How Census achieved a 10x increase in pipeline with the LinkedIn startup team

• The Census Marketing team approached the LinkedIn team with a clear goal: Book high-quality demos from prospects within their ICP. For them, these were decision makers at data warehouse-native companies that can influence change across data, revenue operations, and marketing.

• Census knew their ICP, but given its niche and nature, getting in front of and converting them posed a challenge. They needed resources and guidance from the experts on the LinkedIn team.

Define the strategy

• The LinkedIn startup team worked with Census to understand their goals and develop a strategic roadmap to get there. The process started with a conversation to identify specific targets and performance metrics they wanted to achieve.

• From there, the LinkedIn startup team delivered a fully mapped-out plan to help Census achieve their goals. The revamped strategy was anchored in key areas: audiences and targeting, content and messaging, ad products, and overall campaign structure.

• This helped Census’s marketing team build and refine a high-quality audience, create relevant content and develop messaging, and clearly understand the A/B testing roadmap for the next several months.

A strategy backed by support

• The partnership between Census and LinkedIn went beyond developing the initial strategy. The two teams met regularly to ensure that campaigns were running at peak performance. In these meetings, they reviewed Census’s backend data to identify areas to accelerate growth and generate efficiencies based on pipeline insights and sales outcomes.
  
  
• Corliss credits Census’s success to this ongoing partnership. “The really powerful thing is that after launching, it wasn’t just set it and forget it.” The learnings from backend data reviews allowed Census and the LinkedIn startup team to perform ROI-based optimizations using audience and targeting-driven insights as well as content and messaging-driven insights.
  
  
• The Census and LinkedIn teams worked closely together to stay accountable to shared goals. “The LinkedIn team was not afraid to say ‘good enough is not okay.’ They really guided us to the point where we were generating extremely high-quality contacts,” Corliss shares.

Iterating and scaling

• The regular check-in was a process of continual refinement that brought Census’s campaigns to a new level of efficiency and effectiveness.
  
  
• A weekly lead quality review by the Census team helped refine their targeting and improved campaign outcomes. “Every single month we work with the LinkedIn startup team, our lead quality gets even better. We’re eliminating people we don’t want to target and we’re broadening our audience to even more people who will be impacted by using our product.”
  
  
• In addition to improving lead quality, Census and the LinkedIn startup team also reviewed data consistently – analyzing down-funnel impact by content and ad format, as well as demographic and firmographic trends based on top-performing targeting attributes, conversion rates, and deal sizes. These trends allowed Census to refine their strategy and shift budget toward yielding the greatest pipeline impact.