LinkedIn Advertising
LinkedIn Ads is a paid marketing tool that offers access to LinkedIn social networks through various sponsored posts and other methods. LinkedIn Adds is a powerful marketing tool for B2B companies to build leads, online recognition, share content, and more.
Being part of LinkedIn can have positive effects on growing organically online. To grow in the professional market, companies have to use LinkedIn marketing to achieve it, and with LinkedIn, Ads promote their presence on the platform. LinkedIn ads provide many benefits to companies, not just for added reach and recognition but the opportunity to increase sales, hire talented people, and be a part of an industry’s social media presence.
LinkedIn is a social media for professionals, and its users are mostly using it to connect with other professionals for work-related topics. That could be fulfilling recruitment needs, discussing and sharing news amongst colleagues, discovering industry news, and much more. The best benefit of LinkedIn Ads for businesses is the ability to reach specific business-related goals with online advertising easier.
With more than 660 million users in over 220 countries, LinkedIn is the biggest social network for professionals and businesses alike. LinkedIn is a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2016. LinkedIn ads as a platform can be compared directly with Facebook, in function, and style of targeting, and both have pros and cons when it comes to online advertising.
Depending on your goals choosing the perfect mix of online advertising that utilizes many platforms might be the best solution for your company. Users on LinkedIn are looking for solutions, and by being there, solving problems, and being seen through your ads, you can be ready to solve their problems.
Using LinkedIn to Increase The Visibility Of Your Brand:
Building a brand online is a strong strategy for marketing to implement. LinkedIn Ads can help in building a sustainable and trusted brand online in the professional markets. When visibility from LinkedIn is optimized correctly, marketing spending will lower, or you’re able to scale advertising profitably. LinkedIn ads should be included in your B2B marketing strategies if you want to build an online presence in the B2B markets.
A trusting and strong expert brand online will help your other marketing strategies succeed, as well. For example, being present on LinkedIn, will increase your organic searches on Google and improve your search ranking as people start researching your brand and the content you have created.
Campaigns Ideas To Start LinkedIn Ads:
LinkedIn Adds campaigns can be used for job recruitment ads, service and product sales, lead generation, promoting content, increasing visibility, and reach for a new company location. While LinkedIn offers a great advertising platform for B2B companies, B2C companies can utilize LinkedIn Ads to promote job listings and share relevant industry content, or relevant product categories.
LinkedIn offers many marketing solutions for companies to benefit from to expand their online reach. Compared to other ad platforms such as Facebook, or Google search, LinkedIn’s main benefit, is the ability to efficiently target professionals in your dedicated industry.
Leading Generation With The Help Of LinkedIn:
LinkedIn is a powerful tool for generating B2B leads to increase your sales and build connections. LinkedIn ads provide a solution for getting quality leads at scale, whatever the end goal of an advertising campaign is, whether sales, recruitment, or reach. Targeting the right professional demographics that match your audience, to gain high-quality leads, is an opportunity for every business.
Boosting The Number Of Leads With Lead Generation Forms:
Choosing a conversion campaign and lead gen forms can drive more leads to your business through advertising. When using conversion campaigns, the pre-filled forms can be easier to convert users when compared to a form on your proper website, but both should be implemented.
Lead generation forms improve the conversion rates of your lead generation campaigns, as they are easy to use and fast for the respective customers. With the use of lead gen forms, you can produce high-quality leads at scale, and the leads can be managed with third-party CRM or other marketing automation tools.
Lead generation forms are pre-filled forms that are attached to your LinkedIn advertising campaigns, and available for sponsored content and message ads. Lead generation forms can be used to send traffic to download white papers or direct traffic to thank-you pages. These actions could be tracked separately to measure download rates and other metrics.
LinkedIn As Target:
With LinkedIn, you can target by job titles, locations, industry, level of education, and more. By far, LinkedIn targeting offers its best benefit of a unique spin for online advertising that is advertising for purely professional needs. Having your clients analyzed and building a proper buyer persona from the audience, you can utilize it in your LinkedIn advertising.
By targeting specific audiences for specific goals, you can achieve higher returns on your advertisement. Perfect for B2B advertising online, but B2C companies can still utilize LinkedIn targeting options as they might have found that a perfect client fits a certain buyer persona. Access to reaching high-quality audiences can be difficult in other online advertising channels.
Reach a professional audience that is older, more educated, and has access to more income. For business purposes targeting by the job, titles, and more allows you to tighten your targeting options to match your preferred audience. Audience templates within LinkedIn ads targeting can help you get started with key audiences to start building your ad campaigns.
Start by having a clear objective with targeting and narrow it down from there, without narrowing it too much. Narrowly targeted campaigns will not reach as many users, and it can hurt your campaign as there isn’t enough data for optimization. Industry-specific targeting and audience attribute to build your audiences from:
- Job title
- Seniority
- Company name
- Company size
- Industry
- Skills
- Degree types
- Group and individual interests
Testing With Targeting Options And Audience:
To find the best balance of targeting options and the right audiences for your goals, and campaigns, you will have to test different variables in your audiences to find what works the best for you. By testing audiences, you will increase your reach, impressions, and results from your campaigns.
Gaining access to an audience that works for you can be highly valuable to your business down the line. Start with two similar campaigns and only change variables within targeting to find what targeting options are best for the wanted goals. Always keep improving performance by a/b testing new variables with past targeting options that have won.
Matched Audience And Custom Targeting:
Matching audiences enables you to advertise to a very targeted set of your audience. Utilizing matching audiences, you can increase your conversion rates and click-through rates. Matching audiences utilize the data you have for building strong goal-based retargeting campaigns.
Matched audiences can be created with: Account Targeting to upload CSV of company names allowing the targeting of decision-makers to build account-based marketing campaigns. Website Retargeting to target the users who have interacted with your website earlier and reengage them for improving conversions.
Contact Targeting to upload a CSV of email addresses of your connections enables you to nurture your leads and prospects even further. Custom targeting with audience expansion or by building lookalike audiences, you can identify audiences similar to your target audience. By testing custom targeting options and lookalike audiences, you can start scaling your reach and results with improved data.
Key Matric Of LinkedIn Ads Campaigns:
LinkedIn Ads are optimized by analyzing key metrics of campaigns. Key metrics for optimizing campaign performance: Clicks, click-through adds CTA, Average engagement, Comments, Shares, and likes, Conversions, Conversion Rates, Leads, and Cost Per Lead.
Tracking Ads In LinkedIn Adds:
Tracking custom conversions in LinkedIn Ads requires the installation of the LinkedIn Insights Tag on your website and setting up the conversion tracking feature in the Campaign Manager. Advertisers looking to gain leads, and other custom conversions such as downloads, purchases, and signups have to have conversion tracking enabled in LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn offers high conversion rates when compared to advertising to similar groups or keywords on other platforms.
LinkedIn Ads Formats:
LinkedIn offers a variety of different advertising formats that can be used in its advertising. For building a successful LinkedIn Ads campaign, the key is to find the best ad format for every goal. No matter which combinations of adds formats are the most successful for you, always keep in mind: Clear Call to Action, Constant testing of combinations of ad formats, Measuring and optimizing conversion metrics, Matching content to targeting, Promoting your business profitably
Offer value and quality that gives a reason for a read or click.
Sponsored Content On LinkedIn Ads:
Sponsored content ads on LinkedIn are native to the social platform, and ads are seen in users’ feeds as promoted. Similar to Facebook, Sponsored content ads are visible in user feeds and clearly shown as promoted content. Sponsored content can be seen on every device.
Sponsored content is the default option to achieve the most views for your ads. Sponsored content will serve as the first place you want to start with when building out your campaigns. Sponsored content is great for Promoting articles, and collecting user engagements, Generating leads, For Announcements, Promoting the LinkedIn page.
Sponsored content ads can be either a carousel, a video, or a single image post. Long-form content works well with the ad format, as LinkedIn users are more willing to consume long-form content.
The LinkedIn Dynamic Ads:
The dynamic ads on LinkedIn are automatically personalized ads that can be seen by your audience. Dynamic ads can be used the same way as sponsored content posts, as you can send traffic to a website or a landing page to promote products and services. Dynamic ads can be used to increase your business page followers and increase views for shared organic content on the platform.
Four different objectives define the use cases for dynamic ads are the following which includes Job ads to get more applicants for job listings. And Content of ads to gain leads by promoting downloadable content. Follower adds to expand audiences. The Spotlight adds to share content for the target audience
The LinkedIn Message Ads:
Message Ads is a private messages sent to your wanted target group and can be seen in users messaging on LinkedIn. The ads can be displayed on all placements and platforms. Proper use of message adds requires thought, though.
Message ads are an effective and personalized form of advertisement and require very targeted audiences, for the best results. Untargeted messages will not work as well for the targeted group. Message Ads are more personalized as the users receive messages directly to their inboxes.
Personalized messaging will increase interaction with the ad, and with a good ad copy, it will lead to a conversion or a click. Users get a notification for message ads that can be useful for improving results. Have a clear message with a clear call to action to increase results.
LinkedIn Texts Ad:
The text ads in LinkedIn are small ads that are shown on the side of the main feed, and only shown for desktop users. Compared to other ad formats, it can be slightly hidden from view for users, and that can affect overall ad performance. Using text ads can increase the potential reach of the ads, and in a targeted and effective campaign, it can be useful to boost conversions.
LinkedIn Ads Elevate:
LinkedIn Elevate is a marketing solution within LinkedIn to increase reach and boost content marketing efforts by utilizing employees of your organization. Through the use of LinkedIn Elevate, you can easily share content that matches your employee’s interests. When your employees share the content, you can track key metrics of the sharing, such as website traffic and leads.
LinkedIn Ads Budgeting And Cost:
LinkedIn is a cost-effective and result-based advertising solution for your business. LinkedIn advertising is paid, either pay-per-click PPC, per 1000 impressions CPM Cost per Mille, and Cost per send CPS. The cost of LinkedIn ads is managed with a budget.
LinkedIn Budgets are Daily LinkedIn will spend the daily campaign budget given for it. Best for ongoing campaigns. Setting Bids on LinkedIn will spend the amount you define for certain actions, such as clicks, impressions, and conversions. The setting will not overspend but might affect results if the bid is too low. Not having data to optimize might have an impact on your results as well.
The total budget of LinkedIn will spend the total budget given to a campaign. Perfect budgeting model for targeted campaigns with specific spending targets. Budgets can spend up 20 percent over the daily budget but will average out over time. It is important to consider the goals of a campaign when deciding on a budget option.
Budgets can be optimized for conversions, impressions, and clicks. Depending on your goals, picking the right option can save you a lot of time and money. Proper goals set in place will optimize your campaigns and their profitability, to match your business goals and keep return-on-advertising on par with other marketing strategies.
The creation of suitable content and managing LinkedIn campaigns have to be calculated into the costs and return on ad spend. Spend time figuring out the goals first. Other Cost of LinkedIn Adds To best utilize LinkedIn ads cost-effectively in your marketing strategy is to use LinkedIn ads when you have more data on your target audiences to match your needs.
LinkedIn has more expensive clicks and CPMs, in general, when compared to other online advertising platforms. Its benefit is the targeting of professionals in a professional setting, which effectively makes the higher prices worthwhile for certain types of businesses.
LinkedIn Ads Analytics:
As in other ad platforms, LinkedIn offers its ad solutions analytics to improve your results and overall performance of your ad campaigns. Utilizing collected data from ad campaigns can improve the overall performance of your other marketing strategies as well. Utilize data to build better relations, better products, engaging content for content marketing, and more. The data collected with LinkedIn will help you better understand your overall target audience.
Understanding your customer needs more deeply, what makes them interact and eventually convert, will help you build a more successful enterprise.
LinkedIn Website Demographics:
By installing website demographics LinkedIn Insight Tag, you can see the different user types visiting your website.
You can gain relevant and valuable data from professionals for analysis and improve your marketing with targeted content of Company Size, Industries, Country, job titles, Job Seniority, and Company names. Tracking different pages on your website, and understanding how different professionals use your website, will help you better target them and create content that matters to them. You can also discover completely new professional audiences that you might not have known before, and using the data to improve your LinkedIn marketing efforts is beneficial.
Through the use of website demographics, you can start collecting audience data for your future LinkedIn advertising is knowing what pages each audience enjoys the most makes it easier to create ads that convert that audience the best, improving your return on investment.
LinkedIn Ads Demographics:
As campaigns develop and collect more data, you can see the data in the Demographics tab in the campaign manager. User demographics data tells you who has interacted with and seen your ads. The detailed data helps build stronger content, and better targeting and enables further testing of your ad campaigns.
LinkedIn Objectives:
LinkedIn uses objective-based advertising, which helps advertisers build ad campaigns around specific business goals. Businesses can work through all three stages of a sales funnel, from awareness to conversion. The three main types of objectives are broken down below.
Consideration Ads On LinkedIn:
Options for a consideration ad if you want to qualify leads already somewhat familiar with your brand. These types of ads are optimized to help advertisers meet the following goals Engagement: Encourage likes, comments, and shares, as well as visits to other social media platforms and websites. Website visits: Get more eyeballs on your website and landing pages. And video views to share your business story, your latest product, or a day in the life via video.
Awareness Ads On LinkedIn:
To get your brand on the tip of people’s tongues, start with an awareness ad. These ads help get audiences to talk about your products, services, and brand. Through these impressions based on campaigns, you can also gain more followers, increase views, and spark greater engagement
The Conversion Ads On LinkedIn:
When you want to generate leads or drive home a sale, consider conversion ads. They can help meet these three objectives of LinkedIn Lead generation: Gain leads on LinkedIn by using forms pre-filled with LinkedIn profile data. Job applicants: Spread the word about your company’s latest job opening with a job post. Website conversions: Inspire more website visitors to download an e-book, sign up for a newsletter, or purchase a product.
How To Create LinkedIn Ads:
Here are nine steps to creating LinkedIn ads:
Create A Linkedin Page If You Don’t Have One:
This is required to create Sponsored Content and Sponsored Messaging ads. If you need help setting one up, read our guide on LinkedIn business.
Measure Performance:
When you sign in to Campaign Manager, the first thing you will see is the reporting dashboard for your LinkedIn ads. From here, you can review performance metrics, access charts, and demographics, or export a CSV report. This is also where you’d go for conversion tracking.
Login To The Campaign Manager Or Create An Account:
The Campaign Manager platform, also known as LinkedIn’s ad manager, will be home to all your advertising activities, such as running campaigns and managing your budget.
Select Your Objectives:
Think about what type of action you want to inspire your audience.
Choose Your Target Audience:
First, you must choose a location, and then you have the option of adding a job title, company name, industry type, and personal or professional interests. If it is your first campaign and LinkedIn recommends a target audience of at least 50,000 for Sponsored Content and Text Ads.
For Message Ads, 15,000 is best. You also have the option of connecting with people you already know through Matched Audiences. You can do this by retargeting people who’ve visited your website or uploading a list of email contacts.
Select An Ad Format:
Depending on the objective you chose, you will be able to pick from Sponsored Content options single image, carousel or video ads, Text Ads or Message Adds.
Create Your Budget And Schedule:
The campaign Manager will provide a budget range based on other competing bids for your ideal audience. The initial 2 to 4 weeks are typically considered a learning experience to figure out what works or does not. For testing, LinkedIn recommends a daily budget of at least 100 dollars or a monthly budget of dollar 5,000.
Start Building The Ad:
If you opt for Sponsored Content or Text Ads, the Campaign Manager will share previews so you can get a sense of the final look of your ad. In the case of Message Ads, you’ll be able to send yourself a test message.
Provide Payment Information:
Before you can debut your ad to the world, you will have to provide payment information. Once that is done, you’re ready to launch.
Best Practice Of LinkedIn Ads:
Last but certainly not least, here are the criteria LinkedIn itself says are vital to crafting a successful ad campaign on the platform. Figure out your target audience on LinkedIn, defining where in the world you want your ads to be seen is mandatory.
Your desired location is actually the only field that’s mandatory when setting up your ad campaign. You can go broad by only designating the country, state, or province, or you can go granular and target audiences by city or metropolitan area. You can then further refine your target audience with company details for example industry or company size, demographics, education, job experience, and interests.
One word of caution: LinkedIn advises against getting over-specific with ad targeting. If you’re new to LinkedIn ads, you might want to try casting a wider net initially and sticking to three targeting facets. You can also test campaigns with different targeting criteria, such as skills versus job titles, to learn which audiences connect better with your brand.
Craft your ad copy around a succinct, clear call to action LinkedIn ads should typically end with a clear CTA, often in the form of a text button. Your readers are busy. They need someone to spell out exactly what they should do next, otherwise, they might miss out on signing up for that career-boosting webinar or purchasing a new product that could simplify their life. Just make sure that your CTA matches the objective you initially selected. Some effective CTAs include Register Now or Sign Up Today. Read Hootsuite’s blog to learn more tips about creating captivating CTAs.
Final Words:
In conclusion, LinkedIn advertising is a new way of advertising a brand, company, product, or business. LinkedIn Ads is a great addition to companies’ online marketing strategy. It has many benefits to many types of businesses that can fully utilize the potential of LinkedIn.
Whether your company is looking to generate B2B leads, or reach targeted professionals in your industry, LinkedIn ads are the way to go to achieve those goals online. Depending on the goal of your LinkedIn profile, your LinkedIn summary should include 3-5 sentences that describe:
your years of experience in your industry, your area of expertise, the types of organizations you’ve worked with, your skills, and what you’re most known for professionally. Engaio Digital is a digital advertising agency willing to help companies to start and scale their LinkedIn advertising and to gain more results online.