LinkedIn Marketing: How to Decrease CPC and Boost CTR

LinkedIn is a network imagined as a way to help businesses and businesspeople interact, share valuable information, and find new opportunities. Moreover, LinkedIn marketing has been incredibly successful at bringing businesses new clients and revenue. However, thanks to its role as the number one content distribution channel, LinkedIn newsfeed can also contain a lot of noise – self-promotion, fluff, and attempts at reinventing the wheel.

So how do you make sure to reach your audience with something fresh, different, and straightforward, without burning through your budget in a matter of weeks? All you need is a fresh approach to old-school tricks – and in this guide, we will show you how to decrease CPC and boost CTR it in 4 simple steps.

Who are you talking to on LinkedIn?

There are a total of 590 million LinkedIn users, but less than half of them are active on a monthly level – 260 million. LinkedIn is the #1 most popular channel among B2B marketers when it comes to distributing content. For a good reason – LinkedIn makes up more than 50% of all social traffic to B2B websites & blogs.

Finally, 61 million LinkedIn users are senior level influencers and 40 million are in decision-making positions. This network is also a fertile ground for communication with job seekers – 40 million students and recent college graduates have a LinkedIn profile.

So, if you are looking to promote your (or your client’s business) to other businesses, LinkedIn is the place to go.

What are your chances on LinkedIn?

According to AdStage, at the end of 2018, LinkedIn was seeing record levels of engagement on LinkedIn – Microsoft reported a 34% increase in sessions. The positive change was attributed to analytics updates and changes to sponsored content. Long story short, if you are considering LinkedIn marketing, now is the time to act.

Currently, the majority of advertisers on LinkedIn have a:

• Median cost-per-click (CPC) of $3.72
• Median cost-per-mile (CPM) of $7.57
• Median click-through-rate (CTR) of 0.26%

Compared to the previous years, the median CPC has been the cheapest on record, and CTR has been on a steady upward line. But is this the best you can hope for? Absolutely not. You can skyrocket your CTR and in turn, decrease your CPC with a little creativity. So here’s our LinkedIn marketing strategy.

What people on LinkedIn want?

LinkedIn is a working environment. People come to LinkedIn to get their daily dose of content, news from the industry, and good ideas. For example, 91% of executives rate LinkedIn as their first choice for professionally relevant content. Moreover, people who publish this type of content are supported by LinkedIn’s algorithm.

The success of LinkedIn marketing is further proved by the statistic that a whopping 80% of B2B leads generated on social media come from LinkedIn.

Basically, all you have to do is give your audience what they want, right? Well, around two million posts, articles, and videos are posted on LinkedIn every day, so you definitely need to find the way to stand out.

Now, the truth.

As much as LinkedIn may be awesome, you probably noticed that sometimes, plenty of content published on your newsfeed tends to be fluff, stale news, pointless motivational posters, and empty self-promotion. If you want to stand out, you need to offer people more than that – clear answers and solutions.

This is what B2B marketing requires – having a straightforward, solution-oriented approach towards your potential clients. Yet, your clients are still just people, and you need to tap into their curiosity and competitiveness.

What if we told you that quizzes are an amazing way to make yourself independent from paid advertising and constraints of any social network? Instead of depending on LinkedIn ads and their marketing rules, you can simply use it as a fuel for your own sales funnel. But in order to be successful at that, you need to dedicate yourself to each stage of this process. So let’s go step by step.

1. Define your B2B buyer personas

Knowing your audience is a prerequisite to creating good content. By knowing your audience, I don’t mean knowing some general things about them. Knowing your audience is being able to think the way your customer thinks – walking in their shoes and dealing with their challenges.

Creating a B2B buyer persona differs from the process of coming up with a regular customer buyer persona. With B2B buyers, you deal with their personal and business side at the same time, as the two are intertwined. You need to gather the following information:

• Demographic: gender, age, location, income
• Firmographic: job title/position, size of company, industry, leader/underdog, years in business
• Technographic: communication preference, social media channels & usage, tech tools used, choice of consuming news
• Goals
• Challenges
• Solutions: how your services/products help this client reach their goals and/or overcome their challenges
• Quotes: things your buyer would say about their challenges and goal
• Objections: potential objections about your product and the reason why the buyer would object
• Messaging: how you would present your solution to this buyer
• Pitch: how you would pitch/sell your solution to this buyer

Creating a B2B buyer persona will allow you to understand how to effectively respond to your potential client’s questions and specific challenges – through a quiz. Now, getting very specific about your target audience can be very difficult, especially if you’re a beginner. This is where LinkedIn marketing steps in as a tool.

2. Use LinkedIn to target the right audience

LinkedIn is unparalleled when it comes to targeting the B2B audience. We suggest that you create several versions of the same quiz (explained in the next section) relying on broad information you have about your target audience.

Then, you can use Direct Sponsored Content to run different versions for multiple audiences, and see which one has the best performance, and how different types of clients respond to your quiz ad. This will allow you to run effective campaigns and spend as little money as possible. The better the targeting, the higher the chances for a sign-up and purchase. The more sign-ups and purchases, the lower your CPC.

Our recommendation is that you target your audience both based on demographics, industry, and work-related information such as job position, the size of their company, etc.

You can nail down the buyer persona by targeting specific skills they have, or their occupation description. For example, LeadQuizzes will naturally target B2B buyers whose skills or job description include lead generation and conversion optimization.

Tracking engagement and CTR will allow you to understand how your target audience looks like, and it will also help you nail down the perfect quiz.

3. Create a quiz

You’ve probably seen thousands of quizzes on your social media newsfeed, usually dealing with entertaining, somewhat absurd questions such as “What kind of garlic bread are you” or “How long would you stay alive in Walking Dead?”.

Believe it or not, even this type of quizzes can be an insanely successful lead generation or brand awareness tool, but this time around, we will stick to the fact that quizzes can dabble in serious, professional content as well.

Here at LeadQuizzes, we use our own quiz to identify different types of clients and their specific needs. And it has worked for us very well and helped us build a powerful email list!

Start by focusing on the ultimate solution your product, service, or software offer.

You can run this quiz as a LinkedIn ad, sponsored content, or share it organically on your profile or in groups where you may find your target audience. As you can see, this quiz starts by offering a solution, and a little incentive that taps into your potential client’s curiosity. You can double leads – without increasing traffic or chasing pricey clicks.

The first question identifies one of our four buyer personas.

In the follow-up questions, we identify how much traffic and leads their website is generating, and we check for the possible oversights in their marketing strategy.

Before we present them with the result, there is an opt-in form. As you can see, we include a small incentive – 3 simple website conversion tweaks that aid lead generation.

Once we generate an email sign-up, we present our offer in the results.

4. Create a compelling offer

According to many marketers, landing pages are the cornerstone of online sales. With quizzes, the result is your landing page. It can be created within the quiz maker platform, or it can automatically transfer respondents to a certain page on your website. A quality landing page should include:

• A clear value proposition
• A strong call to action
• User testimonials and other social proof
• How your product/service benefits your users (instead of just listing features)

Now take a look at the results of our quiz. We start with a personalized solution to the client’s challenges – based on the answers they gave us, there is a high chance we could help them double their leads without dramatically increasing traffic.

We include the promised 3 tweaks with real-life examples that can help them generate sign-ups immediately, and we follow up with recommendations from our most successful clients.

In the end, we offer a free 14-day trial, no strings attached, nothing to lose.

And if they say no, for any reason? They are still on our email list.

Apart from these tweaks, you can use several types of lead magnets to incentivize sign-ups. With business users, you should avoid pointless fluff. Offer them something that has practical value, such as free courses, white papers, checklists, ebooks, another super-personalized quiz, etc.

So let’s see what happens with the leads who didn’t immediately buy from you.

5. Nurture leads with content

With B2B lead nurturing, the best solution is to use educational or informative content, such as videos, blog posts, actionable advice and recommendations, and news from the industry. When you create this content, you want to make sure it makes you look like a credible, authoritative source of knowledge.

The way people answer to each question in your quiz allows you to segment the respondents and adjust nurturing content to their needs, challenges, and interests. IHere you can find a guide to creating an effective newsletter that will keep your leads informed and engaged with your brand, allowing you to position your business as a go-to solution to the audience’s problems.

Since credibility and authority are such a big thing in the B2B world, the best way to boost yours is to rely on recommendations from influencers and respected business leaders. While acquiring these recommendations isn’t exactly easy, it can pay-off ten fold.

Case studies should definitely be part of your content strategy. LeadQuizzes has over 30 published case studies, where we offer extensive insights into the way our software helped our clients achieve stellar results. Here you can read in greater detail how we generated our initial growth using quizzes and case studies.

Finally, through Google Analytics or email automation software, you can identify which pieces of content have good click-through rates, high engagement, and generate sales. You can select these content pieces to run them as sponsored content on LinkedIn, generating even more traffic and leads.

Conclusion

The beauty of quizzes is their versatility, and the independence it provides you. With quizzes, any social media network is merely a vehicle for the audience that will move from LinkedIn to your website and email list.

Want to give it a go? Click here to learn in detail how to create the perfect quiz – and if you are ready to make one on your own and revamp your LinkedIn marketing strategy today, just click below.