CASE STUDY How Unified Used LinkedIn Sponsored Updated And Dark Social Tracking To Make B2B Conversions Skyrocket
“As an Certified Ad Partner, we’ve seen firsthand how LinkedIn ads achieve excellent results for client advertising initiatives. Therefore, when we decided to run our own campaign focused on generating high quality B2B leads, combining the power of Sponsored Updates with our own multi-generational tracking technology was an obvious big win for us.” RICK MARTIRA Vice President, Marketing at Unified
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Overview For quite some time, content and engagement have been presented to B2B brands as a onedimensional social media reincarnation of the “if you build it, they will come” scenario. In other words, if you publish great content, then presto—leads are guaranteed to follow. However, while enticing digital marketers to download useful social research might sound like a walk in the park, it doesn’t come without careful strategic planning supported by dynamic technology. Our marketing team was faced with determining the best way to reach our best audience in the best context to get the best leads. To achieve our goal, we devised a strategy to merge the power of LinkedIn’s proven Sponsored Updates and Audience Expansion targeting with our own unmatched social attribution technology. This approach enabled us to not only reach business-minded professionals interested in social media advertising, but also track generational sharing and conversions that extended beyond interactions with our original post.
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Approach The campaign featured a guide to social advertising which users could download for free. We sought to reach senior level executives who had an interest and/or skills in social media, with the explicit purpose of encouraging them to click through to our website and download exclusive research. To achieve desired results, the following four tactics were implemented:
TESTING CREATIVE WAS CRUCIAL Leveraging LinkedIn’s direct sponsored content feature to launch ads as unpublished posts, we were able to test 8 ad units to quickly optimize to the best performing posts.
WELL-ROUNDED TARGETING We used LinkedIn’s premium professional targeting to identify and reach 5 unique groups focused on social marketing, and LinkedIn’s Audience Expansion targeting to find look-a-likes of those individuals to exponentially increase our reach.
MORE THAN MOBILE To reach users wherever they access LinkedIn, we deployed our ads across both mobile and desktop devices.
MULTI-GENERATIONAL EARNED TRACKING We incorporated attribution shortlinks in our ad copy to track multi-generational activity (beyond the first generation ad click) and Dark Social sharing (i.e. copying and pasting links into emails, chats or other social sites) and conversions.
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Results This strategy proved effective, delivering results that exceeded all campaign goals:
36% Under CPA Goal
19% Conversion Rate
143 Conversions Tracked Across All Generations
SENIOR MARKETERS Clicks Tracked Across All Generations
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Conclusion To truly turn quality content into desired leads, B2B brands must also have access to a premium, relevant audience to which creative can be tested (and retested). Attribution is also an important factor, giving marketers the opportunity to measure the virality of their ads, and how it translates to the conversions they receive. The combination of both of these elements is a significant win for B2B marketers.
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About Unified delivers technology and services to connect marketing data sets and optimize investments across the customer journey. Unified’s software empowers Fortune 500 companies and agencies to drive marketing success in the context of their business goals. The Unified platform transforms fragmented marketing data into actionable intelligence and real-time activation. Unified has offices in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago. For more information visit www.Unified.com.
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