Incentivized Gift Card LinkedIn Ads - Pros, Cons & Best Practices

Hey, superstars. Thanks for joining us today. I'm your host, Aaron Zukowski. And today I'm going to be doing a bit of a solo episode here.

No guests today. It's a new format that I've been wanting to test for the podcast for a while. And the idea for these solo episodes was kind of inspired by Nick Huber and his Sweaty Startups podcast, which I've always enjoyed. These short little five to 10 minute podcasts that he produces that are just kind of sharing one or two ideas of what he's thinking about.

So we're going to give that a try today. And today's topic, we're going to be talking about incentivizing LinkedIn ads. So what I mean by that is having an offer in your ads where you're saying, you know, get a hundred dollar gift card in return for taking a demo of a product or something along those lines. And I know a lot of people wonder, do those do those work?

Are they high quality? I've been running some incentivized offers for a few of my clients on LinkedIn recently, and we've had some pretty good results. Now, to be honest, the results are mixed. They've worked really well for some clients and they haven't worked at all for other clients.

So they were going to talk about a little bit, you know, what it takes to make that work and some of the learnings that I've had from those campaigns. Now, obviously, as with any offer, you're going to want to make sure before you run an incentivized campaign that your product or service is really going to help people. But you just have, you know, a product or a service that people aren't necessarily looking for all the time. Right.

And you know, it can help them, but they're not searching on Google and they're not necessarily thinking about it. Or maybe, you know, it's a little bit hard to explain how the product works or how it benefits your customer in a really short little ad copy or something along those lines. But you know that if you can get people to sit through a 30 or 45 minute demo call, then you'd be able to really explain it. And you know that your sales close rates could be pretty good.

In those situations, it could work really well just to get that ICP or ideal customer prospect just to come and take a call. If you need to pay them to do it, then by all means, I think you should do that. Now, in general, the strategy is going to work best if you've got a larger or at least a mid market annual contract value. So I would say on a very minimum, in order to try this, you want to be making sure that you've got a $10,000 annual contract value, ideally even more, and that your sales team expects a pretty good close rate if you can get qualified people onto a call.

Now, when it comes to the incentive they're actually going to give with an offer, it really depends on who you're trying to attract to get onto a sales call. So in many cases, we've had success for some of my clients where we've run just, you know, $100 Amazon gift card. But we've also considered, you know, what if we did $50? What if we did $200?

What if we did an Uber Eats or Postmates card? What if we gave money to charity on their behalf and let them choose from a list of charities? There's a lot of different ways this type of thing can work. In fact I was even thinking you know it similar to you know the old timeshare model that people used to give these companies used to give a free vacation if you would just come to a location for a vacation and sit through you know an hour pitch for a timeshare Again that incentivizing people by giving them a gift in order to sit and hear your sales pitch So depending on the seniority of the person you're trying to get onto a demo call, you're going to have to think about what type of incentive is going to work best with them.

Obviously, CEOs, founders, lawyers, people who value their time very high and are very busy, you're going to need to incentivize them more. Maybe it's not even going to work with them. But if you're looking for mid-range managers, directors, even VPs and other CXOs, we've seen this work really, really well. I'll tell you from my experience in trying this out, for a B2B SaaS company, it works extremely well.

And then to be honest, I've tried it for an accounting firm as well. And in the first couple of tests, we did not get very many results at all, which was quite surprising. Now, obviously it's true that some people will just take advantage of the offer and just want to take a call in order to get their gift card. Now, the first way to avoid that type of situation is make sure that within your ad copy and the landing page people are going to sign up with, that you've put eligibility criteria, that you've told them, you know, in order to be eligible for this, you must have such and such seniority with this job function at a company with at least, you know, a certain amount of revenue or employee headcount or something along those lines.

And if you don't have those things, you will not be qualified to get this. So that way, very quickly in the discovery stage of your call, your sales team could tell somebody, you know, hey, thanks for signing up for this, but we don't think you're a good fit and we're not going to be able to give you the sales call and, you know, save everybody's time, save your money. But the reality is that a lot of time, this incentive is the thing that could push somebody over the edge to come in here with you have to say, you know, especially we're talking about a director or VP level, you know, many times, you know, they're busy, but they're not too busy and they don't make that much money yet that $100 is still a good incentive for them.

if they think that this thing might still be beneficial to them. So I always want to make sure that, you know, we're not giving so much away that people think, yeah, this is totally worth it. Even if I don't care about the product, you know, I'm still willing to take the call in order to get the money. But we want it to kind of be on that border so that they're like, yeah, this sounds like it might be interesting anyways.

And what the heck, let me take the demo call and let me not get lazy about it. And that pushes people to take the call when they might not have otherwise done that. And the fact is, it really can lead to a lot of real sales and closed one deals. In fact, one of my clients was telling me a story recently that they had a prospect that came to them and said they were considering my client as well as another competitor of theirs And because they saw this incentivized offer they decided to take the sales call for my client first and ended up just signing with them and doing a deal And had we not had that incentivized offer, this person probably would have gone and considered the competitor first and might not have been a deal for the client.

Now, again, in terms of the lead quality that's coming through, I think it's really important as always that your sales team and your marketing team are very well aligned so that there's communication between the two to kind of segment out, you know, what are the calls coming through on this gift card or incentive offer? And what's the value or what's the quality of those sales calls that are coming through and tracking which deals are getting closed as a result of them. I know there's often a concern that giving away this extra $100 might just be expensive.

I mean, you're thinking about adding $100 on top of your existing cost per lead within an ad campaign. But the thing I want you to think about is that in many cases, by having this incentive added onto your offer, you're actually going to reduce your cost per lead. And in many cases, you're going to reduce your cost per lead by even more than the amount that you're giving away in the gift card. So if you think about it this way, let's say you're doing a $500 cost per lead, you know, as your default, right?

And you start offering a gift card for $100, you may in fact reduce your cost per lead now to $350. So even if you're giving a gift card on top of that, you're stored at $450, which is cheaper than you're originally paying. And in not all cases and all leads, will you actually pay out that gift card? If someone comes through and they're not qualified based on your eligibility requirements, well, then you're not going to give them that card.

So some leads may end up costing you that new cost per lead of $350, and you're not going to give that card. But what's also true is that because of the incentive, you're going to see an increase in the volume of leads coming through. So in many cases, we're going to see a lower cost per lead, and we're going to see an increase in the volume of leads, which allows you to scale this thing so much farther, fill the pipeline, and get your sales team talking with a lot more qualified prospects much more quickly.

Now, when it comes to the ads themselves, we've tested a whole bunch of different things. Putting an image ad down the LinkedIn newsfeed can work really well. And we've definitely seen a lot of quality leads and meetings come through this process. But what's worked even better, and I'm sharing a little bit of a secret here, is conversation ads.

And what I mean by that is the ads that put a message directly into the LinkedIn inbox. From my experience, I've seen the cost per qualified sales meeting with an incentive offer from those ads come in about 60 to 70% cheaper than running an ad down the newsfeed. So I definitely recommend that you guys give those a try as well. Now in any ad that you running whether it an image in the newsfeed or whether it coming through the DMs or inbox within LinkedIn make sure that you calling out the target customer that you want to attract Call them out by job function or job title and make it clear the benefit that your product or service is going to provide to that person to the extent that you can within that limited amount of space that's there.

And the reason for that, again, is that you don't want somebody coming simply because they want to get the free gift card. You want somebody coming because they're reading at least what they can know about your product or service in that space with an ad and think that, yeah, this might be something I could benefit from and provide me value. So yeah, I think it's worthwhile to give a little bit of my time and they're going to be pushed over the edge, hopefully by the gift card offer.

Now, the great thing that I always love about LinkedIn ads is how specific and how focused you can target in on your ideal customer persona, right? So make sure if you're giving this offer that you're really targeting really tight because you will get a pretty good conversion rate or acceptance rate on this offer. And you don't want to be giving away gift cards to people that are lower seniority. So for example, if you only want to talk to your director and above, you know, make sure that you're not targeting managers and senior and things like that, because those lower level employees will generally be making less money and will be much more interested in taking you up on that offer and signing up for, you know, a meeting for $100.

But you don't want to waste your time or your money attracting those people. So make sure that your targeting is really, really focused on those people. And that's another reason why this offer or the strategy of incentivizing tends to work really well on LinkedIn. And I've also seen it work really well, really well with cold emails as well, or with an outreach strategy on LinkedIn using Expandee or Drupify or DuckSoup or one of those things where you're just kind of sliding into connections, inboxes and putting up this kind of incentivized offer.

But I don't like to run this offer on, let's say, you know, meta on Instagram or Facebook ads, because the targeting there won't be nearly exact and you're going to be going after a much broader audience of people who will take advantage and they will just want to take take you up on the offer to get the gift card, but they won't necessarily be your ICP in that situation. It can work on retargeting though on that as long as you're really tight in terms of making sure you're getting the most qualified leads coming through based on, you know, different signals that you have available to you over there.

All right. So that's what I got for you today. Those are just a few of my thoughts about incentivized or gift card offers with LinkedIn ads. If you've got any questions about it, you know, would love for you to reach out via email or hit me up on LinkedIn and I could share some more information with you as well.

But that's the episode. Hope you enjoyed this new format of a solo episode where I'm just sharing a couple of my thoughts from being in the trenches and working with B2B companies as a fractional CMO and media buyer. And hope you got value out of this tactic or strategy of using incentivized ads.