The Campainless Blog
Any savvy B2B marketer will be familiar with LinkedIn retargeting campaigns. And most know that without at least one in their campaign mix – achieving a decent ROI can be difficult. That being said, many advertisers aren’t getting the most out of LinkedIn retargeting. Nor are they aware of the full spectrum of options available to them. In this post, we give you a quick refresh of what LinkedIn retargeting is before jumping into some of our top tips, tricks and approaches. After reading, you’ll have all the ammunition you need to back up your investment to the wider business. Get started!
LinkedIn retargeting refers to a method of targeting which focuses on “warm” audiences rather than “cold” ones. What does this mean? Prospects in a retargeting audience will have already interacted with your brand in some way. For example, have viewed a video, downloaded a piece of content, RSVP’d to an event or visited a page on your website. The intention with retargeting them is to re-ignite their initial interest in your brand and give you another chance to convert them.
So with the basics out of the way – what are our top retargeting tips?
You need at least 300 people in your retargeting audience before you can advertise to them. This means unlike other types of audiences, you can’t simply create & go to market. Therefore it’s critical that you build your audience as early as possible! Just created a LinkedIn Ads account? We’d recommend you install your LinkedIn Insight Tag and make a Website Visits retargeting audience straight away. This means you won’t risk losing any valuable website traffic.
Just launched an eBook lead gen form campaign? Might end up using it for the base of a retargeting audience? Hit “Create an Audience” as soon as you launch your content to avoid any delay to market later when you do want to use it. Regardless of where you’re at in your retargeting journey or what your goals are – the earlier you can start building an audience, the better! Takeaway: think ahead and avoid hiccups before they occur.
If you’re looking to make a real impact with your retargeting efforts – setting up audiences based on visits to specific pages on your website is a clever move. This best practice tip is particularly effective if you have a strong online presence and high levels of website traffic. Instead of simply retargeting off All Website Visits, use the URL targeting feature. This allows you to split your audiences into specific groups according to pages visited. This could look like an audience of people who have visited top-funnel content pages vs those who have hit more high-intent pages e.g. product pages or demo offers.
By employing this more sophisticated, tiered approach to retargeting, you can tailor your content, ads and offers more effectively. You can also improve your chances of converting. Again, this approach is best-applied if you have a decent volume of traffic hitting your website. If only 300 people have landed on it – it’s not actually possible to segment.
Running lead gen form campaigns? If you’re not capitalizing on lead gen form retargeting – you’re really missing out! According to Linkedin, this method has been shown to boost CTRs by +65% and reduce CPLs by -29% compared to other retargeting approaches.
How do you use it? You have the option to target people who have opened your lead gen forms AND / OR completed them. Targeting “completions” works particularly well if you’re using lead gen forms to promote high-value content pieces like eBooks and whitepapers and then using retargeting ads to move them further down the funnel e.g. with case studies, product demos or free trial offers.
Meanwhile targeting “opens,” works more effectively to re-engage people who have already shown interest in your content by encouraging them to take the next step and fill out the form OR another piece of content or offer. The key is to adapt your retargeting ads to match the level of interest shown by the prospect.
The easiest way to build high-volume retargeting audiences is with video ads. This is because you have the option to target by video views (which are much easier to generate than website visits, form opens or RSVPs for example). You also have the option to get more sophisticated and segment your audience by the percentage of the video they have watched (25%, 50%, 75%, or 97% of the video). For example, if you wanted to target a more engaged audience only, you could choose to target people who have watched 97% of your ad.
We’d suggest using a top of funnel brand video of 15-30 seconds, promoting it to a broad section of your target audience, and then, retargeting to people who have watched more than 25% of it. What with? The next offer in the buying cycle e.g. an eBook, building their engagement with the brand. This is a great way to build brand awareness, fill up your funnel and enhance your overall LinkedIn strategy.
Do you frequently send out event invites through LinkedIn? You may be sitting on a retargeting goldmine ready to be tapped into. Campaign Manager allows you to retarget users based on their event RSVPs (both past and upcoming). Simply create your audience, choose the event and select members who clicked attending. How would your retarget these individuals? You could promote another relevant event or a bottom of funnel offer like a demo now that you’ve built up some trust. With this kind of golden, engaged audience at your fingertips, why wouldn’t you?
Have a decent following on LinkedIn? It might be worth creating a retargeting audience using your company page followers. You can choose how far back you want to go in terms of people having engaged with your page – but we’d say the bigger the time frame, the better with this one. If they’ve taken the step to visit your company page, they’re likely aware of your brand and warm enough to be retargeted to. As the volumes available for this one are typically more limited than other LinkedIn targeting approaches, we’d recommend using it in tandem with other types e.g. website visits and video views for the best results.
While all of the audience types mentioned above are worth dipping your toe into to see what works – often, the secret to a successful Linkedin retargeting strategy lies in a combination of different retargeting approaches. Particularly if you don’t have a huge online presence yet or high levels of brand awareness generally. We’d recommend combining lead gen form retargeting with website visits and more all in one audience. This allows you to maximise your audience size and boost your potential for converting.
Regardless of the re-targeting approach you choose to pursue, it’s important that the ads you put out are suited to the specific needs of your audience and where they sit in the buying cycle. Before sending your retargeting campaigns out into the world – really ask yourself, what are the needs of this audience? How can I provide value? What is the most suited content or offer? What will have the biggest impact? It’s only after answering each of these questions that you should feel comfortable and ready to launch.
There you have it folks! 8 top tips to becoming a retargeting whizz. Hopefully you now feel confident finessing this important component of your overall LinkedIn content marketing strategy. Wouldn’t mind a little bit of extra guidance? We’re happy to answer any LinkedIn audience questions you have, share best practice tips or give you more information about our LinkedIn Optimisation tool that can help you with all of the above.
