LaunchDarkly breaks through barriers with LinkedIn Marketing Solutions

Challenge

LaunchDarkly offers feature management solutions to help software development teams create and release code faster. In fact, they’re the first scalable feature management platform that enables faster innovation, collaboration, and delivery.

Being the first in a space they helped create, awareness has traditionally been a big challenge for the team. “Brand awareness is a big, big part for us,” says Maurice Maxwell, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at LaunchDarkly. “Our audience isn’t necessarily solution aware. We have to educate people and help them understand how our solution will revolutionize the way they develop and code.”

Furthermore, the team’s target audience of “anyone who manages code” casts a wide net of individuals for LaunchDarkly’s marketing team to reach, including CIOs, CTOs, code managers, software developers, and more. LaunchDarkly needed a new, reliable means of getting their message out there and in front of the right people.

Solution

To generate new interest in feature management (a name they helped coin) and their brand, LaunchDarkly turned to the LinkedIn platform for their large, active audience of professionals.

Engaging ad types like Conversation Ads were also a big draw. “With Conversation Ads, we can engage and ask qualifying questions to ensure we’re talking to the right people,” explains Maxwell. “We can say ‘hey, this doesn’t sound like you, let’s not waste your time.’ It’s engaging and the more someone’s able to engage, the better.” This strategy allows LaunchDarkly to generate awareness and qualify leads at the same time.

Results

Since the company’s initial investments in LinkedIn advertising a couple years back, the platform has now become one of LaunchDarkly’s major pipeline generators. “It’s now about a third of our budget,” says Maxwell. “We spend a lot on LinkedIn because we find a lot of our audience on LinkedIn, allowing us to build our brand and capture that brand through demand gen.”

The company’s current highest performing campaign has driven about $1.2 million in pipeline and $1.16 million in incremental Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). If those deals close, their return on investment would be $7.39 per $1 spent.

Targeting is the big differentiator

LinkedIn has traditionally been a part of LaunchDarkly’s marketing strategy, but it wasn’t always the biggest slice of the pie. “When I looked at our results and what we were spending on other platforms, LinkedIn was doing really well so I wanted to dedicate additional budget to it,” recalls Maxwell.

It wasn’t just the previous success of LinkedIn that convinced Maxwell. “We wanted to reach specific target accounts and LinkedIn has the best targeting of all platforms,” explains Maxwell. “It made sense. We want to target these accounts, we really want to move these people through the funnel, so LinkedIn is where we need to be.”

LaunchDarkly’s targeting success on LinkedIn not only resulted in increasing brand awareness, but also a higher and faster conversion rate. “Our sales team has better data from LinkedIn which really helps us there,” says Maxwell. “When they convert on LinkedIn, our sales people know a little bit more about them because they have a LinkedIn profile.”

Feeding their creativity

To stand out from the crowded social media landscape, LaunchDarkly focuses on staying relevant to their targets and capturing attention through new, creative campaign concepts.

“We came up with this idea inspired by a ‘lunch and learn,’” says Maxwell. “It turned into a ‘lunch and learn about LaunchDarkly.’ Prospects would sign up for a product demo and get a $50 DoorDash gift card for lunch. That’s been immensely successful.”

The team’s ‘lunch and learn’ campaign has been one of their highest-performing offers of all time, generating $1.2 million in pipeline and growing

Embracing experimentation

From audience segments to ad types, LaunchDarkly attributes part of their success to thorough testing and experimentation. “Playing around with the segment breakdown function has really helped my campaigns,” shares Maxwell. “When I build our campaign audiences, I play around with that function a lot to make sure that any campaign is going to be super, super targeted.”

Exploring new and even ignored ad types has also helped compound the team’s success. “People often overlook Text Ads, but those ads have some of our lowest cost per lead,” says Maxwell. “Experiment with all ad types, especially new ones. Newer ad types tend to be cheaper and there isn’t nearly as much competition.”

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