Let’s break up the tedious foundational walk-through and take a step back to a little more high-level view of what we are looking to build. 

For those who have never run Linkedin ads before, this will shed light on what all these pieces we are building will eventually look like. And for those who are currently dabbling or running Linkedin ads, this might shed a little light on if you are on the right path or give you a different perspective. 

Overall Strategy

Here is the summary/cliff notes. Our goal is to find our ideal prospects, get our company and solution on their radar, build up trust and credibility with them until we are the clear expert in our space (or at least a top contender), and then nudge them into converting. All while tracking each action/metric so that we can test and improve. 

So here is what a decent 101 basic Linkedin Paid Ads strategy might look like. 

1. You create the audience inside LinkedIn ads and go after marketing startups with 50-200 staff who operate inside the USA, speak English, and our targeting will include founders/owners/ceo’s/presidents - I’ll also throw in that they have an interest in chatbots and marketing automation and are frequent contributors on the platform which means they are active and more likely to interact with our ads. 

1. Next, I’ll run cold ads to this group in the form of Single image ads to get on their radar - depending on the need and complexity of my solution I can either be pretty blunt take a longer approach. I might run a case study as a cold ad (what we do), touch on their major pain point, or come right out and just announce the solution we offer to see if they are curious enough to bite - which in this case means click. 

1. Step 3 - we track all the intent signals from this cold campaign which means we track all the website clicks it produces, company page visitors, even video views if we ran any here or lead gen form opens. 

• We track all of those signals and put those that do interact with our ad, company page, or website into a retargeting audience. 
• We now know they fit our ideal target criteria and have shown some form of interest which makes them a pretty warm lead if you ask me. 

1. The next step here is to build up trust and credibility - You see that one click into your website will rarely ever convert. It’s likely not the right time and even if it is, they don’t know you or trust you yet. 

• We no retarget this group who have shown interest with a series of ads - but these ads won’t always look like ads. I’ll run case studies, testimonials, press releases, us in the news, awards we’ve won, and even cross-promote our podcast, youtube channel, newsletter, and any other communities we are growing. 
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• Paid ads is the best way to ensure the distribution of key content that creates a story or narrative that we want our prospects to see. This is the modern-day nurture sequence. Not some clunky 52 step email drip that they might only open half off. 

• I like to layer in the ads as well so they see some variation or a different angle of us almost every time they log into Linkedin - when you are just filtering the ones who have shown intent, it’s a small enough group that you can dominate without a ton of spend. 
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• Retargeting might only take 20-30% of the budget but it will account for 80-90% of the conversions.