Are you unable to reach top decision-makers through cold calling and email? LinkedIn Advertising can increase your response rate by up to 300%.

So how can you ensure that recipients

• are already familiar with your product before you contact them
• understand which of their problems your product can solve
• know what results they can expect, and
• trust you at least to some extent?

You can achieve this by reaching all recipients with LinkedIn ads that explain the above points before contacting them. To do this, proceed as follows:

• Step 1: Form clusters of accounts that you want to contact in a given month
• Step 2: Create account-based LinkedIn Matched Audiences in LinkedIn Campaign Manager from these clusters
• Step 3: Start delivering LinkedIn ads to the entire buying center of these companies 6-8 weeks BEFORE the outreach via email, phone, or letter to the respective cluster begins.

This turns your “cold outreach” campaign into a “pre-warmed” campaign and increases the likelihood of a positive response. But activating the entire buying center for your leads has two other positive effects:

1. If you continue to run the LinkedIn ad campaign DURING the phone or email campaign, you will have the positive effect of reminding the recipient of your topic in a non-intrusive way through the ads. This means that your outreach team will have to send fewer annoying follow-up questions such as “Have you had a chance to discuss this internally?” etc., and emails that have been forgotten may be brought up again.
2. If the LinkedIn ads reach the entire buying center, the likelihood increases that the lead’s colleagues will also understand why your product can be a valuable solution. This means that the probability of positive decisions in your favor increases (example: “Let’s set up a joint meeting with them”).

Sounds exciting? We would be happy to set up a clean account-based targeting setup for you as part of a pilot project, optionally even with CRM synchronization, so that the account lists from your CRM are pushed directly to LinkedIn Campaign Manager. Feel free to contact us for a free expert evaluation.

To build trust and understanding of the benefits, your content should answer the following questions as specifically as possible:

1. Which of my problems does the product solve for me?
2. What results can I expect?
3. Why should I trust the product?

In addition, common customer concerns should be proactively addressed

To implement this efficiently, systematically, and comprehensively in successful messaging as the basis for your content, take a look at our ReThink180™ methodology, which we have now successfully used for over 150 B2B customers. This is regularly rated by our customers as one of the modules with the greatest long-term added value. Find out more in this article.

“Thanks to the ReThink-180™ methodology, everything clicked into place across all areas of the company. And so, in the end, everyone pulled together.” (Andreas Müller, Kampmann GmbH & Co. KG)

Content must now be produced from the messaging. We have defined various standard content formats for this purpose that are quick and efficient and, above all, highly likely to achieve the above-mentioned goals, e.g.

• Testimonials: Testimonials present the statement of a satisfied customer (as an image or video) in an advertisement. You can find more information here.
• Expert articles: Expert articles address a specific customer problem in detail and present the solution provided by your product, including the likely results. Find out more here.

If you have a larger sales team, you can build even greater trust with a customized setup for each employee. To do this

1. the content is branded to the respective employee, i.e., they are named as the author and, if necessary, even named with their name and face on the ad visuals
2. Each employee then posts their individual content, which is then promoted to their individual target group (industry, region, target accounts, etc.).

In this way, you ensure that not only your product but also your employee is known and enjoys a certain level of trust BEFORE the employee makes contact. You can find more details and examples in our article “Social Selling as a Service for Sales Teams”. Would you like to try out our content approach? We would be happy to implement the content for you in a pilot project.

LinkedIn Advertising can therefore significantly improve results in cold outreach. But it can do much more than that – the channel itself can deliver a high volume of DIRECT leads, which in our projects often significantly exceeds the number of outbound leads. The intelligent combination of channels creates a synergy effect: together, they generate a significantly higher number of appointments than if each channel were operated separately.
We also often notice that LinkedIn allows us to reach top decision-makers and generate leads that we had previously tried to contact unsuccessfully for years via email and phone.

LinkedIn Advertising also compensates for another weakness of 1:1 cold outreach: low market visibility. Phone calls generate relatively few touchpoints, and emails are often ignored or not read. LinkedIn advertising campaigns often generate over 100,000 touchpoints in your target group, including potential customers as well as partners and investors, for example, so that many of our pilot customers often gain widespread attention for the first time in their company’s history.

“The campaigns really gave us and our sales team a boost and ensured that we gained attention in the market for the first time.” (Georg Klappert, Head of Operations & Marketing, Hailo digital_hub)

LinkedIn ad campaigns often generate additional positive feedback in the form of likes, followers, and comments. Every like signals interest, but as a rule, this valuable contact remains untapped, both in organic posts and in paid advertising. Many potentially exciting prospects like your content and would potentially be open to an exchange, but at the moment they consumed the content, they didn’t have enough initiative to actually request more information. Since no one contacts them afterwards, this interest usually fizzles out.

By definition, however, every like is actually a lead – the person has proactively expressed interest (thus establishing a basis for an exchange) and can be reached directly through their LinkedIn profile. If this contact is consistently followed up, LinkedIn campaigns usually generate an additional 30% of sales appointments. With a systematic process that we implement for you in a pilot project, you can also exploit this potential. You can find more information in our article “Social Lead Qualification”.

The trend is clearly moving toward digital—and the potential of physical contact is often overlooked. A click on LinkedIn often costs $10 or more—and for that, you could even get a handwritten letter financed. This can also be a significant optimization in preparing to make contact. We are currently evaluating the integration of letters (including handwritten ones) into outreach campaigns through automated workflows triggered from the CRM. If you are interested in trying this out with us, please feel free to contact us.

We would be happy to evaluate an individual pilot program with you during an introductory meeting.