LinkedIn Ads + Social Selling

Is your main channel sales outreach or maybe even just founder-led sales? Boost it with LI Ads.

How to use LinkedIn Ads to boost your current sales motion in social selling.

Without conversations, there are no meetings, and without meetings, there are no sales.

The concept is simple: connect with someone on LinkedIn, build a relationship (meaningful conversations in DMs or comments) and later having a proper sales call to close the deal.

First Level - The Desperate Way

Sending out connection requests and tring to catch someone over cold DMs. The least efficient way becuase you still need to work on the target list and the success rate is poor.

What you need:

• A company list - that are a good fit, along with profiles of relevant people. So you need A database like Sales Navigator or industry-specific ones like BuiltWith to get the relevant companies.
• Automation tools like Phantombuster or Lemlist to send the connection requests or messages.

Second Level - Creating Reasons to Reach Out

This is usually an overlooked step, but it’s the one that makes the biggest difference.

The traditional approach is to start a conversation when you can actually help or give value with your content. For example, inviting to a webinar like Jason M. Lemkin advocates (read more). Or basically opening the conversations with anything worth discussing (if the person is attending a relevant conference, where you have presentation/booth.)

The smart approach is to look beyond the easily available data (from the aggregators or LI profile). But search for something your competitors can't easily copy. For example, scraping data or using the open APIs. For instance, you want to open the disucussion with an issue the prospect has.

Real example from marketing SaaS tool - you can pull data from Meta’s ad library API to see what type of ads is the prospect running. You can do it in bulks for thousands eshops and send a message. “Hey, I noticed you’re not running dynamic product ads and the holidays are coming. You might want to consider that. By the way, our tool specializes for this.”

For more check out the Scalable, Low CAC Growth Tactics talk from Guillaume "??" Cabane .

What you need:

• Creativity. Find ways to get unconventional data like G. Cabane does.
• Prepare events worth inviting for - Run webinars, conferences or do anything worth discussing.

Third Level - Combining Organic with Paid Ads

This approach involves running ads to relevant account lists, then tracking engagement levels and reaching out when prospects know about us. Using the past posts (ad foramt Thought Leader Ads).

What’s the benefit?

Response rates improve. According to LinkedIn data, paid ads boost acceptance rates by about 19%.

But that’s not the main point. The magic happens in the DMs. The positive responses are what matters and I see consitently much better performance than cold style.

Funny anecdote: One sale guy told me that he saw the best results trying a simple non-automated messages like, “nice case with sony!” (yes, no capitals, no greetings, just the person already engaged with the ads)

Not sure if that is because the sales is ready to start conversations without pushing too hard, knowing they are relevant thanks to hyper-targeting and a past engagement.

What you need:

• Posts with different messages to rotate in the campaing. For the first month, 5 posts are fine, but ideally, you want a mix of 10+ posts over time.

Here’s the usual mix:

• Social Proof (case studies, quotes, PR articles)
• Product Value (main use cases)
• Thought Leadership (educational content)
• Call-to-action to your offer

The good think is that you can use even old content to the mix in case you aren't able to keep up with organic posts.

Fourth Level - Posting on LinkedIn

But if you’re able to post regularly, it drives another boost. Your posts will be prioritized in the feeds of new connection requests, so the more you post, the more “free” exposure you get.

But getting a co-founder to post regularly is be tough. I’ve seen a lot of hacks to make it easier, but having an internal team to get the right feel and understanding of the industry is key.

Similar job does commenting. It’s faster than posting, and you still show up in the feed. Plus, if you comment directly under the prospect's posts they will pay attention. But please, no AI bots. It’s so obvious and just annoys people. If you want to speed it up, use a dedicated CRMs for social selling like Breakcold .

Summary

If you want to do social selling without being too pushy, focus on creating opportunities for meaningful conversations. Paid ads are a great option when you don’t have enough manpower to post regularly.