Tutorial 2: Choose your Campaign Management style

At a high level, what activities are involved in managing a campaign?

Management of a LinkedIn DM campaign is considered to involve a number of chronological activities.

For simplicity, we'll split them into three phases:

1. Building your list of prospects
2. Researching those prospects and/or writing messages for them
3. Sending those messages and tracking engagement results

There are various ways to do each of those phases, and you can choose the way that best suits your needs and budget.

In this tutorial, we'll cover all of the options for how to do each phase, and explain the advantages and disadvantages of those options.

What decisions need to be made?

Typically, you will first make a decision about how much control of each phase you want to have: either you manage the phase yourself, or you delegate that responsibility.

For your campaign, you might choose any of these options: fully self-managed, partly delegated or fully delegated.

Here is an overview of how each phase can be delegated or self-managed.

*Please note this table scrolls horizontally on smaller devices

Let's step through what all of this means.

How each Phase could work if Self-Managed vs Delegated

List Build

Self-Managed

• If you want to build your own lists, you can. There are a number of tools available for you to use to build your own lists, including SaaS subscriptions to databases as well as list-building features of other SaaS tools.
• A tool like LinkedIn Sales Navigator is designed specifically for the purpose of finding prospects that meet your target audience criteria. This is where most B2B prospect list builders start - and it can deliver great results. It is always worth remembering though that the filters here are only as good as the data that users of the platform have captured. And whilst the filters available are extensive, they can be so extensive that it's not necessarily clear which are the best filters to use (we'll cover this in Tutorial 3!)
• There are other databases that you can purchase data from - such as Apollo, Crunchbase, RocketReach, Cognism, Uplead, for example. These can be good if you have additional filters not covered by Sales Navigator, like 'company has raised funding within the last 12 months'. However, sometimes leads found via these databases aren't very active on LinkedIn - and this can have a negative impact on the engagement rates of your campaigns.
• It's worth bearing in mind that if you have a subscription to a LinkedIn Send Automation tool, some have inbuilt list building features too (or the ability to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator from within the tool). More on this when we cover the third phase below!

Delegated

• If you decide that you don't have time to build lists, or you're not comfortable with the filters or database options available, then you may choose to delegate this activity. Delegation of list building can bring benefit in terms of lower unit costs (the delegated authority can have multiple existing database subscriptions if they are list building for multiple people) and additional expertise (the delegated authority will be building lists regularly.)
• The cheapest option is to hire an offshore list building service from somewhere like Fiverr or Upwork. These freelancers often have experience with Sales Navigator and/or a select set of databases. An advantage of this is that you can ask these freelancers to perform additional manual steps - like for example checking whether prospects from non-LinkedIn databases are indeed active on LinkedIn. However, you may experience variability in data quality in the outputs if you do not manage this service closely, or if you do not specify very particularly what you are looking for - and this can be time-consuming for you.
• The next cheapest option is to use Koneksi's list building service. Koneksi uses a combination of in-house and offshore list building services, and provides a management layer to quality-assure the outputs, meaning you don't have to spend any time on it.
• The premium option is to use a LinkedIn Marketing Agency, who will provide a similar service to Koneksi, but at their own premium price point. The additional benefit of using a Marketing Agency will vary by agency - but some will provide a dedicated account manager who will meet with you as regularly as you want, to discuss options and answer questions.

Research & Write

Once you have your list of prospects, it's time to prepare messages for them.

Note that it is an option to send all prospects the same message. If you have a blanket message that is applicable broadly, then you can choose to send everyone the same thing. However, it's worth considering the risks associated with generic messaging - engagement rates will be lower if people can sense that the message has been sent to many others, and in a worst case scenario, your messages might be considered spam. Generic messages can do well if the message is really compelling in its own right, or if it's unusual, but usually generic messages do not perform as well as personalised messages do.

Personalisation of messages drives up engagement rates because recipients get the sense your message is directed to their eyes only, and that it has been more thoughtfully crafted for a good reason. As a result, the message is read more frequently, and therefore has a higher chance of getting a response.

The rest of this section is based on the assumption that you'll use personalised messages, but if not, you can skip to the next section.

Self-Managed

• If you want to personally be involved in the research and message writing process, then you can do so! You can explore your prospects' footprints online via LinkedIn, Google, or any other direct information sources available to you.
• The outputs of that manual research can then be used to curate personalised outreach messages for each prospect - and again, the processing of that information, and the identification of relevant points to include in your messages will be done by you.
• If you have too many prospects to be able to do this manually yourself, then the option to scale this manual process involves hiring additional employees directly into your team.
• Typically lead generation is a continuous process, to maintain a continuous pipeline, so the way you scale this manual approach should be repeatable/sustainable, and if you're targeting high enough volumes, then additional FTE could be the right solution.
• However, this can be a costly approach, and it's not always a full FTE (or whole number of FTE) worth of work. If it's not possible to run this process yourself, and hiring FTEs doesn't sound like a good option, then it's possible to delegate this phase of the process.

Delegated

• If you choose to delegate this process, then you have a couple of options.
• One option is to hire offshore resources on a part-time basis - via sites like Fiverr or Upwork. These resources can be scaled up and down flexibly, and so can perform the research and writing activities you want to perform for a high volume of prospects at any time required. However, in order to assure the quality of the outputs of this service, you (or someone you trust) will need to manage the resources and outputs closely, which takes time and effort - and so this option does not empower you to fully delegate the whole process; you (or your designated manager) will still need to be involved in a hands-on supervision capacity.
• The human time involved in this offshoring option is also more costly than it could be. Reading, understanding and processing a lot of text online takes a lot of time for humans. Much more time than it takes AI.
• The most performant option when working at scale is to use Koneksi for prospect research and message curation. This is Koneksi's core product; our proprietary software is built for exactly this purpose. Koneksi researches each prospect online and then selects the most relevant information from that research to include into personalised 1:1 outreach messages. It can do this consistently for an unlimited number of prospects, all in parallel, and without any supervision.

Send & Track

Self-Managed

• When it comes to sending your messages to your prospects, you might feel most comfortable sending them manually yourself, from your profile. If you choose this approach, you maintain total control of your profile.
• However, taking this manual approach will introduce limitations on volumes of messages that can be sent - on the basis of the time you have available for the activity. Your time is not scalable, so this is not a scalable approach.
• Hiring FTEs to create scalability is not a great option in this scenario - because they all need access to your personal profile in order to be able to send anything manually.
• So the most scalable option is to use automation software that can execute your campaign from your profile. You still control the sending yourself if you use a campaign execution tool, so you do not relinquish control of what is sent from your profile. You give the tool permission to link into your profile, and then you configure a set of steps you want the tool to follow for each of your prospects - like sending them connection requests and messages. If you're interested in exploring options for automation tools, you we compiled a list of them in this blog post here .
• These campaign execution tools are typically designed for you to load your prospect list, configure your campaign steps including specifying the messages you want to send, and then click Go. It's possible to send generic messages with these tools, just with dynamic keywords; but it's also possible to load your custom messages for each prospect to be sent, too.
• These tools also offer near-realtime results data, so that you can track engagement rates as the campaign progresses - which is a distinct advantage over sending everything by hand from your profile, and trying to keep track manually of who has replied in order to understand engagement rates and potential improvement areas.
• The key considerations for you with this approach are 1) ensuring you stay within appropriate automation limits so as not to put your profile at risk and 2) ensuring you optimise the campaign steps for the best possible results. If you don't have experience with running campaigns, this will require some iteration over time as you learn what works and what doesn't.

Delegated

• Given that setting up and running your own campaign in an execution automation tool requires knowledge of how to use campaign execution tools before you start, you may choose to delegate this activity.
• Should you choose to delegate to Koneksi, our experience of running campaigns will help to optimise your results. If taking this option, once Koneksi starts running your campaign, you would start receiving acceptances and responses on your LinkedIn profile, and then Koneksi would send you a campaign results summary once the campaign concludes.
• There are Marketing agencies that offer this service too, although the messages they send are not 100% personalised. And the price point is usually much higher than Koneksi, because they're not using proprietary automation in the way we are.
• You might even choose to start with a delegated approach, so that you can learn how it all works, and then once you feel more comfortable, bring the process in-house and manage it yourself. It just depends on your personal preferences and goals with this process.

Takeaways

Ultimately, the best campaign management style for you will depend on your needs and preferences for quality, cost, and importantly, how much time you have to dedicate to the process.

It might be that you start by delegating more and self-managing less, so that you can see how it all works, before bringing activities in-house. Or perhaps you'll do it the other way around - so that you understand everything first before delegating it for scalability reasons.

These tutorials will, when completed all together, prepare you to run the whole process by yourself. But should you choose to delegate any part of the process to Koneksi, then it's worth knowing our approach and intentions for each phase:

• For List Building, Koneksi aims to offer a balance between reasonable cost and reasonable quality. Our list building service is not the most premium option, but if you want good quality at a good price, then that's what we offer.
• For Prospect Research and Message Writing, this is Koneksi's core capability. If you want to research prospects and curate messages for individuals at any kind of scale, you need automation to do it efficiently - and only Koneksi does this.
• For Message Sending and Campaign Tracking, Koneksi's service is a low cost alternative to using a Marketing Agency - largely because the core of our business is in generating the personalised messages that we send, which agencies do not do like we do. If you're comfortable running campaigns yourself, there are tools you can use. If not, or if you don't have time, this can be done for you at a reasonable cost by Koneksi.

Head to Tutorial 3 to read more about the importance of having a clear Proposition and Target Audience - and how to achieve clarity on both.