LinkedIn’s Differentiating Value for B2B firms

Why does Saratoga use LinkedIn for lead generation?

• Transparency of lead source: With LinkedIn, you know exactly where the leads are coming from. No low-quality black box sources here – just LinkedIn members making their own decisions on what content they want to interact with.
• Highly targeted: LinkedIn allows you to set up campaigns according to specifications we jointly decide upon. That includes geography, industries, job titles, and even specific companies for ABM campaigns.
• Intent of prospects: When LinkedIn members view feeds where your ads are displayed, they are often looking for materials to help with their jobs – a key mindset criteria for B2B firms.

How it Works

Each LinkedIn Ad Campaign needs a piece of premium content that’s valuable enough for LinkedIn members to agree to provide their personal information. If you’ve got content that fits the bill, great – we can use that. If not, we can help you craft appropriate content, drawing on our decades of experience crafting content for IT audiences.

In parallel, we’ll begin the actual configuration of your campaign, segmenting it for your target markets using the range of customer profiling capabilities available in LinkedIn. These include website retargeting, Matched Audiences and Account Based Marketing options.

With retargeting, we remarket to LinkedIn members who have previously visited your website, continuing the engagement with prospects who have a familiarity with your company. We can create retargeting campaigns in LinkedIn to focus on members who visited a specific page, a series of pages or a particular section of your website.

LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences functionality enables you to upload lists of specific individuals or companies that you’d like to target, such as from your CRM or sales platform. LinkedIn then displays your ads to these prospects. In addition to individuals, Saratoga B2B can create campaigns based on specific companies that are part of your ABM campaign strategy.

Here’s a partial list of the many micro-segments we focus on with our LinkedIn lead generation service:

• New prospects by company (Account Based Marketing)
• New prospects, targeted by geo-location
• LinkedIn members who have previously visited your website
• Members who have previously visited specific pages on your website
• Members you already have in your CRM and other platforms
• New prospects, targeted by job titles (e.g., VPs, network engineers, software architects, etc.)
• New prospects, targeted by job functions (e.g., accounting, engineering, HR, etc.)
• New prospects, targeted by job skills (e.g., Cisco certifications, Salesforce Sales Cloud, etc.)
• New prospects based on company size
• New prospects, based on company industry
• And many more

If you opt to collect leads within LinkedIn, we can help you automatically flow them into your CRM or other sales support system. We then work with you to create a calendar outlining a lead nurturing plan to ensure prospects receive a mix of content that matches where they are in the buyer’s journey. Here again, Saratoga B2B can draw on our deep experience to ensure your messaging resonates with IT buyers and decision makers while reflecting the benefits your company offers.

We can also work with your teams to develop a regular cadence of blog posts for your website (which can double as posts on your LinkedIn company page) and new website pages specific to the prospects you’ve obtained. Any kind of content marketing material is in our wheelhouse, including email marketing, remarketing Sponsored Content, LinkedIn InMails and more.

For example, if you are using LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator prospecting tool, we can help craft customized messages for follow-up InMail messaging to all the LinkedIn members who you have contacted previously.

We will also help you navigate the other high-performance features in Sales Navigator, including:

• Creation and management of customized lead lists for your sales team
• Segmentation of your lead lists by territory, job title, job function, seniority level, number of years at a company, level of expertise (e.g., certifications).

Once your first LinkedIn lead generation campaigns have begun delivering new prospects, Saratoga B2B can develop additional ad campaigns using other content offerings, to draw in additional leads from those prospects who didn’t express interest, or didn’t see, your first campaigns. At the same time, we’ll develop the remarketing materials for the new leads from the previous campaigns.

Running a LinkedIn lead-gen campaign requires ongoing agility, and often quick shifts in execution. The kickoff and start-up phases require hours of setup and monitoring time in order to identify the optimal creative and cost-per-click/cost-per-lead bidding strategy. The early phases require ongoing fine-tuning of the target prospect segmentation and dozens of other details to effectively implement the campaign. Saratoga will handle all of this work for you.