Nevermind The Cold Audience: The Cheap Way To Winning the LinkedIn Ads Game

The cold audience phase can be the Mount Everest of LinkedIn advertising hurdles, threatening to topple even the most ambitious campaigns.

It's an all-too-common pitfall for first-time advertisers, leaving them discouraged and questioning their ROI after pouring dollars into campaigns without seeing instant results.

However, savvy advertisers recognize these challenges:

• Sky-high LinkedIn ad costs demand a foolproof plan to maximize every penny
• Expecting instant ROI on cold audience campaigns is a recipe for disappointment
• Inadequate targeting can lead to a deluge of irrelevant clicks and squandered ad spend

Seasoned advertisers with deep pockets understand the value of playing the long game, realizing that not every touchpoint will yield conversions.

But what about budget-conscious, or rooky advertisers?

Understanding the LinkedIn Ad Conundrum ??

First-time advertisers often embark on their LinkedIn Ads journey by starting from scratch, painstakingly constructing audiences using the Campaign Manager's audience builder.

While this approach works for those with extensive know-how and generous budgets, it can be a costly time sink for the rest…

Keep in mind, the common marketing funnel navigates your target audience through a series of crucial steps in their buying journey, such as Awareness > Interest > Desire > Action.

Your prospects must progress through most of these stages, either sequentially or non-sequentially, to reach that coveted "ready-to-buy" status.

But this imposes crafting individual campaigns for each stage, which can be a costly endeavor—especially on a platform notorious for commanding top-tier ad pricing from the get-go.

As anticipated, starting with a cold audience devours a significant portion of your budget in the initial stages, as you strive to achieve brand awareness, cultivate trust, and entice prospects to consider your product.

This time-consuming process leaves an inadequate budget for the all-important conversion stage (Action).

But for smaller advertisers eager to validate their investment ASAP, there's a game-changing workaround...

?? Tap into Existing Traffic & Data to Build Your First Audience

If your business has been around the block, it's likely you've already been driving traffic to your website. This could be from Google Search/Display ads, SEO, email campaigns, or any other strategy that has attracted qualified traffic to your online presence.

If so, fortune favors you!

The following step-by-step guide will reveal how to bypass the cold audience, construct a robust LinkedIn ads audience, and fast-track your way to conversions.

Meet LinkedIn Matched Audiences??

Quick hint: Before following any of these steps, make sure you have the Insight Tag installed on your website (see how).

There are 8 types of Matched Audiences available in your account, split into 2 categories:

• Uploads: Company / Contact; Offline events
• Retargeting: Company page; Event; Lead Gen Form; Single Image; Video; Website

For this purpose, you will be using Company/Contacts uploads, Website retargeting, and Company page.

Company/Contacts lists:

Step 1: In your Business Manager, navigate to your ad account, and head to Audiences (under Plan).

Step 2: Select "Matched Audiences" in the top right corner

Step 3: Click Create Audience, and select Company/Contact

Step 4: Name your audience, and select the list type (Contacts data or Company names).

Step 5: Download the list template and fill it with your own data.

Step 6: Select list, and click upload.

Step 7: Click "Agree & Upload".

And voila...you're done!

It'll take LinkedIn up to 48 hours to match your uploaded data with its existing users. Once it identifies at least 300 users from the list, you’ll have a ready-to-use audience for your next campaign.

But wait, that's not all - you can now create a LOOKALIKE from this audience!

Hint: This one works best with lists of hot leads, purchasers, or nurtured subscribers.

By utilizing LinkedIn's vast member and company data, the lookalike audiences feature enables you to advertise to professional audiences that share similarities with your current customers, website visitors, and target accounts based on the traits of your ideal customer.

Here's how:

Now that your Contacts list is ready, head back to Audiences in your Campaign Manager, click your new audience, click on the three dots (...) on the right, and select "Create lookalike".

Congrats, you now have more quality data for your ads!

This too may take up to 48 hours to generate*

But that's still not all - filter your Lookalike Audience to best match your criteria

Right...

As good as they may be, lookalikes aren't an exact match of data.

Henc It's best to optimize this audience further.

Once your Lookalike Audience is ready (Campaign Manager > Plan > Audiences), it's time to refine it so you really end up targeting only the prospects you need.

Do this by following these simple steps:

Step 1: Head back to Audiences

Step 2: Select your Lookalike Audience, click on the 3 dots (...), and select Generate Insights

(A new window will open with the following tabs: Summary; Content; Location; Member; Company. Carefully examine each category and make notes what to exclude from each.)

Step 3: Click "Edit" on the upper right corner and start excluding any irrelevant criteria you've noted down in the previous step.

You can exclude everything from Location, to Audience Atributes such as Company, Job Title, Seniority, Function, Interests and more.

Once you're done, click Apply on the bottom right, and scroll up to see the summary of your audience.

If you're satisfied with the audience, it's time for the last step.

Step 4: Head up to your right and click Manage, and then select Save. Give your audience a name and a description, and save it as a new audience.

And there you have it folks - you now have a new targeted audience for your campaigns. While certainly not as nurtured as your matched data, I've had plenty of luck with converting this segment to sales.

Put it through a couple of weeks of retargeting with some cheap text ads for some additional nurturing, and then retarget it again with other MOFU/BOFU ads.

Next: Retargeting your Web Visitors

This ones is very powerful!

Espesially if you have quality traffic already coming to your website/landing pages from any type of advertising, email campaigns, or SEO.

Here's how to do it:

Step 1: First thing's first - make sure you have your insight tag applied to all relevant pages.

Step 2: Head back to Audiences, click Create Audience, and select Website.

Step 3: Name your audience

Step 4: Select the range of engagement (I prefer to keep it in the 90-days range, but if your sales cycle is longer, feel free to expand even further)

Step 5: Match your URLs

The tool give you the option to match URLs under 3 conditions: Equals, Starts With, Contains.

Depending on your URL structure and the page you want to target, select one, and proceed by filling box.

Here's LinkedIn's suggestions when to use each:

Starts with:?Use?when you have dynamic parameters at the end of your URL. Your audience?will build?when members visit any page on your site starting with the URL entered.?

Equals:?Use to?build audiences?when members visit this exact URL on your site.?

Contains:?Use to?build audiences?from pages on your site that?contain?keywords or phrases in the URL. When using?contains, you?don’t?need to add the complete URL.?

Step 6: If tracking multiple exact page, or conditioning your retargeting traffic, expand further use "And also" or "Ad a new OR rule".

Step 7: Click Agree & Create.

And here you are - you now have all the retargeting in motion, and you're ready to launch your next campaign.

Why is this better anyway?

As mentioned before, retargeting allows you to serve ads to a warm audience that's approaching the bottom of your funnel.

So, instead of spending vast amounts of money on TOFU LinkedIn Ads (which is great and advisable for those who can afford it), you're given a head start by retargeting quality visitors and building an actual quality audience on the most exclusive B2B network out there.

Bonus tip: Create another type of retargeting layer from your Company Page Audience by selecting Company Page under Create Audience and following the same steps.

Are you doing any of this already? Let me know how this has worked out for you!

If not, follow these steps and thank me later. :)

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