#64: LinkedIn Ads Part 2: Using Clay, targeting tools & intent signals, with Jamie Skeels
33m 23s
In this episode of the SAS Marketing Weekly Podcast, host Ryan and guest Jamie discuss targeting strategies for LinkedIn ads, focusing on how to reach the right audience without wasting budget. Jamie emphasizes that companies should not guess their target market but instead analyze their own CRM data—customer lists and late-stage opportunities—to identify segments where they already have traction. By breaking down data by company size, industry, region, and job titles using tools like pivot tables, marketers can pinpoint their ICP. For cold audiences, LinkedIn's native filters (e.g., company size, industry, department) are effective but have limitations, such as relying on user-filled data that may misclassify industries. To overcome this, Jamie recommends building custom account lists with tools like Clay, which can enrich and vet accounts by scanning company websites and LinkedIn profiles to ensure they match specific criteria (e.g., construction companies focused on residential projects). This approach reduces wastage and ensures ads reach viable prospects. Ryan adds that intent data, such as recent funding rounds, can further refine targeting. The key takeaway is to always start with proven customer segments before experimenting with new ones.
[Music] Hey, this is Ryan from RocketSats, and you're listening to the SAS Marketing Weekly Podcast, the show that gives you actionable marketing strategies and campaign ideas to rocket your SAS business. And, if you want even more SAS marketing ideas, go to SASMarketingWeekly.com to join my free newsletter. Hello, and welcome back to the SAS Marketing Weekly Podcast. With me, your host Ryan, the founder of RocketSats, and here we are with episode two of this mini series, which is how to get the most out of your LinkedIn ads. If you haven't listened to part one, please go back to the previous episode, where me and Jamie talked about the top, the middle, the bottom of the funnel, what types of ads you should be creating for each element of that funnel, what content you need to be backing up your ads. So if it was like a workshop, we've done that, we've created loads of great ads, we've created loads of content to support it, we haven't launched the ads yet because we need to do the targeting. We need to know who we are going after, we just set it all up into the LinkedIn ads platform, and then we're going to be ready to launch. Part three, by the way, is about the budgeting and how to split the budget between the areas of the funnel and the re-targeting. Also, we're going to talk about how to optimize the ads moving forward, but this part, part two, is about targeting. So Jamie, you've got a load of beautiful ads that have been created, loads of great content, we're ready to get it out there. So how do you know who you're going to be targeting, how do you define that audience? Obviously, you don't want to go too broad because this podcast is for startups to scale up, so they don't have millions of pounds to spend every month. So how do we get our ads seen by precisely the right people we want to target? No, it's, I've got very strong views on this. That's why you're here. So there is a way to do this, and there is a way not to do this. We've targeting, in general, particularly just in general, but for ads, particularly when spending money to reach people, do not get in a room and decide together, this is our target market, this is who we're going after, based on, for example, like, well, enterprise, we're going after the enterprise. We've got like a really big juicy deal there in the past, where we got one, two years ago, we want more of them. Let's go and get them. Don't do that. Don't do that. Look at your customer data. Start from there. Look at your opportunity data. Look at your own CRM to find out which segments and which audience profiles you should be targeting. That's, I think, fundamental to one, just good targeting for most B2B SaaS brands, but also very particular for your ads. Okay. So this is only for companies that are beyond the kind of actually start of the startup phase. So if you're saying, if you've got customers, you should start by analyzing your existing customer data. Yes, but even if you're early on, even if you're early stage, and maybe you haven't got tons of customers yet, I would at least use your opportunity data on your late stage pipeline. People who have become close, but maybe they just like fell away at the last minute. Try and look at your own data as much as possible. Whatever is closest to revenue, use that as your starting point for building your audience. Main reason I suggest that, it's going to be a lot easier, particularly if you're getting started with a paid media program, if you're getting started with LinkedIn, it's going to be a lot easier to scale what's worked previously than to try and sort of generate kind of traction in a segment or in a type of company where you've really not had much success in the past. Always start with where you have traction. Yes, Rocket's has made that mistake in the recent past. We tried to go after American clients. We had a few American clients, not many. When Trump won his second election, there was a huge excitement about the American economy about to boom. I was like, great, we'll just get a little American clients. I just run some ads to America and spent 10 grand and got basically nothing from it. I realized that I probably should have changed my website a bit, Span on Pan American landing page, created some case studies, those American clients. My business and my brand wasn't ready to go for that. Same, Rocket's has to currently trying to go for slightly larger businesses rather than just focusing purely on the start-up scene. We are now doing it properly, is that we're creating assets to target those businesses rather than just being like, I would like to run big deals. Let's just press some LinkedIn ads. You're saying start by looking at where you've had success in the past. Absolutely. I think it's just super important that there is going to be 90% of the time. Whenever I do this, we do this exercise internally in the agency with our clients. 90% of the time, when you look into someone's customer data or their opportunity data, their pipeline data, what you'll see is when you start, because what we want to do and what someone who wants to run the LinkedIn ad should do when they're understanding who they should target is you look at the opportunities or the customers as a whole. You break it down by the different dimensions within that list. What I mean is really looking at at the very start of the core demographics of what company headcount sizes you get in traction from. What titles or departments where you get traction from. What industries where you get traction from, which regions where you get traction from. When you start breaking the data down to those levels and you start getting those dimensions, what you'll see 90% of the time is a very clear trend on you are probably getting a lot of traction in normally one or like a one, two, three segments in particular. Quite often it can be one. It's just really just an outlier for your business. You see it like you've got traction in a particular industry. You get traction with particular company sizes and you get traction from particular departments. What you're going to do is when you break that data down, so you pull that data from your CRM, you break it down, spreadsheet it out, pivot table it, get an review of right. We know now that 70% of our business comes from sort of the software companies. 80% of the time they're coming from people started. The person starting up by process is from the IT department. They're all from the UK and normally they're from like company sizes of around 50 to 500. All of a sudden we have a very clear idea of right, this is where we get traction. So if we're getting started with a paid media program, we want to get far results. The most logical thing to do is start there. Now obviously you need to factor in your company goals into this. You might be targeted in like different segments. That's important to bear in mind. But if the goal is just centered around kind of where can we get the most traction and drive the most revenue from this program, always start with your SAP. Who your best equipped server right now. So practically and sort of technically, how does that work? So let's say if you're an in HubSpot as your CRM, that's where all of your clients are going to be and all of your leads. Is it a case of exporting it into a spreadsheet and just manually going through it? It's not with a dream. Not always do it. So like you can, if you depend on how capable of CRM you are, like I used to use Salesforce at Cognizm, my old job, like you can break the data down in Salesforce in a lot of cases, which can be really helpful. But most of the time what I do, I want to download that data. So I want to get a list of all of my opportunities or customers, ideally customers, get my customer list and I want a list that has all of the dimensions that I just mentioned in. So who's the primary contact on that deal? Well, the job title. Yeah, the actual primary contact. So the person who's on there is the person who like started the buying process or was the main person involved in the process. Who's the primary contact? Their job title, what industry they're working, what region they were from, what the company size is and so on and so on. You can go on through those, that's some core information that's really helpful for particularly paid media targets and LinkedIn targets in particular. So I'm going to download that, get that data and then I'm going to get that into a spreadsheet. All I'm going to do is I want to start kind of sorting the data into ideally, I do pivot tables. So start creating to pivot tables where I can see quite easily like, okay, now I can see this percentage of our business comes from these kind of seniorities, this percentage of our business comes from these industries, this percentage of our business comes from these regions. And all it does is it gives you guidance on this is where we win business. And if you're setting up a paid media program, if you're going into LinkedIn, do that, do more of that. It's going to be much easier to do more of that. And I think too much, but I see in fact a lot is people going after the deals that the company wants and I understand that I understand people wanting to get big juicy well deals and maybe sometimes you're set up to do that. Maybe that is where you're in business. 90% of the time it might not be. And particularly when you're starting with LinkedIn, start with where you get traction. Every time it's going to be much easier, you can prove it out and then you can expand into more experimental campaigns to get in different types of companies. Okay, so now let's get into the actual LinkedIn ads platforms and the different types of targeting. So there's I guess two major categories. One is a cold audience, which is people who have not been on your website before. They probably have never even heard of your brand before. And then there's the re-targeting audience, which is the people who have been on your website or they've engaged with some of your ads and therefore you can re-target them by showing them a different app knowing they've gone through a bit of a journey. So in terms of a target in point of view, obviously you go into LinkedIn campaign manager to set up your ads, you use the various filters, set vocations, job title, company size, that kind of thing. So that's like the basics. Yeah. So you can cover some of that of the typical kind of filters that you use. [laughter]
then I know you want to get into like the more advanced stuff, which is layering on external sources of data, external tools to really help you out. This is where the sort of podcast gets really interesting in terms of hopefully teaching people's new things that they haven't done before, even if they've been running LinkedIn ads for a long time. So yeah, let's start with probably the cold audience and the filters that you typically look for in LinkedIn. Most people are probably familiar with these already if they've run LinkedIn ads, but how do you do it? Yeah, no, definitely. So obviously, to let you mention, there's multiple ways to approach a cold audience. So if you're going out to a cold audience, the main way that a lot of people will be using right now is LinkedIn's native targeting filters. So within LinkedIn, when you sell a campaign, there are multiple kind of firm graphic normally criteria that you can enter to match the type of buyer that you want to reach. So obviously, like we mentioned, what we'd have done by this point is we'd have analyzed our customer data. We know who go in after. We're now going to go into LinkedIn and we're going to build the criteria to match that criteria. So in LinkedIn, what you're going to have available to you is things like company size, the titles or departments that you want to go after, the locations, and also things like seniority. There's also other ones that you can layer in, things like revenue, kind of bands, and like member groups and interests and skills and things, but the core really is going to be what you typically in a LinkedIn campaign, company size industry, department, and location. So those are kind of the core filters. So that's a really easy to build. Obviously, it's just kind of selecting them within the LinkedIn platform. And that's just like a standard cold audience. Proves, it's actually very precise compared to other platforms. So compared to like meta or radio, any really advertising platform that's available to LinkedIn is very precise and its target filters are very good. Yeah, the reason for that is if you remember what you entered when you created your LinkedIn account, you entered your name, your date above your email address, the company that you work for, your job title at the company, and then that can easily connect to the company that's called its own profile, which shows you how many employees the company's got, where their headquarters is located. It's like perfect B2B data. Yeah. As opposed to when you register an account on Reddit or Facebook or Instagram, you enter name, date above email address. Yes. And location, yeah. So therefore Facebook Instagram has a lot of the same thing. They have no idea who you work for, what your job title is. They can guess and they won't get into that now. But this is why LinkedIn is the best B2B. Yeah. So that's the pros. It is a good target option. I would 100% say that you shouldn't be worried about using those target filters. They are accurate. They are very like precise. They are downsides. They are. It's not perfect. It's very good. But it's not perfect LinkedIn target filters. So one of the downsides, that's why we get to get on to alternatives and a set. One of the downsides of LinkedIn target filters is that it is reliant on what people have filled out for their own business or their own personal page. And so what that can lead to is, for example, in software, SaaS is a really good example. So a lot of businesses in SaaS, with their company page. So you'll see it when you actually go on some company page. You see that there's an industry usually underneath there like title, usually on the page. So that's decided by the business. So quite often say you're a fintech business. Maybe you should be described as a software business, but you're putting your industry as financial services. So if you're going on LinkedIn and you set your industry targeting as computer software, software development, you might not be capturing those people. And maybe you're trying to reach fintech businesses in particular. That's one of the downsides of LinkedIn's native filters. They're alternatives to that. And that's what we're going to kind of get on to now. Yes, I agree. The industries is the most annoying thing. Is that yeah, you're trying to target healthcare software providers and they could call themselves, how far healthcare company they could call themselves. Yeah, all sorts of things. And so you think to yourself, like construction is a bit of a classic. Like, construction is a really broad term on LinkedIn. If I want to target construction companies, but I only want to target construction companies, like this type of construction company that are doing this type of project, like maybe only residential construction companies, but you can't be specific and say, I only want to target residential construction companies because you have to target all the commercial ones as well. Therefore, you're showing ads to so many people that you're not, you shouldn't be. And therefore, you're wasting budget because they're clicking on it and it's just causing problems. So that's why we're now going to talk about how to get specific in terms of not wasting your ad spend by targeting it. A load of people that aren't going to click on it. So how do we make it more specific? Yeah. So the alternative to LinkedIn's native filters is to build your own account list with a more kind of specific data provider. So there's lots of kind of providers that can do this. You can do this with. We use internally. We use a tool called Clay, which is an incredible tool. It's very, very intuitive. It's a data provider and enrichment tool that allows you to kind of build a account list and enrich those account lists with other data that's very hard to get with other data providers, but you can also use more simple data providers like Apollo, Cognizm, etc. Yeah. So to describe Clay, so I'm really impressed with Clay since we've been using it. So to give you an example of let's say that construction space. So let's say I'm a construction staff company. I only want to target construction companies that are doing residential. I'm not interested in construction companies that are doing commercial buildings with Clay. I can say, show me a list of companies that are in the construction category that have got between 100 and the thousands employees. And I want to target the job title of site manager. And then what's really clever about Clay is Clay's kind of got. Imagine if it had its own like chat GPT. It went on every single one of those websites. So let's say it pulled up 5,000 companies. It goes on every single one of those 5,000 websites and it reads the content of the website. And it also can go onto the CEO's LinkedIn page and read the content of the LinkedIn guy is posting out. And therefore it knows that if that website is using the word commercial property a lot and not using the word residential property a lot, it's like no, that's not what Ryan's looking for. So it can basically learn and read. It's like sending a little agent to every one of those websites and try and figure out if that's the right company. Is that a good way to describe it? 100%. I think so. So I think what's really powerful about doing it this way. So if you build an account list through one of these tools like Clay, Punic doesn't recommend Clay is brilliant. But like you can control the list much more than you can with LinkedIn's native targeting filters. So we can do exactly what you just said. So we can build with our close one analysis that we did at the very beginning of this process. We know exactly we want to go after. We can build a list with that criteria, wherever that might be like Ryan mentioned construction, certain company sizes, etc. And then we build that list and then we can use Clay to basically validate that all of those companies say we're targeting software and we're worried that there might be other types of industries in there from businesses from a relevant industries. We can get it to vet and check it and remove those ones that we don't want to reach. Which means that what we're left with is a very tight account list of accounts that we know we can serve. So we know there's no wastage or very minimal wastage. And that means that all of our ads we know we're going to get to people who we can viably sell to. And that's really kind of our own universe. That's our known universe. That's our ICP right now that we can serve. And we know that our ads are going to be reaching them, which is the cold goal for us. When we're at a rocket SaaS example, we just want those messages in front of people, the right people. Yeah. And you can also start to create very, very tailored laser target ads. So again, to use an example of rocket SaaS, a key to talk about intent data as well. We obviously target B2B SaaS companies that are struggling with their marketing or they just want to ramp up their marketing dramatically. Therefore, any B2B SaaS company who has just raised funding, they see your series of funding, that is like a great target account for us. We should be going after those companies. And you can use tools like CrunchBase or Clay does it as well, where it can use those filters similar to like the LinkedIn filters or Apollo filters or Cruelfansium. And it can say these B2B SaaS companies have just raised funding in the last quarter or even the last month. So we can create that list, export it, upload that list into LinkedIn and say show these ads to these companies. So we know that these ads in this particular campaign is only going to be seen by companies that have recently raised funding. So our ads can literally say things like if you've just raised funding for your B2B SaaS company, you probably want to ramp up your marketing dramatically, introducing rocket SaaS. So that is very, very powerful. Another one is hiring. And I'm using my business as an example, which is an agency, but for most B2B SaaS companies, hiring is still an important intent signal as well. So if you are, again, this example of a HR SaaS platform, if a enterprise business has put a job out looking for a new HR manager or a HR assistant, that means they're investing in HR. That means they may well also be interested in investing in a new software. Or if they're bringing in a new HR manager, they are probably considering ripping up the system and bringing in a new HR software. So there is intent. So you can use tools again, like clay or various other intents, different platforms to find companies that have recently posted jobs for this particular function. And then you put, again, put them into a campaign. So again, very effective. And it's brilliant for your salespeople because they can start reaching out as well, but we're not going to get into sales today. Yeah. I think it's really powerful, though, like in terms of being able to, like we said, once you have that countless and then being able to enrich that, with signals like you're just talking about higher signals.
funding signals, like merger and acquisitions, all different types, depending on what's relevant for your business. That allows you to have flexibility in terms of really target campaigns, really target messaging, and then work very closely with sales as you just mentioned. So yeah, I think that's really important. So there's two options you can really take with that coal campaign. Like we mentioned, though, it's you can go down the standard native route, which is fine. It works. You get to the audience, the better route, the probably the optimum route, create your own account list, and then it also opens up the flexibility to add intent data and signals into that audience to kind of give you flexibility as well. Yeah. Okay. So in terms of target in, we use the best LinkedIn fields that we can, we're aware it's a bit broad, but now we're also layering on intent signals and using other tools like clay. So what about should we get into retargeting? Yes, definitely. Okay. Favorite. Well, that is, yeah, I mean, just doing ads to cold, a cold audience, I've never heard of you before, even with our clever tactics and intent data, it's still a cold audience. You know, it's very rare for a cold person that's never heard of your brand to book a demo today. That is why retargeting ads is the play for LinkedIn ads. If you're not doing retargeting ads, you might as well turn it off and not bother. I've a lot of clients that come to rocket sass and they're with a current agency and I'm like, so what retargeting ads are you running? I don't think we're running any. What are you doing? So you have to be doing retargeting ads. So I think the audience should know what retargeting ads are. I think we covered that in part one of this mini series, but let's get into actual sort of targeting of the retarget ads. Yeah. Yeah, no problem. So I suppose we touched on it a little bit. I think in the last episode, like you're reaching out to people who have engaged with you before. So that can take many forms in LinkedIn, people who visit your website, people who engage with your ads, people who visit your company page, etc. I think what can be really powerful about LinkedIn retargeting is go back to the last episode you've ever watched already is that once you know that person's had a touch point, it suggests a level of awareness and it suggests that basically look a bit further along in their journey, which opens up the pathway to serve different types of content, start nurturing that person forward. Now, what I think can be really interesting with LinkedIn's remarketing is you can split the audience, your remarketing audience if it's big enough into different segments in itself. So for example, like if I segment my, so I know that of all my remarketing audience, I have maybe say, let's say there's 20,000 people in it, so I've got a really healthy web traffic. It's 20,000 people in my remarketing audience. If I know that I have a few thousand people in that remarketing audience who in the last 14 days have been to my demo page on my pricing page, that opens up really interesting routes for me to be able to target very specific people with very specific messages. So I know if you're visiting the pricing page of the demo page, there was probably some interest. There's some degree of interest, so I can serve for people visiting the pricing page. If there's enough track, like enough volume, I can serve pricing focused messaging to those people. I can go out very specific campaigns and messaging to like combat objections around pricing. If they've been to the demo page, then I know maybe if I just give them a better offer, they might come back. We might have to capture that interested part. Maybe they won't really in that moment, maybe they didn't really get it when they were on the page. If I can clarify that with a really good offer, maybe I can get those people back in. And then you can also look, I think this was something that we did at Cognizum and I was lucky enough to work with some really talented paid media people at Cognizum who built a really, really clean structure. You can segment your remarks and audience based on the number of days that they've been in that remarked an audience. So imagine it like look back windows of 14 days, 30 days, 90 days, 180 days. What I think is really interesting with remarks and audience is when you're starting able to segment it like that, you can plan the different types of content that go into each bucket. So like I just mentioned, the 14 day one, maybe that's a really high intent audience. They've been to the website really recently. Might have been specific pages. Let's try and get them back and interested. If they fall down into the 30 day audience, more than 90 day audience, maybe we're more thinking about well, maybe not interested right now. So what would they need to know to be interested in the future? And that's when we talk about things like the mid-orf funnel, messaging. So things like the competitor adds a social proof product demos, all those sorts of things. Maybe they weren't ready in that moment. Maybe they didn't really get it. Let's keep an eye on them when they're ready again. They'll know more about a product than I know if we're the right fit. And then you kind of get towards kind of longer term ones and maybe you start circling things like Fort Leedow ads. That might come into the 90 day one as well. But it's just a way to think about remarketing that you can really segment it up. Your audience size will remarketing will factor into this. Don't break it up if there's not enough people. If you've got a small remark to an audience, you're better focusing on a small number of campaigns. But it does show you kind of the flexibility that's there in the way that you can target remarketing. So I'm right in saying that you can't even start retargeting until you've got 300. 300. So from the day that you install the LinkedIn Insights tag in your website, HTML code, or however you install it, 300 visitors have to have come to your website before LinkedIn allows you to do retargeting. Yes. In a specified period. Yeah. It's just right here at the time. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And I'm also right in saying that those 300 people don't have to come from LinkedIn ads. No, that's a really good point. So a common misconception. Yes, which is an excellent point to raise. So I think that's actually one of the most powerful things about LinkedIn remarketing is that we've had into kind of technical delinquent remarketing tag, the pixel that you add to your website. It can pick up on traffic from all sources, all traffic sources. So traffic that's coming to your website from Google ads, from meta, from organic search, from everywhere. LinkedIn can tap into that data, track it, and feed that back into LinkedIn for you to retarget on LinkedIn, which is super valuable. So if you have a website that has decent SEO, for example, when you're getting like over a thousand visitors a month organically, then LinkedIn retargeting ads, well, and other platforms as well, actually meta, which you won't get into. You should probably definitely. No, no, no, no, no, no, brainer. You should be running retargeting ads. If you are the unfortunate end where your website isn't getting much traffic because you're not anywhere on SEO and you're not driving any traffic from ads, then it takes a bit more time. You're going to have to run enough ads to drive at least 300 people to the website, which is going to cost a bit of money, and then you can start to retarget them. Yeah, and I think that's like, like you just mentioned, though, that's the real power of it, is that that tag picking up all that traffic. Those are people that express some kind of intent to either like just discover your content or discover you, or they were ready to buy, but some they've had a touch point, they were aware that something happened that made them come to the website. So that's a really good signal that they're ready for different types of content now. So whether that's like trying to get them like book a demo content, the bottom of the funnel, whether that's middle of final content, they're ready to kind of be nurtured along. They've expressed some kind of action to make them kind ready for that kind of content. But I think that's like a really important thing is that you can pick up on that traffic and then you can reach them on the place that they're most likely in a lot of industries. They'll be spending a lot of their time when they're working LinkedIn. They're spending a lot of time in LinkedIn and you can be there all the time every day. Just kind of like following them around with useful content, useful messaging and kind of just keeping front of mind, which is super important like in a B2B buying journey, which is long and takes time. Staying in front of mind is everything. Yeah, I had a sales call with somebody today and she said to me Ryan Rocket SaaS has been on my radar for about a year. I love the content that you create. I love the top of funnel educational content that you create and I just see you pop up on my LinkedIn. I've subscribed to your newsletter. I listen to your podcast. I just see your ads. You're clearly very good at what you do and we need to do the same as what you're doing. And those are very typical things that people always is that yeah, I see you guys everywhere and that's the power of retouching ads. Yeah, 100%. And I think it's well for a smaller SaaS brand. I think this is one of the most important things about it. It makes you appear bigger than you are. So if you're a smaller SaaS brand and you're constantly surfacing on LinkedIn and you're constantly in front of that buyer, it makes you feel like a bigger brand, which can make someone trust you more. It's just by like there's like a psychological principle. I think it's their familiarity principle or something like that. But just by being there and present and familiar makes you more trustworthy. Yeah, I remember like when to give an example, I'm really Monday.com like appeared. Just I can't it was like a long time ago. You've never left. Yeah, but I've never been on their website. I've never used their platform. I've never done a feature. I don't even know anyone that's using Monday.com. I don't think I've hardly had anyone talk about it. But I would just because I saw their ads everywhere. I was just like, yeah, Monday, they're one of the industry leaders. Yeah. Because I see them all the time. Pay no. Yeah. And yeah, I had no idea if they were or not, but like psychologically I presume that they were just because I was seeing a lot of their content all the time. And I'll see it look slick. So yeah, you're right. Just kind of showing up enough time. Just puts you on the radar because it just goes back to how people buy 95% of people that are seeing your ads are not looking to buy. But at some point in their buying journey, they will be ready to buy a software. It could be in a week's time. It could be in 12 months time. But whenever they get to that point, when they're ready and they're having conversations with their boss or whoever, the first thing they say is, okay, who can we go with and your name needs to be on that list and your name is not going to be on that list if you want to.
not showing up and you're not showing ads to those people. But if they are seeing you every time they go on, they're linked in and they're metta and all these other platforms and channels, they'll immediately go, yeah, well, we're definitely going to book a demo of them and maybe they'll look at other companies as well. But ideally, the Holy Grail of Demand Generation, which is what's happening with Rockets House here, is when people do get to that point where they want to buy, they don't look at anyone else. They go, "Rockets House has been on our radar for the last 12 months or six months or two months. We're ready to speak to them. We're not going to look at anyone else because we love their content so much and we just see them all the time. We know we're going to go with them." "We love those people." "We love those people, and the fact that we show up pricing on our website as well, they even know how much we cost. So as long as this house guy doesn't totally screw it up, it's in the bag. And that's the Holy Grail of Demand Generation and doing retargeting answers the whole, I think. So I think we can probably wrap up part two there and assume he has to answer. "I don't think there's that much really. I think just to recap, those are the target options. I think in future episodes we talked about is something we get diving to a lot of this stuff in specifics as well. But I think when it comes to targeting, you have the cold options available to you. The native targeting, we recommend if you can get an account list built, retight list of accounts you know are the ones you can serve. And then to crank things up, especially if you've got a good website traffic, retargeting, engaging with people who have already engaged with you and staying in front of that buyer and serving them relevant offers is a really, really powerful way to target buyers as well. And they kind of work together." Love it. All right. Thank you so much, Jamie, for part two. So next week, tune into part three, where we're going to be talking about budgeting. So again, if you're doing this as a workshop, you've created the ad, you've created the content, you've now set up all your targeting, you're ready to go. But how much money should you be putting into it to expect to get results? How much money should you be putting into the cold layer versus the retargeting layer? And we're also going to talk about how to optimize the ads ongoing. You can't just launch the ads and just let them run. You need to be monitoring various different metrics and tweaking the budget and turning ads off and pumping more budget into ads that work. So we're going to be going through all of that in part three, which you can tune into next week on the SaaS Marketing Weekly podcast. But until then, I will ask you to leave us a review. We don't do any ads on this podcast. We just do it from the love of our hearts. So I'm really grateful if you could just go onto your Spotify app or whatever it is. Leave us a high star review that I really have a scale to help other SaaS marketers scale their business. So thank you. See you for part three next week. Thank you for listening to the SaaS Marketing Weekly podcast. Now, if you are a founder or a marketer of a B2B SaaS business and you are struggling to generate leads, you should check out my demand generation agency Rocket SaaS. But roughly the same price as hiring one in-house marketer, you will get a full team of marketing experts to create your demand generation strategy and execute on content ads, leave magnets and website optimization. All designed to scale your SaaS business and generate you inbound leads. To find out more, please go to rocket-s SaaS.io where you can apply for a free SaaS marketing strategy call with me.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Analyze existing customer and opportunity data (CRM) to identify segments with proven traction before setting up LinkedIn ads.
Use pivot tables to break down data by company size, industry, region, and job titles to define a precise Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
LinkedIn's native targeting filters (company size, industry, department, location) are precise for B2B but rely on user-provided data, which can be inaccurate.
For more accurate targeting, build custom account lists using tools like Clay to vet companies based on website content and other signals.
Avoid broad targeting based on assumptions; always start with where you have already won business to minimize wasted ad spend.
Summary:
In this episode of the SAS Marketing Weekly Podcast, host Ryan and guest Jamie discuss targeting strategies for LinkedIn ads, focusing on how to reach the right audience without wasting budget. Jamie emphasizes that companies should not guess their target market but instead analyze their own CRM data—customer lists and late-stage opportunities—to identify segments where they already have traction. By breaking down data by company size, industry, region, and job titles using tools like pivot tables, marketers can pinpoint their ICP.
, company size, industry, department) are effective but have limitations, such as relying on user-filled data that may misclassify industries. , construction companies focused on residential projects). This approach reduces wastage and ensures ads reach viable prospects.
Ryan adds that intent data, such as recent funding rounds, can further refine targeting. The key takeaway is to always start with proven customer segments before experimenting with new ones.
FAQs
This episode focuses on how to get the most out of LinkedIn ads, specifically on targeting strategies for B2B SaaS companies.
Analyze your existing customer data or late-stage pipeline opportunities from your CRM to identify where you've had the most traction.
It helps you focus on segments where you've already succeeded, making it easier to scale and avoid wasting budget on untested areas.
The core filters are company size, industry, department, location, and seniority, which are precise for B2B but rely on user-provided data.
They depend on what users fill out on their profiles, leading to inaccuracies, such as companies misclassifying their industry on LinkedIn.
Clay allows you to build a custom account list, enrich it with data, and validate companies by scanning their websites or LinkedIn posts to ensure they match your ideal customer profile.
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