LinkedIn Follower Ads: How To Increase Conversions

How often do you visit a brand’s LinkedIn page and think, “Oh, they’ve only got 100 followers…they must be new in the market.” Or “This brand’s got a million followers, they must have awesome content and are quite established.” Your LinkedIn company page’s followers reflect your authority standing and build your brand credibility. Not to mention, your followers end up being your go-to target audience for your marketing campaigns that you can reach organically.

The catch – how do you get a significant number of followers for your campaigns? How do you get people to follow your company page? Of course, the kind of content you put on your LinkedIn page makes a lot of difference. However, is that all? How do you get people to see that content and follow you? Well, any LinkedIn marketer worth their dime would tell you to try out LinkedIn follower ads if your goal is to increase your page’s follower count.

Having said that, not many would tell you how to make your follower ads give you the results you expect. That’s what I am going to cover here – LinkedIn follower ad conversion hacks. Though, before I reveal my secret mantra, let me get you acquainted with what follower ads are and why they make a great choice for LinkedIn marketing.

What are Follower Ads on LinkedIn?

Let’s do a quick exercise. Hop on to your LinkedIn feed and look at the box right under the LinkedIn News section. Chances are you’d find your picture there along with the brand logo, and a Follow button under it. It comes off as if LinkedIn is recommending you brands or pages you can follow that match your interests and domain. Look closer – you’d find “Ad” written on the top right-hand corner of that box. That, my friend, is a follower ad.

Essentially, a follower ad is that square box you find on your feed that has very little amount of text and more importantly, a picture of your prospect (the person seeing your ad!). That’s what makes a follower ad personalized. Each person viewing the ad sees a customized version of it. It can also be customized to have the prospect’s name on it along with that picture. So, if I’m viewing the ad, it would have my profile picture and say, “Hey, Justin” along with a quick message.

You also have options for the Call-To-Action (CTA) for these ads. By default, any person who’s not following your company who sees this ad would see the CTA as “Follow”. It would take them to your company page and they would see your content and follow your company page. However, in case they’re already following your company, you have the option of choosing between the CTAs “visit our company” and “view more content”. That way, your CTA is always relevant to the prospect.

These are the options available if they are already following us – otherwise, it’s just “follow” by default. Here’re a few LinkedIn follower ad examples below.

Believe me, follower ads on LinkedIn are worth every dime you spend on them, and for good reason.

Why LinkedIn Follower Ads Are A Good Choice?

I’ll give you three reasons why I often recommend follower ads on LinkedIn to our clients.

1: Follower ads look personalized.

By default, a Follower ad addresses the person with their first name or at least their profile picture. So, they make the prospect believe that they’re getting customized follow suggestions suitable for them as opposed to random ads.

2: They catch the eye.

Since all follower ads come with the prospect image, they grab more attention. After all, wouldn’t you notice an ad, anywhere it may be if it has your own picture on it?

3: They are super affordable.

If you consider the price per impression or price per click, follower ads would always be the more affordable choice as far as LinkedIn is concerned. I believe the reason LinkedIn charges less for it is that it’s not considered a prime spot and not many companies and marketers explore this option. It’s a simple demand-cost game there. (Good for us!) and it’s also underused by a lot of companies and marketers.

LinkedIn Follower Ads Conversion Hacks

Now that I’ve managed to convince you that follower ads indeed are a great option to consider for your LinkedIn marketing strategy, let me share my trade secrets with you when it comes to follower ads.

Hack #1: Think of the entire prospect experience, not just the ad.

One of the biggest reasons why Follower ads are one of my favorites is because they let you curate the right experience for your prospect. No, I am not talking about the profile picture and the first name (we’ve already covered that). I am talking about the step after that.

A follower ad is an inexpensive way of getting people to your company page, right? So, you then need to build the experience on your company page. You need to make sure that they see the right things when they get to your company page. That means you have to be extra careful about the first post on your company page.

LinkedIn company pages let you pin a post to the top of your page, so you can guarantee what these people are going to see first and that’s really important. The hack is to first send these people to your company page using the follower ad and then pin the post that has the most social proof or best positions you as a trusted expert.

I recommend for brands to go for a press release or an interview or a podcast. Ideally, use the one that has a lot of social interactions, likes comments, and more. Here’s what you’d find on our LinkedIn company page. We currently have a podcast that got high engagement on the platform. The interview is with an industry expert in the world of PPC.

The good part – since you have the post pinned to the top, it would organically keep getting more and more likes and comments. After all, it’s a guaranteed post that every single company page visitor will see.

Does that put things in perspective? You essentially are building an experience of putting a follower ad, attracting visitors to your company page, and then putting a post that puts you in the best light and creates the best first impression.

What should your pinned post be – the super hack!

If you’re wondering which post you should pin to your LinkedIn Page, I’d recommend one where a third party validates your marketing standing or brand authority. You should not pin something where you’re talking about your brand or promoting it, but one where someone else is praising or talking about you. That’s why I always go for a press release, a guest speaking spot on a podcast, you in the news, or other people saying really nice stuff about your company or product in the article.

I am not saying this just because I do that. When I look at my LinkedIn follower ad campaign inside of my LI ads account, a lot of actual conversions attributed are to the follower ad. In simpler words, the Follower ad is the last paid ad that they interacted with before going to the website and converting.

It means they click on the follower ad > go to the company page > see this post and probably other posts – and that gives them the level of comfort or confidence to then visit our website and book a call. It works because we’ve curated the entire experience of exactly what they’re going to see in order to kind of push them over the fence.

The reason I put a lot of weightage on the pinned post is that most people don’t think that they’re being sold or advertised in that post, it’s just there. They don’t consider it as a part of the marketing effort and hence end up trusting the pinned post more than they would ever trust any ad.

Hack #2: Go for retargeting over a cold ad.

One of the biggest mistakes that I see brands making when it comes to Linkedin follower ads is that they use them to get a completely cold audience to convert and follow the page. Trust me, that doesn’t work.

Rather, you should go for people who’ve already heard about you, visited your website, or previously engaged with your content. These slightly warm leads are more likely to convert and follow you. To do that, you have to use the LinkedIn follower ads as retargeting ads.

Using follower ads as retargeting ads not only helps you in building trust & credibility, and showing them your services, but you also encourage people to follow your company page. The idea behind is that if they’ve already seen you, heard of you, and visited your website, there’s a better chance that they might want to actually follow your company page. I think that makes a big difference too and I don’t think many people are using it that way. Here is a simple follower ad we made for Aquaflex that’s gotten 4 conversions. We used it as a retargeting ad and added some emojis to catch attention.

And another from Brontide that has gotten some good conversions.

Summing It Up

Follower ads are one of the most inexpensive ways to create personalized ad experiences for your target audience. The best part is that they bring you closer to two of your major marketing goals – increasing social media followers and conversions. What more can you ask for?

There are many such hidden unexplored gems when it comes to LinkedIn marketing. While I keep writing these articles to give you a sneak peek into the world of LinkedIn Marketing, every brand needs its own strategic mix to ace its efforts on LinkedIn. You can always rely on us to do the leg work for you and assist you in making the right mix for you. Schedule a call to explore how Impactable can help you with your business objectives!