6 B2B SaaS Best Practices for LinkedIn Advertising

LinkedIn advertising is powerful way for B2B SaaS businesses to achieve their goals, whether your goal is to promote your brand or to capture more quality leads. The LinkedIn advertising platform is designed to be convenient and easy to understand, allowing you to do more work with less stress.

While it doesn’t take long to understand the LinkedIn ads platform, it’s important to follow a few best practices to help you reach your goals.

1. Set your company up for success with a free company page

Before you start with your LinkedIn advertising campaign, it’s essential to lay a strong foundation for your company on the platform. Start by creating a free LinkedIn company page for your B2B SaaS business. This will establish your brand presence on LinkedIn. It’s also required for specific ad formats, so it really is the first step you need to take!

In addition to setting up a company page, create a LinkedIn campaign manager account. This account allows you to properly manage the ads platform. You can set up ad accounts, run campaigns and control your budget just by signing in. 

2. Create captivating content

Before you starting creating LinkedIn ads, you should first familiarize yourself with the LinkedIn ad formats to determine which is best for your goals. There are three different forms LinkedIn ads can take:

• • Sponsored Content
  • Sponsored InMail
  • Text Ads (pay-per-click)

Most people use LinkedIn to gain unique insights that are relevant to their industry or interests. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes and consider which format would best catch your attention. Choose language that will appeal to this audience, with clear, compelling copy that directs leads to take action.

Additionally, we also recommended that you follow these best practices with your ads:

• • Include an image relevant to the advertisement
  • Link to a landing page that matches the message
  • Address your specific audiences directly—“Are you a social media marketer?”
  • Use a strong call to action
  • Refresh your ads at least once a month with new text or images
    

3. Target specific audience segments

The LinkedIn ads that perform best are relevant to a specific target audience. The LinkedIn ads platform is unique because you can target based on what a person does professionally, helping you to ensure you’re only spending to place your ad in front of the strongest prospects.

Targets you can filter by include:

In addition to using LinkedIn ads, you also have other options for reaching your target audience on LinkedIn:

• • Reengage website visitors with Website Retargeting
  • Nurture prospects with Contact Targeting
  • Run account-based marketing campaigns with Company Targeting

4. Test your ads

Your goal with LinkedIn advertising is to give your audience the content they crave, but how do you do that? We recommend creating at least 2–4 ad variations for each campaign. You can do this by testing different ad copy, call-to-action buttons or images. Making these small changes can have a big impact, allowing you to see what type of content is most appealing to your audience.

As you start receiving clicks on your LinkedIn ads, the best performing ad will show more often and you can pause the ads with lower click-through rates. But don’t need to toss these ads out completely. Instead, show them some TLC to make them more appealing. Then, test again.

5. Set a competitive bid

Unfortunately, there isn’t a specific formula for success when it comes to budgets or bidding. It takes time and testing to learn what’s right for your business. However, there are some basic LinkedIn ads bidding best practices you can follow. 

A great place to start is by setting your SMART goals for why you want to use LinkedIn advertising. Determine what you are trying to achieve, then set and measure your budget accordingly.

When you’re ready to set your budget, you want to lay a strong foundation for a long-term strategy. LinkedIn recommends testing with at least $100/day or around $5,000 in total. However, for most SaaS startups we work with, that budget is a bit high, so we recommend aiming for $200/week to start.

For each campaign, you will set a payment method as well as a bid. The payment method can be either pay per click (PPC) or pay per 1,000 impressions (PPM), and the bid is the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for those clicks or impressions.

If your goal is to be competitive, you will want to set a bid that’s on the higher end of the suggested bid range. This range is an estimate of the current competing bids by other advertisers. LinkedIn will discount your click or impression bid so that you are only paying the minimum necessary to outbid the next advertiser.

Keep in mind, if you don’t enter a bid that’s within the suggested range, your ad will be less likely to beat the competition.

6. Analyze your campaign performance

If your goal is to gather views and interest, then you should spend more time focusing on clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average engagement. If you are focusing on driving leads, you will want to monitor conversion rates, leads and their respective costs.

After determining your priority, you’re ready to evaluate and optimize. LinkedIn advertising provides professional demographic data you can use to discover and target new audiences. Once your most responsive demographic is determined, you can adjust your audience for more efficient reach.

Furthermore, LinkedIn campaign insights allow you to easily understand how your ads are performing and provides recommendations to improve bids and budgets, which helps increase your ROI. You can test variations of your ad and adjust your ads based on your findings to continually improve your LinkedIn advertising strategy.

If you’re considering advertising for your B2B SaaS company, LinkedIn is the place to be. Don’t miss out on an opportunity to capture more leads and generate more impressions of your business. When running your campaigns, remember to keep testing and trying—practice makes perfect!