This is a tale of a small team with less than three years' experience between them at the time, bidding at the minimum LinkedIn would allow, using data, insight and clever creatives to drive quality conversions and deliver a new high-performance marketing channel for our business.
Through innovative targeting, roping in creative brains from around the frist database business and learning from losses, this is how we turned a heavy loss-making LinkedIn marketing campaign to generating over £1,000,000 of revenue annually. Proving that you don't always need the biggest budgets to benefit from Linkedin's high quality traffic.
Main Objective and Performance Targets
MVF's LinkedIn team were tasked with launching a US Telephone Systems (TS US) campaign on LinkedIn. Telephone Systems is one of the biggest product categories MVF runs. However, with client demand exceeding the volume we could generate on our other quality channels, we needed to find a new source of quality business leads and be able to scale it quickly.
Our target for LinkedIn was to generate 100 conversions a month and to hit our profit margin target, we couldn't afford our cost per acquisition (CPA) to be too high. As well as this, we needed the proportion of our conversions from the lowest revenue audience tier (businesses who needed under 5 phones) to be under 50%.
However, our big challenge was that Linkedin cost per click is significantly higher than our other channels. So we had to find a way to get the most value from our Linkedin clicks. The key to this working would be exceptional targeting and high intent creatives to ensure we were paying for only relevant clicks from high quality leads.
Marketing Strategy
Given our strict CPA target and the high costs of running LinkedIn Ads, the bid strategy remained the same throughout all of our testing, which was to bid at or close to the minimum bid floor (the lowest LinkedIn allows you to bid for your target audience ) on cost per click bidding.
Knowing that LinkedIn bidding takes into account not just how much you're paying but your quality score; how relevant your ads are and your click through rate (CTR), we knew we could win the bidding through clever targeting and really relevant creatives without blowing our budget early on. But first, we needed to find out what audience was going to work for Telephone Systems on this brand-new channel.