If you sell to marketing and sales teams, LinkedIn is one of your main channels by default. It’s where your audience is posting, commenting – at the very least lurking – every day and thinking about work.

Organic plays a huge role in building their awareness. But an eye-catching ad after someone has read a few of your thoughtful posts, browsed your website, maybe viewed a report is what might turn a passive scroller into an MQL.

The problem is targeting. For as many marketers and sellers as there are on LinkedIn, getting in front of the right ones is hard. And you want accuracy, lest you burn your entire ad budget on people who work at Amazon.

Meredith Gershenson, Demand Generation Lead at Navattic, set out to find tools that could help target her ICP not just based on role or account, but intent.

She landed on Vector, a contact-level advertising platform, to identify visitors already viewing high-intent pages on Navattic’s site, then fed that audience into LinkedIn so that ads (ideally) only reached people who were primed to convert.

Keep reading to learn how she set up her campaign, why she used interactive demos and customer testimonials as ad creative, the results she got, and what she’s changing the next go round.

We briefly touched on this in the intro, but LinkedIn’s native targeting only goes so far.

“You get a decent high-level snapshot (industries, job functions), but it’s not super accurate. For example, you can exclude a company or a certain job title from the campaign, and you’ll still see it in the campaign report days later,” says Meredith.

For her newest campaign, she wanted to go a level deeper, retargeting folks who already had a sense of what Navattic was and had taken steps to show their interest.

“I wanted to know what happens if we retarget audience members who have visited high-intent pages. My hypothesis was that, since these people already know Navattic exists, they just need some social proof to act,” Meredith shares.

To retarget with accuracy, LinkedIn’s native audience builder wouldn’t cut it. She needed contact-level identification, something she thought Vector could provide.

Here’s how she set it up:

1. Build an Audience in Vector

First, she set her ICP criteria in Vector. For this campaign, she focused heavily on SEs. Then, she defined “high intent” as visits to Navattic’s:

• Pricing page
• Book a demo page
• Interactive demo page
• State of the Interactive Product Demo report
• State of Demo Automation report

After some tweaking, she had a list of verified visitors who matched her desired ICP, along with their actual names, their titles, and the companies they work for. She also retargeted people who had already gone through Navattic's demo.

2. Push That Audience to LinkedIn

Vector has a native integration with HubSpot, which was already connected to Meredith’s LinkedIn Ads account.

Which meant that instead of exporting CSVs from Vector and uploading them to LinkedIn, she could just pipe the audience through HubSpot on to LinkedIn.

From there, she could easily run and monitor her ads.

3. Tailor Creative to Your Audience

Because the audience was made up of people who had visited Navattic’s site – which meant they’d probably seen at least one interactive demo – she opted for static customer testimonial ads that pointed directly to a corresponding customer story. That one change led to:

• 2x higher CTR (0.79% vs. 0.37%), 44.7% above LinkedIn’s benchmark
• 47% lower cost per conversion ($83.29 vs. $156.13)
• Longer dwell time (6.52s vs. 4.99s)
• 4x higher engagement rate (3.54% vs. 0.84%)

“Demos work when the buyer needs to understand what you do,” Meredith notes. “Once they know, what they need is a reason to act. That’s where I think testimonials and social proof can start to take over.”

4. Let the Campaign Run for a Few Weeks

Once Meredith felt comfortable with the social proof ads she had, she let the campaign run for three weeks.

“It was really cool to see that, in such a short span of time, we had 4 named high-intent visitors and even got 1 conversion,” she emphasizes.

“That person got fed into our inbound sequence, and at the end of it booked a call on our website!”

Turns out being more specific with your retargeting gives you a leg up – in reporting and understanding the customer lifecycle:

• On LinkedIn, Meredith reached 175 unique visitors but didn’t have their names.
• With Vector, she got 4 verified, named visitors identified from those same impressions, a ~2.3% de-anonymization rate on a cold retargeting audience.

“The most meaningful conversion from this campaign didn’t show up in LinkedIn's reporting at all,” she points out.

“With Vector’s contact-level data, we could trace the whole journey of the person who converted: they saw the ad, Googled Navattic, booked a call on the site, and then wrote ‘LinkedIn ad’ in the ‘How did you hear about Navattic’ field on our demo form.”

The form field told Meredith the LinkedIn campaign was working, but Vector told her who it was working on.

Without that, she’d have 1 self-reported conversion and 175 anonymous impressions, a much harder case to make for additional ad budget.

Coincidentally, this sort of “unmasking” is the same problem that Navattic solves.

In Navattic’s Analytics Dashboard, you can see exactly what steps they viewed, how long they stuck around, whether they clicked your CTAs, and whether they came back for another look.

As Meredith puts it: “Knowing that someone spent 10 minutes in your demo and came back to it twice tells you they’re probably ready to buy.

Vector kind of does that for ad impressions – telling you someone in your ICP got sent an ad, they dwelled on it for this long, actually clicked it the second time around, so it’s a good idea to reach out to this person, and, oh, by the way, here’s their name, title, LinkedIn profile.”

LinkedIn ads are expensive, which means you have to be really prescriptive about where every dollar goes.

“There’s no shortage of ad spend you could throw at LinkedIn,” she highlights.

“So when I run ads, I’m trying to be strategic and reinforce the behavior of something like dark social or word of mouth – get someone to make a mental note of Navattic, so we are top of mind when they are ready to act.”

That mindset influences how she thinks about creative, trying to match it to each stage of the funnel.

Top of Funnel

Best creative: Video campaigns and thought leader ads

Thought leader ads are the best-performing format for Navattic. But one thing to note with thought leadership ads is you can’t add a CTA, so it’s better for awareness.

Middle of Funnel

Best creative: Interactive demos, static customer testimonial ads

People who might already be bought into your product need something to make the case internally.

Interactive demo ads are great for this because they allow people to explore your product on their own. You could also try exporting them as a GIF for a flashier snapshot.

“I find GIFs to be a more dynamic form of creative that hooks people mid-scroll,” says Meredith.

Best destination: A more personalized interactive demo

Meredith advises, “Try a more specific, use-case or persona-focused demo. These buyers already know the category and are deciding between options.”

A word of warning, here: Don’t show demos to audiences who’ve already seen them. They want something different: social proof, a customer story, a specific use case.

If Vector (or a similar tool) identifies a contact who engaged with the ad but didn’t convert, put them in a follow-up demo sequence or personalized outreach referencing what they saw.

1. Pick a Large Enough Audience

To run a solid LinkedIn campaign, you need at least 300 people in your audience. And at first, Meredith’s retargeting pool was too small.

“If your frequency is capping at ~3.5, it means your audience can’t absorb your daily budget. You should either lower your budget or expand out the audience,” she says.

“I would expand the audience first, and then maybe lower it back to that 300 threshold so you’re sure it’s worth your ad dollars.”

2. Use Vector or Another Contact-Level Intent Tool

Use Vector (or any contact-level intent platform) to build your LinkedIn audience, then serve them customer testimonial ads. Don’t rely on LinkedIn’s limited native targeting to do both.

“The combination works because the audience already understands what you do,” Meredith says. “What they need at that stage is social proof from someone who looks like them.”

The other benefit is visibility on the back end.

Even if someone saw your LinkedIn ad, sat on it for a while, and then converted through a different channel a week later, you can see who it was and credit the ad with the assist.

Want to use interactive demos in your ads? Build your first one for free.