Today we’ll cover how to integrate your brand’s LinkedIn Ads account with the Hubspot CRM and all of the ancillary benefits that come along with the integration.
Connecting A LinkedIn Ads Account to Hubspot
The first step in connecting a LinkedIn Ads account within Hubspot is ensuring that the user in charge of connecting the platforms has the necessary permissions. The HubSpot user who connects a LinkedIn Ads account needs to have “Publish” access to the ads tool within HubSpot and must have an Account Manager role in that LinkedIn Ads account.
To check permissions within LinkedIn Ads, click the gear icon in Campaign Manager and select “Manage Access.”
Once necessary permissions are granted, we can navigate back to the Hubspot interface to finish the integration process. First, click the gear icon in the top menu bar to navigate to settings and scroll down to the Marketing section where you’ll click “Ads.” From there, click the button that says “Connect Account.” When prompted to choose an ad network, select LinkedIn, then log into your account and click “Allow.” Choose the LinkedIn Ads account you want to integrate with Hubspot and hit “Connect.” A dialog box will ask if you want to sync leads from this LinkedIn account – check yes as this will allow Hubspot to automatically retrieve leads from your LinkedIn Ads without having to manually download them. This is one of the key benefits of integrating the two platforms. There you have it! You should now see the connected LinkedIn Ads account under the Ads Accounts tab within Hubspot.
Hubspot Leads Synching
Now that you have integrated the LinkedIn Ads Account with Hubspot, you can begin to take advantage of all the incredible perks that come with it. As mentioned earlier, by turning on Lead Syncing, all leads captured on LinkedIn will automatically be transferred to Hubspot to make it easy for the client’s Sales team to reach out to prospects right away. This significantly reduces the lag in communication from the time a user fills out a Lead Form until the time they’re contacted.
Hubspot Custom Audiences
Another great benefit of integration is the ability to create highly targeted audiences that can sync with your LinkedIn account. For example, in Hubspot, you can create a list of contacts that fall within certain deal stages of your sales pipeline, and then directly market to those users on LinkedIn by creating ads that target the audience you generated. You can choose whether to have the audience list remain Static (not change) or Active, which will dynamically update to include or exclude users who have moved beyond or fallen out of your Sales Pipeline. You can create an audience of contacts who are in the early stages of the deal process and serve them ads that contain relevant information to nurture them through to the next level of the sales funnel. The ability to create highly customized lists allows you to cater the content of your ads to ensure you’re reaching the right audience with the right message. This is extremely beneficial for B2B clients who have a longer than average customer purchasing cycle and need to really groom and educate their leads. One thing to keep in mind is that you need a minimum of 300 contacts in a list in order to generate an audience on LinkedIn. This means you need to avoid creating hyper-segmented audiences otherwise they won’t populate.
Hubspot Ads Reporting
One great perk of connecting your accounts is the ability to take advantage of Hubspot’s Ads Reporting Dashboard. To navigate to the dashboard, go to the top menu, select Marketing, and then click Ads. This dashboard is incredibly beneficial if you’re not only running ads on LinkedIn but Google or some other platform as well. The ads dashboard will display and report on all existing ads campaigns from your connected ads account. This allows you to track the performance of all your different campaigns across several platforms in one centralized location. You can even take it a step further and refine your reports based on specified filters such as Date, Attribution Reports, Accounts, and whether the campaign is active or inactive. If you click the Analyze tab, you can compare the overall performance of each platform against each other to see which channel most of your traffic is coming from.
Closing Thoughts
Hubspot offers some pretty incredible capabilities when integrated with LinkedIn Ads that allow you to efficiently create campaigns, and analyze the effectiveness of the campaigns you create. If you work for an agency and a client is willing to grant you access to their Hubspot account, you can gather a ton of useful information to generate reliable insights and influence your digital marketing strategy accordingly.
