What we learnt after spending ?332,922.33 on LinkedIn Ads

That’s not for one my clients. It’s for my agency XOR Labs .

Last year, we had an epiphany: we’re marketing experts—and we’ve never marketed ourselves.

A bummer, isn’t it?

Since then, we initiated multiple marketing activities from hardcore performance marketing and speaking engagements to PR and branding focused campaigns.

LinkedIn Ads was among those.

Between 01 April 2022 to 30 September 2022, we spent ?332,922.33 on XOR Labs LinkedIn Ads account. Here’s quick summary of the results.

• Amount spent: ?332,922.33
• Total impressions: 957,221
• Video views: 721,395
• View rate: 77.45%
• Video view completions: 31,224
• Video completion rate: 4.33%

Why do I talk about video views so much? Well, hang on. I will come to that.

LinkedIn has taught us so much that we’re going bullish on LinkedIn from here on. Here’s a quick summary of what we learnt.

1. LinkedIn is NOT costly

Unlike the popular opinion, LinkedIn is as cheap as it can get—if you understand how B2B marketing works.

We deployed LinkedIn for three campaign types:

• Video views
• Lead generation

If you judge LinkedIn from the perspective of cost per lead, it will seem costly.

But bring in the parameter of SQL, it’s even better.

What is SQL? It stands for Sales Qualified Lead—to put it simply, a lead that’s qualified for your service or product. Every company has its own parameter of what an SQL looks like. For us, there are some parameters too—the size of the business, vision for the next 6-12 months, and how confident we are about the product.

When we calculated, the SQL from LinkedIn Ads was way better than Meta Ads.

And that’s just one part.

LinkedIn is even better from top of the funnel perspective. Our cost per video view and video completion was also better as compared to Facebook and Instagram.

2. Branding campaign work in mysterious ways. Referrals jumped by 4x

Remember how I talked about video campaign metrics in the beginning?

Here’s why.

95% of our ad spend was on Video View objective.

Why?

Because our focus was to increase visibility. That’s the single metric we were optimising for. And what impact did we see from LinkedIn campaigns?

• We had 4 times higher referrals between April and September this year as compared to the previous six months
• Our business grew by 2x within the period

3. LinkedIn creates recall

Imagine one morning, you see BRAND ONE’s ad on Facebook.

And the same evening, you see a competitor’s, let’s say BRAND TWO, ad on TV the very same day and, that too, multiple times. You see this brand’s ad again on Facebook.

Which brand are you likely to recall: BRAND ONE vs BRAND TWO?

There are multiple studies which point that certain platforms create better recall. For instance, TV or even YouTube. In our case, we saw this happening with LinkedIn.

A lot of leads and prospects I talked to remembered seeing XOR Labs “somewhere”.

Conclusion

LinkedIn, as we see it, is goldmine for B2B marketing. And more specifically, for agencies.

This is a compilation of six month’s learning. We’re doing much more based on what we saw in the half yearly campaign.

I will be sharing more details about the next round of learning and soon.

Stay tuned for more insights.