SHI International — B2B LinkedIn ads and A/B tests

SHI International is a global IT solutions provider. This was an ongoing LinkedIn campaign in their Canadian market, promoting Microsoft cloud services and HPE security products to enterprise IT buyers.

The interesting part isn’t any single ad. It’s that the ads were built in pairs, each designed to answer a question.

Writing for a buyer who isn’t the user

Enterprise IT purchases don’t work like consumer ones. The person clicking a LinkedIn ad is rarely the person who will use the product, and they’re almost never the only signature required. They’re gathering evidence for an internal argument.

So the copy doesn’t try to close. It offers the thing that makes their next conversation easier — a clear statement of what SHI takes off their plate, or what the technology protects against. The cloud ad leads on removing backend work, which is the IT manager’s actual daily problem, not a feature of Microsoft’s product.

Building the ads as tests

Each pair holds everything constant except one variable, so the result means something.

The Microsoft pair tests the headline: social proof against savings. One version points to the number of Microsoft cloud users who chose SHI; the other leads on cost. Same body copy, same image, same URL. Whichever wins tells you what this buyer responds to, and that finding carries into every future ad.

The HPE pair tests the creative instead — identical copy, red treatment against blue. Holding the words constant is the only way to learn anything about the visual.

That discipline is easy to lose. It’s tempting to change the headline and the image at once and call it a test, but then you’ve learned nothing about either.

Brand voice under testing

The constraint running underneath all of it: every variant has to sound like SHI. Testing generates a lot of copy quickly, and the fastest way to win a test is usually to write something louder than the brand would say.

Holding voice steady across variants means the test measures the message rather than the volume.

A note on this piece

Written for SHI International through an agency partner.