Author’s Note: This post was originally published in 2020. It has since been updated for 2024! 

LinkedIn has gotten a rep in the past that it’s only useful for B2B marketing. And while that is somewhat true—and we’ll provide a few Linkedin ad examples below—we’ve also seen great success testing the channel for B2C efforts, too! LinkedIn’s member base consists of a more engaged, professional audience than some other channels, so it’s a great place to be if you’re looking to promote a product or service that may best be served to this particular audience when they’re paying the most attention.

Let’s take a look at some of the LinkedIn campaigns we’ve run over only the past 6 months for our partners and some of the results those campaigns have yielded!

Driving free sign-ups to SaaS organization Nulab’s core software products

Goal: Driving free sign-ups to Nulab’s core software products through a variety of messaging – content-based and action-based

Campaign Objective: Website Conversions

Ad Format: Sponsored Content → Static Image

The Linkedin ad format you likely think of (or see while scrolling on your feed) is Sponsored Content, which essentially appears as a promoted post and can feature a static image, video, carousel, or even an article. Images tend to perform well when driving site traffic or conversions, and video or carousels work best as upper-funnel awareness-building content. A square ad ratio is recommended for Sponsored Content ads due to its ability to take up a larger portion of the screen across both desktop and mobile placements. Don’t forget to include text overlay and branding to catch the audience’s attention quickly and form strong brand associations!

We’ve tested a variety of static image creative for Nulab, whose product suite includes a project management software and online, collaborating diagramming software. In an effort to position their products to their target audience on LinkedIn, we promote a lot of their educational and value-based content to engage with users. 

Driving B2B MQLs for EdTech organization Multiverse by promoting valuable pieces of content

Goal: Driving marketing qualified leads that will be nurtured in their down-funnel sales pipeline to ultimately become deals by promoting valuable content that’s relevant to their target audience

Campaign Objective: Lead Generation

Ad Format: Document Ads

Want to take promoting content a step further? Why not check out Document Ads?

Multiverse, one of our EdTech partners based in the UK, has a very robust content strategy that involves several new reports, white papers, and case studies being published every quarter that are relevant to the ICP they’re trying to reach and what is going on in the industry at the time. In late 2022, we identified the new-at-the-time Document Ad format as a great vehicle to get this content in front of our target audience – GATED – without them ever needing to leave their LinkedIn feed to access it.

Linkedin Document Ads are especially a great format to test if you are a B2B organization looking to promote the content you already have on hand. They appear native to the platform because they are essentially an embedded slideshow presentation that you can swipe through to read, like turning a page or moving to the next slide. For gated Document Ads, we usually recommend previewing the first 1-3 pages and requiring users to fill out the lead form to download and view the full document. Since this format allows you to share a Document directly in the feed, there’s no need to click off to a different landing page, making the content easier and more convenient to read and engage with – and we’ve found that LinkedIn users prefer to stay on LinkedIn when they’re there.

In order to run a Document Ad, you just need to incorporate your content into a PDF, DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX file type that is no greater than 100 MB in size and no longer than 300 pages (we recommend anywhere from 10-20 as a sweet spot because the more pages = the longer it will take to upload to the platform, and users are less likely to download a resource longer than 20 pages). To follow LinkedIn’s best practice of 5-8 creative concepts per campaign, we recommend creating several cover variations of your report/white paper/e-book so that you can swap them onto new versions of the PDF and run each version as its own creative concept!

The types of content we have historically promoted via Document Ads for Multiverse include case studies, reports, and white papers.

From the content we’ve promoted, we’ve taken away some learnings around what works well to drive click engagement and leads from this type of ad format:

• Case studies that feature well-known organizations or companies
• Relevant content that is being talked about in your industry – for Multiverse, this is skills gaps, upskilling, and AI
• Clear messaging around what the content is about and what value a prospect will be getting if they down this content

We tend to see Document Ads being a bit more costly than other formats as it’s a hot commodity in terms of ad formats to promote, but we’ve found a sweet spot with promoting it alongside other formats, such as Sponsored Messaging campaigns, to get more bang for your buck.

Driving leads for FinTech organization Acres by promoting content through personalized messages

Goal: Driving leads to that will be entered into nurture workflows in their CRM by promoting their latest, science-backed report on land value data

Campaign Objective: Lead Generation

Ad Format: Message Ad

Another one of the formats that is unique to LinkedIn that we love testing, especially alongside Document Ads or other in-feed ads to further ramp up high-quality lead-driving campaigns, are Sponsored Messaging campaigns. Whether you’re testing Message Ads or Conversation Ads, both formats offer the ability to reach audiences in a personalized and conversational way through the use of dynamic fields that auto-populate with a member’s first name, last name, company name, or job title, creating a tailored message experience at scale.

This ad format performs best when the designated sender has a Director or higher job title relevant to the content of the message, plus a welcoming profile picture. 

Key Message Ad Components: 

• Subject Line: A short and engaging hook
• Body: The sender introduces themselves and then leads into a clear and concise description of the offering, ideally 500 characters or less for better performance
• CTA Button: Customizable text, up to 20 characters

TIP: Bullet point formatting helps drive home the main points of the Message Ad and subtly guides a user’s eyes toward the CTA button (like we did just now!)

We tend to find that, when paired together, Document Ads and Message Ads are a real powerhouse together when you are promoting the same content and targeting the same audience: you stay in front of your target audience while they’re scrolling their feeds with a visual asset, grabbing their attention, and then you follow up on that with a personalized message delivered directly to their LinkedIn inboxes, where they may be more engaged.

We’ve promoted Acres’ land value report across both ad formats simultaneously and have generated over 100 leads that their team has been able to nurture down the funnel.

Taking it one step further

If you have the resources and bandwidth to do so, leveraging various ad formats at once allows you to capture your audience’s attention in several ways – whether that’s through informative document ads with in-depth insights or personalized messages that directly tap into the value that your organization is offering. And if you’re not sure what would work for you? Test, test, and test again! LinkedIn specifically is a great paid social channel to test on – they even introduced their A/B test tool late last year so you can now do this on your own – so you can take your learnings and apply them to your future strategy.

By taking advantage of the channel’s features, we’ve been able to layer LinkedIn into our paid social channel mix to reach our target audience in new ways and with new messaging, and there is so much more to explore! If you’re looking to take your LinkedIn advertising to the next level, let’s talk!

The post LinkedIn Advertising in 2024: LinkedIn Ad Examples From Tuff Clients appeared first on Tuff.

Have you seen how folks are skimming past those long ebooks and hefty guides lately? You pour your heart and soul into crafting these valuable resources, but still, it’s tough to generate leads and MQLs on the platforms you’re promoting them on.

We’re starting to notice this because search engines are dishing out answers directly on the search results page (SERP), resulting in fewer visits to your website from Google. Plus, more people are tuning in to short video clips, newsletters, and LinkedIn posts instead. In 2022, video accounted for 82% of all internet traffic, up over 10% compared to the time period before the pandemic – likely due to how our consumption behaviors have changed since then.

At Tuff, we’ve found that engaging and authentic videos, not just slickly produced ones, are your golden ticket to standing out and building stronger connections with your audience, especially in the B2B realm. It’s not just about being visible; it’s about forging genuine bonds. Nowadays, people are turning to video content for more of their information, evident in YouTube’s longstanding position as the second most popular search engine globally and the rising use of TikTok for searches. Your audience is already consuming plenty of videos in their personal time—why wouldn’t they want to watch them when it comes to business decisions?

In this post, I’ll break down why short form video should take the spotlight in your B2B content and creative strategy. Plus, I’ll dish out some examples of the video marketing that have been hitting it out of the park with our clients. Ready to dive in?

The Case for Short Form Video in B2B Content 

When it comes to grabbing attention, videos take the cake over static images. They’re dynamic and include movement and sound, making them harder to scroll past. Plus, viewers tend to stick around longer, getting more engaged as they watch. Starting with a hook ensures viewers are drawn in from the get-go.

Also, in one video, you can convey multiple messages or clips, saving you from creating separate ads for each. With video, creative testing becomes a breeze—it’s way more efficient and scalable compared to static assets. This versatility is especially handy for products or services that need a bit of explaining to pique interest. And with a whopping 88% of people persuaded to buy after watching a brand’s video, it’s clear videos are more than just informative—they drive conversions.

Insights into High-Performing Videos and Categories: Current Success Factors

In our client portfolio, we’ve got a diverse mix of B2B brands, and nearly all of them have jumped on the video marketing for bandwagon for both their paid and organic inbound efforts campaigns.

Now, a common question we get is: what types of videos should you be creating? Well, based on recent successes, here are some categories we suggest diving into or at least considering, along with examples of each:

Explainer Videos: 

One awesome aspect of explainer videos, especially for intricate products or services, is that they’re easily crafted using stock images or videos. This makes them super useful for brands that don’t have a load of their own footage lying around.

Check out these two recent explainer videos we whipped up for clients. They’ve been successful in various paid campaigns, boosting both awareness and conversions:

Testimonial or Case Study Videos: 

Social proof is absolutely crucial for B2B. With decisions often hinging on referrals or thorough research, it’s key to have that backing. When we’re targeting specific audiences further down the funnel in our campaigns, we lean heavily on social proof and case study videos to encourage action. Our goal is usually to get them primed for engagement with the sales team. 

Check out this recent example of a short-form social proof video we used in B2B campaigns on LinkedIn:

We’re big believers in short-form video testimonials, so much so that we use this strategy for our own growth efforts too! Take a peek at this collection of testimonials from our clients sharing their experiences working with our team.

Animated Videos:  

When it comes to animated videos, nailing that attention-grabbing hook in the first few seconds is crucial. Plus, don’t forget to add some text overlay for an extra boost of engagement. These short-form videos, like explainers and testimonials, can really shine on your website and in LinkedIn and YouTube campaigns. Check out this recent animated video we did for a B2B brand—it nails all the key creative elements and has been a real winner for us in campaigns

User-Generated Videos: 

While you might think of UGC content as more fitting for DTC brands, it’s gaining traction and significance in B2B efforts too. One major perk? You can repurpose, tweak, and leverage UGC in various ways to maximize your budget. People connect with faces, so showcasing them in your content builds a deeper connection. That’s why UGC is such a hit—it works wonders in B2B, just like it does in D2C setups.

Check out one of our recent favorite examples that we crafted for a client to use in their paid campaigns:

Measuring Success with Short Form Video Campaigns

Wondering how to gauge the performance of your short form videos? Here are some key metrics to focus on when leveraging them in campaigns:

1. CTR (Click-Through Rate): This percentage shows how many people clicked on your ad out of those who saw it. It’s a good indicator of how engaging your ad is.
2. VTR (View-Through Rate): Similar to CTR, but calculated based on the number of people who viewed your ad. Depending on the platform, a view may be counted as 2 seconds to half of the video.
3. Ad Hook Rate: This measures how effective the beginning of your video was at capturing attention and keeping viewers engaged.
4. Completion Rate: This percentage tells you how many viewers watched your ad all the way through. It gives insight into overall engagement with your video content.

Ready to jump into video marketing? Now that you’ve seen what works and how to check if it works for you, it’s time to get going! You don’t need fancy gear or editing software to start—just dive in. But if you need a hand, reach out to our team! We’ve got a skilled bunch who can craft your performance creative strategy and handle everything from start to finish for your first video ad. 

The post Video Marketing for B2B: The Key to Elevating Your Content Strategy with Short Form Video appeared first on Tuff.

Lead generation is vital for many of Tuff’s B2B partners. The goal: Create a customer database for future marketing and remarketing initiatives. Social platforms, like LinkedIn, offer native lead generation forms, making it a go-to choice for many brands. Leveraging LinkedIn’s credibility and network, you can attract and drive leads from relevant prospects to boost your business.

However, there’s also the tried-and-true method of driving leads/form submissions via a dedicated landing page experience. This gives you total control of what you’re showing users and the information you’re collecting from them.

As with most aspects of digital advertising, there are pros and cons of both methods. We’ve outlined what these look like below, as well as some questions to think through when deciding which strategy works best for you. Keep these quick tips in mind as you move forward with lead gen efforts.

LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms: Pros and Cons

Let’s begin by taking a look at LinkedIn lead generation forms, which are created and hosted in the platform and appear native. These are easy to set up and don’t require any additional resources on your end to implement and execute.

🟢 The Pros

Let’s talk about what makes LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms work:

Seamless UX

• One of the biggest benefits of utilizing LinkedIn’s lead generation feature and the in-platform native lead forms is they provide a seamless and simple user experience. Since forms are integrated directly into the platform, users don’t have to navigate to a landing page and away from their current tab. This reduces any drop-offs on the form submission and, thus, increases the likelihood that the form is completed. 

Auto-populate feature in LinkedIn

• LinkedIn stands out from other social platforms for lead generation thanks to its auto-population feature. This means that when users fill out a form, it automatically fills in their name, job title, company name, and sometimes even their phone number and email address from their LinkedIn profile. This saves users from the hassle of manually entering this information, and they only need to edit the phone number and email address fields if necessary.

Credible and trustworthy platform

• Besides the fact that submitting information via a lead form is easy and doesn’t take much time or energy at all, users tend to trust LinkedIn more because it’s a credible platform that they already interact with. They may be more comfortable handing over personal info than they would on an external website. Overall, this comfort coupled with the auto-populating feature above means that lead volume (and lead quality) may be higher. Since users need to have information associated with their profile and since LinkedIn is a professional network, this means that the users submitting their information may be more reputable and genuinely relevant to your product or service. 

Efficiently and easily download your leads

• Finally, the process of collecting leads through LinkedIn is really efficient because there are so many ways to set up a landing page and, thus, so many ways to collect lead information. On LinkedIn, you will be able to download leads directly from the platform in a .csv format. Even more convenient, you can also integrate your ad account with your marketing automation or CRM system, such as HubSpot or Salesforce (but those are only two of several!) This means you can automatically send the leads you’re driving into your system so you can bake them into your existing workflows, enter them into your lead nurture campaigns, and more. 

🔴 The Cons

Sounds great, right? However, it’d be remiss of us to not mention the cons:

Inability to customize the lead form

• When using LinkedIn’s built-in lead generation forms, you’ll face certain restrictions. One significant limitation is the inability to fully customize the form to your needs. LinkedIn offers a variety of predefined form fields to choose from, but they might not always match your exact requirements. Although you can create a custom field and provide options, there’s a limit to how many options you can include. Alternatively, you can allow users to input their own information in a custom field, but this means that certain fields won’t be automatically filled out, which can add unnecessary friction to the form submission process.

Visual design limitations

• In addition to customization limitations, there are constraints on visual design. You’ll find character limits for the form’s headline and copy text. Also, the image displayed is typically your company page’s banner, and unfortunately, you can’t customize it at this time. (But that’d be really great! C’mon, LinkedIn!)

Costly objective

• Lead generation is also one of the most popular campaign objectives on the platform, meaning it can be costly. LinkedIn is already a more costly platform than the other social platforms. Your CPC (cost-per-click), CPM (cost-per-thousand-impressions), and especially CPL (cost-per-lead), may be higher as you compete against a larger audience in the ad auction.

As you can see, LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms offer convenience and credibility for lead generation but come with limitations and potential added costs. Now, let’s explore the implications of using a traditional landing page for lead collection from LinkedIn.

Traditional Landing Pages: The Classic Approach

A landing page is a standalone web page that’s created specifically for an advertising campaign. Its primary purpose is to offer more information tailored to the campaign’s audience and present a single clear call to action for visitors, ensuring a straightforward and focused experience.

🟢 The Pros

Let’s chat through why you might choose a landing page:

Control over the design and layout

• When driving to a landing page, you have total control over the design of the page. You can completely customize the layout of the page depending on what landing page host you’re using. Controlling the layout means you can control the journey for the user, and ultimately drive them to the conversion action you’re optimizing for. This means you can implement best practices around CRO, or conversion rate optimization, to ensure you’re keeping people on the page and steering them toward the action of submitting the form. You also have visual and functional control over the form. You can add your desired amount of text to intro the form and you can include form fields that are necessary to your business. It is important to note, however, that the fewer the form fields, the more likely people are to successfully fill out your form without abandoning it for TikTok.

Incorporate multi-channel strategies

• Landing pages also give you more opportunities to utilize multi-channel strategies, such as supporting SEO goals alongside conversion goals to bring more visibility to your site. A landing page is also a great way to get visibility to the website for people who might take a longer journey to conversion. Allowing them the chance to visit a page that’s integrated with the main website will give them the opportunity to read more and find further convincing information. It’s also a great way to improve tracking of each user’s journey to conversion allowing validation in what’s working.

🔴 The Cons

And how about those drawbacks?

Similar to LinkedIn, driving to a landing page from your advertising campaign can come with some disadvantages. 

Risk of clunky user experience and high bounce rates

• Will the page take too long to load and cause the user to exit the entire experience before filling out the form? Are they using a device like their mobile phone where the experience may not be optimal? Will the landing page include too much information that the user will become overwhelmed and back out? All of these hurdles can factor into a high bounce rate, meaning a user has left the page almost immediately after landing.

Issues if you don’t match the design and messaging between the two

• Smart marketers optimize each landing page to have the same messaging and/or design as the ads driving to it. If a user has clicked on an ad for a reason, they expect to find the same experience when they go to another page. If you’re not aligned in your strategy, people may become confused and believe your product or service is not as relevant to them as they thought. Being strategic about matching the landing page to the ad creative and copy may take more time, planning, and resources.

Choosing the Right Strategy

Now that you know the pros and cons of both strategies, it’s time to choose which one is right for you and your campaign. We recommend thinking about the following factors:

1. Your goal = Is your goal genuinely to drive as many leads as possible? Is your goal to drive them within an efficient CPL? Are you looking to remarket to the people interacting with these ads? This means you need to send them to a page you can build a retargeting audience off of.
2. Your budget = Do you have a budget that would allow you to bid competitively against the other advertisers utilizing LinkedIn lead forms? Do you have a budget (and bandwidth, for that matter) that would allow you to design a new landing page? What about optimizing an existing one for UX?
3. Your audience = Is your audience one that’s spending time on LinkedIn – enough of it that they would be taking an extra second to fill out a native lead form OR visit another page? Do they seem trusting of handing over information that’s already populated or filling it out themselves?

A Note on A/B Testing

If your answers are unclear, try out A/B testing. Set up one campaign for lead generation with ads containing a form. Set up another campaign for website conversions with ads driving to a landing page.

Right now, LinkedIn doesn’t offer self-service A/B testing like Meta. You can still target the same audience and use the same budget across two campaigns. But be careful not to spread your resources too thin, which could lead to suboptimal budgets for each campaign.

Tips for Effective Lead Generation

Depending on your chosen strategy, here are some valuable tips for achieving effective lead generation:

In-Platform Native Lead Gen Forms

• Make the form as short as possible to eliminate friction when someone is filling it out. Lean toward the fields that auto-populate with existing information from the user’s profile.
• Utilize engaging formats such as Document Ads or Conversation Ads, which provide more value to the user and increase the likelihood of them completing the form.
• Make your form’s headline and text unmistakably clear about what users will get and what follows after submission.
• Integrate your CRM with LinkedIn before you launch your campaign for quick follow up.
• Provide a strong CTA. Take advantage of the in-platform button and include it on your ad creative. Make it clear what will happen after submitting the form.

Landing Pages

• Test the page load speed before you launch your campaign to make sure this doesn’t become a bottleneck.
• Keep the design and layout simple and straightforward.
• Include only one CTA or action for clarity.
• Ensure that copy and creative on the page match what you promoted in your ad on the platform.
• Utilize the extra space you have by providing valuable content, such as social proof/testimonials, videos, FAQs, case studies, and more
• Install the LinkedIn Insight Tag on your page and set up precise conversion tracking. Use this to monitor and optimize your conversions effectively within the platform.
• Install various platform pixels on this page to enable remarketing on LinkedIn and beyond.

Prepare for Launch

Now that you have the info you need, it’s time to build your form or landing page. Let’s kick off your campaign! And don’t forget – you can ALWAYS A/B test anything. At Tuff, we live by this motto – test fast, learn fast, move fast 🚀

If you’re interested in getting started with a lead generation campaign but need some help, hit us up!

The post LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms vs. Traditional Landing Pages appeared first on Tuff.

The Internet is constantly evolving with a new platform or a new tactic or a new feature coming out nearly every week. This means that growth marketing is also constantly evolving, and it’s really easy to want to jump onto every shiny new toy as they roll out. Our expertise here at Tuff is in a variety of areas and especially growth and performance marketing. Therefore, we’re always looking for new ways to diversify our partners’ channel mix to utilize their digital ad spend to drive the best, most efficient results possible.

How to choose channels to diversify your digital ad spend

If you’re considering trying out a few new platforms, we recommend asking yourself some key questions before you decide which ones to explore:

• What is the budget I have to work with, and what do I feel comfortable spending on a daily basis in a given channel?
• Who is the audience I’m trying to reach? How can I reach them – by interest, demographic, groups they’re apart of?
• What type of creative do I have access to or what can I create? 
• What kind of time do I have to manage these campaigns and make optimizations? 

Once you’re able to answer some of these questions, you’ll be able to figure out quickly which channels you have the resources and bandwidth for. Now for some ideas…

TikTok

This may seem like a no-brainer at this point, but we have a lot of partners who come to us looking to diversify their channel mix who are not yet running paid ads on TikTok! This is usually the first channel businesses who have just started to scratch the surface of paid social want to explore next, and for a good reason: TikTok reported that they have 150 million monthly active users in the US in March 2023 – up by 50 million in just 2 years. 40% of users have reported that they don’t have a Facebook, so if you’re looking to get in front of an audience that you haven’t tapped into just yet, they are likely here. We’ve tested TikTok for both B2C and B2B businesses and have seen success with both!

TikTok is a great channel to explore if you’re looking for a way to promote your product or service with creative video assets. The best part? They don’t even need to be super-produced or polished. In fact, the audience on TikTok gravitates toward ads that appear more native to the platform, like scrappy UGC testimonials, the green screen feature, and trending sounds. We’ve even seen success with ads made for TikTok on other channels, like Facebook and Instagram, which shows that people are looking to consume this type of content.

You have the ability to target by age range, gender, geographic locations (states, cities, or DMAs), interests, hashtags, behaviors, and more (hint: we have a lot of success with broad targeting, meaning no additional targeting outside of geographic and age targeting 😉) You can even leverage an ad format called Spark Ads, which allows you to run an already-existing TikTok video from your own organic account or influencers’, appearing even more native on the channel.

Pros: possibilities to be more creative with your video assets due to the nature of the platform; large audience in mostly every age range

Cons: limited geographic targeting (no postal codes or radius targeting); strict ad policies; higher daily budget necessary to make a mark than other ad platforms

Perfect For: B2C or B2B advertisers looking to generate awareness and conversions through video creative to a very engaged audience

Reddit

In an age of both community and curiosity, people are very often looking toward platforms where they can ask questions, learn new things, and interact with like-minded individuals, and Reddit is the perfect place to do all of the above. Reddit is a social media channel but also a forum and news site where people can join hundreds of thousands of communities, or “subreddits,” that usually fall within a specific category. 

Reddit users are typically very active and spend time on the channel every day – it’s expected that 55.79 million people will use the channel daily this year. This means the reach you’d have access to is pretty massive. Reddit users are pretty tuned into whatever it is they’re reading or talking about in subreddits, and they also tend to be more skeptical of advertising on the platform. It’s important to really make your creative native to the platform and to target very specifically so that you make sure you’re reaching the right audience. Targeting options include communities (subreddits), interests, custom audiences (like lists, remarketing audiences, and lookalike audiences), and, as of June 2023, keywords. 

The platform also offers a wide range of ad formats, including text ads, image ads, video ads, carousel ads, and even a product called Conversation Placements, which sit within a conversation thread under a post but above the first comment, appearing like a native addition to the conversation. The key to success in optimizing your Reddit ad creative is to make sure you’re producing assets that do not appear too much like an ad but rather a way to make a valuable contribution to the subreddit. 

Pros: exposure to a highly-engaged audience; a variety of targeting options (and you have the ability to do audience research directly on the platform by perusing subreddits); less expensive than other ad platforms

Cons: not every subreddit that exists is available to target as a community; Reddit users may ignore ads more than users on other ad platforms; very simple ad formats

Perfect For: advertisers looking to reach a niche audience where they’re already spending time (like people interested in career development, shopping, fitness and health, personal finance, etc.)

Programmatic

“Programmatic” has been a buzzword for a while and we’ve certainly been hearing more and more partners who are interested in testing it out as of late.

In essence, programmatic advertising allows advertisers to reach very specific audiences outside of Google and Facebook/Instagram.  Notable programmatic platforms include StackAdapt, The Trade Desk, and Criteo, though there are many others.

Ad types include standard display, video, CTV, audio, and native display, making it easy to repurpose assets used on other channels before investing into platform-specific creatives.  Using benchmark data from legacy platforms will help inform early optimizations and the overall effectiveness of the strategy. If you’re looking to tap into a platform that can massively scale your digital ad spend, programmatic may be just the thing for you. Let’s take a quick look at a few of our favorite platforms.

The Trade Desk

The Trade Desk is the biggest player in the programmatic space. This is the home of more traditional Media Buying. You can go here to advertise on all of the big networks you are familiar with. Fox, ABC, ESPN, CBS and everything in between are available for placements. Out of all of the programmatic platforms, Trade Desk has the largest inventory available out of all of the possible programmatic platforms, but also the highest minimum spend thresholds. 

With revenue over $1B annually, they are certainly a giant in the space, but it makes sense as to why they are so large. They are used by agencies, large media companies, and many enterprise level companies. Their open API makes Trade Desk a perfect fit for a team with a large swath of data to analyze and utilize. You can plug directly into the platform and get to work immediately with all of your data at your fingertips. 

Pros: Virtually unlimited inventory, multiple integrations with other platforms, open API.

Cons: High monthly minimum spend not achievable for smaller businesses. 

Perfect For: Media buying agency or enterprise level company.

Criteo

When we think about Criteo, we think about dynamic retargeting. If you are an ecommerce business, Criteo may be just right for you. It makes it incredibly easy to retarget users who have been to a product page, but have yet to convert. They have placements all over the internet that engage users throughout the full buying journey. Criteo is truly a powerful option for nurturing people who are familiar with your brand or product, but need that extra nudge over the finish line.

According to the company, they serve over 5 billion ads per day. Although retargeting users is one of Criteo’s strongest assets, they offer solutions for demand generation, customer acquisition, and brand awareness. Their platform is as easy to use as any of the top competitors in the programmatic space, making this a viable option for just about any advertiser.

Pros: Quality machine learning, high end placements, detailed remarketing

Cons: If you are not an ecommerce business, this may not be the most effective platform four you

Perfect For: Ecommerce business looking to retarget users with product related ads.

StackAdapt

There’s lots to love about StackAdapt. It’s an easy to use programmatic platform that allows brands to advertise on Display, Video, Native, CTV, and Audio placements all over the web. Their reporting is top notch and can easily integrate with any internal CRMs, pixels, or preferred tracking platforms while also providing an accurate representation of data directly in the platform. 

One of the best selling points of this programmatic platform is that there is no minimum to run campaigns. This can be added easily to any media plan. Many others have minimums of $50,000 or above, but with StackAdapt, you can do powerful testing on a limited budget. Their access to audiences is another key area that Tuff utilizes when advertising for our partners. We have access to over 300,000 audience lists for both B2C and B2B users. Regardless of the business or budget, StackAdapt may be for you when thinking of running any kind of brand campaign. 

Pros: Variety of ad formats, lots of creative options, massive reach of users, effective targeting options, no minimum spend required, self serve platform.

Cons: Easy to get lost in the weeds or overspend on ineffective placements.

Perfect For: Business of any size looking to test programmatic on a large or small scale. 

MNTN CTV

We’ve been hearing for many years now that linear TV advertising is out, especially with the rise of social media and the Internet, where we’ve unlocked other avenues to advertise to an audience. However, when Connected TV advertising about 5 years ago, advertisers quickly saw the value of promoting their content through the channel. As of July 2022, a report from Nielsen reported that streaming platforms accounted for just about 35% of total TV consumption, beating our cable and broadcast TV.

CTV advertising refers to video ads that are delivered to an audience over the Internet as they stream movies and TV shows through their Smart TV or devices like an Amazon Fire Stick or Roku. You’re able to reach people with the impact of traditional TV advertising but with the precision and measurement capabilities you’re used to having access to through digital advertising, like audience-based targeting, IP-based targeting, and multi-touch attribution. You also have access to a self-service advertising platform where you can navigate everything from campaign set-up to adjusting our daily budgets to generating customizable reports.

Pros: ease of use with an intuitive advertising platform; customizable campaign set-ups; finetuned audience targeting; customizable reporting options; accurate, real-time multi-touch attribution 

Cons: you need to work with a CSM to create and set up your account; more expensive than typical digital advertising on social and programmatic platforms

Perfect For: advertisers who have polished, produced video assets they’re looking to get in front of a large audience 

Nextdoor

Nextdoor advertising has become an attractive option for many advertisers, with 1-in–3 of US households being present on the platform.  Data indicates that these users make 90% of their purchases within 15 miles of their work or home, and predominantly from local businesses.  

When Tuff works with partners that have more of a local target audience, Nextdoor is one of the first non-traditional PPC tactics we explore. 

While Nextdoor is a great emerging channel for diversifying your digital ad spend, we do run the disclaimer that it likely won’t be a major part of your media budget. With limited placements and a growing userbase, it’s hard to spend a large amount of money on Nextdoor in any given month – although this could change in the near future as they continue to grow. 

Pros: Hyperlocal targeting, affordable CPMs, engaged local audiences

Cons: Smaller userbase, limited placements

Perfect For: Businesses with local presences

Pinterest

Pinterest can be a great option for advertisers, especially for ones that already possess a strong paid search strategy.  This is because the Pinterest platform allows you to use keyword targeting.  Since Pinterest is used as a search engine, this makes sense and can allow for incredibly targeted advertising.

The platform also has other traditional targeting methods that mirror Facebook, Instagram, and Google audience targeting, such as interest-based targeting.

Pinterest is a largely untapped platform, especially for ecommerce brands and service businesses. Since Pinterest users are planners, we recommend using their larger attribution windows (30 / 30 / 30) and using it as a mid-funnel tactic to increase consideration for your brand, and having it be a smaller part of your digital ad spend. 

Pros: Visually appealing ad formats, very active userbase, lots of targeting options (intent + demographic)

Cons: Low last-click activity, longer attribution windows

Perfect For: Businesses trying to reach users in the consideration stage of the funnel

Spotify

Spotify should definitely be considered when attempting to diversify ad spend and reach new audiences.  As one of the largest podcast and music streaming services in the world, the reach is massive and the audio ad-format adds another method of communicating with your target audience.

However, the targeting on Spotify can seem somewhat limited when compared to other platforms. Though reduced targeting options may cause an advertiser to shy away from the platform, it is still worth testing as a top-of-funnel awareness play due to its tremendous reach. 

Pros: Good ad formats, affordable CPMs

Cons: Limited targeting options, secondary platform

Perfect For: Businesses trying to scale top of funnel reach

Microsoft Ads

Formerly known as Bing Ads, this platform is an obvious choice for businesses or advertisers looking for incremental conversions for their product or service. Microsoft Ads has basically the same offering as Google Ads. You can advertise on Bing with Search and Shopping Ads easily by importing campaigns directly from Google into Microsoft. This import feature makes this platform highly accessible to businesses of all sizes. 

Even though search volume is of course much smaller than Google Ads, Bing has some unique offerings that make it a great option to add to your marketing mix. According to Microsoft, they own 17% of desktop market share, meaning that there are over 600 million PC users available to reach. This equates to over 13 billion monthly searches. Yes, that is 13 billion! Google is obviously the main player when it comes to online searches, but Bing has a significant reach that cannot be forgotten about. 

Users of Bing also tend to be older and have higher incomes than the average user on Google. With 36% of its users in the top 25% of household income, Bing’s audience has more buying power for your product or service. We tend to allocate around 10% of the overall paid search budget to Microsoft Ads at the start. Learn what works for your business on this platform and scale from there!

Pros: Tends to bring in cheaper CPCs than Google Ads, lots of desktop traffic, substantial buying power from user base.

Cons: Less overall search volume than Google Ads, user interface is sometimes hard to navigate

Perfect For: Business with an older target demographic, or one who is looking to find incremental conversions to accompany other paid search and shopping efforts. 

Things to Avoid While Diversifying Digital Ad Spend

While testing new channels and tactics for your digital ad spend, it’s important to remember that channel diversification can take many forms and isn’t a one-size fits all. It’s also not a panacea – testing a new channel and finding a strategy that works for you will take time. You shouldn’t expect to see immediate results on a new channel by copying the strategy you have on one of your primary channels – it will take testing, learning, and refining to find the right tactic for you.

Here are some common mistakes we see in digital ad spend diversification that you should try to mitigate: 

It takes time to optimize

Most tests and experiments on new channels don’t work in the sense that they are a completely new tactic, and take time to master. Don’t try to diversify ad spend and expect to get the same results you’re seeing on other channels in week, or even month one. 

Don’t forget to account for extra management

Adding new channels can increase the complexity of reporting, optimization, and overall management. Instead of checking Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Google Analytics, for example, now you’ve got to learn how to incorporate new channels’ data and reporting dashboards into your existing systems and processes. 

Don’t over-diversify

While diversification of spend and strategy is a great idea, over-diversification is a thing and can present issues of its own.  If spend is spread too thinly across multiple new channels or platforms (or even multiple campaigns or ad creatives in one platform), it will take longer to gather actionable data and will be much more difficult to gauge the effectiveness of.

Want to Diversify Your Digital Ad Spend?

Tuff has managed ads on just about every platform imaginable, with budgets from partners ranging from a few thousand dollars, to one million-plus a month. Whether you’re in scale-up mode and wanting to try some new tactics or channels, or you want to optimize your advertising efforts on your existing channels, we can help. Let’s talk!

The post 8 Channels to Diversify Your Digital Ad Spend appeared first on Tuff.

How can I scale while maintaining lead quality? That’s a question that many B2B marketers often face. Scaling growth relies on a mix of marketing channels—which often includes paid media. Along with the right channels, you need the right mix of campaign objectives and formats for efficient results.

Ad creative, audiences, and landing page experience aren’t the only levers to pull. We’ve found success by testing different campaign formats on LinkedIn to generate more qualified leads at more efficient cost-per-lead rates. Especially for partners where we’re executing an account-based marketing strategy on the platform. One of those formats is LinkedIn Document Ads.

Paid Strategy 🤝 Content Strategy

If you’re allocating time, money, and resources to developing your content strategy, then you probably want to squeeze everything you can from the high-quality content you’re producing. We know how valuable content is to your audience, no matter the industry, and how imperative it can be to attracting new customers and contributing to engagement.

If you’ve historically driven traffic to a landing page with gated content or used in-platform lead form ads, you should consider testing LinkedIn document ads in your next campaign. While gating content is a way to get efficient MQLs, it’s not always the easiest user journey. The fact is that consuming content that requires you to input personal information can deter people from engaging with your brand in a meaningful way. But what if you could streamline this process to deliver a valuable resource to your audience AND collect their information at the same time? 

Meet LinkedIn Document Ads. 

What are LinkedIn Document Ads?

LinkedIn Document Ads are LinkedIn’s latest addition to their ad format directory. They were released last fall as a way to promote Documents, which have taken the platform by storm as a new way to showcase high-quality, relevant content. You’ve likely seen a Document post or maybe even an ad on your own feed.

It appears as an embedded slideshow presentation that you can swipe through to read, like turning a page or moving onto the next slide. Since this format allows you to share a Document directly in the feed, there’s no need to click off to a different landing page, making the content easier and more convenient to read and engage with.

By running a Document Ad, you’re able to put ad spend behind this format and promote it to an audience that is most relevant to your products/services. You can choose between un-gating this Document, which would freely generate awareness and grow your company’s thought leadership, or gating it, which allows people to unlock the full document after filling out an in-platform lead generation form. 

At Tuff, we have tested the latter as a way to collect leads, especially with our B2B partners whose primary goal is lead generation.

What types of content should you promote via Document Ads?

At this point, you’re probably already thinking about what types of content you’d like to promote through this ad format. Since you’re able to showcase a lot more than if this was a static image ad or even a video, you can look at Document Ads as a really great way to promote long-form content you have, like ebooks, guides, reports, white papers, or case studies. However, there are a few important factors to think about when choosing this content.

Questions to ask when identifying content to promote: 

Can I make this content visually appealing?

Since people will see the title page of the Document and possibly a few more pages (we’ll expand upon this more soon!), you’re going to want to make the content as visually appealing as possible by repurposing it into a designed resource, if it isn’t already. This means brand colors, logos, images, and other design elements. Since the goal is to get people to stop in their scrolling tracks and take a moment to review the ad and what they can see of the Document before deciding to download, you’ll want to take some pointers from the insights we’ve learned testing performance creative on paid platforms.

Is this content relevant to my audience?

Before taking the next step to package your content up work for a Document Ad, take a moment to consider if the content makes sense and is relevant to the audience you can reach on LinkedIn. Is your content step-by-step guidebook of how they can approach a facet of their business in a new way? Or does it report on findings you learned from a test you ran? How about a case study that features clear results from a company that worked with you? It’s likely that all of those, especially with the right cover and ad copy, would immediately appeal to your audience if that content makes sense to them. If your content is long-winded and doesn’t provide much to walk away with, or even connect with you post-download, then you may want to reconsider the content you’re planning to put your ad dollars behind.

How to set up LinkedIn Document Ads

Setting up a Document Ad campaign is a pretty seamless process and mostly similar to setting up the other ad formats on the platform. When you set up your campaign, you can choose any of the campaign objectives with the exception of anything web or video-based. This means that if you’re not interested in driving leads and want to leave your Document ungated, you cannot drive to your website. People will just be able to download the Document with one click and then move along. This is why we have mostly tested Document Ads with the Lead Generation objective. 

In the “Ad format” section of the campaign set-up, select “Document ad.” You can save your campaign and move onto the ad creative section. Click to create a new ad and fill out your ad name, the introductory text (your ad copy), and your headline. You’ll then upload your Document. 

Document ad specs:

• File types: PDF, DOCX, DOC, PPT, PPTX
• Limits: 300 pages (although we don’t necessarily recommend this because it will take you quite a bit to upload, and your audience quite a bit to download)
• Aspect ratio: vertical, horizontal, or square
• Size: 100MB

Your Document will take a minute or so to upload, depending on the file size, so we recommend uploading the Document itself and then filling in the rest of the components of the ad for the most efficient set-up process. A slider right before where you upload the Document will indicate how many pages you’d like as part of the “preview.” This means how many pages a user can see before choosing to download.

Choosing Your Preview

This is a decision you can go back and forth on – including only the title cover of the Document in the preview may cause more intrigue and encourage people to download to learn more, whereas it could also not make it super clear what the document is about, therefore deterring people from filling out. On the flipside, including a few more pages in the preview could give people a better idea of the content, but it also might not lead them to download if they feel they’ve learned enough in a few pages.

If your campaign objective is set to Lead Generation, select the form you’d like associated with the ad. Once someone fills out this form, they’re not taken to a thank you page screen of the form but rather the form will close and they’ll have access to scroll through the rest of the Document in their feed and download it to their device.

Once you have set up one Document Ad, you can move forward with setting up additional ones and testing different Document covers, ad copy, or headlines. LinkedIn recommends 5-8 creatives per campaign as a best practice. One nuance with setting up Document Ads if you cannot duplicate them at this time, so you will need to build each new ad from scratch.

LinkedIn Document Ad Results

Now for the exciting part! When it comes to leveraging the success and efficiency of Document Ads, we have optimized solely for Marketing Qualified Leads and cost-per-MQL. We’ve also leaned on CTR, which was originally trending higher than Sponsored Content campaigns but has since been relatively the same (anywhere from 0.30% to 0.80%). Document Ads have shown to be a little more expensive than Sponsored Content campaigns in terms of CPCs and CPMs, and thus we have allocated more budget to this format to accommodate increased competition.

How utilizing Document Ads contributed to our B2B partner’s LinkedIn performance:

For one of our B2B partners, a company that specializes in working with large companies to design and execute apprenticeship programs, we have been testing Document Ads since late last year. On the surface, before digging into particular campaigns, we generated a 280% increase in MQLs when comparing MQL data between October and November when we started introducing the new format. In addition to more MQLs, we also generated a nearly $4,000 lower CPMQL despite spending almost double in ad spend. 

We also began testing them alongside Sponsored Content campaigns that were promoting the same content. For one particular content piece, where we ran an Engagement objective Sponsored Content campaign driving to a landing page where people could fill out a form and download the guide, we saw 6 more MQLs driven from the Document Ads in a month.

Are you ready to get started with Document Ads?

If driving more leads through LinkedIn at an efficient cost-per-lead and finding new ways to leverage the content strategy your team is working hard to produce is a goal of yours this year, we recommend giving Document Ads a try. Test different audiences, test different content pieces, test different ad copy and headlines! Test it all to see what works best for your product or service. If you’re looking to get started with LinkedIn advertising or take your existing strategy to the next level, let’s talk!

The post Boosting Your B2B Content Strategy with LinkedIn Document Ads appeared first on Tuff.

We’ve written blogs about the key components that make up performance creative and how to utilize this type of creative to generate results and we’ve written blogs about how to use targeting platforms to build super segmented audiences. But how do you merge the two together to make sure that you’re targeting the right people with the right creative?

This is where the fun part comes in – figuring out how to differentiate different creative for each stage of the lifecycle and growth marketing funnel.

The marketing funnel – what is it?

For several of our partners, it’s a priority to differentiate their advertising strategy and marketing dollars by each stage of the marketing funnel. The marketing funnel outlines a customer’s journey and helps categorize where in their journey they fall into, which then dictates the best way to reach them, market to them, and nurture them. The most prevalent stages of the funnel are:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Decision/Purchase/Conversion

As a growth marketing agency, our role is to apply strategies across the entire funnel by implementing data-driven process for launching structured experiments to drive a specific behavior/action. While it’s definitely possible to create audiences that target each part of the funnel separately directly in certain ads platforms, such as LinkedIn where our targeting can get really granular, we also tend to see our partners find more success when they use account-based marketing (ABM) audience tools such as 6sense, DemandBase, and more. This allows them to truly find which companies make sense to reach depending on their level of engagement with the company already (for instance, if someone has never been touched by a company, they’d fall into the awareness stage; whereas if they have interacted with the company in one way or another, they’d fall into Consideration.

How do you determine the type of ad creative to show at each stage?

If you’re choosing to segment your audience targeting by stages of the marketing funnel, it’s in your best interest to also prioritize producing content and creative, especially will ABM creative- otherwise, you’ll be showing people who are at very different places in their buying journey the exact same ads and you won’t truly be tailoring to the way they’re thinking. 

When you’re looking to get in front of people who are higher in the marketing funnel at the Awareness stage, the goal is to show them inspiring ads that are simple and get the point of the company/service/product across pretty easily but also are inspiring and tap into their emotions to hook them to learn more, thus journeying down the funnel. Once a person is in the Consideration stage, it’s important to begin to lean on educational ads – sometimes this means you may need to expand your assets to include more robust content or landing pages where you can provide more information with more time to explain. Finally, you want to leverage persuasive assets that will drive home that decision once a person is in the Decision stage. A good way to look at it is:

Inspire → educate → persuade 

It makes sense once you start to think more about it, right? But the hard part is what parts of an ABM creative asset can be customized to speak to that part of the funnel? 

Creative aspects to differentiate for each part of the funnel

For our partner, Multiverse, who designs and manages apprenticeship programs for US and UK-based companies, we were tasked with strategizing and executing their B2B efforts targeted to companies who would be interested in hiring Multiverse to create programs for them. Last year, we had a brainstorming session to chat through the particular companies/personas that fall into each stage of the funnel for them, and how they were looking to market to them. We took a look at a variety of aspects:

1. Content

You may hear the phrase “content is king 👑” quite often, and this is especially true when it comes to B2B marketing, and even more true when it comes to the main social ads platform we leverage with Multiverse – LinkedIn. No matter what stage of the funnel, content is extremely valuable for anyone in their journey with a business, but it’s really important to be intentional about the type of content you promote to each stage. For the Awareness stage, where people are just looking to learn about a company and gain more information, content is a huge incentive for them to engage. Therefore, we lean on gated content, whether that be directly gated in-platform or gated behind a landing page where people can learn even more information before submitting their information. Even once someone travels down the funnel toward Decision, content is still valuable and worth utilizing, and you’ll want to make sure you’re choosing content that is even more helpful to people who are about ready to make a decision in their buying journey.

2. Messaging

Arguably one of the most important parts of an ad is the strategic messaging behind it as this dictates the ad copy used and the text overlay in the creative, both of which make up the entire ad itself that people are seeing. When it comes to the Awareness stage, we like to lean on educational and informational messaging that will help someone brand new to the company get a general idea of what the company does or offers. For those in the Consideration stage, messaging that offers more specific selling points is useful. And finally, for those in the Decision stage, messages that are relevant to the journey this audience has already been through that will help bring the sale home are necessary.

For Multiverse, we came up with the following value propositions for each stage of the funnel as follows:

• Awareness = educational and informational about what Multiverse does and how it can solve a problem for a company
  • “Compete for the same pool of talent with other big tech companies”
  • “Create your OWN talent”
  • “Is outsourcing the best option for you? You can cultivate your own talent development in-house!”
• Consideration = more specific selling points
  • “Customized curriculum”
  • “Time and efficiency with value”
  • “Coaching support”
• Decision = relevant messages to bring the sale home
  • “Sense of urgency in solving problems in today’s economic climate”
  • “Avoid burnout of your current team and foster retention”
  • “Other companies are getting ahead of this and you should too”

3. Call-to-actions (CTAs) 

While they may be considered part of the messaging, call-to-actions are another way to personalize and differentiate an ad to a particular audience who is in a particular stage in the funnel. CTAs are easy to get to stick out too because you can make them pop on a creative asset but also, most platforms offer a button to customize with CTA text or you can choose from a drop-down of options. 

Keeping in mind the stage of the funnel the audience you’re targeting is in will help you make sure that you’re showing them the CTA that makes the most sense to them. The higher in the funnel they are (the newer in the journey), the softer the CTA. The further-down-the-funnel, the harder the CTA. Here are the CTAs we’ve rotated between for Multiverse:

• Awareness: get in touch, learn more, see how, discover
• Consideration: learn more, book a call today, see how
• Decision: let’s talk, get started

Real-life results from Multiverse

We began testing this “creative by lifecycle stage” approach with Multiverse’s audience segments, which were targeting companies that were likely to have needs for data apprenticeship programs based on the nature of their products or services. Our creative team designed 3 concepts for each stage of the funnel. Here is the top-performing concept from each of those stages in terms of click-through rate:

When looking at two months of performance, the campaigns’ CTR are as follows:

• Awareness: 0.32%
• Consideration: 0.34%
• Decision: 0.41%

Right away, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that CTR increased from top of the funnel to bottom of the funnel, which can very much speak to the more tailored the messaging became and “harder” the CTAs were as we traveled down the funnel to the Decision creative.

How can you get started?

If this type of creative brainstorming and production sounds like something you need to tap into to make sure you’re approaching each stage of your funnel with the right ads, then take some time with your team that communicates with these audiences every day to see the type of messaging they resonate with and translate that exactly into the creative you’re serving to them. And, like we always say, the most important next step is to test, test, and test again!

The post Capture Demand and Visibility Across Customer Segments with Full-Funnel Message Testing appeared first on Tuff.

Several of our partnerships here at Tuff are with B2B businesses who are looking for new and fresh ways to generate leads – and quality ones at that. B2B is a different ballpark than D2C and you have to get creative when it comes to how you target, the ads you test, the CTAs you push, and the means you use to convert people into leads.

We’re beginning to find out that digital advertising has become the primary way to drive B2B leads – $442 billion worth of sales happened because of digital advertising, accounting for 62% of the total advertising sales that occurred all over the world. When you’re looking for a digital advertising channel to find these leads, you’re going to want to find one where you know your audience will be – and that’s LinkedIn.

Benefits of using LinkedIn as a B2B marketing channel

It probably comes as no surprise that LinkedIn is THE channel to be on if you want to reach an audience of professionals. Seeing as the purpose of the channel originated as and still stands as a way to connect business professionals to new career and educational opportunities, that’s the network you can find on LinkedIn.

As of this spring, LinkedIn has reported it has 675 million monthly users, 40% of which are on the platform on a daily basis. That’s a whole lot of people to be reaching – a whole lot of ENGAGED people. If you’re looking for a marketing channel that you can rely on as a way to reach new leads and assist with your B2B efforts, you’ve pretty much just found your place.

Audience targeting options on LinkedIn

Not only is the audience you’re likely looking to hit on the platform, but LinkedIn also provides some of the best targeting options to reach business professionals. Since users decorate their LinkedIn profiles with a ton of information, such as their education, job title, company, accolades, skills, and more, you’ll have access to targeting people by these parameters. Some of the most useful ones we use on a regular basis are:

• Company Name
• Company Industry
  • This parameter can often be a little broad – this article breaks down which more niche industries fall into a broader category!
• Job Title
• Job Function
• Job Seniority
• Member Skills

LinkedIn also offers the option to target lists of contacts or companies if you have a large volume of either of these that you want to reach. The company list targeting allows you to upload a list of company names that will then be matched against the 50 million LinkedIn pages on the platform. The platform recommends that you upload a list of at least 1,000 organizations and allow it to match for at least 48 hours. The most important fields LinkedIn recommends you include to provide accurate and effective matching is the LinkedIn Company Page URL.

These targeting options will help you tailor your targeting to exactly the type of audience you’re looking to reach – and you can even break down performance by demographic once you’ve started running your campaign to see how each job function or company industry is targeting.

Driving leads via your website or native lead generation forms

Once you’ve nailed down your audience targeting, it’s time to decide exactly how you want to collect these leads. You may want to drive this audience to your website so they can learn more and submit their information. However, driving traffic away from LinkedIn needs to make sure you have a really optimized experience once you get there (and don’t get us wrong – we’ve got the skills to help you do that!)

However, LinkedIn also offers a native lead generation feature where users can click the ad and open a form where they’re able to submit their information, all while never leaving their current browser window. These forms are customizable, so you can ask the typical information you may need to qualify a lead, such as:

• Name
• Email address
• Phone number
• Company name
• Job title

The best part about this is that since most of this information is already part of a user’s profile set-up, the platform will auto-fill most this information in the form without the user having to input it themselves, which leads to higher lead submission rates! There’s also the option to include a custom field where users can select a multiple choice response or type something in if you need additional pieces of information that LinkedIn doesn’t offer.

We test a few different ways to drive these leads – we can either just encourage them to submit their information so they can learn more about the company’s products or services, or we can encourage them to submit their information to gain access to a resource or other piece of content from the company. In order to customize this, once someone submits their information via the form, they’ll be taken to a “confirmation” portion of the form where they’re met with a short message and a CTA button that you’re able to customize. You can drive them to a landing page or your website to learn more with the CTAs “Visit company website” or “Learn more,” or you can drive them to a piece of content using the CTAs “View now,” “Download now,” or “Try now.” For the latter, where you’re granting them access to a piece of content, you can link to a page that has the content either on a web page or as a PDF.

Offering content as a valuable incentive to collect lead information

We’ve found that when it comes to driving leads, offering a piece of content in exchange for a user’s information tends to be more successful. Especially in the B2B space, content is becoming more important than ever – 54% of decision makers spend more than an hour a week reading and reviewing thought leadership, and that same amount more frequently purchases a new product/service they had not considered before once they’ve read a compelling piece of thought leadership. Whether it’s an e-book, a white paper, a guide, or a checklist, promoting a piece of content that’s unique to your business will increase the value for someone deciding if they want to fill out the form.

While this strategy is completely possible with LinkedIn’s tried and true Sponsored Content ads, LinkedIn has also released a new product that we’ve been testing lately at Tuff – Document Ads. These ads showcase a preview of a document (in PDF, PPT, PPTX, DOC or DOCX formats) and require a user to submit a form to unlock the full document. They stand out in the newsfeed as a piece of content, which is attention-grabbing as it is, but they also don’t require visiting another page or downloading the resource if they don’t want to – they can simply read the full resource directly in the platform.

Results from real Tuff partners!

We’ve been testing in-platform lead generation with a few of our B2B partners in an effort to increase lead volume after originally driving to the landing page, and it has led to an increase in leads – and, even better, an increase in qualified leads.

Radion Health partners with brokers and consultants to offer level-funded and medical stop-loss insurance to small employee groups, and LinkedIn has been a top-performing social channel for them since we began working with them over the summer. We began to see lead volume decrease and CPLs spike after a few months of driving to the landing page, so we made the adjustment to lead generation campaigns – and leads increased by 265%. These leads also had an over 60% qualification rate, a 164% increase in quality compared to the period before.

Another one of our partners, Multiverse, which builds professional apprenticeship programs that companies can offer in place of corporate training or to adults who are looking for an alternative to college, has also relied heavily on LinkedIn for their B2B lead generation efforts. After testing driving to a landing page with a form from our ads, we switched to lead generation in October and have seen a 3x uptick in qualified leads compared to the period before.

We’ve also been testing Document Ads with a native lead generation form versus Sponsored Content ads driving to a landing page to promote a piece of content for Multiverse. For one particular report, we’ve driven 17 leads from the Document Ads compared to 1 from the Sponsored Content ads during the same time period!

Are you looking to drive leads through LinkedIn?

If driving leads through LinkedIn is on your radar for 2023, we recommend utilizing its products such as the native in-platform lead generation forms or Document Ads and testing them to see what works best with your audience and with your offerings! If you’re looking to get started with LinkedIn advertising or take your existing strategy to the next level, let’s talk!

The post What’s the Best Way to Generate High-Quality B2B Leads on LinkedIn? appeared first on Tuff.

Author’s Note: We’ve given this blog post a refresh on November 2, 2023, complete with fresh information, new links, relevant data, and more.

As we head into the end of the year and approach 2024, you’re likely starting to think through your marketing strategy for the new year. What channels have worked well for you this past year? What do you want to explore to meet your goals? At Tuff, we’re always identifying new channels to help our partners scale and diversify their digital ad spend, and TikTok is one of the first channels we recommend if it makes sense for our partner’s product, service or audience. 

It’s been reported that there are 1.7 billion users as of 2023, a 17% increase year-over-year, and this continues to grow. If low attention spans on the platform scare you from advertising on the platform, TikTok has reported that ads viewed for less than 6 seconds still produce a stronger impact compared to ads viewed for 20 seconds or more. If you have video creative you can customize for the platform – or you’re able to bake it into your resources this coming year – now’s the time to explore the top social media platform and reach an audience that may not be present on other platforms.

One of the biggest barriers to entry onto a new platform is the cost. Many elements of a campaign have the ability to impact cost, like the creative assets you use and the audiences you target. Having engaging video content is absolutely imperative for a successful campaign on TikTok as 93% of TikTok users spend time on the platform with sound on. When developing your creative assets for TikTok, it’s important to look through it at a performance creative lens and keep in mind creative best practices for TikTok specifically.

Before launching campaigns on TikTok, start by asking yourself the following questions: 

1. Do you have a library of lofi, attention-grabbing videos – preferably user-generated content?
2. Have you defined the audience you want to reach?
3. Last but not least, do you have a product or service that could be promoted in these videos to get the message across to said audience?

If you have “yes” to all of the aforementioned questions then you are ready to start building your first campaign with a TikTok ads agency like Tuff. In this article, we’re breaking down what it takes to run a successful ad campaign on TikTok and how TikTok ads compare in costs to other social ad platforms.

TikTok Ads: Is It Worth It? 

Before you start thinking about an advertising budget for TikTok, you might wonder if TikTok is even worth testing. While TikTok might be known for its virality and trends from organic videos, its advertising opportunities have been proven extremely beneficial for companies in almost every industry, from eCommerce to tech to education. We’ve tested a lot on the platform – even spending $100k in a 30-day period with one of our partners!

We’ve even tested TikTok with our B2B partners, who are not technically partners that immediately jump to explore the channel. If you are able to find pockets of success on TikTok, it’s very scalable and can help not only engage existing demand but also create new paths for revenue for your business.

How Do TikTok Ads Work? 

TikTok ads are less obvious to spot to the average user since they come off in a more organic nature compared to other channels like Facebook or Instagram. As typical with online advertising, TikTok ads cost different amounts and exist in different forms. A user can view your ad in different places which impacts the costs of your ad. If you decide to advertise on TikTok, you can choose from a variety of different ad formats, such as: 

• Image Ads
• Carousel Ads
• Video Ads
• Spark Ads
• Collection Ads 
• Playable Ads 

Image Ads

Image ads run through TikTok’s newsfeed partner placements, such as the Global App Bundle and Pangle, and will include an image, brand or app name, and ad text.

Carousel Ads

Carousel ads are a newer ad format that are supported on the newsfeed app series, BuzzVideo. You can highlight up to 10 images and unique captions in one single ad, shown from left to right in an order that you can specify. You can also point to one landing page URL or a unique URL for each image, which makes this format helpful in showcasing several products.

Video Ads

Video ads will run through the platform’s newsfeed and/or the newsfeed of apps that fall under TikTok’s newsfeed partner placements again (Global App Bundle and Pangle). These are the most common type of format for self-serve ads as they will show up in your target audiences’ For You Page (FYP). 

Video ads can be 5-60 seconds and can include a video, display image, brand name and ad text. TikTok (and our social team here at Tuff) recommend shorter videos that can keep the attention of your audience. TikTok reports, “1 in 4 top-performing videos have a duration between 21 and 34 seconds and see, on average, a 1.6% lift in impressions.”

Spark Ads

Spark ads allow you to leverage existing organic TikTok posts by generating a code that lets you run the video as an ad directly from your TikTok page or a partner/content creators’ page. If you are familiar with boosting posts on Facebook or Instagram, this ad type is very similar. Additionally, spark ads incorporate more ways to interact, engage with and ultimately convert via your ad.

Because the videos look more native than ordinary video ads, we’ve seen a lot of success with spark ads at Tuff. For a few of our partners, we have run spark ads through a content creator’s or influencer’s page using the spark code. We’ve tested this for a few different partners and seen differing results – which just proves this is the format to test!

 In the table below, we analyzed regular videos vs. spark ads to understand the difference in users to the site, pages/session, time on site, last click conversion volume and the average cost per acquisition. You can see a much better performance on TikTok once we started a regular vs. Spark Ad test for one of our partners.

In this table, however, we tested the same exact creative asset as a Spark ad vs. as a regular uploaded ad to the partner’s ads library and, while we generated the exact same CTR, we drove slightly more conversions at a more efficient CPA.

Collection Ads

When using collection ads, someone taps an interactive element of your ad and it will lead to an Instant Gallery Page, where visitors can browse a curated gallery of product cards. You can either handpick the products to feature in your Instant Gallery Page or let TikTok Ads Manager dynamically display the most relevant products for each visitor. From the Instant Gallery Page, people can browse your catalog of products and then head to your website to complete their purchase journey.

Playable Ads

Playable ads allow you to display an interactive preview of your app ahead of downloading it. The idea is that you are able to give your audience a fully-immersive experience ahead of the commitment of downloading a new app.

How much do TikTok ads cost? 

Similar to other social ad platforms, you can customize the amount you spend and personalize your bid strategy. Typically, advertisers on TikTok pay a median price of $1.00 for every click and a CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) of $10. Keep in mind that this number is generated through a blended analysis of all advertisers so this cost is not the case for every business. 

TikTok has two different minimum daily spends, depending on where you set the budget:

• If you set your budget at the campaign level, there is a minimum daily budget of $50
• If you set your budget at the ad set level, there is a minimum daily budget of $20

Campaign Objective 

Choosing the right objective is really important when setting up ad campaigns on TikTok. TikTok recommends starting by choosing an objective that will get at least 50 events during the first 7 days, which will allow TikTok to have enough data to get your ad out of the learning phase. Similar to other platforms, you will see lower CPCs and CPMs when optimizing for an objective that’s higher in the funnel (traffic, page view) vs. optimizing for a lower-funnel event (checkout, complete payment), but the CVR will be higher when optimizing for the lower-funnel events.

Audience Segmentation 

TikTok’s algorithm is one of the best out there so most of the time you will see lower costs when your audience is broad and therefore large. In fact, TikTok recommends consolidating your audiences as much as possible and either putting all of your interests into one “super” audience or running the ad group with no interest targeting and letting the TikTok algorithm do its thing and serve the ad to the user who will likely take the action you are optimizing for (better known as Automatic Targeting). If you want to read more about this, check out this blog where we outline Tuff’s recommendations for prospecting campaigns that convert!

Budget & Bid Amount 

TikTok allows you to set a daily or lifetime budget at both the campaign level and the ad set level. When setting the budget at the ad set level, you can use:

• Bid caps for more manual control over the bid used in the auction by putting a limit on the cost per result 
• Cost caps for a more goal-based cost per result as you will never pay higher the bid amount set but you might not spend your entire budget
• Lowest cost for the maximum number of results

Creative

Last but not least, the most important factor to achieving low costs on TikTok is the ad creative. While TikTok users are typically more engaged in the video ad than users of any other social ad platform, the average CTR on TikTok is typically a little lower than the CTR on other social ad platforms. That is why we like to look at a TikTok-specific metric called ad hook rate which can also be considered as the “thumb stop rate.” This metric reports on if an ad has caused people to stop scrolling past the video and watch it. It is calculated by 2-second video views divided by impressions and is helpful in indicating if a video has captured your audience’s attention, or if it hasn’t, and it is time to pivot by testing something else in line with TikTok’s creative best practices.

Here at Tuff, our performance creative team prioritizes producing creative assets that are designed for each individual platform. Our approach looks like this:

We design and produce our assets based on the partner’s messaging and value propositions

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We build a creative testing framework to help test specific variants and generate fast results

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We pull the data through monthly analyses to call out top-performing assets and trends in messaging and design

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We build out new creative according to these top-performing aspects and rotate in!

How Do TikTok Ads Compare to Other Platforms? 

Data is great but without context, it does not have a lot of impact. It is always hard to get an apples-to-apples comparison on social ad platform costs since there are a lot of factors that go into the average, but when looking at CPCs and CPMs, TikTok is more cost efficient than Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. 

Take a look the benchmarks our paid media pulled this year for TikTok and Meta that span across industries, objectives and creative types:

What does this mean for you? If your target audience is on TikTok and you have the budget and creative needed to test on this channel, then it’s 100% worth the test and has the potential to be a very successful and scalable channel for your business. 

Looking for more tips on how to set up a successful TikTok campaign? Check out this article!

The post How Much Do TikTok Ads Cost? [Updated] appeared first on Tuff.

Author’s Note: This post was updated on November 8, 2022 with new content, resources, links, and information. 

Here at Tuff, we love to shout 🗣️ “diversify your channel mix!” 🗣️ from the rooftops – especially when it comes to paid social advertising. The more channels you can implement into your marketing mix, the more times you’ll be staying in front of your target audience.

Twitter is a channel that we don’t always include in every growth marketing strategy, but it’s one that we still like to explore and test. Even though we haven’t heard of it much over the last few years as it’s behind the likes of TikTok and Facebook/Instagram, it’s still the world’s 7th favorite social media platform – so might as well be on it!

If we think it’s right for our partners, we’ll brainstorm some audience targeting, design and write creative and copy that works for the platform, and get started! Here are some important things to know if you’re looking to incorporate Twitter ads into your social ads strategy – and how some tests have panned out for us here at Tuff!

Placing the Twitter Pixel + Setting Up Conversions

One of the first steps you want to take when preparing to launch your Twitter campaign is to place the pixel on your website – this will allow you to not only build remarketing audiences of people who have visited your site, but also set up conversions to track the particular actions you want them to take. 

You can place the Twitter universal tag directly into your website’s code or via a supported third-party Tag Manager, like Google Tag Manager. Then you can set up events such as Purchase, Lead, Download, etc. depending on what makes sense for your campaign – you can set these up via Google Tag Manager as well.

Audience Targeting

An important question to ask yourself when deciding if Twitter is the right channel to advertise your product or service on is “does the targeting make sense for me?” Like most ad platforms, Twitter offers a variety of audience targeting options that can cater to the goal you’re trying to achieve while advertising on the channel, but keep in mind that they might not be the most relevant to every business. 

In addition to demographics such as location, language, age, gender, and device/platform settings, you have the option to target prospecting audiences and custom audiences, like retargeting and list-based:

Prospecting:

• Keywords
  • Includes people who searched for, Tweeted, or engaged with the keywords you choose
• Follower look-alikes
  • Targets people with similar interests to an account’s current followers
    • Recommend including 30 @handles per campaign and that are mostly tied to your business rather just Twitter accounts with a lot of followers
• Interests
  • Includes 350+ pre-set interests across 25 categories
• Movies and TV shows
  • Includes people who Tweet about or engage with movies & TV shows in a specific market
• Events
  • Includes predetermined events in 8 categories but updated regularly
• Conversation topics
  • Includes people whose everyday conversations include content around predetermined 25+ categories and 10,000+ topics

To create the following custom audiences, navigate over to Tools > Audiences on the top navigation bar.

Retargeting:

• As long as the Twitter universal website tag is installed on your website, you’re able to target people who have visited any web page or a specific web page if you want to get more granular!
  • This audience needs to reach 100 Twitter users in order to be eligible for targeting

List-Based:

• If you have a list that contains your own user and customer data, you can leverage it for targeting on Twitter – however, there are a few pieces of information that are necessary in order to match accurately in the platform:
  • Email addresses
  • Mobile Advertising IDs (iOS Advertising Identifiers and Google Advertising IDs, or when not available, Android IDs)
  • Twitter @handles or Twitter user IDs

Since you set the audience targeting at the ad set level, you can very easily test a few different audience types to see what works best for you and where you’ll find the most engaged members of your target audience. We’ve conducted a few tests for a few partners and seen the following results:

For our partner Multiverse, who was promoting their Software Engineering apprenticeship program to big tech and non-tech companies who may be interested in hosting in implementing it into their company, we used the Follower Look-alike option to reach people who looked like the followers of influencers in the tech space and tested it against keywords in software engineering. 

The keywords were not only responsible for more impressions and clicks, but also a higher click-through rate and engagement rate. We didn’t target 30 accounts for the Follower Look-alike audience like Twitter recommends, which could be a reason for the small impression volume!

Similarly, we tested audiences with one of our partners in the fintech space, Nova Credit, who was looking to reach businesses who may want to partner with them to offer their products and services. We tested financial keywords against interests in personal and business finance and business news.

Interests is a broader approach than the keyword targeting, hence slightly more impressions and clicks, but both CTR and engagement rate were really the same, so we never identified a clear winner throughout this test and continued to target both!

Creative Types

An important aspect in executing your Twitter campaign and actually driving results is your creative. You have a few options here:

• Text ads – these just appear as a simple text ad, like an organic Tweet that doesn’t have any media associated with it
• Image ads – these appear as Tweets with an image attached below
• Video ads – these look the same as Image ads except the video will auto-play
• Carousel ads – these appear like Image ads but as a slideshow that you can scroll through to see a few different slides

These ads appear with a “Promoted” message at the bottom of the Tweet, and they won’t show on your Twitter page as organic Tweets. They’ll also only go live after your campaign starts. To create your first ad, navigate to Creatives > Tweet Composer. You can even batch create Tweets in one fell swoop in the Composer, and then attach them to your campaign when you’re ready to build it out, which makes things very seamless!

You’re probably asking at this point, “Well, what creative type should I go with then?”

The answer is not all that simple, because of course I’m going to tell you the magic word that infiltrates most of our creative work here at Tuff – TEST! If you have the capabilities and resources to develop several types of formats, then we recommend testing to see what resonates with your target audience the best. For one of our partners, Nova Credit, where we tested a static image promoting a white paper download versus an animated version of that same graphic, the ads generated the following results:

As you can see, the image ad was responsible for more of the impressions, click volume, and a slightly higher click-through rate, but the video ad actually generated an engagement rate 0.10% higher, meaning people engaged with the video ad more often than the video. This makes sense since video tends to capture people’s attention a little more, or keeps them interacting with the ad as long as the video is playing.

Budget

When it comes to determining a budget to get started, we’ve found that CPCs are relatively cheap on Twitter – oftentimes within the $1 to $2 range when we’ve conducted some of these audience tests. We’ve leveraged daily budgets as low as $30/day and still seen sufficient impression and click volume daily, so no matter your budget on the platform, you can still give Twitter a try! 

At this point, you’re probably thinking that this whole Twitter ads thing seems pretty simple, so why not get started? And that’s exactly what we’d recommend – if you think that your audience is on Twitter and you have the resources to produce ads for the platform, you might as well incorporate it into your mix!

The post The Ultimate Guide to Twitter Ads: Metrics, Insights, Tools, and Tips appeared first on Tuff.