If you work in B2B marketing, you know that a targeted lead list is one of the most important things that enables your sales team to achieve good results. The LinkedIn platform is the default for B2B professionals in marketing and sales departments. For marketing teams, LinkedIn’s incredible targeting capabilities and the ability to create precise audiences using the LinkedIn Sales Navigator tool to run campaigns on them compensate for a high CPM and lower general capabilities of the ads platform. And here is the breakdown: yes, Facebook’s ad tech is more advanced and its costs are generally lower, but the targeting capabilities for B2B are not optimal, to say the least. Sales teams will usually benefit from LinkedIn’s premium tools, such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which allows for running effective scaled prospecting. Both LinkedIn products use proprietary data owned by LinkedIn and voluntarily updated by users. They can be segmented across various dimensions to give you the exact audience you need.
In this post discussing LinkedIn advertising, I will share with you how to leverage the best of both worlds by using data collected with LinkedIn Sales Navigator to improve your ad targeting.
Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find the right audience
As a marketer playing with a Sales Navigator account for the first time, I came across several interesting filters offered in this tool that do not exist anywhere else on the platform. So if you want to leverage this, you need to make sure you have a Sales Navigator account.
If this is the first time you are using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can watch a short tutorial video here.
Pro Tip: LinkedIn offers a 30-day trial for Sales Navigator (by entering credit card details).
After logging into your Sales Navigator account, you’ll notice additional filters you can use, such as:
- Technologies used
- Company revenue
- And more
The information found under the “Technologies” filter also exists in tools like BuiltWith, but these are quite expensive tools. And if you’re paying for a Sales Navigator account anyway, you might as well use all of its capabilities.
With this data, we can create wonderful segments.
For example, suppose you are selling an e-commerce email automation solution, you can search for accounts in the retail and fashion industry that use MailChimp, and reach out to them.
In a few clicks, you can get a great list of people to talk to.
This is what your list should look like:
This is usually the stage where the sales team creates a shorter list and reaches out to each and every name on the list personally. But I’m a marketer, and I want to work at scale.
Adding the data to your LinkedIn Ads audience
The next logical step would be to use the data in your LinkedIn Ads, and target only these accounts.
The problem is that these filters do not exist in LinkedIn Ads; they only exist in Sales Navigator. Therefore, we need to upload these accounts as matched audiences to LinkedIn manually.
Unfortunately, there is no export option for accounts from Sales Navigator.
Fortunately for us, there is Phantombuster and their wonderful suite of APIs.
With a few simple clicks, you can create a highly targeted search in Sales Navigator, and use Phantom Buster to export the search results to a CSV file (link).
All you have to do is grab the search URL and run it in Phantombuster (oh, and this tier of usage is completely free).
Once you do this (this process usually takes about a minute), you will have a CSV file with a list of companies. This CSV file needs to be formatted before it can be uploaded to LinkedIn as a matched audience.
You must remove all columns except the company name, which should be named companyname (in lowercase, no spaces).
You can upload the list into LinkedIn Ads using matched audiences as a “List Upload”.
It usually takes about 24-48 hours for a given audience to be ready for use.
Pro Tip: Sometimes, there is a mismatch between the data you exported and what you upload back to LinkedIn. To improve the match rate between the list and LinkedIn’s database, and to reduce the chances of missing data, you can upload the companies alongside their domains (e.g., Microsoft, microsoft.com).
If you have imported a few hundred or a few thousand companies, this can be an extremely tedious task.
Fortunately, you can use Clearbit’s Company Name to Domain API for this exact purpose.
The Clearbit API is free but a bit more technical. I managed to solve the problem with a simple scenario in Integromat, but that will have to wait for a separate post.
Next Steps
In the next step, you need to run your LinkedIn Ads using the matched audiences we created.
It is important to note that, unlike other social platforms (e.g., Facebook), LinkedIn has a particularly low active audience reach. As a rule of thumb, you can expect only 20-30% of your audience to be active on this platform. This means that if your list has a few thousand people, you will actually be able to reach only a small portion of that audience, so you need to be sure your audience is large enough (or loosen the targeting).
And of course, always remember that hyper-targeting can work amazingly well if you have the right ad and the right funnel – yet, on its own, it is not a guarantee for a low CPM, but will usually result in better lead quality for your sales team (and higher ROI).
Article Author
Elad Levi
Elad is a marketing geek with a fetish for analytics. He is an experienced marketing executive with a passion for marketing technology. Currently, he serves as Head of Growth at Fixel, a startup company changing how advertisers measure user engagement. Elad is a consultant and lecturer on everything related to web analytics and marketing automation. Husband, father to 2 rascals, and an avid South Park fan.
