Using Linkedin to target ideal customers?
https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/content-marketing/linkedin-b2b-marketing
Has anyone here used Linkedin to target ideal companies with their marketing content? If so, what techniques did you have the most success with?
Over the past few months I've put together detailed case studies on our ideal customers and have started writing content that I think would appeal to them.
Right now we are:
- Filtering LinkedIn search results to keywords that match our buyer persona
- Using the b2b marketing toolset provided by linkedin: https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/content-marketing/linkedin-b2b-marketing
Just wondering if you all have experience or words of advice on what to do (or what NOT to do) when getting started with LinkedIn advertising in this context.
Thanks!
Full disclosure: I sell in this space — Avery Lin (avrlin). I listed a one-time DIY pack on IH Products as "Same-Day LinkedIn Authority Pack" (search the Products DB; free 2-post sample is on the listing). Sold via an AI assistant storefront — also disclosed.
Targeting ideal customers on LinkedIn is the right first filter. The adjacent stall I keep seeing: founders finally get the right people looking… then the profile + first week of posts still read like a generic resume (or LLM-flat), so interest evaporates before a real conversation. Offline Markdown blanks (offer-line headline/About + 5–7 lived posts for week one) are a different job than prospecting lists — same platform, more "what do they land on when they click through."
Curious: when ICP targeting is solid but replies still stall after the profile visit, is it usually messaging, or the profile/content mismatch on arrival?
Not used any of the above, but Ministry of Testing has done really well this year with growing our LinkedIn page with zero ad spend, from basically zero followers to 26k - https://www.linkedin.com/company/ministry-of-testing/
Wow. That's genuinely impressive.
Wow @rosiesherry that's impressive. Do you have any suggestions about how you were able to grow your page with zero ad spend?
And honestly...if you scroll through the LinkedIn page...any post that is an open question gets loads of traction. Stick a link in it and the response is entirely different.
Honestly, I just posted a few times a week for a while, didn't even pay attention, then at around 12k mark I looked at the stats.
Mostly I posted to content of ours. Then I realised that if you post open questions (once you have a good amount of followers) without links then it all kind of exploded. People would responding in the comments, hundreds of comments at times for posting the simplest of stuff. Recently posting a question a day would lead to so many comments + 1k new followers a week. Kind of nuts.
I wrote this back in July - https://rosie.land/the-treat-linkedin-like-twitter-approach-to-linkedin-growth
What kind of content were you sharing when you first got started, before you realized the value of asking open ended questions?
I think it was mostly updates about the events we do (online and offline) and pointing towards free content we had. Nothing special tbh!
Did Ministry have an existing web presence on other social platforms, mailing list, or any other resources that you drew from to promote the linkedin page?
Yeah.
We have a LinkedIn a group (35k) which I hate because so many people post spam to it.
We generally have a strong community behind it. Twitter. Slack. Our own forum.
Ah okay so that would explain the passive assent to 26k in a year. Thanks for clarifying!
I work with clients to leverage LinkedIn for their marketing purposes so I can share some tips with you. They're following:
#1 Besides asking a question, use various content format (native video, presentation etc.). I noticed that sometimes boring content (product content, for example) can be more attractive after turning it into another format (native video, for example).
#2 Content with your staff is always a good choice because people love to see other humans at a given company.
#3 Do you know that you can follow three hashtags and giving response for threads related to them? By that you can build your expertise brand as a company among Linkedin users :)
#4 Involve your employees in the distribution chain of content from your LinkedIn Page.
#5 Daily check out "Content suggestions" box that's available at admin panel. It should be inspiration for you.
#6 Post don't so often - I recommend 2-3 times a week - with strongly focusing on content that you want to deliver.
Let me know or DM if you will have more questions.
Great tips! I hadn't thought about following and responding to hashtags but that makes a lot of sense, as it delivers value and feels better than a canned, direct message.
@Ebell I have to start a new reply because we've conversed so much there wasn't a "reply" option anymore. 😆
Great idea on hiring a consultant to help. With the right person, that can make a huge difference.
You should be very proud of yourself for what you've done so far. You're well ahead of most businesses that are more focused on lead gen and not really about diving deep into who their ideal customers are.
The more you learn about your ideal customers, the better you can serve them too. You'll find out how they make decisions, what they value most, how they prioritize their goals with your products -- this data simply informs everything you do moving forward and makes it more powerful and effective -- not to mention that good customer experience tends to follow right behind. 😍
What you're doing with all this research is setting up a system so critical information about customers can flow to where it's needed -- product, marketing, sales, customer success etc. It's providing a great foundation for your future growth. 🙌
Oh wow, that's funny, I guess we are being chatty! Really appreciate all of your positive energy and support. Feel free to call on me any time if you need help in your endeavors :)
I've enjoyed this conversation immensely. 🙂
If we were meeting over coffee, it would have either have gone cold or we would have been getting glares from the staff because closing time was 15 minutes ago! 😂
Thanks for the offer. And same to you -- my contact info is in my profile if you ever want to reach out. 👍
Cheers, I've sent a message :)
I would be more inclined to build up your personal profile than the company page. People interact with people so the company becomes a source of information when they want to learn more.
Alot of people say its not worth the expense but would strongly recommend getting sales navigator and while their algorithm is pretty awful, (especially after 500 contacts) its a fantastic tool but you need to test out different strategies to get the best results. Leads vs accounts, title vs function, groups vs connections.
Dont be shy and ask for a meeting as its a business platform. If you offer a great service with relevant content why would an exec get pissed if its something that will improve their business. The main thing is to act natural and not get too salesy and lost in the lingo. We have set up meetings with senior execs across all industries ranging from Apple, NY Giants, United healthcare to Vuyner Media but doesnt work for every company. Have found that healthcare, emerging tech and specialized agencies get the most consistent results.
That's a good point, I can see why building up a strong personal profile would be valuable, since you're interacting one on one with other users.
Are you using Sales Navigator for both your personal and business accounts?
We use it for business development so mostly for personal. The biggest priority for our clients is to gain more connections and meet with potential partners so not much time is spent developing the business account. Ideally you are running both as one is focused on short term wins while the other grows the brand.
I see, so it sounds like you're using Sales Navigator for your personal account, which is your main point of contact when networking and running your sales initiatives. Thanks for clarifying that!
I tried it, but it was too expensive ($2 CPC) and did not perform well...
I'll look into the current costs and see if they're still comparable to that. Thanks for your input @ramuta
Hi Ezra, LinkedIn outreach worked so well for me (in a B2B context) that it inspired me to create an outbound agency, replacing my income as a consultant. I think it is a great channel to generate qualified leads and book calls, bringing the conversation offline. It is also a useful tool in terms of customer discovery, to test new products / services to a target audience.
While social selling is a huge topic on its own and there are many resources out there, for me the most important thing is to not be salesy. "People like to buy, but not to be sold to." If you communicate clearly and engage while qualifying, you'll naturally identify opportunities.
Feel free to DM if you'd like to chat more about it, but here are some of the things I focus on when engaging and connecting with leads:
Good luck!
These are amazing tips @DaniloKreimer. Thank you so much for your input. Can you send a link to your outbound agency so I can take a look at the kind of services you offer? We will likely be doing it ourselves but I'd like to keep you on file in case I know other people who are looking for similar services.
Sure @Ebell. We only have a simple website for now (since the official launch of the service will be in November), you can check it out here (https://singularreach.landen.co/).
Have you decided on prices yet? I noticed that the price section doesn't include that info yet.
All of the companies that we're working with now are subscribed to an early access plan with special pricing, which has a substantial discount. From November onwards, our basic plan (with an outreach of 1,000 prospects + clean CRM data) will be priced around $750/month - we estimate 7-20 scheduled calls as a result of it. That is more accessible than most of the (serious) competitors and less than a fourth of what you can expect to spend to hire and train a SDR.
PS: Let me know that you discovered the service on IHs and we'll add email support (to follow-up with prospects and improve results) without any additional cost :)
Thanks for clarifying, we're not looking for a lead gen tool at the moment but I'll keep SingularReach in mind!
Great question!
I pretty much solely prospect for ideal customers via LinkedIn and love it. 👍👍
I've got a finely tuned system now.
I use Sales Nav to search and get a small(ish) list.
I then take time and manually decide whether they would be a good prospect. (Sales Nav is good but it's still not that refined.)
Once I get my list saved in my various lead lists, I reach out to connect on LI.
If I don't get that connection request, I send a series of 3 cold emails.
If that fails, I send something via snail mail.
My connection rate on LinkedIn is about 76%.
I'm just starting the email sequences.
And I've been snail mailing for a while with really good results (usually takes a couple rounds before I hear from them. I'm currently in discussions with 2 big logos at this point.)
Best part about this?
I simply enjoy the process (especially the snail mail part 😀)
That's fun, I like the approach you've described here @AnitaToth. Snail mail wouldn't have occurred to me but that's probably why it's an effective way to stand out!
It seems like you really value the connection and feedback that you get from these prospects. So once you connect on LI, do you have a prescribed sales sequence or tend to approach the conversations more organically? Also, do you use a booking page to schedule web conferences with prospects?
It certainly does make me stand out. It's a bit more effort than writing a cold email but more effective in getting attention. 🙌
Once I've connected on LI, I try to send something I think might be of use to the person -- an article (not one of mine) or a link to some software that might help them. Anything that I think might be helpful (of course, in researching the person I've noted things like this so I'm prepped for when we do connect).
I'll be honest, this approach of finding something helpful has been a bit tricky and sometimes downright frustrating.
But just an hour ago🙌, I came across a great idea that I love -- I'm going to record a quick, personalized video to them as my first outreach once we connect.
Pretty sure I'll get better results with this.
I'll let you know how that goes.
And yes, I have a Calendly link specific to these types of meetings. (If you're looking to do this, set the software up so they can only book on certain days. For me, all my prospecting calls are made on Thursdays and Fridays only. Monday - Wed are for my clients.)
Does this system sound like something you can use?
Amazing, please do keep me posted on how the personalized video goes. The human touch seems like it could help a lot, and it's faster than a hand written letter in snail mail.
I've been talking with my team this morning about whether to focus on ads or the prospecting / sales approach. Since I am employed full time, it would be cheaper for us to advertise than have me prospecting. My guess it that we will put more budget towards hiring a marketing consultant who can produce highly relevant content for our audience and then take out linkedin ads for hyper focused target user segments.
As for scheduling apps, that's great to hear that you have one. Our company is actually a calendly competitor ;)
I will keep you posted Ezra.
I just saw an interview with Patrick Campbell from ProfitWell and he mentioned this video approach had insanely good ROI. (He wouldn't divulge how good, though. ☹️)
Personally, I see ads as a great way to scale what's already there. Think adding fuel to a burning fire.
The advantage of the manual route is that you can really get to know who your ideal customers are so you can better target them when you run ads.
My last business (FB ad agency), I focused almost solely on using ads to generate leads early in the business. While it was effective, I attracted a lot of customers who weren't so great.
I fully attribute that to not really knowing my ideal customer.
For this business (reducing churn for SaaS), I'm doing manual outreach and already it's paying off in better quality relationships with people (even those who aren't customers) and in attracting my ideal customers.
Yes, it's tedious at times to do the manual route but I try to make it fun. Like I'm on an expedition and I'm exploring to see who I can find that might be a good fit.
I swear this mental approach (explorer vs drudgery) is what is helping me focus on the tasks at hand when they get a bit challenging.
Whichever route you choose, test and record. Then test and record some more.
You're right about taking an explorative approach. It's so much better than getting into a mechanistic mindset. The firewood analogy makes sense too. I hope our company gets the opportunity to see it in action over the next six months. We'll definitely be doing a lot of testing and performance monitoring.
I am the sole customer success manager at an app with 50K active subscribers, so I speak with users on a regular basis and am deeply aware of there interests, requests, concerns, etc. This is currently how we continue to learn and refine our product to fit the target market.
You might be interested - to learn who our ideal customer persona was, I defined two major high performing user segments and then narrowed the list down to a single, ideal customer persona type. Then I looked at our 50 most successful companies and did a deep dive into their individual use cases. We learned a lot from this process, including recurring keywords, configuration scenarios, and other industry related patterns.
Right now we're developing strategic partnerships with other companies that use Zapier. These kinds of articles are relevant to our audience. They also help build domain authority through backlinks and can drive traffic to our site through partner's blogs and case study pages.
Harnessing existing traffic from partners has been a key growth factor for us, but we don't want to rely on it exclusively, so eventually we will be taking out ads on landing pages and definitive guides.
Sounds like you have a good strategy in place and have been very intentional about building that ideal customer profile.
-- Just to throw a monkey wrench in here -- You likely have 2 -3 ideal customers who might vary by demographics, end goals they want from the product, the product's value they seek and activity behaviours.
You will want to identify these and market to each of those groups. That will only help you better target them and lower your CAC as a result. 👍
Partnerships are amazing. Glad to hear you're taking full advantage of them. (It's one of my main channels right now too.)
Agreed on opening up a new channel with paid ads and not relying solely on a few channels.
Lastly, I hope your ideal customer profile(s) 😉 are available to the sales and marketing teams. It's super helpful to them to see get a full picture of the company's ideal customer so they can better do their job.
Also, customers, markets and culture changes constantly. If they start noticing something (again sales might discover a hidden need or want through their contacts with prospective customers) that customer support wouldn't necessarily hear.
Also, it's a great way to keep everyone focused on the biggest thing -- the customer. 😀
I'm chuckling over here because we are a small team of three developers and myself, so I currently run customer success, sales and marketing simultaneously.
Insert circus monkey gif here
But your intuition is right, our ideal customer persona is actually still fairly broad. Our most successful organizations use the app for both sales and customer support scheduling. There are subpatterns within that, the simplest being "sales only", "support only" and "consultation service only".
When evaluating this segment based on industry, we find that the use cases vary wildly. EDU was one of the exceptions, as they tend to use scheduling almost exclusively for advising, but that industry comes with a unique set of challenges - accessibility standards for example.
You are inspiring me to dig through our research again and see if I can identity 2-3 key identifiers that are not related to use case. It's difficult to use LinkedIn to do a quick search and determine a company's appointment scheduling intent.
It's certainly worth digging to find out what those customer groups are because your CAC will be tied to how well you can market to them.
If you're only trying to market to one customer group, your CAC will be higher as your marketing won't be as effective.
If you can get down to the 2-3 customer groups, your marketing will become more effective and your CAC will drop as a result.
It's amazing how you can really dial this in. The 2-3 groups might describe the product's value differently, might have different goals and may even use unique language to describe their situation.
Even though you're wearing so many hats, take the time and document these customer profiles in a spreadsheet (I prefer Airtable) and then start adding to them the more you learn about those customer groups.
Over time, you'll start seeing more differentiation among the groups and more similarities within the groups.
Get to that point and you're marketing will be much easier and more effective. 🙌
Totally - I've been meaning to try Airtable, I hear good things. Our team works in Notion currently.
Your advice is great and consistent with what I've done so far. I targeted a segment of users in intercom, exported the key data into spreadhseets for our two major customer segments: EDU and SaaS companies.
There are about 20 key data points for each company. I created an additional set of new data points for information that was gathered manually.
It turns out almost every SaaS team has a need for scheduling tools. Those types of companies are just slightly more difficult to query in LinkedIn because they're not industry specific.
As you can tell, I'm still learning here, so we're hiring a consultant to look over the research and help us to define a full brand and marketing strategy.
Hey Ezra, I like to use LinkedIn to gather information and estimate the size of my target audience. I'll connect with anywhere between 20 and a couple hundred depending on who I'm looking for and for what reason.
For me, about 30% connect and many are happy to have a conversation, especially if they can share their expertise.
Good luck, it's a powerful tool!!
Hey Tyler, thanks for chiming in here!
It sounds like you and @AnitaToth both create a prospect list and then reach out manually.
For the high touch approach to work, I would need to target upper management at companies with teams of 40-100 members. We do have well defined customer personas, so I have a sense of which industries to filter through with LinkedIn's search tools.
Do either of you run paid ads on linkedin? If not, is it because you have found direct communication to be more effective?
@Ebell
LI ads -- oh boy. My experience was painful.
$700 in 3 days cause my PPC was high. Didn't realize how different LI audiences were to my Facebook ones. That was one hard lesson to learn.
Takeaway: LI ads are way more expensive than FB ads if not done correctly. 😝
I have found this personal outreach to be better right now, even though it's time consuming.
I'll likely go back to LI ads once I've got more traction in the market. I'll use LI ads to scale once I've got good momentum going this manual way.
Ahh, sorry to hear that about the linkedin ads!
Can you go into any detail about what you did 'incorrectly' to bring your cost to $700 over 3 days? Is there a daily budget feature that was misconfigured?
This was over a year ago now so the platform may have changed (there's was no daily budget feature).
I think the driving force behind my 'failure' was:
I've really been focusing on LI for over a year now and understand so much more about it.
Using Sales Nav is a better use of my money right now than LI ads.
And that's more a function of my growth stage; growth is happening but it's a bit early to put fuel to the fire with ads.
I'd say test them out. Set aside a budget and see what happens.
You might have awesome results. 🙂
Got it -- I've taken notes on the ideas you've shared and will definitely research LinkedIn's sales nav tool. Thanks again for the suggestion Anita!
Amazing coming across this thread because I've been thinking about using LinkedIn for thegoodstartup.com. I have a pretty strong network on there, but I am so uninterested in the "professionalism" LinkedIn has. Anyone know how the algorithm works to get your personal and business page posts to show up more?
Social Selling Index found in Sales Navigator.
It's the best way to increase your visibility by focusing on 4 metrics the algorithm uses:
Each of these is graded on scale of 1-25.
I got the most reach on my posts and the most inbound connection requests as I hit 80 SSI score (At 80 SSI score, I was also ranked in the top 4% of my network).
I've been a bit quiet with responding to other's posts in the past few weeks and my SSI is now at 72. (The biggest drop was in #3 Engage with insights -- go figure. 😉)
Since dropping to 72, I've seen a HUGE drop in inbound connection requests (from 10 a day to less than 1 a day) and post reach (half of what I got at 80 SSI).
@Ebell This might help you a bit too. 😀
@foreverhannahle Have you checked out any of the Udemy courses on this topic? I've personally used this one to inform my strategy, though I haven't acted on all of their suggestions: https://www.udemy.com/linkedinmachine/
I haven't done any LinkedIn advertising in a long time, and I remember it was difficult to get a decent ROI (at least for the business I worked for back then). I imagine things have changed quite a lot since then — last time I used it was something like 4 years ago and I didn't have time to put as much love into it as I would have liked. In theory LinkedIn should be great for B2B.
What I've seen some companies do successfully, not only on LinkedIn, is to advertise not their product, but relevant, useful content to bring people in at the very top of their funnel. Once they're in the funnel, more specific ads can be a possibility (via remarketing, for example, but don't be annoying), getting them farther into the funnel. (Or if you can build your email list this way, even better.)
By what you wrote here, looks like that might be your plan? Would love to see how it goes.
To your last question, yes the user research has definitely helped us to define our top of funnel "awareness" content, which we share on our blog. However my current plan is to take out linkedin advertisements on dedicated landing pages, rather than blog content or definitive guides.
I've had a lot of success with Linkedin. With out current company we probably did over 100+ interviews - many turned into customer discussions. I have some material i can send you if you'd like.
Yes, please send along any material on this topic. I'm curious how the interviews fit into this.