How Blissfully Applies a Persona-Driven Framework to LinkedIn Ads

Valeri Veselinski
July 18, 2024
Social Media

Undeniably, LinkedIn is an important platform for targeting your audience and ensuring higher visibility.

With a wide reach and an audience accustomed to business-related content, the platform is an ideal advertising channel for SaaS businesses. In fact, 94% of B2B marketers are using LinkedIn for distributing content.

Blissfully is one of these companies.

Their main focus is on helping businesses understand their SaaS usage within their organization.

In their LinkedIn ads strategy, Blissfully has successfully weaved in a persona-driven framework to craft targeted and personalized ads that bring value to their audience.

Let’s take a closer look.

About Blissfully

Before diving into Blissfully’s ad strategy on LinkedIn, let’s have a quick look at their website.

The homepage greets visitors with an attention-grabbing CTA. Right underneath it, the brand is leveraging the power of social proof by showing the logos of trusted customers. This is a great strategy for adding extra credibility to your business and promoting trust.

In the “complete IT platform” section, you can see the business’s use cases, as well as the personas that they’re trying to speak to.The section is strategically divided into four categories:

  • System of Records – speaking to the operations people within the organizations
  • Workflows and Automations – hinting at operations but also starting to expand the different personas, including HR, purchasing directors, or employees in charge of partnerships
  • IT Collaboration – appealing to personas operating within the IT department
  • Security and Compliance – targeting legal employees, general counsels, and compliance personas

Overall, this section is solving a range of problems for a range of people in an organization, essentially doing an excellent job at showing the array of use cases that the tool can apply to.

Analyzing Blissfully’s LinkedIn Ads Strategy

Lead gen ads on LinkedIn can pay off big time. That said, advertising on the platform is costly and it has considerable personalization limitations, which could impact lead quality.

Before breaking down Blissfully’s LinkedIn ad strategy, it might be worth noting that to justify spending higher cost-per-clicks on the platform, your customers need to have a lifetime value of $10.000 and up.

Fundamentally, Blissfully is targeting audiences based on specific factors – job function, industry, company size, specific problems, and not-yet-known pain points.

Job Function

Here’s a good example of how Blissfully is leveraging an effective creative that speaks to a clear persona and solves a clear pain point related to their job function.

Right off the bat, by using unique and catchy wording (i.e. “onboarding deja vu”), the ad is becoming instantly appealing to HR personas and members of the leadership team who need to onboard new employees.

In addition, by using questions in the ad copy, the company is triumphantly encouraging people to stop scrolling and become curious about the product.

Industry

In their LinkedIn ad strategy, Blissfully is also targeting users based on the industry they operate in.

In the ad below, for instance, the brand is speaking to a finance persona who is likely concerned with an aggregated SaaS bill.This persona might be having questions such as “Are we still using these tools?”, “Are teams still getting enough value out of them?”, “Which ones should we downgrade?”, and “Are there tools that need more users?”.As teams and SaaS stack grow, the complexity multiplies, as well. The ad strives to position the tool as a solution to optimizing complexity by getting rid of tools that are no longer being used.

Company size

For their LinkedIn ads strategy, Blissfully has included an interesting segmentation – company size based on headcount.

Here, they are targeting companies that have roughly between 50 and 100 employees. Based on their own buyer persona research, they know that on average these companies have around 40 SaaS subscriptions.

The type of ad, along with its messaging, is extremely useful for instantly identifying with your segmented audience.

Specific Problem

Blissfully’s LinkedIn ad strategy further serves as a great example of how slightly changing the creative can work towards solving different problems that the personas have.

Let’s explore two evident examples.

Automating Processes

Including a specific number (i.e. companies using 137 unique apps) without saying how big the average company is, might not be particularly useful.

That said, the ad copy below is still focusing viewers on a big number and highlighting that a lot of these tools are likely overlapping. It’s offering an attractive solution to eliminate app waste spend without spreadsheets, appealing simultaneously to multiple personas who are trying to move processes from labor-intensive to more automated.

Optimizing IT costs in a SaaS stack

Blissfully’s “use it or lose it” LinkedIn ad is also a good example of how to leverage ad copy to solve a specific pain point.

Because the advertisement itself is impressively simple, it allows users to quickly grasp all the necessary information.It suggests that if you’re not using a tool anymore, it might be time to opt out. The clear message “eliminate app waste without spreadsheets” combined with simple colors, style, and messaging is the perfect combination to grab the attention of the target persona.

Hidden Pain Points

If the tech stack is showing a certain number, you might have to verify that the invoice data is accurate.

In the following example, Blissfully is focusing its strategy on data and the accuracy of ad spend. It’s attracting the interest of users by making a strong promise and using a powerful, straight-to-the-point ad copy.

Additionally, the message is planting seeds as to how accurate the data inside these SaaS products actually is. By itself, this is a wonderful way to identify and point out a pain point that people might not yet realize that they have.

Persona Use Case Matrix

While we might not know the details of Blissfully’s ad strategy on LinkedIn, the company is likely utilizing an important marketing asset – the persona use case matrix.In a nutshell, the matrix includes an axis for core functions we want to speak to and an axis for company sizes.

Consider the table below. On one axis you have the different functions in a department:

  • Legal trying to solve compliance issues
  • Finance looking to optimize costs
  • IT interested in improving processes and workflows
  • Operations looking to drive greater productivity and perhaps streamline certain processes in the organization
  • HR looking to onboard and offboard people more efficiently

The horizontal axis showcases the different sizes of companies, from small, to medium, to large.

In each one of these boxes, there is a message that needs to go out. Right away, you can see how quickly the creative needs are going to scale.

For the strategy to be effective, each of these 15 unique messages needs to be A/B tested. By extension, this requires you to create and test 30 unique pieces of ad creative.

What gives Blissfully a lot of success with this strategy is the platform itself. Because it aligns seamlessly with the platform’s own targeting, LinkedIn is arguably your best bet when targeting prospects by job functions and company size.

Driving MQLs Through LinkedIn Ads

A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a prospect that’s more likely to eventually convert (compared to other leads) but is not quite ready to buy yet.

MQLs often require additional marketing assistance before they’re ready to jump on a sales call. To win the prospect’s trust you will need to use strong lead generation magnets and, eventually, start building remarketing campaigns.

Blissfully’s low hurdle leads form is requesting the viewer’s email to try and warm the prospect up to the brand and position them to accept their solution.

How Did Blissfully Do on Their LinkedIn Ads Strategy?

Overall grade: A-In a world with continuously shortening attention spans, simplicity and brevity are vital, which is what makes Blissfully’s ads especially impressive.

The company has successfully managed to create a segmentation of the personas and display their different use cases. The creative speaks uniquely to the different personas, it’s eye-catching and easy-to-skim, making it ideal for LinkedIn users who are quickly scrolling through.With that in mind, there are still a few things that the company could be testing. In terms of different creatives, for instance, there could be more diversity in the creative itself.

Taking Your Ads Strategy to the Next level

LinkedIn is increasingly popular among SaaS marketers, which means it’s a crowded space, and converting viewers into loyal customers might turn out to be a challenge.

To create ads that inspire, head to our blog and discover how to write a good ad copy that sells.

Valeri Veselinski

Head of Social Media Marketing

Leading a team of social media marketing specialists. Utilising Facebook and LinkedIn advertising capabilities in the best possible way.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/valeri-veselinski-9a739356/