You’ve mastered Account-Based targeting using Sales Navigator, crafted very advanced LinkedIn + Email sequences, and tweaked your copywriting to ever fine-tune it to your audience. You already have a good conversion rate, but you’re looking to get more calls!

In all these optimizations, you’ve probably forgotten one thing: building trust in your brand by doing social ads on Facebook/Instagram and LinkedIn before, during, and after your outbound campaign

A great brand is that indescribable impression that compels prospects to buy right away. That “je ne sais quoi” creates trust in paying a premium price because you’re the right product for them.

Building a great brand used to be like building a great reputation: it would take years!

But thanks to social advertising, not anymore!

Looking to improve your outbound results by leveraging brand advertising? Read-on

Table of contents :

Building a brand is the concept of building a renowned name that resonates with :

If I mention MailChimp, Slack, Notion, or Zapier - these probably ring a bell to you because they have great brands built over time. Each of them has a specific tone/identity

You know MailChimp is the go-to solution for email marketing. You know they’ve reached great success without single funding. You know Notion with its distinctive design (that so many copied), as a great way to organize knowledge within your company. And so forth…

Building such a reputation takes a lot of time. But you can accelerate that using Brand Advertising. The goal is to print advertising to your target audience to build awareness and trust. And eventually, when they get to think about your product, they’ll know you, why they should use you, and how you do what you do.

Well-used, brand advertising can greatly accelerate the time necessary to build a strong reputation. Coupled right in time while doing outbound, it’s a great marketing weapon to drive up conversion!

The main challenge when doing outbound and/or cold calling is that, by definition, your leads are probably cold. They know little to nothing about you, what you do, why, and how you do it. Thus, they have little trust in what you’re pitching - which can end up in low reply rates and long sales cycles.

By doing strategically placed brand advertising BEFORE, DURING & AFTER your outbound campaigns, you can help warm up leads by building awareness, trust, and even FOMO when you’re doing it well!

Let’s deep-dive into it!

There are three distinct periods you’ll want to do brand advertising on :

Goal: driving awareness about your product, so that when they receive your emails, they feel like “Hey, I know them - can’t put a finger on it exactly, but they seem trustworthy”.

What sucks about cold outbound is that you have to build trust from zero. What if your leads already unconsciously knew about you? Already had a sense of trust about what you do, how and why you do it?

That’s what brand advertising before your outbound campaign is about. Warming up your leads by building awareness.

Your ads should be about building familiarity with your brand, what you do, and how you do it. Done well, it’ll make your company look more developed than you are, for just a few bucks a day!

Think top-of-the-funnel information - don’t talk about price, but why you do what you do!

Here’s a selection of examples at La Growth Machine - you’ll notice the theme and recognizable graphic design

Goal: supporting your outbound by building additional trust via social proot and proving ROI

If you’re doing brand advertising before your outbound, your leads are already warmed up a bit. Since you’re copywriting is done right, they’ll be tempted - but sometimes, they also need outside confirmation that you’re the right product, and just daily reminders (that are not just follow-ups) by being present every day, everywhere

Be present every day, everywhere can be done with dedicated adsets reminding you what you do, and the value you bring! Here’s an example of a carousel ad we use at La Growth Machine :

Or simpler, with a single reminder :

While driving social proof can be done using testimonials! Here are a select few from La Growth Machine

Goal: you know these people are the right target. It’s just a timing issue. Let’s use ads to stay top of mind!

For a big part of your outbound leads, you won’t get a reply immediately. There are several reasons for that - but if you’re targeting it right, it’s mostly due to timing or that they already have a solution in place. That doesn’t mean that they won’t buy from you in 3 months, 6 months of hell, years from now.

Brand retargeting is so cheap that making sure your content gets printed over time will only cost you a few bucks - one late conversion thanks to it can turn into a 100x ROI, even more

This is the aim of brand advertising AFTER your outbound campaign - most known as retargeting!

You can use any of the assets mentioned above, or even share additional content (case studies, advanced blog posts, etc…)

Thanks to that, you’ll stay top of mind. From then, three things may happen :

Anyhow, you should do it!

Now that you have the core concepts, let’s implement them!

Brand advertising can be done in any social media: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter, Pinterest, you name it…

We will focus on the two core social ads that work best for B2B :

Before doing these, you’ll need to have assets and media-ready.

Just as you can build a list of target accounts on Sales Navigator, you can choose to pre-target advertising on that same audience via the LinkedIn Ads Platform

Transpose your Sales Navigator Search into the LinkedIn Ads target, either by :

DURING and AFTER brand advertising relies on retargeting brand strategies. Retargeting is the idea of doing advertising on people who have already interacted with your brand, either because :

Facebook doesn’t allow you to do work-based targeting as well defined as LinkedIn will. While a broad targeting would work great to drive awareness generally, this isn’t the purpose of today’s teachings as this won’t support our ultimate goal of warming up leads before our outbound.

However, Facebook is a great place to implement retargeting strategies: as with LinkedIn, there are two sources you’ll use :

You’ve got the basics, but let’s deep-dive into La Growth Machine's very advanced retargeting capabilities for DURING & AFTER brand advertising strategies!

As mentioned above, one way of doing retargeting is using a custom audience by uploading a customer file of emails into Facebook/Instagram or LinkedIn and having these platforms match who to do ads on based on their signup data.

This works great as this will allow you to do laser-targeted retargeting on people despite them having visited your website.

However, you can’t just push any email. Work emails won’t work, as anybody signs up on LinkedIn on Facebook with their workaround, but their personal email!

But wait! When you connect with people on LinkedIn, 80% of people will share their personal email, and La Growth Machine will automatically gather them for you!

You get the idea: we will use just that to automate our brand strategy!

Now that you know that you can retarget people using personal email La Growth Machine will automatically collect once you connect with somebody on LinkedIn, let’s automate that process using La Growth Machine native integration Zapier.

Anytime La Growth Machine will enrich a lead and find a personal email, we will push it to social ads of your choice. Let’s use Facebook as an example

First of all, create a dedicated audience target Custom Audience on Facebook Ads. Go to your Audience Manager and click “Create Audience”. There, select “Customer List”

Next, import a sample of leads to initiate the Audience. If need one, you can use this CSV ready-made for you. Before uploading, make sure to select NO when asked to include a column for customer value, otherwise, Zapier won’t be able to connect!

Upload the test file we’ve provided, map for emails, and name it “La Growth Machine Retargeting Custom Audience

We’ve set up leads to push into and now use Zapier to automate pushing leads into this audience.

Create your Zap by following the same steps

Step 1: Define the Trigger and the action

In this example, we will want any time a lead is enriched, to push the personal email enriched into the Audience, let’s plan for that by having a trigger when a profile is enriched

Step 2: Connect your La Growth Machine account with your personal API key

You’ll find your API Key in your account settings

Step 3: Select the campaigns you want to do retargeting with.

It can be all campaigns or only a few :

Step 4: Filter the leads to identify those with a personal email.

Step 5: Choose the event: Add email to the custom audience in Facebook Custom Audience.

Then, select the Facebook Custom Audience account.

Step 6: Test it and launch it!

You’re all set now! You have a Facebook Ads Audience, and can repeat the same process for LinkedIn Ads! Link this Audience to your Brand Advertising Assets (BEFORE, DURING & AFTER depending on your strategies) and you’ll be set to succeed!

Don’t forget, this is even better than traditional Website retargeting, as we will be able to retarget people regardless of whether they visit or not your website! Amazing!

We’ve shared with you a very advanced social ads strategy that, when implemented, will greatly impact your output. Use it with the right sequence in La Growth Machine and close more deals!

Here’s some additional reading you should look into :