Most B2B companies struggle to make LinkedIn Ads work.
The problem is that marketers always want to advertise to the middle or bottom of the funnel.
Their ads direct prospects straight to request a demo.
But prospects don’t want to give you 30 minutes of their time for a demo if they don’t understand your brand or your product yet.
It’s time to start thinking of LinkedIn Ads as a content promotion platform.
- Promote valuable content downloads to your ideal customer avatar
- Nurture your leads with an engaging, educational and value-added email sequence.
- Then (and only then) direct prospects to request a demo.
Sounds easy but it’s not.
Here’s a flowchart of the LinkedIn ads funnel that we’re running for our B2B clients.
LinkedIn Ebook Ad Examples
To give you some inspiration for the top of that funnel, I’ve want to share these screenshots of some LinkedIn ads that are promoting ebooks or other content downloads.
Drip
There’s no way to avoid noticing the bold magenta colors of this ad.
And the offer of 9 Essentials makes it sound like the ebook itself will be short and sweet in delivering value.
Bynder
There’s something about the simplicity of this ad that I just love.
However, I think they could use the text or the headline to highlight the title of the book more. The title of your ebook is how to demonstrate the value of the offer.
Lessonly
This is an ad that my team at Zammo Digital ran for our client, Lessonly.
The ad did very well.
Probably helped that the illustrated style of the image is strikingly different than most of the ads you typically see on LinkedIn.
Zammo Digital
Here are two ads that I recently tested for my own ebook. These ads did pretty well attracting high quality leads for low CPL.
This first ad a high click through rate of 1.71%. Anything over 0.5% is considered very good on LinkedIn.
However, this ad was a little tricky because people thought the image was the form. The overall conversion rate on this ad was a little low as only 13% of people who clicked actually submitted the lead form.
This next ad had a lower CTR (0.95%) that the ad above. However, people who clicked were much more likely to submit the lead form.
Here’s what the lead form looked like for both of the ads above.
You can download my SaaS Scaling Framework PDF here.
BambooHR
It’s refreshing to see an ad for a ebook that doesn’t use the same style of book cover. I like the emphasis here of the bold title and the CTA to “Download Now”
Xero
Sometimes, templates are perceived as more valuable and more quickly consumed that a full ebook.
This ad from Xero offers a free downloadable balance sheet template.
Klarna
One things I love about LinkedIn Ads is that they permit us to use lots of big bold text in the ad image (unlike Facebook ads with their 20% text rule).
Their use of the Shopify logo also helps them to attract their target customers.
TalentGuard
Here’s another ad that I made for my client, TalentGuard.
This was actually one of our best performing ads. I know it’s not pretty, but It did generate a lot of high quality leads for under $20 per lead.
Drift
This ebook ad from Drift is BIG, bold and beautiful.
And the headline challenges the way that most B2B marketers do marketing.
Who wouldn’t want to learn a better way?
Here’s a screenshot of the landing page for this Drift ebook…
Slack
This ad from Slack would be pretty easy to replicate.
Just make sure that you ebook’s title addresses a true pain point that your customers want a solution for.
Shopify Plus
This ad is pretty simple but it communicates it’s value very clearly.
Litmus
Again this ad gets the job done without using an image of a book.
Not only that, but the use of easily recognizable logos draws the attention of their target customers.
Ebook examples from Facebook and Instagram
Here are a few extra B2B ebook ads that I found on Facebook or Instagram. These should provide some inspiration for your LinkedIn ads as well.
I really like this ad from PriceSpider below 🙂
Remember, LinkedIn Ads are a tremendous tool for generating high-quality B2B leads for your business.
But don’t treat LinkedIn like Facebook and go straight for the trial or demo request. LinkedIn should be used as a content distribution platform using Lead Gen ads.
Need help with your LinkedIn Ads? Get in touch. I’d love to help.