The Cold Audience Problem
Looking for a LinkedIn full funnel strategy that can help you close more MSP clients?
Most MSPs that attempt LinkedIn ads get it wrong right out of the gate. A company launches LinkedIn ads targeting IT directors and CFOs at mid-market companies, pushes them straight to a demo request or consultation booking page, and then declares that LinkedIn advertising “doesn’t work for our industry.” The truth is that cold audiences simply aren’t ready to hop on the phone with your sales team, and in my experience, this applies to roughly 95% of IT services companies.
Why Cold Traffic Doesn’t Convert
Think about it from your prospect’s perspective. They’re a busy operations director at a manufacturing company with 200 employees. They’re dealing with compliance headaches, aging infrastructure, and employees who keep clicking on phishing emails. They scroll past your ad promising “comprehensive managed IT services” and, even if they’re vaguely interested, they’re not about to carve out 30 minutes for a sales call with a company they just discovered two seconds ago. They need to be warmed up first, and that’s where a multi-stage funnel becomes essential.
How the Multi-Stage Funnel Works
The concept is simple: instead of going straight for the kill with every prospect, you create a series of campaigns that gradually build familiarity and trust with each stage moving the prospects closer to conversion. Based on our experience, multi-stage funnels have a 3x lower cost per conversion compared to single-stage funnels.
Stage One: Cold Brand Awareness Campaigns
Stage one is for your cold audience. Here you can leverage LinkedIn’s powerful targeting to reach your ideal customer. For an MSP, this might mean targeting COOs at companies with 50 to 500 employees in specific industries where you have vertical expertise. At this stage, you’re not asking for anything significant. You’re simply putting valuable content in front of them. Based on my experience, thought leadership ads are by far the best content for Stage One. We’ve seen thought-leader ads generate cost-per-click (CPC) rates that are 75% lower than those of other ad formats.
Stage Two: Retargeting Engaged Prospects
Stage two is when retargeting begins. Anyone who interacted with your Stage One content will be an audience member for Stage Two.
In Stage Two, we want to focus on education. For IT service providers, this is an excellent place to showcase client success stories, industry-specific case studies, or informative material that positions your team as experts. One key point is that you need to exclude these engaged prospects from your Stage Onecampaigns. Otherwise, they’ll continue seeing your cold-traffic ads instead of progressing through your funnel.
Stage Three: Bottom-of-Funnel Conversion
Stage three is all about conversion. At this point, your prospects have now interacted with your brand at least twice. They recognize your logo, they’ve consumed your content, and they understand what you do. As a result, this audience is significantly more receptive to a bottom-of-funnel offer. When you ask them to schedule a network assessment or book a consultation, they’re far more likely to convert because you’ve earned their attention through value rather than demanding it outright.
For MSPs, we love running free cybersecurity assessments, IT expense audits, or anything else that we can provide for little to no cost that our prospects will find valuable.
Hands-On Application Tips
Campaign Naming and Organization
For campaign organization, I recommend naming your campaigns with a stage prefix like S01, S02, and S03. This keeps all organized properly in Campaign Manager and allows you to quickly assess performance at each funnel stage.
Budget and Schedule Projections
Now, I won’t sugarcoat the requirements. To run this plan successfully, you’ll need patience and an adequate budget. LinkedIn requires at least 300 people in a retargeting audience before it will serve ads to that segment, which means your stage two and three campaigns won’t launch immediately. A monthly budget of around $3,000-$5,000 provides enough runway to build these audiences while still generating meaningful volume, though you can certainly start smaller and scale up as your retargeting pools grow.If you aren’t ready to invest that much, that’s okay. There are plenty of other low-budget LinkedIn ad strategies that you can leverage as an MSP.
