A quick forenote…

I’ve complained about LinkedIn Ads a lot over the years. As an employee, customer and now an agency, believe me - I’ve had a lot of angles. But complaining about some features of ad platforms is a necessary evil, if you’re an avid user of LinkedIn Ads and you’re not complaining about its limitations, then you’re most likely not pushing it hard enough and the product team won’t improve.

However lately, there is a sense that the tide is turning and I’m finding it hard to ignore the buzz around LinkedIn right now, both organically and paid. Every day I speak to new potential clients, and every day I feel the understanding of how to use LinkedIn is moving in the right direction.

More and more B2B brands understand that building salience, demand and community are the actions and great lead generation is simply a well-executed effect.

And more good news for 2024 is that the product team are doing some good stuff too.

7 LinkedIn Ads tactics to watch in 2024

Trends come and go in the marketing world, like a flash in B2C and in B2B, it’s traditionally been more like a stone that skims eternally, each dying skim reflecting the rate of adoption in B2B.

B2B trends just move slower, but they can afford to - it’s the opposite of the mainstream.

It’s been a while coming but the LinkedIn product team does seem to have been busy with some interesting things in the pipeline. B2B advertisers haven’t just been patiently waiting though, they’ve really been out there getting creative with existing features and creating their own trends.

In this post, I break down my opinion on the top 7 things to get excited about for 2024, including creative uses of current products and new product/feature launches.

7. Thought Leader Ads

Released last year, Thought Leader Ads are simply put - sponsored personal profile posts from employees of a company. You can only do this within either the Brand Awareness and Engagement objectives in Campaign Manager.

Yes, they were released in 2023 but why they’re something to look out for in 2024 is down to how they can be used - brands will be getting more creative. Originally, you could sponsor these posts with no image or just a static image but now you can sponsor video and more recently (without having to hack it) you can include links to your website.

These improvements open up this ad format for lots of different uses in 2024 and I’m sure we’re going to see many brands getting very creative with how they’re promoting their founders and brand advocates.

6. Sales Navigator + Campaign Manager Integration

Rumblings of a closed Alpha for 100 customers of integration between Sales Navigator lists and Campaign Manager have been circulating in the last weeks which has made us B2B marketers really excited. I know most of you are probably thinking “this is huge, why is this not further down the list?”. Well, it’s because this closed Alpha actually happened before, I had a client on this in like 2018 - and it failed… pretty badly.

I’m hoping this 2.0 alpha is different and the product team have learned from their mistakes but even if it does succeed, we’re probably not going to see this until the latter side of 2024.

The good news is you can still just do it manually, just create your own lists of engaged accounts from Sales Nav and upload them to Campaign Manager. Canberk from Cognism speaks about how he does it on The LinkedIn Ads Lab Episode 2 [Timestamp:34:50].

5. Long vertical creatives

Longer vertical creatives have been popping up around the feed lately and they’re an interesting concept for advertisers as they capture the entirety of the screen of your audience.

What’s interesting is that some brands are using them not just for statics but also for video ads, it’s immersive and impactful. I like the format and I’m sure there will be more to come.

4. In-feed Product Demos

For the last 10 years, so much of the industry has been hiding their product behind a form, the aim being to capture curiosity rather than signalled interest. Brands are finally starting to realise that grabbing someone’s phone number and sending a bad SDR to ‘qualify’ them in a mediocre sales process is the B2B equivalent of having a high-street sweet shop (candy store for my American friends) with no windows.

In recent years, thanks to the likes of Saleo, Walnut, Screenspace etc. - brands have been ungating their product demos on their sites/landing pages.

And now, B2B marketers are going a step further with their LinkedIn Ads - bringing their product demos to the LinkedIn feed.

I like the concept and I say if you’ve got product-market-fit, flaunt it.

3. User-Generated Content

Are people commenting about your product/service? Or name-dropping your product/service on podcasts? Or on camera speaking about your product/service at events? Or are key clients telling reps how great they are?

Screenshot it, record it (… get permission for it) and get it all in your ads.

This type of content has been at the forefront of ad creatives for innovative brands in 2023 and it’s becoming more and more popular. Expect to see a lot more of it in 2024.

2. AI… of course.

LinkedIn has an AI campaign management tool in Beta right now rumoured to be called Accelerate. It seems similar to Meta’s Advantage+ and Google’s Performance Max with one key differentiator being creative production. It promises that AI will do the heavy lifting for you by choosing your audience, building your creative from a product landing page and then managing the campaigns (bidding, optimisation etc.)

My opinion on this is simple - for advanced advertisers, I’ll be very VERY surprised if the first iterations of Accelerate don’t miss the mark. It might make some of the basic features slightly more intuitive but knowing the LinkedIn product team, it’s probably going to oversimplify your campaigns the same as how the current automated features (Max Delivery, Optimised Creatives etc.) currently do.

What I am excited about is the direction and a dream where AI becomes part of the end-to-end. For example, if an AI-powered product was able to connect an advertiser’s CRM and then create audience, copy and creatives based on things like sales-call notes, buying group roles and company sales structure - then that’s when I’d be excited. Right now, I predict it simply won’t have the right data to work off and this more surface-level product will miss the mark for those advanced at B2B advertising.

However, I’m more excited about some of the AI creative concepts we’re going to see appearing in the feed. There are new tools popping up every day and some brands are already embracing it - let’s see where it goes in 2024.

1. Website Actions

Implementing tracking pixels takes time, your time, your developer’s time, and just everybody’s time really. Then of course, sometimes it works right away but more often it needs debugging to get it to work - this is all about to change.

In 2022, LinkedIn acquired Oribi - a tool that upon integration would potentially allow you to do all of this code free—allowing you to build and understand website conversions without tags and build retargeting audiences from ALL of those actions if they meet the minimum threshold (300 members).

This has already arrived on some of my client’s accounts, I’ve already been using it - it’s cool and is going to save a lot of time and frustration, while also allowing all you advanced retargeted (and content marketers) out there to get even more advanced.

Think ‘LinkedIn retargeting audience based off any website action - not just page visits’ or ‘automatically implementable conversion tracking based on any REAL action on your website”

A nerd like myself finds this cool and I think it’s going to be the biggest game-changer in 2024.

If you'd like to work together in 2024...

We advise on, build and report on everything I've mentioned above to help you be successful with your LinkedIn strategy.

So feel free to reply directly to this email or book a call if you:

• Have any questions about the content

• Would like to discuss your own LinkedIn strategy

• Want me to build a LinkedIn Ad strategy for your business