Promotion of LiveDune on LinkedIn: how to find B2B leads abroad
LiveDune is a multifunctional social media analytics service. It offers convenient statistics, reports, and indispensable tools for working with social media accounts: auto-posting and monitoring messages and comments.
Also, LiveDune is our long-time partner. We have been using the service for a long time.
LiveDune approached us with two tasks:
- To attract new clients to the most marginal tariffs - Business and Agency.
- To test new traffic sources
We decided to use LinkedIn. The platform provides many opportunities: you can target your audience in detail by job title, skills, level of position held within the company, and even by size. These features align with LiveDune's rates, which are suitable for medium and large teams, large SMM agencies, and brands.
Strategy
First, we decided on an approach to user acquisition. Unlike other platforms, Linkedin is quite expensive in terms of UA. So, the most effective mechanic on this platform is lead generation. But why would a user fill out an application for a demo service when LiveDune already has a free trial period?
At the same time, the LiveDune team began to form a sales team to work with Business and Agency clients to help them to choose analytics services, highlighting LiveDune's capabilities that will help solve specific customers' problems.
So, we came up with the idea that our advertising campaign would also be a test campaign for the sales team, who could practice a personalized approach to clients.
Targets
We have chosen the lead-gen mechanic, where users can open a lead form and send an application if they are interested in the offer. As a backup plan, we have chosen a direct-marketing mechanic to communicate with users in DMs.
We have used two groups for GEO targeting:
- CIS countries
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and others. - Other countries where expats live:
Turkey, Georgia, Israel, Portugal, Argentina, and others.
Creatives
We wanted to show the power of LiveDune: how analysis of statistics can increase user engagement, as well as how social listening can influence sales. Also, we wanted to convey the core philosophy of LiveDune of making business decisions based on reliable figures.
So, we've structured all tools of LiveDune and their benefits and added feedback from our customers.
As a result, we’ve created a working document, which helped us to generate visual and motion concepts for ad campaigns.
Eventually, we’ve chosen two ad formats: carousel and video.
Audience selection has been a special treat for our target specialist. LinkedIn distinguishes the roles of content manager, copywriter, community manager, and social media specialist. Detailed segmentation opportunities helped us to find those who work with analytics, collect statistics and interpret data. We highlighted the industry of the company and its size.
This is how we have divided our potential customers into two large groups:
- Those, who work with the service as a specialist
- Those, who make decisions about strategic development
1. How was the strategy implemented?
We looked for both audiences in each geo: specialists and decision-makers. We use two types of creatives in ad campaigns: a carousel and a video.
We received the first responses and seven completed lead forms in the first days of the campaign. First, we checked the metrics to find out the behavior patterns of executives and specialists. Then, we did not get a single response for a few days, although users clicked on the ads and asked about the company's profile.
As the time for the test was limited, and the cost per lead started to rise, we decided to change our approach and switch to advertising in DMs.
2. What have we tested during the campaign?
The ad campaign in DMs was risky. However, together with LiveDune, we’ve decided that the offer's benefits (to solve work tasks with a user-friendly analytics service) outweighed the possible negative or perception as spam.
The message was written with a call to request a service demonstration. We uploaded the data from the application to Google Sheets.
Communication with international customers via cellular phone turned out inconvenient and expensive for sales managers. They preferred to find users on messengers and communicate via text. Then the LiveDune team suggested asking users to link their LinkedIn profile so that managers could contact the potential customer directly on the platform.
There was a barrier in the work of sales managers: a request to connect must be accepted to message users on LinkedIn outside of advertising. This feature made it difficult to communicate on the platform.
Our stake on the InMail campaign worked out. We began to receive feedback from our target audience actively. During the campaign, specialists clicked on the ads quite often (there was a higher CTR), and there were more form openings and form submissions from decision-makers. And, as expected, traffic from CIS countries was cheaper.
We also compared the effectiveness of impressions by campaign type: the conversion from lead-form opening to fill-in in a lead gen campaign was 3%, while in InMail it was 52%. The CPL there was 19 times lower.
3. What are the key factors of an effective launch of an ad campaign on LinkedIn?
- The InMail campaign type is only available outside the EU.
- It is important to maintain the company profile because it builds trust. Users will click on it and judge it.
- It is essential to remember the margin of error of the settings: even if you a language as the main one of a user's profile in the targeting settings, it does not mean that the user is fluent in it
We met our bid plan by 114% and reduced CPL by 12.5%.
We received 30% of conversions in lead gen campaigns and 70% in lead forms from the messages.
Interaction with the client team
We worked together smoothly and frequently consulted with the client team. We were able to quickly build up a communication system that was convenient for everyone:
- A chat in Telegram to find solutions to minor issues;
- A simple Google sheet for leads, where we entered the incoming information about leads and the LiveDune team commented on them;
- Zoom calls were used to approve our solutions and to brainstorm on creatives.
Conclusions and development plan for the advertising campaign
LinkedIn is the right tool to find an audience by position, profile, or work sector. Also, the platform remains a network space, where people showcase their skills, professional experience, and work achievements to make new contacts.
Sending DMs works great, but you must remember that this approach will not work every time. Sending a message for LiveDune was natural: we looked for marketers, and social media specialists and offered them to try a service that would be useful to them daily at work.
Each niche will have its way of promotion. The main point is to be bold and experiment and try new traffic sources.
Comments from the LiveDune team
LinkedIn was an experiment for us. We wanted to test the new source of leads and see how the sales department could manage this flow. So, we worked on equal terms with the sales managers, providing them with leads they needed to communicate with.
What worked: