LinkedIn Ads & HubSpot CRM = Better Advertising Results, ABM & More

In today's competitive digital landscape, increasing lead generation and improving lead quality are paramount for business success. Effective marketing goes beyond reaching a broad audience; it involves targeting the right prospects with precision, delivering personalised content, and optimising campaigns for maximum impact. LinkedIn Ads, renowned for its professional audience targeting capabilities, offers an unparalleled opportunity to connect with key decision-makers and industry leaders. However, managing and optimising these campaigns can be complex and time-consuming. This is where HubSpot comes into play.

HubSpot Ads, integrated with LinkedIn Ads, provides a powerful solution for businesses looking to enhance their advertising efforts. By combining the robust capabilities of HubSpot with LinkedIn's professional network, this integration allows marketers to manage and optimise their ads across multiple platforms seamlessly. HubSpot Ads helps increase lead generation and improve lead quality through targeted advertising, optimisation, tracking, and reporting.

Integrating LinkedIn Ads with HubSpot's robust CRM and marketing automation platform can revolutionise your advertising strategy. This powerful combination enables streamlined campaign management, enhanced targeting precision, and deep insights into ad performance. By leveraging the strengths of both platforms, you can create highly personalised and effective advertising campaigns that not only reach your ideal audience but also drive meaningful engagement and conversions.

In this guide, we'll walk you through the steps to effectively use LinkedIn Ads with HubSpot, providing you with the tools and knowledge to maximise your marketing efforts. Whether you're looking to improve lead quality, manage budgets efficiently, or develop a data-driven strategy for ROI optimisation, this integration will help you achieve your marketing goals with greater efficiency and precision. Join us as we explore how to harness the full potential of HubSpot and LinkedIn Ads to elevate your marketing strategy.

What is HubSpot Ads?

HubSpot Ads helps you not only increase the number of leads you generate but also improve lead quality through more targeted advertising, optimisation, tracking, and reporting. The integration with LinkedIn Ads offers some unique abilities that can take your advertising further and faster.
HubSpot Ads (CRM Advertising) exists within the HubSpot platform designed to streamline the creation, management, and optimisation of digital advertising campaigns. This tool allows marketers to manage their ads across multiple platforms, such as LinkedIn as well as Google and Facebook, all within the HubSpot environment. Below is an overview of what HubSpot Ads encompasses and its key features.

HubSpot Ads provides a unified interface for managing advertising efforts, making it easier to create campaigns, track performance, and optimise results. By integrating with HubSpot's CRM and marketing automation tools, HubSpot Ads enables businesses to connect their advertising activities with broader marketing and sales efforts.

Benefits of Using HubSpot Ads with LinkedIn Ads

Integrating HubSpot Ads with LinkedIn Ads can significantly enhance your advertising strategy by leveraging the strengths of both platforms. Here are the key benefits of using HubSpot Ads with LinkedIn Ads:

Improve Lead Quality

Lead quality optimisation is perhaps the primary reason to use HubSpot Ads. If you are solely relying on online conversion tracking for LinkedIn Ads, you are optimising for the highest quantity of leads without considering lead quality. By using HubSpot Ad Events (offline conversion tracking), you can sync your contact lifecycle changes back to the ad platform to score lead quality. This improved reporting allows you to:

• Adjust manual bidding and budgets to allocate more funds to higher-quality leads.
• Optimise automatic bidding (machine learning) to focus on acquiring high-quality leads, ensuring the AI prioritises the best quality leads, thereby reducing lower-quality leads.

This approach ensures that your advertising efforts yield more valuable leads, ultimately improving your campaign’s overall effectiveness and ROI.

Audience Targeting Improvements

Utilise lists and buyer personas from HubSpot’s CRM to craft highly targeted LinkedIn Ads campaigns, ensuring your messaging reaches the most relevant professionals. Share lists of target accounts or companies from HubSpot to LinkedIn, including contact emails and website cookies. This approach expands your reach to cold traffic and strengthens your retargeting efforts. Build a funnel on LinkedIn to nurture leads before capturing their details with a lead form on LinkedIn or your website. 

Streamlined Campaign Management

Manage your LinkedIn Ads campaigns alongside other platforms like Google and Facebook within HubSpot’s centralised interface. This integration simplifies workflows by reducing the need to switch between multiple systems and makes it easier to view your advertising results in the context of your business data, matched to contacts and companies rather than anonymous online conversions.

Streamlining the ad creation, management, and optimisation processes significantly reduces the time spent on administrative tasks, allowing you to focus more on strategic decision-making.

Enhanced Analytics, Reporting, and Optimisation

By leveraging the combined strengths of both platforms, you can optimise your advertising efforts, achieve better results, and drive business growth. This integration provides valuable insights and tools to maximise the impact of your LinkedIn Ads campaigns.

Budget & Bid Management

Sales and Marketing Alignment

Ensure that your LinkedIn Ads efforts are fully integrated with broader marketing and sales activities, fostering better collaboration and strategic coherence. Utilise HubSpot’s CRM to track all interactions with leads and customers, providing a comprehensive view of the customer journey and enhancing cross-functional communication. Establish a Service Level Agreement (SLA) between sales and marketing that defines a sales-ready lead (MQL), follow-up protocols, and close rates to ensure alignment and accountability.

Scalability and Growth Opportunities

Scale your LinkedIn Ads campaigns by leveraging HubSpot’s automation and integration capabilities, accommodating business growth without proportional increases in effort or complexity. Analyse performance data within HubSpot to uncover new growth opportunities and refine your LinkedIn Ads strategy to target emerging markets or demographics.

Using Hubspot Ads to Achieve LinkedIn Advertising Best Practises

HubSpot Ads can significantly enhance LinkedIn advertising efforts by providing tools and features that align with the best practices for LinkedIn Ads.
Here's how HubSpot can help advertisers achieve these best practices:

Define Clear Objectives

Utilising HubSpot Ads, you can seamlessly align your LinkedIn campaign objectives with your overarching marketing goals. Whether you aim for top-of-the-funnel brand awareness, middle-of-the-funnel consideration (such as website visits, engagement, or video views), or bottom-of-the-funnel conversions (like Lead Ads and Website Conversions), HubSpot Ads offers a comprehensive solution.

By sharing HubSpot audience lists with LinkedIn, you can effectively target potential buyers at various stages of the sales funnel with the right content. This strategic approach ensures that your campaigns drive results from initial brand awareness, through the consideration phase, and ultimately to conversion.

Improve Audience Targeting

HubSpot integrates with LinkedIn to share targeting lists you have created in HubSpot. These can be company lists, contact lists, or website cookie list users. You can then combine these audiences by overlaying LinkedIn's audience targeting on these lists to target specific job titles, industries, company sizes, and more.
This approach ensures your ads reach the most relevant professionals, maximising the effectiveness of your ad spend.

Utilise HubSpot’s segmentation tools to create highly specific audience lists based on detailed criteria such as:
When filter criteria are met: Objects will enrol when the criteria are true. For example, when a contact’s city is "Dublin," you can trigger a specific action.
When an event occurs: Objects will enrol when an event has happened. For example, when a form has been submitted, or when a contact revisits your website.

Create Engaging Content

HubSpot provides a suite of tools for developing high-quality, engaging content. You can create compelling visuals, and write clear messaging directly within the platform. Use HubSpot’s personalisation features to tailor your ad content to different audience segments, buyer persona and ICP (Ideal customer Profiles). Personalised content is more likely to resonate with your target audience, increasing engagement and driving more prospects through the buyer funnel.

Test and Optimise

Continuously monitor your campaign performance with HubSpot’s detailed analytics. This includes tracking metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and ROI. Based on performance data, HubSpot provides insights and recommendations for optimising your campaigns. This might include adjusting targeting criteria, refining ad creatives, or altering bidding strategies. 

Improve Reporting

HubSpot consolidates LinkedIn’s data with your marketing data, providing a unified view of your campaign performance. This helps in making informed decisions and refining your strategy.

Nurturing Down the Funnel

Use retargeting strategies within HubSpot and LinkedIn to nurture leads further down the funnel. 

Website Retargeting: HubSpot enables you to set up retargeting campaigns for users who have visited your website. This helps re-engage users who have shown interest in your brand but have not yet converted (Completed lead form or phone call). 

Contact Retargeting: Use HubSpot to create custom audiences for retargeting on LinkedIn. This includes uploading lists of contacts or leads that you want to target specifically.

Company/Account Retargeting: Retarget companies that have visited your website, not just the individual employee at the company

Once you have captured their contact details, you can also use workflows that deliver targeted content and follow-up messages based on user behaviour and engagement history. 

Using HubSpot Prospects Tool for LinkedIn Company/Account Targeting

The HubSpot Website Prospects tool is a powerful feature within the HubSpot platform designed to help businesses identify and track companies visiting their website. This tool leverages reverse IP lookup technology to provide valuable insights into website traffic, helping businesses better understand their audience and tailor their marketing efforts accordingly. When combined with LinkedIn advertising, it is a significantly more powerful tool than standard remarketing using website cookies or email lists.

The HubSpot Prospects Tool and Target Accounts, when integrated with LinkedIn Ads, provide a powerful way to enhance your Account-Based Marketing (ABM) efforts by leveraging the professional network and targeting capabilities of LinkedIn. Here’s an explanation of how the HubSpot Prospects Tool can be utilised in the context of LinkedIn Ads:

Company Identification: The tool identifies the companies visiting your website by analysing their IP addresses. This allows you to see which organisations are showing interest in your website content, even if they haven't filled out a form or provided contact details. This tool can be used to build a company list in HubSpot and share this with LinkedIn for retargeting efforts.

Visit Details: For each identified company, the tool provides detailed information about their visit, including the number of page views, the pages they visited, the time spent on your site, and the date of their last visit. This helps you understand their level of interest and engagement.

Company Information: HubSpot enriches the data with additional company information such as industry, company size, location, and revenue. This context helps you prioritise prospects and tailor your outreach based on their potential value.

Filtering and Segmentation: You can filter and segment the list of visiting companies based on various criteria such as industry, company size, or visit frequency. This makes it easier to focus on the most relevant prospects for your business.

Integration with CRM: The tool integrates seamlessly with HubSpot CRM, allowing you to add identified companies directly into your CRM as prospects. This facilitates follow-up actions, such as assigning tasks to sales reps, creating workflows, or launching targeted marketing campaigns.

Custom Alerts: You can set up custom alerts to be notified when specific companies visit your website. This ensures timely follow-up and maximises the chances of converting interested visitors into leads.

HubSpot Website Prospects tool is a robust solution for identifying and engaging with potential leads. By providing detailed insights into website visitors and integrating seamlessly with HubSpot CRM, it enhances lead generation, sales efficiency, and marketing effectiveness, ultimately driving business growth. We will discuss using the HubSpot Prospects Tool, Target Accounts, and ABM alongside LinkedIn Ads in more detail later in this guide.

HubSpot Ads Capabilities

HubSpot Ads offers a comprehensive suite of features and tools designed to simplify the creation and optimisation of advertising campaigns. 

Improved Audience Targeting

Enhance your targeting on LinkedIn by leveraging HubSpot’s CRM to create highly targeted ad campaigns based on detailed customer profiles. Use HubSpot’s segmentation capabilities to craft custom audiences and reach specific groups with tailored messages.

With HubSpot Ads, you can build audiences using your HubSpot data and upload them to LinkedIn, where they are matched with LinkedIn users or accounts/companies. This approach improves targeting by reaching warm audiences that already know your brand, leading to more effective advertising campaigns. By creating more targeted ad campaigns, you can ultimately drive better results.

HubSpot Ad Audiences allows you to create custom audiences to share with ad platforms using multiple data sources within HubSpot:

Company Names:

Remarket to specific companies that have visited your website, enhancing B2B marketing efforts. You can retarget anyone at the company of the site visitor, identified by their company IP address, or filter down using LinkedIn Ads job title targeting. Use the HubSpot Prospects Tool to create a list of companies that visit your website and remarket to people at the company (not just the individual who visited your website). You can retarget everyone in the company, but it is more effective to focus on key decision-making job titles by overlaying this audience upon your company/account target list.

Website Users:

Remarket to individuals who have visited your website, ensuring your ads reach those already familiar with your brand. The user is matched with their website cookie list as gathered by the LinkedIn Pixel.

Email Contact Lists:

Retarget your segmented email lists to create audiences based on specific behaviours, preferences, or demographics. For example, you can upload your customer list to upsell or exclude them from cold traffic campaigns.

Lookalike Audiences:

Build a cold audience of people who are most similar to your website visitors, email subscribers, and customer lists by matching with the ad platform user database through hashed encryption.

Lifecycle Stage Audiences:

Tailor your ads to different stages of the buyer's journey. For instance, show introductory offers to new leads and premium service features to marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). Display different ads to prospects in the quote/deal/opportunity lifecycle stage. Show top-of-the-funnel ads to new prospects who are not yet leads, or have different adverts for each lifecycle stage of a new lead. Upsell to existing customers with specific ads, encouraging repeat purchases or promoting complementary products and services.

Event-Based Audiences:

Target users based on their interactions with your content or events, such as webinar attendees or those who downloaded a particular resource. For example, send an email automatically using a workflow to contacts generated by HubSpot Ads that return to your website.

Geographic Audiences:

Customise your ads based on the location of your audience to deliver region-specific offers or announcements using HubSpot properties such as city name or postal code.

Demographic Audiences:

By leveraging these diverse audience types, you can create highly personalised ad experiences that resonate more deeply with your target audience, driving higher engagement and conversion rates.

Buyer Persona Audiences:

You can segment your retargeting lists based on personas that you have created inside HubSpot to create more tailored ad content.

Hyper-Targeting Audiences:

Depending on the sizes of your audiences, you can overlay multiple audiences to create hyper-targeted audiences. Just remember that Google Ads audiences do have minimum sizes due to privacy restrictions. LinkedIn Ads has a minimum audience sized of matched LinkedIn users which is 300. A good match rate is around 70%, so it is more like 

Ads Interaction Audiences:

You can segment contacts in lists based on their ads interactions in ad networks including Google Ads, Facebook Ads and LinkedIn Ads.
Ad interactions include when users click on your ads or submit a form after they engage with your ad. Each ads interaction filter represents a trackable ad interaction, such as identifying which contacts clicked through to your website from a specific LinkedIn Ads campaign.

Improved Conversion Tracking (Online & Offline)

In essence, online conversion tracking helps increase lead quantity, while offline conversion tracking helps improve lead quality. Most advertisers use online conversion tracking to measure the cost per lead and the number of leads generated. However, more companies are now taking this further by using offline conversion tracking, as recommended by LinkedIn and other ad vendors.

Online Tracking (LinkedIn Conversion Tracking):

LinkedIn Ads records the number of people who filled out a form on your website as an online conversion, relying on the LinkedIn Pixel placed on your website. Success is measured by the number of leads and the cost per lead, which only considers the first step in your sales process (the lead enquiry). Lead Ads on LinkedIn have their own tracking system because the form is hosted on LinkedIn.

Offline Tracking (HubSpot Ad Events):

Offline conversion tracking goes beyond just capturing form submissions by tracking what happens after the initial contact. With HubSpot Ad Events, you can determine whether a lead becomes a qualified lead, receives a quote, or eventually becomes a customer. Without offline conversion tracking, you only know who filled out a form, but with HubSpot Ad Events, you gain insights into which businesses later scheduled a meeting, received a quote, and purchased your service.

Since not all leads are equal and some are more likely to turn into paying customers than others, tracking what happens after the initial contact is crucial. By focusing on acquiring high-quality leads, you can optimise your advertising budget effectively. HubSpot syncs change through each stage of your sales process, following the lead through qualification, quoting, and purchase stages. By tracking leads through every stage of the sales funnel and optimising ad spend based on lead quality and revenue, you ensure your advertising budget is used efficiently, driving higher ROI and attracting customers who bring long-term value to your business.

• Optimised Ad Spend: Allocate more budget to ads that attract leads similar to those who have previously purchased your offering. Waste less money on ads that only attract form fillers without further engagement. Knowing which leads convert into high-quality customers allows for more strategic budgeting.
• Enhanced Lead Value Understanding: HubSpot helps LinkedIn Ads identify the most valuable leads. Whether you set bids manually or use automatic bidding, this integration ensures that your money is spent wisely. LinkedIn Ads will prioritise leads that are more likely to convert into paying customers.
• Revenue-Based Customer Scoring: HubSpot Ad Events can send sales revenue data back to the ad platforms, allowing you to score customers based on the revenue they generate and their purchase frequency. This information helps optimise your advertising to achieve better results.

HubSpot Ad Events: Tracking Lifecycle Stages as Offline Conversions

HubSpot Ad Events is a powerful feature that enhances your ability to track and understand the progression of leads through your sales funnel.
HubSpot syncs changes in lifecycle stages back to LinkedIn Ads for improved reporting and optimisation using machine learning AI.

HubSpot Ad Events allows you to see the real impact of your ads on lead generation, qualification, and conversion. By syncing lifecycle changes back to LinkedIn Ads, you gain improved reporting and optimisation capabilities through machine learning AI, ensuring that your marketing investments drive tangible results.

HubSpot defines several lifecycle stages to help businesses track and manage the journey of acontact through the sales funnel. These stages include:

1. Subscriber: A contact who has shown interest in your content and has opted in to hear more from you, typically by signing up for a blog or newsletter.
2. Lead: A contact who has demonstrated potential interest in your products or services, often by filling out a form or downloading content.
3. Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): A contact who has been identified by the marketing team as having a higher likelihood of becoming a customer, based on engagement and fit criteria.
4. Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): A contact who has been vetted by the sales team and deemed ready for direct sales follow-up.
5. Opportunity: A contact who has entered the sales pipeline and is considered a potential deal.
6. Customer: A contact who has completed a purchase and become a paying customer.
7. Evangelist: A satisfied customer who advocates for your brand and refers new business.

Ad Management

HubSpot Ads provides a unified interface to create, manage, report on, and optimise advertising campaigns across multiple channels directly from within your CRM. This integration ensures seamless management of all ad campaigns alongside your company data, enhancing reporting capabilities. By connecting your ad platforms, HubSpot enables you to track digital ad performance, maximise ROI, and minimise ad spend. This flexibility in ad creation ensures that your advertisements align with your business objectives and resonate with your intended audience. Monitor the health of LinkedIn Ads compared to other platforms to evaluate not only cost per lead but also cost per MQL, SQL, deal, and sale. Use this data to align your marketing and sales efforts to generate more sales-ready leads.

Seamless Ad Creation

Use pre-built templates and intuitive tools to create visually appealing ads quickly by reusing existing content from HubSpot’s content library, making it easy to incorporate existing assets into your ads.

Comprehensive Lead Management and Nurturing

Automatically sync leads captured through LinkedIn Ads lead generation forms into HubSpot’s CRM for immediate follow-up and nurturing.

Lead Scoring and Qualification

Prioritise leads based on their engagement and potential to convert, ensuring efficient use of resources.

Automated Nurturing

Create automated workflows to nurture leads captured from ads, ensuring timely and relevant follow-ups.

Personalised Marketing

Deliver personalised content and offers to leads based on their interactions with your ads. Tailor your marketing efforts according to which ads they engaged with, enhancing the customer experience and boosting conversion rates.

Ad Reporting

You already receive reporting within LinkedIn Ads, so how does using HubSpot Ads take this further? HubSpot allows you to integrate your advertising data with your marketing database to gain deeper insights into your efforts. This surpasses the standard advertising interfaces of LinkedIn Ads, which only provide anonymous data not linked to your prospects and customers.

HubSpot Ads reports on standard metrics such as impressions, clicks, and online conversions, but it also goes beyond the standard metrics available in ad platforms. You can see not only the cost per online lead but also the cost per Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), cost per deal/opportunity, and cost per sale, along with revenue value. These valuable insights enable data-driven decision-making, allowing you to focus your efforts on the most effective campaigns and strategies.

HubSpot’s reporting capabilities enable you to gain deeper insights and make more informed decisions:

Lifecycle Stage Analysis

Understand how your ads influence different stages of the customer journey, from awareness to conversion.

Attribution Reporting

Identify which ads, assets, and channels contribute most to conversions, allowing you to allocate your budget more effectively.

ROI by Campaign

Compare the return on investment across different campaigns to identify high-performing strategies and areas for improvement.

Multi-Channel Performance

Assess the performance of your ads across multiple platforms, including Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook, within a unified dashboard. Compare cost per lead, cost per MQL, SQL, deal, and sale.

Improve ROI

HubSpot reporting lets you measure and enhance your ad campaigns using ROI as a key metric for measurement and improvement.

Comprehensive Insights

Access in-depth analytics and performance metrics for your LinkedIn Ads within HubSpot, tying back results to individual contacts or companies. Gain more context into your advertising by integrating this data with your marketing database.

Performance Tracking

Monitor key metrics such as impressions, clicks, conversions, and ROI in real-time, facilitating agile and data-driven decision-making.

Ad Optimisation (ROI)

HubSpot Ads ROI (Return on Investment) is a critical metric that helps businesses measure the profitability and effectiveness of their advertising campaigns on the HubSpot platform. By evaluating the financial return generated from ads relative to the amount spent, businesses can gain valuable insights into their advertising performance. To measure the effectiveness of your paid ad campaigns within HubSpot, you need to configure your ROI calculation to use revenue from deals or estimated revenue.

Revenue from Your Deals:

This method calculates ROI based on your deals in HubSpot, using the Default deal amount settings. For a deal to be included on your ads dashboard, it must:

• Be marked as closed won.
• Be associated with a contact attributed to your ad campaign.
• Have the contact in the lifecycle stage customer. 

Estimate Revenue:

HubSpot estimates ROI based on your average sale price and average contact-to-customer rate.

• In the Average Sale Price section, enter the numerical value of your average sale price.
• Enter your average contact-to-customer rate as a percentage.
• By configuring these settings, you can accurately measure and optimise the effectiveness of your paid ad campaigns in HubSpot

Lead Management: Nurturing & Sales Assignment

Now that you are recording leads, it is important to decide how to follow up with different lead types. Some leads are ready to be handed to sales, while others require nurturing by marketing until they become marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). Following up on leads in the most effective way improves conversion rates and enhances the return on investment in advertising. By leveraging the powerful combination of HubSpot Ads and HubSpot CRM, businesses can streamline their marketing and sales processes, improve lead nurturing, and ultimately drive higher conversion rates and revenue growth.

Enhanced Lead Tracking

HubSpot CRM's integration with HubSpot Ads allows businesses to monitor the journey of each lead from the moment they engage with an ad. This provides detailed insights into which campaigns generate the most qualified leads, enabling marketers to allocate resources more effectively. Track leads from the initial ad click, to lead, to deal, and then to customer and beyond, ensuring that every interaction is captured and can be acted upon. The synergy between HubSpot Ads and HubSpot CRM enhances lead nurturing and sales management in several key ways:

Lead Scoring

Use lead scoring to determine the correct follow-up most efficiently, saving sales departments time and ensuring leads are correctly assigned. Understanding a lead's history and preferences allows for tailored messaging that resonates more effectively with potential customers, improving engagement and conversion rates. Create personalised marketing campaigns.

Improved Sales Efficiency

Sales teams benefit from having a complete view of a lead's interactions with marketing campaigns. This context helps sales representatives engage in more meaningful conversations, addressing the specific interests and needs of the lead, thereby increasing the likelihood of closing a deal.

Automate & Streamline Processes

HubSpot's CRM and ad integration enable the automation of many routine tasks, such as lead scoring and nurturing workflows. Automated workflows can send follow-up emails, assign leads to sales representatives, and trigger alerts based on lead behaviour, ensuring that no opportunity is missed.

Data-Driven Insights

The integration facilitates the collection and analysis of data across multiple touchpoints. Businesses can generate reports that combine ad performance with CRM data, providing a deeper understanding of campaign effectiveness and customer behaviour. These insights are invaluable for refining strategies and improving ROI.

Seamless Communication Between Teams

The unified platform fosters better communication between marketing and sales teams. Shared access to data and insights ensures that both teams are aligned in their goals and strategies, leading to a more cohesive approach to customer acquisition and retention.

Using the HubSpot Prospects Tool with LinkedIn Ads

Identifying High-Value Target Accounts

The HubSpot Prospects Tool helps identify companies visiting your website, providing insights into which companies are showing interest in your products or services. This identification is crucial for targeting the right audience on LinkedIn. Once you have identified these prospects, you can segment these companies based on various criteria, such as industry and company size, using HubSpot's automatic company data enrichment. This segmentation ensures that your LinkedIn ad campaigns are focused on the most relevant accounts.

Creating Targeted LinkedIn Ad Campaigns

Use the data from the HubSpot Prospects Tool to create custom audiences in LinkedIn Ads. This involves uploading lists of target accounts or contacts identified through HubSpot to LinkedIn Campaign Manager. LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences feature allows you to retarget companies that visited your website directly from HubSpot, ensuring your ads reach the right companies.

Personalised Ad Content

Develop personalised ad content that speaks directly to the pain points and needs of your target accounts. Use the insights gained from the HubSpot Prospects Tool to craft messages that resonate with your audience. Utilise LinkedIn’s dynamic ad capabilities to create highly personalised ad experiences that capture the attention of decision-makers within your target accounts.

Nurturing Leads through LinkedIn Ads

By using LinkedIn Ads, you can ensure continuous engagement with these prospects, guiding them further down the sales funnel. Set up retargeting campaigns to re-engage visitors who have previously shown interest in your website. Promote valuable content such as case studies, whitepapers, and webinars to your target accounts, helping to build trust and position your brand as a thought leader.

Tracking and Analytics

Use LinkedIn’s robust analytics and HubSpot’s reporting tools to track the performance of your ad campaigns. Monitor key metrics such as impressions, clicks, and conversions to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. Analyse how your target accounts are interacting with your ads and website. This data helps refine your ad strategies and improve targeting for future campaigns.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

Ensure a seamless transition of leads from marketing to sales by syncing LinkedIn lead gen forms with HubSpot. This integration allows for automatic lead capture and follow-up, ensuring no opportunities are missed. Foster collaboration between your marketing and sales teams by sharing insights from the HubSpot Prospects Tool. Both teams can work together to tailor outreach efforts and close deals more effectively.

Using HubSpot Prospects Tool with LinkedIn Ads

Combining the HubSpot Prospects Tool with LinkedIn Ads allows for a highly effective and targeted approach to marketing. By leveraging detailed prospect insights and LinkedIn’s advanced targeting capabilities, you can create personalised, impactful ad campaigns that drive engagement and conversion among your most valuable prospects.

Enhanced Lead Generation

By identifying anonymous website visitors, the Website Prospects tool helps you uncover new potential leads that you might have otherwise missed. This can significantly enhance your lead generation efforts.

Improved Sales Efficiency

Sales teams can prioritise outreach efforts by focusing on companies that have shown a genuine interest in your products or services. This targeted approach increases the efficiency and effectiveness of sales activities.

Better Marketing Insights

Understanding which companies are visiting your site and what content they are engaging with provides valuable insights for your marketing strategy. You can optimise your content and campaigns based on the interests and behaviours of your website visitors.

Personalised Outreach

With detailed information about visiting companies, you can personalise your outreach efforts. Tailored communication that addresses the specific needs and interests of prospects is more likely to resonate and convert.

Enhanced Targeting

By combining HubSpot’s prospect identification with LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities, you can precisely target high-value accounts and decision-makers, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion.

Increased Personalisation

Personalised ad content based on detailed prospect insights leads to more relevant and impactful campaigns, improving the chances of capturing the attention of your audience.

Improved ROI

Focusing on high-value prospects and delivering targeted, relevant ads can result in a higher return on investment compared to broader advertising approaches.

Better Lead Nurturing

Continuous engagement through retargeting and content promotion helps nurture leads effectively, guiding them through the sales funnel and increasing the likelihood of conversion.

Comprehensive Analytics

Detailed tracking and analytics from both HubSpot and LinkedIn provide a clear picture of campaign performance, allowing for data-driven decisions and optimisation of future campaigns. 

Use Cases

Account-Based Marketing Campaigns: Target specific high-value accounts identified by the HubSpot Prospects Tool with personalised LinkedIn ads, enhancing your ABM strategy.
Event Promotion: Promote webinars, conferences, and other events to prospects identified through HubSpot, ensuring that your invitations reach the most interested and relevant audience.
Product Launches: Announce new products or features to a targeted list of high-value prospects, driving awareness and interest among those most likely to benefit from your offerings.
Lead Retargeting: Re-engage website visitors who did not convert on their first visit by delivering targeted LinkedIn ads, encouraging them to return and take action.

HubSpot Target Accounts

HubSpot Target Accounts is a feature within the HubSpot platform designed to support Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategies. This tool allows businesses to identify, track, and manage high-value accounts that are most likely to generate significant revenue. By focusing on these target accounts, companies can create more personalised and effective marketing and sales strategies. 

Account Identification and Selection:

Define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) based on factors such as industry, company size, location, and revenue. This helps in identifying which accounts should be targeted. Create and manage a list of target accounts that fit your ICP. This list is central to your ABM strategy and helps prioritise efforts on the most valuable prospects.  

360-Degree Account View:

Access a comprehensive dashboard that provides a complete view of each target account. This includes detailed information on company size, industry, location, and key contacts within the account. Track all interactions with target accounts, including emails, meetings, calls, and website visits. This ensures a clear understanding of the engagement level and helps tailor future interactions.

Account-Based Marketing and Sales Alignment:

Align marketing and sales teams around shared goals and metrics. Both teams can collaborate effectively using the same data and insights to drive account engagement and conversion. Develop and implement playbooks that outline specific actions and strategies for engaging with target accounts. These playbooks ensure consistent and effective outreach across teams. Shared goals, data, and strategies ensure cohesive efforts towards account engagement and conversion.

Personalised Content and Campaigns:

ABM allows for highly personalised marketing and sales efforts. By understanding the specific needs and pain points of each target account, you can deliver relevant and timely content that resonates with key decision-makers. Create personalised messaging and content tailored to the specific needs and pain points of each target account. This increases the relevance and impact of your communications. Use HubSpot’s automation tools to create workflows that deliver personalised content and follow-up actions based on account behaviour and engagement. 

Detailed Reporting and Analytics:

Monitor key engagement metrics such as email opens, clicks, website visits, and content downloads for each target account. This helps assess the effectiveness of your campaigns. Track the performance of your ABM efforts through detailed reports and analytics. Measure the impact of your strategies on account engagement and progression through the sales funnel. Detailed reporting and analytics provide actionable insights into the performance of your ABM efforts. These insights help refine your strategies, optimise engagement, and drive continuous improvement. 

Integrations and Customisations:

Seamlessly integrate Target Accounts with HubSpot CRM, ensuring all account data is synchronized and easily accessible.
Integrate with other tools and platforms to enrich account data and enhance your ABM strategy. 

Focused Resource Allocation:

By identifying and prioritising high-value accounts, you can allocate your marketing and sales resources more efficiently. This focus increases the chances of converting valuable prospects and maximising ROI.

Enhanced Personalisation:

Target Accounts allow for deeper personalisation in your marketing and sales efforts. Tailored messaging and content resonate more with key decision-makers, improving engagement and conversion rates.

Higher Conversion Rates:

By focusing on high-value accounts and delivering personalised experiences, you can achieve higher conversion rates. Engaging with accounts that are more likely to generate significant revenue leads to more successful outcomes.

Use Cases for HubSpot Target Accounts

• Enterprise Sales: Companies targeting large enterprises can use Target Accounts to manage and engage with multiple stakeholders within each account, ensuring a coordinated and effective approach.
• B2B Marketing: B2B companies can leverage Target Accounts to focus on high-value prospects, delivering personalised content and experiences that address specific business needs.
• Complex Sales Cycles: Businesses with long and complex sales cycles benefit from the detailed tracking and engagement capabilities of Target Accounts, ensuring consistent communication and follow-up.

HubSpot Target Accounts is a powerful feature that supports effective Account-Based Marketing by enabling businesses to identify, track, and manage high-value accounts. With its comprehensive tools for personalisation, engagement tracking, and team alignment, Target Accounts helps businesses maximise their ABM efforts and achieve better results. HubSpot Target Accounts is an essential tool for executing ABM strategies, providing the necessary features to identify, engage, and convert high-value accounts.

What is HubSpot ABM?

HubSpot Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a strategic approach that focuses on targeting specific high-value accounts rather than broad market segments. This method is particularly effective for B2B companies aiming to engage with larger, more complex accounts. HubSpot provides a comprehensive suite of tools and features to facilitate ABM, enabling businesses to create highly personalised marketing and sales strategies that resonate with key decision-makers within target accounts.

With HubSpot, you can identify and select high-value target accounts that align with your ideal customer profile (ICP) using firmographic data such as industry, company size, location, and revenue. The platform allows you to create custom properties to track specific data points relevant to your target accounts, ensuring all necessary information is captured and easily accessible.

HubSpot’s integration with major advertising platforms like Google Ads and LinkedIn allows you to create highly targeted ad campaigns aimed at key decision-makers within your target accounts. You can also implement retargeting campaigns to re-engage contacts from your target accounts who have previously interacted with your content or visited your website.

Creating and delivering personalised content and messaging tailored to the specific needs and pain points of each target account is made easy with HubSpot. This includes personalised emails, landing pages, and dynamic website content. HubSpot's workflow automation can send personalised content and follow-up messages based on the behaviour and engagement of contacts within target accounts.

HubSpot gathers and displays detailed insights on contacts and companies within your target accounts, including engagement history, communication logs, and website activity. Pre-built ABM reports measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, track key metrics such as account engagement and deal velocity, and provide data-driven insights to optimise your strategy.

In summary, HubSpot ABM equips businesses with the tools to identify high-value accounts, create targeted and personalised marketing efforts, integrate seamlessly with major advertising platforms, and leverage detailed insights and analytics to refine and enhance their marketing and sales   

Benefits of HubSpot ABM

Higher ROI:

By focusing your resources on high-value accounts, ABM tends to yield higher return on investment (ROI) compared to traditional marketing approaches. The personalised nature of ABM increases the likelihood of conversion and revenue generation from each target account.

Improved Alignment Between Marketing and Sales:

HubSpot's ABM tools foster better collaboration and alignment between marketing and sales teams. Both teams work together towards common goals, ensuring a cohesive approach to engaging and converting target accounts. HubSpot provides shared dashboards and reporting tools that allow both marketing and sales teams to track the progress and performance of ABM campaigns. This ensures alignment and collaboration between teams. Track the progression of target accounts through the sales funnel with deal stage tracking, helping both teams understand where each account stands and what actions are needed to move them forward.

Greater Customer Retention and Expansion:

ABM not only helps in acquiring new high-value accounts but also in retaining and expanding existing ones. Personalised engagement and targeted campaigns can lead to stronger relationships and opportunities for upselling and cross-selling.

Measurable Impact:

HubSpot's ABM tools provide detailed analytics and reporting, allowing you to measure the impact of your efforts and make data-driven adjustments to your strategy. This ensures continuous improvement and maximises the effectiveness of your ABM campaigns.

Use Cases for HubSpot ABM

Enterprise Sales: For companies targeting large enterprise clients, ABM helps in creating tailored engagement strategies that address the specific needs and challenges of each enterprise account.

Complex Sales Cycles: Businesses with long and complex sales cycles can benefit from ABM by maintaining consistent and personalised communication with multiple stakeholders within target accounts.

High-Value Deals: When the value of individual deals is high, ABM ensures that marketing and sales efforts are focused on the most promising and profitable opportunities.

LinkedIn Ads Campaign Objectives & Targeting Explained

LinkedIn Ads offers 3 primary campaign objectives to align with different advertising goals. Selecting the right objective helps ensure that your ads are optimised for the desired outcomes. The main campaign objectives include:

Brand Awareness:
Designed to increase awareness of your brand among a broad audience. These campaigns aim to maximise the number of people who see your ads.

Consideration:

• Website Visits: Aimed at driving traffic to your website. This objective is ideal for increasing the number of visitors to your landing pages or website content.
• Engagement: Focuses on increasing engagement with your LinkedIn content, such as likes, shares, comments, and followers for your LinkedIn Page.
• Video Views: Optimises for video views, helping you reach people more likely to watch your video content.

Conversions:

• Lead Generation: Optimises for capturing leads directly within LinkedIn through Lead Gen Forms. This is useful for collecting contact information from interested prospects.
• Website Conversions: Aims to drive specific actions on your website, such as form submissions, downloads, or purchases. This objective requires setting up LinkedIn’s conversion tracking.

How HubSpot can help meet LinkedIn advertising objectives

HubSpot Ads can significantly enhance an advertiser's efforts on LinkedIn by providing robust tools for creating, managing, and optimising ad campaigns. Here's how HubSpot Ads can help advertisers achieve various LinkedIn campaign objectives:

Brand Awareness

HubSpot allows you to import and sync your LinkedIn audiences. By leveraging HubSpot’s detailed segmentation and targeting capabilities, you can ensure your brand awareness campaigns reach a broad yet relevant audience. Use HubSpot’s analytics to track the performance of your LinkedIn brand awareness ads. Metrics such as impressions, reach, and frequency are easily monitored to measure the effectiveness of your campaign.

Consideration

Website Visits: HubSpot tracks website visits and attributes them to specific LinkedIn ads, helping you understand which ads are driving the most traffic. This insight enables you to optimise your ad spend on the most effective campaigns. Create optimised landing pages in HubSpot and directly link them to your LinkedIn ads. HubSpot’s A/B testing features help you refine these landing pages to maximise conversion rates.

Engagement: HubSpot's social media tools allow you to schedule and publish LinkedIn posts that complement your engagement ad campaigns. This integrated approach ensures consistency and maximises audience engagement. Monitor likes, shares, comments, and follower growth through HubSpot’s engagement reports. This data helps you adjust your content strategy to boost interaction with your LinkedIn content. Use the most popular organic content as advertisers to boost reach.

Video Views: Use HubSpot to create personalised video content tailored to specific audience segments identified through LinkedIn targeting. This increases the relevance and effectiveness of your video ads.

Conversions

Lead Ads :
Integrate LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms with HubSpot to automatically capture leads from LinkedIn Lead Ads into your HubSpot CRM. This seamless integration ensures no lead is lost and enables immediate follow-up. Create automated workflows in HubSpot to nurture leads captured from LinkedIn ads. These workflows can include email sequences, personalised content, and follow-up tasks for sales teams.

Website Conversions:
Set up LinkedIn’s conversion tracking within HubSpot to monitor the actions taken by visitors on your website. This tracking helps you identify which ads drive specific actions, such as form submissions or downloads. Use HubSpot’s tools to create optimised conversion paths, including landing pages, thank you pages, and follow-up emails, all tailored to maximise the conversion rates of your LinkedIn ad traffic.

LinkedIn Targeting Options 

LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities are one of its strongest features, allowing you to reach a highly specific audience based on various professional criteria. The main targeting options include:

Demographic Targeting:

Location: Target users based on their geographic location, including country, state, city, or postal code.
Age and Gender: Although LinkedIn primarily focuses on professional criteria, you can also target by age and gender if relevant to your campaign.

Firmographic Targeting:

Company: Target based on specific companies, company size, industry, or company growth rate. This is useful for ABM strategies.
Job Title: Reach users based on their job titles, helping you connect with decision-makers and influencers in your target accounts.

Role-Based Targeting:

Job Function: Target users based on their job functions, such as marketing, sales, or finance, which groups professionals based on their general role.
Job Seniority: Focus on specific levels of seniority within organisations, such as entry-level, manager, director, VP, or C-level executives.

Skills and Interests:

Skills: Target users who have listed specific skills on their LinkedIn profiles, ensuring your ads reach professionals with relevant expertise.
Interests and Traits: Use LinkedIn’s interest targeting to reach users based on their professional interests and activities.

Education:

School: Target alumni of specific schools or universities.
Degree and Field of Study: Focus on users based on their educational background, including degrees and fields of study.

Groups:

LinkedIn Groups: Target members of specific LinkedIn Groups, allowing you to reach users with specific interests or affiliations.

Matched Audiences:

• Website Retargeting: Retarget users who have visited your website, enabling you to re-engage visitors who have already shown interest in your content.
• Contact Targeting: Upload lists of email addresses or use LinkedIn’s integration with your CRM to target specific contacts.
• Account Targeting: Upload lists of company names to target specific organisations, ideal for ABM campaigns.

How to Setup LinkedIn Ads with HubSpot

Define Your Campaign Objectives
Choose your campaign objective based on your marketing goals (e.g., brand awareness, lead generation, website visits). Each objective tailors the ad setup process to align with your desired outcomes.

Identify Your Target Audience
Use LinkedIn’s robust targeting options, including industry, job title, company size, and more.
Refine your audience to ensure your ads reach the most relevant professionals.

Create Your Ad Content
Develop compelling ad creatives, including text, images, and videos.
Use clear and concise messaging that speaks directly to your target audience’s needs and pain points.

Set Your Budget and Schedule
Define your budget, bid type (CPC, CPM, CPS), and campaign duration.
Monitor LinkedIn’s recommendations to optimise your budget allocation.

• In HubSpot, navigate to Marketing > Ads.
• Click on “Connect Account” and select LinkedIn.
• Follow the prompts to authorise HubSpot to access your LinkedIn Ads account.

• If using LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, ensure they are synced with HubSpot.
• Go to Marketing > Lead Capture > Forms in HubSpot.
• Select “LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms” and configure the necessary settings to import leads directly into HubSpot

• Develop workflows in HubSpot to nurture leads captured from LinkedIn Ads.
• Navigate to Automation > Workflows in HubSpot.
• Create a new workflow, setting triggers based on form submissions or ad interactions.
• Include follow-up emails, content offers, and other nurturing actions to guide leads through the buyer’s journey.
  

Further Reading

If you want to learn more about HubSpot Ads, check out our HubSpot Ads Guide.
For a more theoretical overview of advertising, see our guide - How to using AI and Automation with Advertising.

HubSpot Ads works with LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads and Google Ads.
For a more in-depth review of each ad platform integration with HubSpot, see our blog posts:

Conclusion

Integrating HubSpot Ads with LinkedIn Ads offers a transformative approach to your digital marketing strategy. By combining HubSpot’s robust CRM and marketing automation capabilities with LinkedIn’s professional audience targeting, you can significantly enhance both lead generation and lead quality. This integration allows for seamless campaign management, precise targeting, and in-depth performance analysis, ensuring that your marketing efforts are both effective and efficient.

By following the strategies and steps outlined in this guide, you can optimise your LinkedIn advertising campaigns to reach the right audience with the right message at the right time. From defining clear objectives and improving audience targeting to creating engaging content and nurturing leads down the funnel, the HubSpot and LinkedIn Ads integration provides the tools and insights needed to drive meaningful engagement and conversions.

Ultimately, leveraging the combined strengths of HubSpot and LinkedIn Ads enables you to create highly personalised and impactful advertising campaigns. This powerful integration not only helps you achieve your marketing goals with greater precision and efficiency but also maximises your return on investment by focusing on high-quality leads and data-driven decision-making.

Embrace the power of HubSpot and LinkedIn Ads to elevate your marketing strategy, drive business growth, and stay ahead in the competitive digital landscape. By utilising this integration, you can ensure that your advertising efforts are aligned with your business objectives, resonate with your target audience, and deliver measurable results.