it easy for you to navigate and digest. Bookmark this tab and keep it up your sleeve.
Before we dig into the tools you can leverage to improve platform performance, it’s important to scrutinize the value and power of Linkedin itself. A question on the tip of your tongue might be – “Is LinkedIn itself an effective marketing tool?”
In our opinion, if you’re a B2B business, particularly a product-led one, and you are investing in content marketing – the answer is a big, emphatic “Yes.” It’s really not much more complicated than that.
While LinkedIn can be comparably expensive, it is a highly effective tool for B2B marketers because:
While there are some companies that will naturally struggle on this platform, as with any, on the whole we think it is a great marketing tool worthy of investing in.
In this helpful, meaty part of the guide, we’ve categorized each of our most-recommended LinkedIn marketing tools into 3 easy-peasy camps. Hopefully this segmented approach will make it even easier to find the tools that fit your specific needs.
LinkedIn Ads Reporting is a very important ingredient of successful LinkedIn marketing. If you fail to understand how to read, interpret, analyze and mine your data for insights, it’s very unlikely you’ll be able to get the best results out of your spending (and your superiors won’t be happy).
Adstage is a sophisticated LinkedIn ads reporting tool. It enables you to create customized, powerful reports, in the format you desire, in a way that’s easy to read and interpret by your executives and clients. The polished presentation of Adstage reports makes it easy to display important performance metrics and prove ROI. There’s also a bunch of bonus features like scheduling and optimisation that help you speed up simple campaign tasks like bid and budget adjustments.
DashThis is an alternative LinkedIn reporting tool that has the advantage of consolidation and comparison. Their platform provides marketers with a single, consolidated dashboard for all their LinkedIn campaign data. There’s the ability to customize for the specific metrics you want to pay attention to and also to compare to 34 other ad platforms e.g. Tik Tok, SEO, Google Ads, Facebook ads and more.
If you’re a lover of templates and uniform structure, Databox might be the reporting tool for you. This helpful tool has its own template-based LinkedIn Ads reporting, that allows you to easily connect your account and start visualizing performance within minutes. This platform is a particular stand out for a UI that’s clean and modern – it also has the ability to access, view, annotate and act easily on mobile.
Reporting Ninja is the final LinkedIn Ads reporting tool we’ll cover. Their software allows you to create customized, accurate reports quickly and also provides the option to calculate metrics e.g. add a cost margin or markup. If you ask us, Reporting Ninja is a supremely helpful LinkedIn Ads reporting tool worth adding to your arsenal.
Automation is another key component of a successful, lead-generating LinkedIn Ads machine. LinkedIn Ads automation basically handles repetitive and mundane tasks involved in ad campaigns – making your life easier, and your campaigns more efficient.
There’s a whole bunch of online tools in this powerful segment – and there’s a lot of search volume around this market. Here are some of the best LinkedIn Ads automation tools we recommend:
Zapier is an automation tool that can help you connect your Linkedin Account to your CRM – allowing leads and other information to flow through easily. This removes the need to download your leads manually and upload them, reducing friction and labor.
It also allows you to easily set up workflows off the back of your campaigns – to notify the right people, send follow-up emails and add to the right lists. Meaning reduced friction and peak efficiency. Similarly, it also allows you to feed through audiences and performance data in a seamless, frictionless way.
Another tool that can be adapted for LinkedIn automation is Power Automate. This handy Microsoft tool, integrates smoothly with LinkedIn Ads, and allows you to create powerful workflows off the back of your campaigns. They’re super easy to set up and help you get the most out of your LinkedIn ads by ensuring follow ups are quick, relevant and effective. For example, they can be a really efficient way of converting content download leads into bottom-funnel prospects.
Another area of LinkedIn ads which has attracted a lot of integrative software players is audiences. And this is because, something that B2B businesses need to pay close attention to is their audience composition. As every impression and particularly click, is valuable, they need to make sure they’re in front of exactly the right people. These audience tools help you nail audience building:
Bombora is an intent data platform that allows marketers to create accurate, up-to-date and intent-based lists of potential prospects using a bunch of super specific filters. For example, job title, revenue, company size, location and more. You can rest assured that Bombora “provides accurate and affordable sales and marketing contact data that is tested and re-verified every 90 days.”
Another tool that aims to help you to nail your LinkedIn targeting is Zoom.info. They pride themselves on using “a rich combination of foundational data and buying signals” that to create high-impact target buyer lists for their customers. They are also able to ensure that any data provided is accurate, actionable and data-privacy compliant. We’d highly recommend giving it a spin if audience accuracy is something you care about.
A final area of LinkedIn ads which is admittedly quieter, and less crowded, from a software perspective is optimization. Our own platform, Campainless, is one of the few on the market that specializes in providing additional value in this area.
So what does Campainless do in the optimization space? Our software provides marketers with powerful AI-generated optimisation recommendations to help improve the efficiency and performance of their LinkedIn ads accounts. Like Opteo for Google, our goal is to save marketers time spent scouring over and analyzing data, and empowering them to make better, quicker and more empowered LinkedIn Ads decisions.
Another tool that can help in this area is MarinOne. Their intuitive platform helps LinkedIn marketers harness the power of machine learning to manage and optimize their LinkedIn Ads campaigns more efficiently. While MarinOne is a very helpful solution, particularly from a time-saving perspective, it’s focused primarily on the bidding and budget components of optimization.
While each of the tools we’ve covered adds significant value in its own right – they are all likely to have the most substantial, lasting impact when used as one part of a varied suite of tools.
What does this mean? For example, you might choose to employ one for automation to streamline and reduce time spent on bland, menial tasks. Another to supercharge and add nuance to your reporting. And another again to help you manage and optimize your campaigns.
The point being that there’s no single tool in the market that will do everything to ensure your LinkedIn results are stellar.
There you have it! Our top selection of tools for LinkedIn ads automation, reporting, audience composition and optimization. Hopefully the insights we’ve provided in this guide will give you the ammo you need to broach your execs, board, CEO or CRO with a new solution to invest in to better your Google Ads.
