As we move past the midpoint of the year, now is the perfect opportunity to reassess and reinvigorate your sales pipeline. Here are three LinkedIn marketing steps you can implement now to help you hit your EOY numbers — and position your firm for next year’s growth.
Fulfilling your firm’s growth goals for the year isn’t something you wait to do in December. You implement and execute tactics year-round, right? You take a proactive marketing approach that keeps your sales pipeline healthy and surpasses your EOY numbers through your various awareness, lead generation and thought leadership strategies.
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. But that doesn’t mean you can’t implement quick-hit solutions now to turn things around in time.
If you’re past the mid-way point of the year and hitting your firm’s EOY numbers seems daunting, consider three tactics to attract your ideal clients — and keep the pipeline flowing.
#1 – PREPARE YOURSELF TO RUN LINKEDIN PAID CAMPAIGNS
Before diving into crafting any lead gen strategy, you need to do some homework first so you get the biggest bang for your marketing buck. Without a clear idea of who your ideal clients are, you can’t effectively speak to their challenges or offer the right solutions in your messaging, nor can you target them effectively (which all translates to wasted money.)
To fast-track finding your ideal client, reflect on the first half of the year. Are you doing business with the right companies? Evaluate whether they are a good fit or not — and why or why not. Your ideal clients should not only have unique challenges you can solve, but they should also generate enough revenue to afford working with you.
(Want to dive more into defining your ideal client? We’ve got you covered.)
This type of in-depth analysis of the first half of the year can give important insights that either identify the right clients to pursue business conversations with or ones who aren’t a good fit right now. It also ensures that when you strategize your lead gen campaign, you’re putting your budget behind the right targets, channels, and messaging.
CRAFTING COMPELLING CREATIVES FOR YOUR LEAD GEN EFFORTS
Next, you need to get your ad creatives in order. Start by crafting a minimum of five unique creative pieces for your LinkedIn ads.
You can pinpoint what truly clicks with your ideal client by serving up varied content with slight, strategic differences between copy and/or design. For example, if you’re marketing a downloadable guide on how to navigate current issues that you know your ideal clients are grappling with, you could have a few creative pieces that home in on different takeaways from the guide. The other pieces could have variations in design with the same message.
At Rattleback, we aim to create different “buckets” of creative. For example, in our current Rattleback lead gen campaign, we have three buckets with up to four creative variations. In bucket one, all the copy is the same, but each design is different. In bucket two all the design is the same, but the copy is different. And, in bucket three, we have a mix of different designs as well as different copy.
The bottom line: Use your ads to test and learn. You rarely know what specific messages will resonate with your audience until you serve a variety of them and see what sticks. And when you only have mere seconds to get someone’s attention, every message matters.
CONTINUOUSLY IMPROVE YOUR CAMPAIGNS FOR LONG-TERM SUCCESS
What works today doesn’t necessarily work tomorrow. Your winning strategies and tactics right now can’t be guaranteed for the future. Instead of getting frustrated, stay curious and embrace a mindset of learning and adapting across the entirety of your campaign.
How long should you keep a campaign running before optimizing? We recommend not touching it for at least 14 days. That should give you enough data to recognize any patterns and start gathering insights.
Markets change. Industry needs change. Pressing issues of the day change. Even beyond these big changes, many other factors are still in flux. This means the same strategy you use to find and communicate with your ideal clients now isn’t going to cut it forever.
So be patient and be open. Take time to learn the strategies — messaging, channels, and targeting — that do and do not resonate with your ideal clients and adapt accordingly.
#2 – DRIVE AWARENESS OF YOUR FIRM AND ITS EXPERTISE WITH LINKEDIN AD RETARGETING
A well-rounded marketing strategy begins with creating brand awareness and culminates in driving qualified leads into your pipeline. This tactic explores an awareness-building approach to set the stage for an effective lead generation campaign later.
LAY THE FOUNDATION WITH AWARENESS
Building a strong foundation starts with raising awareness of your firm and the problems it is primed to solve. After all, you can’t attract those who don’t know about you. To establish your presence across the right channels and platforms to reach a wider audience, utilize LinkedIn’s powerful Insight Tag to track website visitors and gather valuable data on their preferences and behaviors. Adding the Insight Tag to your website now will open opportunities for additional marketing later.
NURTURE WITH RETARGETING
Give the Insight Tag a few months to do its magic and aggregate your audience. Once your audience has been built, it’s time to nurture those who have shown interest in what your firm has to offer. To do this, implement a strategic retargeting campaign that reminds potential clients of your brand and expertise. This can look like a combination of approaches, such as:
- Creating retargeting ads and messages that are relevant to the content that users previously viewed on your website. For example, you may promote solution-specific benefits that your firm provides to people who have visited specific solution pages on your site.
- Offering valuable resources like downloadable ebooks, whitepapers, guides, or handbooks that are specific to the types of content visitors have read in the past. You know what interests them, encourage them to go deeper with additional follow-on content.
- Providing a follow-on offer of a free product demo. This can be particularly helpful for visitors that spent a reasonable amount of time on your product pages, but simply haven’t converted for reasons unknown.
SEAL THE DEAL WITH A SMART SALES OUTREACH STRATEGY
As your retargeting efforts continue to warm up potential leads, it’s essential to capitalize on these interactions effectively and within a reasonable amount of time. Assign a business development manager in your firm to conduct targeted one-on-one outreach to the leads you’ve generated through your campaigns to-date. Have them connect over LinkedIn or send an email shortly after conversion. And make sure to keep it personal: tailor your outreach based on who they are and their interactions with your content and downloadable assets.
#3 – QUICKLY GENERATE HIGH-QUALITY LEADS WITH LINKEDIN LEAD GEN ADS
When it comes to achieving end-of-year targets, a robust lead generation strategy plays a pivotal role in fueling the pipeline with qualified leads. Analyzing the success of the first half of the year provides valuable insights into shaping an effective approach for the remainder.
Let’s explore a blueprint that capitalizes on recent wins to maximize revenue growth potential.
REFLECT ON RECENT SUCCESS
If you did your homework, this step is easy — if not done already. Take a moment to reflect on your quality leads from the first half of the year. Which channels and tactics delivered the most promising results? From there, you can better understand where your most successful leads originated to focus your efforts efficiently.
FOCUS ON BEST-FIT OPPORTUNITIES
Not all leads are created equal, and focusing on the best-fit opportunities is crucial for achieving your end-of-year targets. Identify the specific practices, services, business lines, or offerings that not only generated revenue but also boasted the highest close rate. By aligning your marketing efforts with these successful areas, you attract leads more likely to close, driving tangible results in your pipeline.
CRAFT A TAILORED AUDIENCE
With insights from your past successes, it’s time to build an audience tailored to your most promising segments. Targeting the right audience is essential for capturing qualified leads that align with your business objectives. So leverage your findings to refine your audience segments and craft compelling messages that uniquely resonate with each of them. Look for insights like firm size, revenue performance, buyer job titles, industry, etc.
PROMOTE HIGHEST-PERFORMING ASPECTS
Now that your audience is defined, it’s time to spotlight the practice, service, business line, or offering that drove the most revenue and boasted the highest close rate. Put your marketing dollars behind these high-performing aspects through thought leadership content, engaging campaigns, and compelling visuals. By capitalizing on what you know works, you establish authority in the market and build trust with ideal clients, encouraging them to enter your pipeline.
FINISH THE YEAR WITH IMPACT
What sets this paid media strategy apart is its dual-pronged impact. It delivers quick results and equips you to enter 2024 with a robust, successful game plan for lead generation.
Remember, this approach is not set in stone. The beauty of digital marketing and lead generation lies in its collective adaptability. So monitor your campaign’s progress, make the necessary adjustments, and continue to refine your approach based on your ideal client’s preferences and responses.
The closing months of the year offer the perfect opportunity to learn, adapt, and achieve your firm’s revenue targets. So strap in and let the second half of your year’s journey begin on an upward trajectory.
