1 Winning LinkedIn Thought Leader Ad Tactic

Connect with your ideal audience with LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads

The author: Tom Hunt, Founder & CEO of Fame.
The goal: Move to a CPM ad metric and reach ideal buyers.
The tactic: Use a tool to draw a list of ideal buyers, run outbound campaigns, then focus organic marketing content through a personal LinkedIn page, boosting successful posts to that same audience.
The result: Better performing ads and more inbound demos.

What's the fast marketing tactic?

Tom has been adapting his marketing strategy to the changing ways consumers encounter ads. In the past, ads were interruptive, and the goal was always to keep stretching their reach to cover an ever-wider audience.

His altered tactic takes a more targeted approach while having a more personal touch.

First, he used Apollo’s AI-assisted audience targeting tool.

With this tool, he created a list of people who would likely be interested in what he was selling. Whether it’s him or not, the emails in this tactic should come from someone you want to put front and center to your outreach— company.

Next, he stepped away from only posting from his business account on LinkedIn. No matter how prominent your brand is, a personal post from a team member providing informative, interesting, perhaps unusual zero-click content, is the way forward.

When one of his posts on LinkedIn performed well, instead of boosting it to a broader audience in general, Tom would boost it to the people on the list he created by focusing on impressions.

What was the result?

LinkedIn Ad data shows that waiting until an ad/post starts to do well organically is a good cost-efficient way of running a marketing campaign.

The cost per impression (CPM) indicates the power of boosting organically successful posts to a hand-picked audience consisting of potential customers you have already reached to.

Why does it work?

This tactic is effective because it rides on the curve of how consumers interact and engage with ads. Consumers are exposed to hundreds to thousands of ads a day. Naturally, we’d become desensitized to an interruptive style of advertising that is commonplace, and therefore, less attention-grabbing.

Instead of wasting money in an attempt to reach a huge audience inundated with countless ads, this method takes a longer-term and more targeted approach.

By building users' familiarity with an employee of a company, your target audience may not see the content as an ad. Based on Tom’s experience, they will engage with whatever fun, interesting, and uncommon advice you provide.

By connecting with your target audience to create awareness and build trust then you can capitalize on posts that already show promise by amplifying its reach with LinkedIn Ads.

Stand out to the right audience and create content that attracts your ideal customer with our Growth Marketing Minidegree.