The metric: SQLs

Gabriel Ehrlich, Founder & CEO of Remotion, shares experience and insights on how they use LinkedIn Ads to drive high-value SQLs for growing B2B clients.

Insights on Driving SQLs via LinkedIn Ads

1. Use benchmarks to identify competitive advantages.

Look for instances where SQL rate (lead to meeting ratio) is 2-3x higher than average, and come up with a hypothesis as to what caused that growth.

Then, see if you can duplicate it in another campaign.

Once Remotion finds meaningful variance, they determine if the higher performance was owing to factors that can be duplicated.

If so, they’ll increase the budget and spin off a new campaign where they lean into the things that made the former campaign perform so well.

2. Get qualitative insights into ad performance.

His team uses common sense, and deep familiarity with their clients to create a hypothesis of why a campaign saw meaningful change in performance.

By talking with clients, they’re able to learn what’s happening that might be affecting performance.

For example, after talking with the client they learn that John – the company’s best SDR – is on vacation.

This is the cause of lower results down-funnel.

And since they have access to their client’s CRMs accounts, they’re able to be proactive in looking at any other factors that impact ad results that they might not have seen by staring at performance numbers in the Ad platform.

3. Remain “strategy agnostic” until you find what works for you.

Gabriel has seen a lot of commonly accepted truisms fall on their face when applied to Clients in different countries or industries.

4. Look at performance often enough to derive insights, but avoid knee-jerk decisions.

Remotion gives each client gets their own real-time dashboard which shows:

  • CPL
  • Last 7-day CPL
  • Trend over last 30 days
  • Comparison to previous 30 days

… and more.

They know what a client’s current CPL is every day.

But for metrics further down the funnel, they evaluate them monthly. This helps them make more informed decisions based on proven trends, and avoid knee-jerk reactions to a bad (or good) week.

5. Determine your campaign goals early.

Most companies run 2 types of campaigns:

Direct response = promote your product, get someone to talk to you

Content = promote your POV & provide value

Each generates different outcomes, so choose the one that best serves your goals. If you aren’t sure which type of campaign you want to run, Gabriel advises running both, then determining the CPL. Benchmark your performance to know if one is higher than the industry average. If it is, use that one.

6. What companies get wrong about LinkedIn ads:

  • Under-investing
  • Being inconsistent
  • Being unclear about their goal
  • Not having messaging honed in
  • Having an inactive audience on LinkedIn
  • Not being ready (too early, no product-market fit)

7. Testing messaging through LinkedIn ads can be costly.

You need a lot of data to see how it impacts SQO rate.

For example: you want to run 2 tests > you need 50 leads on each (100 total, to have enough meaningful data) > and your CPL is $100.

That means 1 test costs 10k. This can be great if you have a 100k budget. But if your budget is 15k/mo, then it means you spent almost an entire month testing 1 message variant.

If that’s worth it, that’s great. But Remotion finds that often, it’s not significant enough to justify the investment.