LinkedIn Ads Integration with HubSpot – Part I

LinkedIn Ads integration with Hubspot Feb 16, 2019 - Marcel Odena

On February 13, 2019, LinkedIn announced on its blog the integration of LinkedIn Ads with HubSpot, one of the best Marketing CRMs on the market today. So what does this mean for a company that uses HubSpot and is investing money in LinkedIn advertising? It means that you can now connect your HubSpot account with your LinkedIn advertising account so that HubSpot audiences (Smart Lists) will be visible on your LinkedIn campaigns. Therefore, you can create campaigns on LinkedIn using LinkedIn members as an audience who form part of a subset of HubSpot contacts with specific characteristics (job, company size, industry, etc.) and have displayed certain behaviors (interest in the products, downloading specific content, etc.). Furthermore, this integration also allows the leads you’ve obtained through the LinkedIn Lead Generation Form to be transferred to HubSpot.

News regarding the integration of Linkedin Ads with HubSpot can be found in this article of the official Linkedin blog and in this HubSpot article.

What does the HubSpot and LinkedIn Ads integration include?

The integration of HubSpot with LinkedIn Ads primarily includes two vital aspects:

  1. Audiences: Integration of HubSpot audiences with LinkedIn Ads.
  2. Leads Transfer: HubSpot integration with the leads obtained through the LinkedIn Lead Generation Forms.

1. Integration of HubSpot audiences with LinkedIn Ads

The LinkedIn Ads integration with HubSpot audiences allows you to create campaigns on LinkedIn using your HubSpot contact lists (leads) as an audience.

The great advantage of this integration is that you can use HubSpot’s intelligence when dealing with the leads you’ve already obtained through your LinkedIn Ads campaigns. Through this integration, you can now benefit from the strengths of each platform:

  • HubSpot: You can take full advantage of its tremendous capacity to classify leads according to demographic characteristics (job, company size, country, etc.) and behaviors (level of interest, engagement, etc.). You can classify leads according to their characteristics and behavior through HubSpot’s Smart Lists.
  • Linkedin Ads: You can take advantage of its privileged B2B environment and its versatile advertising platform. which allows you to show sponsored content to Linkedin members who belong to preselected HubSpot Smart Lists.which allows you to show sponsored content to Linkedin members who belong to preselected HubSpot Smart Lists.

With these two programs, companies are able to show much more relevant ads to potential buyers (leads). Together, they can show messages and promotions of more appropriate content depending on where the user is within the sales funnel .

2. HubSpot integration with LinkedIn Leads Generation Forms.

The integration between HubSpot and LinkedIn allows to transfer to the HubSpot lead management system all the leads obtained through Linkedin Lead Generation Forms.

In a HubSpot article about the integration the company stated that the Lead Gen Forms have been integrated with HubSpot. We’ve been able to verify through one of our clients that the Lead Gen Forms are indeed integrated with HubSpot.

This means that when you capture a lead using the Linkedin Lead Generation Form , it gets transferred to HubSpot directly after a few minutes without going through Zapier, which is how leads are currently being transferred. The problem with Zapier is that it’s a bit tedious to work with and suffers from frequent technical problems. For example, the Linkedin-Zapier connection can sometimes fail, so the leads don’t transfer across.

Therefore, in terms of being better able to evaluate lead behaviors ahead of time, we can presume the integration contains improvements in the campaign attributions of a lead. When analyzing the activity of a lead in HubSpot which the integration has captured through the LinkedIn Lead Generation Form, an entry can be observed which indicates both the campaigns and the name of the advertisement that the lead came from. This is excellent news because it facilitates the analysis of which campaigns contribute the most to generating business (pipe).

Here is the information that appears in HubSpot for a lead which has been transferred from LinkedIn:

  • FirstName & Lastname was created from Paid Social from LinkedIn
  • FirstName & Lastname had an Ads event:
    • FirstName & Lastname clicked on your LinkedIn “name of the ad
    • LinkedIn campaign: Default Campaign Group
    • LinkedIn ad account: “account name
    • LinkedIn ad group: “campaign name

How to integrate HubSpot with Linkedin Ads

The integration of HubSpot with LinkedIn Ads works as follows:

1) HubSpot-Linkedin connection. Your HubSpot account is connected to your LinkedIn advertising account.

conexion cuenta Linkedin Ads en Hubspot

2) The HubSpot Smart Lists or the web visitors list is prepared (explained in the next section).
3) Create the audiences for LinkedIn in HubSpot . From HubSpot, we indicate which lists we want to use in Linkedin. See the following illustration:

integracion hubspot linkedin ads - comparticion de listas inteligentes

Image obtained from the official HubSpot website

 

Creating HubSpot audiences for Linkedin Ads

There are two options when creating audiences in HubSpot and then using them in Linkedin Ads, which are:

1) Audience that is based on visitors to the web: in HubSpot, we can create user lists based on the pages they’ve visited, just like you can on Linkedin. However, the advantage is that you can make these lists more sophisticated in HubSpot. You could say: “users who have seen page A but not page B,” and similar combinations (this cannot be done in LinkedIn at the moment)

2) Audience that is based on a HubSpot contact list: you can elaborate HubSpot Smart Lists according to the groups of leads that you want to deal with. For example, you could create a list for the leads that are Top Of The Funnel (TOFU), another for those that are in the Middle of the Funnel (MOFU), and another for those that are in the bottom of the funnel (BOFU).

Below is an image in which you can select one of the two options:

create audience hubspot linkedin

 

Does this integration work to generate new leads?

The integration of Linkedin Ads with Hubspot doesn’t generate new leads because the HubSpot audiences we use in Linkedin Ads are the leads we already have in the HubSpot system. All these leads will have been acquired through various channels such as organic traffic, pay-per-click, and Linkedin ads, etc. In any case, these are leads that you already have.

The great thing about this integration is that it allows you to accompany the user along the customer journey, combining the intelligence of HubSpot to learn about the lead’s state with the power of Linkedin to show them advertisements. As you’re undoubtedly aware, the task of generating new leads is as important as pushing them down the funnel. With that in mind, you may want to read this article about the need to create a strategy to push leads into the sales funnel.

What type of LinkedIn ads are supported with the HubSpot integration?

Of all the types of ads that Linkedin supports in this integration, only the following ad formats are available:

1) Sponsored content ads, both the classic format and the Lead Generation. For more information, you can check this article about sponsored content ads. Here is an example:

Anuncio contenido patrocionado con imagen y Formulario de Generacion de Leads (LGF) version movil

2) Text ads:: this type of ad consists of a relatively short piece of text. Although it’s not a visual format, it can work well in certain circumstances. Here is an example of a text ad:

text ads

For now, video ads, carousel ads, los Inmail ads, and dynamic ads are not part of the integration.
This information has been obtained from the official HubSpot website.

Is there an investment limit to use the integration?

The integration of HubSpot and LinkedIn Ads is designed for a maximum investment of 10,000 euros. If you exceed this investment, you have to pay an additional cost which HubSpot calls an “Add-on:”
ads add-on HubSpot

As you can see in the image, the add-on costs €90 per month on top of what you already pay to use HubSpot, for an additional investment of €50,000 (therefore, €60,000 in total). You’ll have to talk to the HubSpot sales department if you’d like to invest above these amounts.

Conclusion

The integration of HubSpot and LinkedIn Ads opens a new door to anyone who wants to improve their day to day B2B marketing. It allows you to use HubSpot’s intelligence to create lead groups based on their behavior, and then customize your advertising through Linkedin Ads depending on what position they are in the sales funnel.

Acknowledgments

For the creation of this article, we’d like to give special recognition to:

  • Luis Carlos Martin, LinkedIn Enterprise Account Director, for letting us know about this new feature through his publication about Hubspot-Linkedin integration.
  • The marketing team at RedPoints and especially to Carles Civit, marketing analytist, for the agility in analyzing the data from the integration and for observing the great news, that the campaign is attributed with the lead obtained, vital to be able to analyze the ROI of investment in advertising.

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Marcel Odena

Marcel Odena

CEO at Magnetica Advertising | LinkedIn Ads Expert

Since 2013 I've been working in the Pay Per Click Advertising Industry. I manage Google and LinkedIn Ads accounts for several B2B companies. I work to deliver results to my clients as well to contribute to do better B2B marketing. I like to learn and share my knowledge at the same time.