When it comes to paid advertising, the goal is simple: get people to take a desired action. Maybe you want to send them to your website. Maybe you want them to buy something, or fill in a form. Whatever it is, paid advertising should help you achieve this goal, and LinkedIn ads aren’t any different.
However, we often get so caught up in trying to gain new users and potential customers that we often forget about remarketing. This makes sense. New users are exciting, like shiny new toys on Christmas. But the truth is that they likely aren’t invested in your business at all yet, which makes them harder to market to.
Your remarketing audience, however? That’s an entirely different story. They’ve seen you around. They may even have flirted with your content a bit . . . watching your ads, clicking around on your website. . . In other words, they’re not as cold as a brand new audience, so they may be more open to your business.
I run a paid ads agency called Snowball Creations, so I literally do this for a living. And I’ve decided that it’s the season of giving, so my gift to you is going to be sharing how you can remarket to existing leads. I’ll wrap it all up nicely and neatly and finish with a big bow.
Oh, and as an extra present, if you don’t feel like sitting here and reading through everything I have to say, you can head over to my YouTube channel to watch this video, where I also share some advice on how to make the most of your LinkedIn ad campaigns when it comes to retargeting ads.
Show me the money
We’re a money-obsessed generation, so I wouldn’t be surprised if your first question is “How much is this ad campaign going to cost me?”
It is, after all, a fair question. Everyone who’s ever dabbled in paid advertising will know that it isn’t cheap, but the good news is that remarketing campaigns are some of the cheapest ads that you can run on LinkedIn.
As you likely know, if you want to see substantial growth with LinkedIn ads, you need at least £2 000 ad spend. And that’s just the starting point.
But with a remarketing ad campaign, you can see results from half, or even a quarter, of that amount.
Who's your retargeting audience?
With any retargeting ads campaign, your target audience is going to be one of the most important elements, so that’s what I’m going to focus on.
You likely have an idea of who your target audience is. Since you’re using LinkedIn ads, I can assume that it’s people in the B2B niche. But of course, you will get much more specific with that as you learn more detailed demographic information about your audience. If you haven’t nailed that yet, give this post a read.
I would recommend combining multiple forms of retargeting ads to help you get the best results. The simplest way of doing this is to include:
- Anyone who’s been to your website
- Anyone who’s engaged with your company page
- Anyone who’s viewed your LinkedIn videos
Note: even if you don’t have enough video views to go off of, you should at least have some website traffic and people who engage with your company page before you start remarketing.
Website vistors
When you’re creating your audience, starting with your traffic is going to be the simplest thing to do. The more data you have, the better, which is why I would recommend tracking all site visitors.
Selecting the date range is a bit trickier. If you have a lot of website visitors, you could get away with a thirty or sixty-day view, but generally, it’s best to follow people for a long time, so stick to ninety days.
The reason for this is that the types of sales people get through LinkedIn often take a while, so even if you make that sale months after the person saw your ad, you need to be able to track them all the way back to that initial ad. If you have very little traffic coming through to your site, you can even do 180 days.
And tracking your website visitors from LinkedIn is really simple! You just need to put in the URL of the website and make sure that everything that contains that URL is included. The LinkedIn insight tag can help with this.
People who have engaged with your company page
Again, the entire point of a LinkedIn retargeting campaign is to target people who are already aware of your business on some level, so naturally, targeting people who have engaged with your company page is going to be a smart move.
Luckily, you can simply select this option when building your LinkedIn audience. There are some decisions to make, though.
You can either target people who have simply visited your website, or you can take it a step further and target people who have clicked your call to action. Keep in mind that if you do the latter, it’s going to be a teeny tiny audience. At my LinkedIn ads company, we generally do the “visited company page” option. Again, we generally stick to ninety days, although it is worth noting that you can go up to a full year with this.
Video views
When you’re retargeting people who have viewed a previous video ad, you essentially target people who have viewed a certain percentage of one of your previous videos in your retargeting campaign.
Of course, if someone has viewed an entire video ad of yours, they’d be a super good quality user – but those are rare. Instead, you will need to target people who have viewed 50% or 70% of a video. In some cases, like if you’re just starting, you may even need to target people who have only viewed 25% of a video.
While this might be a small percentage, keep in mind that it will still be better to target them than someone who hasn’t viewed any of your videos at all.
You need to balance quality and quantity – viewers who have seen a large portion of your video will be better quality but few and far between, whereas those who have seen small parts of your videos will have increased numbers but the quality won’t be as great. You also need to consider your budget, of course.
Bonus round
While those are the three main things I would recommend focusing on during your LinkedIn retargeting strategy, there is one more thing I’d like to mention . . .
LinkedIn lead gen forms can also be great for remarketing campaigns since you can target people who have opened your lead gen forms but have not actually gone ahead and filled them in.
Final remarks
So, that’s how I would approach setting up a LinkedIn remarketing campaign! I’d take all the factors mentioned above and create an audience with them so that you have an easy way of hitting all your bases – and helping out your sales team while you’re at it.
Sometimes, people just need to be reminded that you exist, and this is a great way of doing this. Of course, if you still feel like you have no idea what to do when it comes to LinkedIn remarketing (or paid ads in general), fill in the form below to get in touch with Snowball Creations, a PPC ads agency.