The LinkedIn video ad strategies no one wants you to know…

If you’re a B2B company advertising on LinkedIn, great! You’re doing the right thing, and it’s a great place to be. All of your decision makers are there, and the community is strong.

But - if you’re advertising on LinkedIn, you’re probably not thrilled with your performance, and you might be struggling with implementing what’s likely too complex of an ad system.

If you read our last blog post about how we spent $20k in ads and generated $600k in pipeline, this post unfolds one of the many key strategies that we’re convinced no one is sharing because they work so well. 

Time to crash the secrets party with our first strategy…

The Billboard

Here’s the thing, what everyone else is doing works for them - or does it? You don’t know. Your objective should always be to eventually get to what works for you. 

Nearly everyone tries gated content, complicated top / middle / bottom funnel approaches, and frankly, stale creative that looks great next to other stale creative. The problem is, this is all highly inefficient, and we’ve found new ways to breathe life into your LinkedIn advertising.

So, what’s everyone doing that should be avoided for the sake of cost and efficiency? They’re focusing on driving cold traffic with static content or long-form video to their website in order to capture high-intent audiences off the bat on the very first touch. 

With narrow audiences, this could mean a $20 CPC to capture get that audience to your site. Woof. If your budget is only $100/day for this cold audience, you might get 5 clicks. Yikes.

Introducing “The Billboard” strategy.

Instead of static or long-form video for cold audiences, hit your cold audience with an extremely short video - 10-15s - that stops them in their tracks. A visual they’d rarely see on LinkedIn works quite well, because it’s what no one else is doing. Perhaps inject a pain point you solve.

Rather than exhaust your budget on 5 measly clicks, all you need to do is get their attention enough to make it through 2-4 seconds of your video and you’ve now captured that audience to retarget in a more inexpensive way in your next ad.

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This tactic might not capture 100% of high-intent audiences, but with a larger audience to retarget to, you’ll find way more cost efficiency. Plus, if your targeting is already spot-on, you’ll likely pick up plenty of long-tail prospects along with those bleeding necks you caught with your hook and pain point.

Examples: Here are the examples of our Billboard ads, which were no more than 15s in length.

Results:

Spending $1,130 to cold audiences with the above videos…

Impressions. This tactic generated an incredible amount of impressions which has a lot to do with how short the video is, the fact so many people watched all of it, and the engagement - which is highly favored in the LinkedIn algorithm, rewarding you with great performance for great ads.

These billboards generaged 57,233 impressions giving us an average CPM of $19.76 for cold traffic - that’s insanely cheap.

Clicks. This is where the numbers aren’t amazing, but it proves our point. For cold audiences, clicks are typically very expensive. The objective is to capture an audience the cheapest you can - and focusing on clicks is not ideal for cost.

With all those impressions, we generated 230 clicks, an average CPC of $4.92. Not a ton of clicks, but the CPC is impressively low for a cold audience! The point here is that if this was a static ad, our retargeting audience wouldn’t even hit LinkedIn’s threshold for 300 audience members.

The number that matters - 25% Views: 25% viewers are a parameter in LinkedIn audience building that can be set to 30-365 days. This means that this cheap audience you acquired can be retargeted to for an entire year. WOW.

So, rather than be upset with less than 300 audience members… how about 16,026 25% viewers for the same price? It’s a no brainer. This means that each member we added to our retargeting audience cost us 7 CENTS.

How to implement:

To run this tactic successfully, create 5 10-15 second “Billboard” ads. They can all be the same or different creative, but be sure to only test one thing - creative, CTA, or copy - otherwise, it will be a missed opportunity to learn from your first try and improve the next.

Serve these to your cold audience in 2 campaigns, one for clicks, and one for engagement. This will by nature show your ads to different audiences based on their platform behavior - and a little known trick is that the recommended bids for engagement are usually 50% lower than clicks. Also, don’t worry about engagement, because for this objective, you’re only focus is getting people to 25%, so you actually want less engagement and more impressions to keep costs minimal.

What we will do differently next time:
When we re-launch this tactic, we’ll be using more vibrant hooks, as our View Rate was only 26% for these videos. In a recent experiment with hooks, we found ones that are giving us over 50% view rate, which means for the same money, we’d have likely tripled our audience size.

Want to learn more?
Video Brothers is a B2B video production agency. We’ve been making content  for 10+ years, from explainers to 140+ episode branded entertainment series. 

Click below to schedule your 15-minute consultation call to find out how video can help you create content that grows your business.

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