For every marketer, optimizing campaigns is important. Better performance translates to a lower cost per lead. A lower cost per lead allows you to generate more leads with the same budget. More leads equal increased sales, increased profits, and increased company growth.
A common mistake is when marketers focus too narrowly when attempting to enhance campaign performance. They might focus extensively on targeting, for instance, which is only one of five distinct factors affecting performance. It’s equally common to put too little effort into copywriting, to overlook the importance of a bidding strategy, or to only optimize the landing pages. For a campaign to succeed at its full potential, all the components must be considered, enhanced, and aligned.
The Five Performance Drivers
To fully boost performance, marketers need to gain insights and use tools that enable them to optimize any campaign’s five individual performance drivers:
1. Ad Creative
2. Audience Targeting
3. Bidding Optimization
4. Landing Page
5. Form (if content is gated)
Each driver has distinct characteristics, measurable key performance indicators (KPIs), and the potential to revolutionize campaign results. Figure 1 demonstrates the potential range of any one performance driver’s results, contrasting a low- and a high-performing scenario with example data.
Figure 1: Examples of high and low performance
Please note that values will vary for different companies depending on targeting, markets, industry, and other factors.
While the above values are meant as an example, the ranges are not an exaggeration. Differences in ad creatives really can make a 16x performance difference. Revamping a landing page can drive performance up by 15x.
Our agency has first-hand experience with exemplary surges in clients’ campaign performance after we help them optimize their marketing strategies on LinkedIn. Figure 2 displays several (anonymized) screenshots (from the LinkedIn Campaign Manager) of respective clickthrough rates (CTRs), selected from hundreds of campaigns.
Figure 2: Real life examples of high and low performance
Low performance | High performance | Extreme performance |
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Note that every company’s CTRs will vary depending on factors such as audience, topic, competition, industry, geography, etc. Please do not use the numbers above as a benchmark for your own company. Only a consistent content marketing strategy on LinkedIn can reveal your own performance benchmark.
How Performance Translates to Cost Per Lead
Once we understand how much each of the five campaign components drives results, it’s essential to examine what this means in real-money value. As a first case scenario, Figure 3 shows how each step of a campaign contributes to doubling the performance if it’s well-executed. In this simple instance, the results between a well- and poorly-executed campaign can differ by 32x!
Figure 3: How a well-executed campaign can generate 32x performance
Granted, there’s no one-size-fits-all silver bullet. But while we’ve seen campaigns bordering on both extremely poor and extremely good performance, basically all campaigns can benefit from smaller performance enhancements at each step. Figure 4 compares three other realistic examples, all of them everyday occurrences in the marketing world.
Figure 4: Everyday marketing performance examples
As the figure shows, even small improvements at each step can mean a significant difference in overall performance. Here we have three companies who have the same campaign budget but are experiencing different results. The first company, which has managed to attain a well-optimized strategy, is making the most of their budget, generating extensively more leads, and experiencing significantly lower costs than the two other competitors. The third company, with the same $10K to spend but a very poor strategy, is facing 8.7x the expense of the first one.
How to Approach the Five Steps Systematically
Given that each individual step contributes to the campaign’s overall success, it is important to systematically and thoroughly optimize every step. This can be tricky since each step involves slightly different skillsets and specific knowledge. There is a difference between good ad copy for content marketing, clever use of images, optimizing the auction bidding strategy, and implementing a high-performance lead gen form. Optimizing each step entails the expertise of different people with different talents. It also requires someone with an overall vision, who can guide a campaign through the five steps, from strategy to tactical implementation.
For this reason, it is good to have a set of well-defined processes and checkpoints for each step to measure progress. Only by applying the same processes again and again in a systematic way can campaign performance improve over time. A systematic approach to the five steps will generate high performance for any marketing team.
Figure 5: The five-step Markick Performance Toolbox
We at Markick have developed our own tools and process that we leverage to optimize each of the five steps, as displayed in Figure 5. When we run campaigns for our clients, we apply tools such as the Markick Ad Creation Toolkit, Markick Audience Mapping, the Markick Platform for Automated Bidding Optimization, and Markick Dashboards & Reports. Throughout the execution, we apply best practices, compare with benchmarks, and utilize data analytics. With the help of these tools—coupled with experience gained from running thousands of campaigns for hundreds of clients—we can drive good performance across the entire campaign execution.
At Markick, we believe that excellence is attained by strategy, not chance. Our tools have enabled many clients to achieve dramatic improvements in their execution on LinkedIn, typically improving performance with a factor of at least 2x to 3x, and sometimes far more.
Contact Markick
If you would like a free advisory assessment of your company’s opportunities on LinkedIn, feel free to contact us here and we will get back to you within 24 hours.