I spent $1m on Linkedin Ads and Added $3m of new Revenue, Paragon CMO
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All right, thanks, everybody. Yeah, today I'm going to be talking about LinkedIn ads. So quick context, you know, I've taken Paragon from pretty much a couple beta users to now kind of mid-seven figures in ARR over the last three years, and LinkedIn ads has been a huge piece of how we've gone there. So I'll share my framework. But for some context on me and my experience so far, pre-Paragon, I was running kind of fractional growth for a couple C to Series B startups, really helping them figure out, hey, how do we...

drive leads, right? Whether that's through paid ads, whether that's through outbound email, we really understood and dove into their products, their ICP, to figure out where do we think the highest leverage experiments should be run. Now, at Paragon, you know, I've joined three years ago. Since then, we've 30Xed our ARR. Obviously, small place to start, but still valuable to share. And this year so far, I've spent over a million dollars on LinkedIn ads.

So why are you all here? Well, actually, before that, what is Paragon? So Paragon, we're an embedded integration platform. Essentially, developers at SaaS companies use Paragon to build integrations with third-party apps like Salesforce, Slack, task management tools. Everybody needs integrations, and so we target developers and product teams, and even with this highly technical audience, LinkedIn Ads works for us.

But you're probably here because you hear this, right? LinkedIn ads is too expensive. And I used to think this too. I used to run, oh, some of the animations are off, but I used to run Facebook ads until iOS 14 hit. And you can see some of the online comments, people were not happy, right? All the performance dropped. You know, I was at the agency at the time. We were running a lot of Facebook ads. Efficiency just plummeted. So we had to pivot, right?

And so what I've learned in the last three years is LinkedIn ads is too expensive only if you don't have a strategic framework to run it. So I'm going to share that framework with you today. So in the next 20 minutes, it's going to show you everything you should do before you spend your first dollar, how to actually think about your campaigns on LinkedIn ads, and then also how to go from zero to one and then one to 100 on LinkedIn ads. So before you spend your first dollar...

Now your ICP, right? A lot of people start spending money without really having a clear sense of their ICP, and that's just the best way to burn money. So here's a framework I use. This is how specific you want to be. You can take a photo if you want, but I'll give you our example here to make it a little more colorful. So we target product and engineering leaders, that's the contact, right? And non-verticalized B2B SaaS companies in these regions,

companies of a certain size or a certain funding who don't have dedicated integrations engineering team and have less than 30 integrations. And these last two attributes are very, very detailed. We're not just talking about we target B2B SaaS. We're really honing in on who we have product market fit with. By the way, is anyone like this here? No? Yeah? All right, we should talk after. We have a couple customers here as well.

So this ICP, once you've crafted it, this becomes your framework for your targeting universe. This is the boundary of who you want to be spending your dollars on, right? And we'll get back to this later, but basically we took that definition and split it into account data, split it into contact data. So now that you have your ICP, the next question is, is LinkedIn ads the right channel for you? Right, it may not be. And so here's a list of questions I would ask yourself before you start LinkedIn. If you don't have a clear idea of your ICP, hopefully we just solved that, but if you don't, don't spend money yet.

If your ICP does not spend time on LinkedIn, meet them where they are. Don't spend money on LinkedIn if they don't. Third, if you don't have content your ICP will find value in, I'll get into this more later, but you probably shouldn't spend too much money on LinkedIn if you don't have content.

Fourth, if you have a very low ACV, if you have a PLG product where you're trying to drive signups for $100 a year, probably not a great channel fit for you. And then if you have less than 5K to spend and try to build confidence in the channel, I would say probably not worth running. So if you're like, we can only spend $200, you're not going to be able to optimize enough to figure it out.

All right, so once you've said yes or no to all of those, let's talk about data and infrastructure. This is what you need, again, before you start spending your first dollar, right? Now, there's a bunch of stuff here. I'm not going to spend my time on the first two because you can find a bunch of tutorials online. It's very easy, just like basics, you know, LinkedIn setup, some stuff on the website, like how did you hear about us because attribution is a pain. What I'm going to be focusing on is own

Own data, which is mostly building an account list. This is the most important thing. If you don't have this, don't spend money. And then the post-lead operations. What do you do with your leads after you get them? Because they're valuable.

So, account data. There's a couple ways to get this. You can be very scrappy, as you're on the far right. That's how we started. We paid Upworkers to help us scrape websites manually. That's how we, when we were very early, that's how we were figuring out, hey, you know what, this is the best way for us to build a highly accurate list to work off of. Now, there's also a lot of off-the-shelf data providers that you're probably all familiar with, like Apollo, Crunchbase, you can use those.

And then if you're starting to spend more money, which is what we do, would definitely work with a vendor like GoodFit or Keyplay. These are data as a service platforms. They basically work with you, understand your ICP, understand like the custom attributes you want to understand to help you score accounts. Like for us, you know, it's like, do they have an integrations engineering team or how many integrations do they have? They scrape their websites for us and they enrich all this account data so we can better segment. That's kind of the gold standard, I would say. But even starting here is great.

And with these platforms, once you've defined that ICP, going back to the ICP, you can now use your ICP to build filters. And this is how you kind of arrive at this account list that you can start using in all your campaigns.

Cool. So now we just talked about everything you need to have before you spend your first dollar. And how do you actually go spend it? So now in the middle, we're going to talk about the actual basics of LinkedIn ads, right? This is like how to think about targeting, how to think about campaigns, how to think about creatives. So we're going to start with targeting because it doesn't matter what your creative is, you don't know who you're targeting, right?

Simple, marketing funnel, right? The world doesn't necessarily work this cleanly at all times. People jump steps, but this is still the most productive way and the easiest way to think about your audience. The biggest segment are people who don't know about you or don't care or are not ready to buy, right? And so, yeah, that's the cold segment. Engage warm, it's like, hey, you know, these are people who have maybe read some of our content, been on our blog, but they're not really actively evaluating, but they're aware of who you are.

are people who have visited key pages on your website. They may have visited the demo page, the pricing page, but they just haven't converted. And then I have this little line saying here's a key conversion point depending on what your business model is. After that is evaluating. These are people that are in your sales process. These are people who have maybe signed up for a free trial. You want to think about your strategy from this lens. And this kind of ties into targeting.

So when you build your targeting framework, those segments we just put together, that builds up the account or company part of your targeting. So for every campaign, you need to figure out what roles are we targeting? Are we targeting product leaders? Are we targeting marketing leaders? That's consistent across all campaigns.

And then in the middle, that's where you decide, okay, for this campaign, am I targeting the cold segment, the warm segment, the hot segment, or maybe even trying to accelerate sales cycles, right? You want to make sure that you're thinking about the funnel as you're building your targeting.

And then last is just regional. This is just very tactical. Like, are we targeting all over the world, or are we targeting, you know, just the U.S.? It's pretty straightforward. So to give a tactical example, this is just one of the many cold campaigns we run. Here we target the regions I mentioned earlier in my ICP, you know, Europe, Canada, Israel, Singapore, United States, you know, pretty standard stuff. In the middle here, roles, you know, we actually split our ICP, so we have campaigns dedicated to product, campaigns dedicated to engineering because they care about different things,

Different messaging resonates to each of them. So in this campaign specifically, as you can see, we're targeting engineering. And then at the bottom, we have, we call LinkedIn tier three. That's just how we've scored our accounts. We have different tiers. This is the tier three accounts. And because it's just a list of accounts, it's cold, right? There's no intent here. There's no engagement here. It's just, here's a list of companies. Cool. So now we've gone over targeting the framework there with the funnel. Next is about creatives and messaging, which is actually hyper important too. And I've realized this over time more and more.

So here's a formula for how I would think about creatives. First is context, right? This goes back to what we just talked about. The funnel helps you understand the context in which this person is seeing your ad, right? If they don't know your brand, you have to think about that as you're thinking about what to present to them. If they're evaluating, you know, they know your product very well, you have to understand, okay, the context in which this person is seeing my ad is that they've evaluated our product or are actively evaluating our product, right? So context is first, right?

Second is offer. So based on this context, what do they care about? What do I think they care about? So for Top of Funnel, if I'm selling, hey, book a demo, they're like, I don't even know who you are. Why would I book a demo with you? But for someone who's actively engaging, maybe you want to throw some injection handlers at them. So what do they care about? And then last is, how do I actually make this topic that they should care about interesting enough or engaging enough so they will actually engage with it and read it and click through? So this is the framework for creatives.

And I like to use this as a reminder, don't get shit about your product, except for maybe a very small percentage who are actively in the buying cycle.

So just to kind of split this into the funnel and give you a view that way, here's some ideation prompts. So on the left, I have my cold and my warm audiences. And here's some questions to ask yourself. What is your job to be done? What problems are they facing? And remember, this is agnostic of your product. Try to remove your product as you start to ask these questions. And over time, figure out, okay, how does my product maybe or the problem space relate to it? But really start from the core. What do these people care about? Because they don't care about your product, so they have to care about something else to engage with you.

What questions do they need answers to? What do they want to learn? This is where you want to focus your efforts on in the cold and warm. And that's why in slide two or three where I said don't start LinkedIn if you don't have content they care about, this is why.

And then in the kind of hot evaluating phases, now you can start to really think about, okay, is it, you know, they're not convinced that my product is the right solution. Do they think the problem we solve is not a priority? You can start to think, ask yourself these questions to inform what you focus your ads on, right? Because they're kind of actively buying

And so here's just some examples. From the left, we have our cold ads. On the right, we have hot. And so just to give you an example of how we kind of break this apart, on the left, we're talking about kind of engineering content where integrations are a small piece of it, but it's really just like a very kind of hot topic that all engineering leaders at SaaS companies are thinking about, which is like how do we build AI features, right, into our product. Integrations are part of that, but it's more about like, hey, what is the thought leadership that will engage them? And people love this stuff.

As we start to move mid-funnel, right, now we're talking about integrations. We're not talking about our product, but we are talking about integrations. Why are integrations important for your buyers, right? And then as you get closer to making decisions, like, should you build or should you look for a solution? And at the end, these are the people who are actively evaluating. Let's retarget the heck out of them with, like, case studies, objection handlers, right, and really convince them, here's why you should buy or here's why you should convert.

Now, once you've gotten some leads, the follow-up is very important. Leads are very valuable. You're spending a lot of money. LinkedIn ads can be cheaper, but it's still not free. So you want to make sure you have a really robust follow-up strategy for all your leads. And so here, again, the funnel comes through. You want to think about, once I capture my lead, where are they coming in from? Are they coming in from something that's like a book of demo form or something that's very bottom funnel, like a product tour? In that case, feed them. Just get them on an 80s calendar. Don't waste time there.

If they are downloading content, but it's not product content, don't just go and say, do you want to book a demo? Have messaging that's related to the content they've shown interest in. And so here I call it asset-specific sales follow-up. I'll give you an example later. And then if you're just driving them to cold content, well, hopefully you're not gating it. But if you are putting a lead form in front of it, don't get sales to go after them. You're wasting your sales team's time, and they're going to be pissed off. So again, think about your follow-up strategy.

And this is mine. So for pretty much everything we've gated, we have a kind of choose your own adventure path, right? They get their own automated STR cadences. So hopefully that doesn't expose my secrets. But everyone gets like a very personalized cadence based on the content they read or the tour that they came through or the form that they filled out. Okay, last, I have a couple minutes left. So I'll try to run through these. Now that we've kind of have the basics, we have the infrastructure piece set up.

Let's talk about how do you actually start. How do you spend your first dollar? And so where do you start?

First, retarget. I think that's the lowest hanging fruit. These are people that have been on your website, that have looked at your pricing page, and they're interested. They're actively looking to buy. They're actively evaluating. They just haven't been convinced enough. Just get them over the line with retargeting. This is really easy to set up, and you also don't need to create a lot of content. You already know what the common objections are. You know what the common reasons people don't buy are, so you can start creating ads and experimenting here.

but this audience is small, so you can't stay here forever, right? And so once you scale beyond that, pick one segment. So we talked about ICP, but an ICP is not a segment. Your ICP is your universe, right? Your ICP is made up of many, many, many segments within it, and

And, you know, in our case, we talk about non-verticalized B2B SaaS as the example, but there's sales software that we can sell to. There's marketing software we can sell to. There's HR software we can sell to, as an example. Those are all individual segments if you break it down. You know, this is also a pretty big range of company sizes, right? And so we think about our tiers in terms of, okay, are they 50 to 200 employees? Are they 200 to 500 employees? Right, these are all different ways of cutting the pie. Remember, your ICP is not your...

Not your segment, it's your universe. So pick your best segment, look at your sales data, look at where you have the fastest sales cycles, where you have the highest win rates and the highest conversion rates throughout the funnel, and start with your best one, where you have the best product market fit. Because it's going to deteriorate over time as you go into your kind of long tail segments.

And so, yeah, just examples of how you could think about, like, how we just one ICP and split it into segments, start with your best, slowly move down the list, right? And also experiment with different ways of cutting up your ICP. And quick note, super tactical. You're going to see this if you're running it yourself. It's going to be very overwhelming.

stick with these three. Retargeting, brand awareness, this just means you're going to try to spam them with impressions. If they're aware, you just want to be in front of them, top of mind all the time, handling objections, reminding them why your product and the problem you solve is important. For top of funnel stuff, get them to the website, get them the content that's valuable, that way you can then retarget them later on. It's kind of a little bit of a funnel, a little bit of a cycle here. And then...

For those who don't have confidence and are like, hey, you know, we spent like $2,000 and we're driving them to content. We're not sure if it's working. How do I build confidence? Because it's really about convincing yourself to spend another dollar to keep scaling, right? You have to have confidence that this is working to some extent.

Start with lead generation ads. These are basically, you're putting a form in front of the ad, they fill it out, they get content. Even if it's not converting into demos right away, if you can see, hey, look, these are exactly the types of people we want to be having conversations with, it'll give you confidence that you're hitting the right people on LinkedIn, and now it's just about optimizing what content I give them, how do I convert them later on. You're using this to give yourself undeniable attribution that these ICP people are coming through LinkedIn.

And then last is measuring performance because it's very important. Don't fall into the attribution trap. This is a really hard one. I struggle with this all the time. But everyone's like, oh, what is the exact cost per lead on LinkedIn? The truth is LinkedIn is an outbound channel. What do I mean by that? People are not looking for your ad when they're scrolling on LinkedIn. You're feeding it in front of their faces when they're trying to look at, you know,

weird posts by people talking about things on LinkedIn all the time. So you're kind of trying to stop them from scrolling. And so...

They may not be ready to convert right away. In most cases, they don't. So what we see, for example, is we have a lot of engagement on LinkedIn, but most people end up coming on a different device, and then they go on book a demo, right? So you're not going to be able to measure attribution like you would Google Ads, where they're searching for a solution, they convert right away. So don't fall into it. My tip here, isolate. Don't change too much when you're trying to run LinkedIn ads on your other channels. Keep everything steady. Spend a bit on LinkedIn ads. See the overall lift.

We see that whenever we spend more on LinkedIn ads, organic and direct also shoot up. And so don't try to get into the manual tracking of it too much. Just look at overall efficiency.

Cool, but then you still have to care about on-platform metrics. These are early indicators of, hey, are we doing the right things directionally? So click-through rate, are people clicking on our ads, tells you two things. One, is our audience accurate? Are we targeting the right people? And two, if we are targeting the right people, is our messaging resonating? That's what this is telling you. If this is off, then either your messaging is wrong or your targeting is wrong. Website activity, once they click on our ad, what do they do on my website? Are they leaving right away? Or are they actually getting value? Are they spending time? Is the content good enough?

And then last is just some proxy metrics. You get cost per lead, cost per conversion. Again, would not be looking at this from an ROI perspective. More to compare performance between different campaigns to say, okay, this campaign seems a little more efficient. Again, look at overall efficiency where you're trying to decide, hey, is LinkedIn the right channel for me? And then last, I got two minutes, scaling. Just iterate and test everything we've talked about today. Keep testing. Test your segments. There's a bunch of different ways for you to splice and dice your ICP.

Second, keep iterating on your messaging, your ad creatives and your offers. Try to figure out, you know, and a lot of this can be learned through like your sales cycle, right? Like what is the messaging that works the best and resonates with prospects the most in our sales cycle? Take a lot of these insights on product messaging and feed it into your ad experimentation and like play around with different offers.

Third, keep shipping valuable content for us. I always talk about content is the fuel and the lifeline for our LinkedIn ads. Without new content, it's going to get saturated. People are going to be bored of seeing your brand. You want to make sure you continue to add value constantly, even if they're not ready to buy, so that when they're ready to buy, you're the first thing they think about. And the last is experiment with ad formats. There's a bunch of ad formats you can kind of play around with. Start with images, they're the easiest, but yeah, you can always continue to experiment with. And so in the last three years...

We have about 75 campaigns, sorry, 511 campaigns and over 2,600 creatives that we've been kind of cycling through and experimenting with. And so if nothing else today, remember these four things. One, nail your ICP. Two, match your funnel. Three, no one cares about your product. And four, scale one segment at a time.