LinkedIn marketing has become an essential part of how B2B businesses grow their revenue. More than 706 million people are using LinkedIn worldwide.
And there are also more than 50 million companies that use LinkedIn for business and hoping to expand and grow.
Not a long while ago, LinkedIn used to be known as one of the more established job site platforms.
But today, LinkedIn is being utilized in various ways.
It’s all about career advancement, professional connections, industry discussion, and other business-related activities.
Based on Sprout Social, business marketing on LinkedIn generates 277 percent more leads on average compared to Facebook marketing alone.
A survey said that LinkedIn is responsible for B2B marketers’ social media leads by up to 80 percent.
Many users are now using the platform to learn from experts and professionals on how to improve their careers. LinkedIn careers have changed from just being a “job portal” to a daily news hub for professionals and big companies.
In this article, we’ll go through how to use LinkedIn to promote your brands, increase web traffic, get more leads and create awareness of your brand.
Why Is Linkedin Ads Important For Business Today?
Helping other businesses and organizations achieve their mission is exactly what LinkedIn aims to do. The platform has been rated as the number 1 most trusted social media platform by Business Insider for three years.
Through LinkedIn, it’s feasible to tap into a robust network of individuals who can add value to your company and help build a sales funnel. The best part is LinkedIn is entirely free to use and highly effective when used properly.
Improve your brand’s credibility
LinkedIn is the perfect platform to boost your online presence. With many professionals signing up on LinkedIn every day, businesses have the opportunity to network with a growing number of interesting contacts. Using various personal and group features in LinkedIn, companies and the people representing them can improve their brand visibility and credibility.
Creating and publishing quality content that is relevant and based on your skill will let you become an authority in your industry. You can share the wisdom you have gained from your experiences in business and life. Offering insights to your network and connections will significantly boost how you are viewed.
Staying engaged with other users by adding value through reacting and commenting to their posts will improve how they see you.
Educate and nurture potential clients
LinkedIn is terrific at educating prospects. From explaining your products and services to delivering engagement through leadership content.
Lead nurturing is the process of developing a relationship with leads who are not ready to take action yet. The goal is to educate and encourage your customer base by using your company’s expertise by providing value from the first point of contact.
By providing answers to questions on LinkedIn, you can drive impressions. If your reaction is by offering a solution or replying to an inquiry asked by your connections or client base, they will contact you to know more about the product or services you’re offering.
Promote your business
LinkedIn company page allows businesses to reach its target audiences. A company page can be used as a platform to promote your business’s core values, attract leads, and, of course, improve the visibility of any available job offers.
Communities are crucial for success in most businesses. Partners, employees, customers, and job candidates comprise a large community in LinkedIn. Together, it can help drive your business’s growth through relevant conversations.
Participate in the conversation as your company page, utilize the community hashtag, and communicate as your brand for faster growth and reach.
How To Create A LinkedIn Ad Campaign: A Step-By-Step Guide
Before you start with your first campaign make sure you have a LinkedIn account. Fill up all the necessary info about your company on the main profile together with a clear image. A completed profile is crucial because it provides your target audience with a comprehensive view and impression of who you are.
Step 1: Choose your objective
It’s essential to build your entire campaign based on your goal, which is why this is the very first step you have to take. You’ll want to decide whether your objective is to create awareness, conversions, or consideration.
Then you choose from subcategories so your campaign can be more specific and precise. Selecting your objective helps show ad formats, bid types, and features that support your objective during the campaign initiation.
Awareness campaign – this campaign seeks to maximize your business’s SOV (share of voice). SOV is a measure of the market your company owns in comparison to your competitors. It acts as a gauge for your business visibility and how much you influence the conversation in your industry.
Conversation campaign – this type of campaign motivates your target audience to engage with your brand and better understand what your company is all about.
Conversion campaign – focuses on creating leads and using conversion tracking to calculate the results of your ads so you can optimize them for better performance.
It is highly recommended that you balance your goal across the awareness, consideration, and conversion category in a full-funnel marketing strategy.
Awareness Objectives
Awareness is all about introducing your brand to everyone. Usually, you don’t emphasize so much on conversions and clicks. You need people to see your ads and know your brand and what you’re offering.
Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is ideal for impression-based campaigns. This means it’s a perfect choice if you want to grow the visibility of your business because it’ll show your ad to users who are most likely to view it. With this objective, LinkedIn will focus on getting the most views of your ad appropriate to your budget. Nevertheless, viewing is not the same as converting or clicking. So if your goal is to create more leads or leverage conversions, you will probably get frustrated over the results.
The focused objective of brand awareness is to view, increase the followers of your business page and engage with your target audience. Select brand awareness as your business campaign when you need to build your brand and warm up your prospects before reaching out to them. As mentioned earlier, the goal is to ensure your business is recognized and what you’re known for.
Campaigns with this objective will charge by impressions using CPM (cost per thousand impressions).
Consideration Objectives
At this step of the funnel, you want people to click on your ads, and you want them to take action, visit your page, read your contents.
There are three different objectives you can use at this step:
Website visits
You want people to visit your site. And you have to be creative in getting people to go to your site. You can encourage people to sign up for your webinar, try a 1-month free trial or read your new post.
Since the volume of data required to optimize your bidding is lower than the lead generation objective, website visit objectives are a perfect choice for any action you want people to make on your site.
Engagement
You might want to use an engagement objective to increase both the quality and quantity of your page’s followers.
You want people to follow and react to your posts, and you also want to build a relationship with them. The more people follow your page, the more engaged they are, and it’ll help boost your content.
Video Views
If you want your viewers to view your video ad, you can choose this objective. Video is still available as an ad format when you select other objectives; however, video views are the only objective that allows you to bid based on how many people watched your video. (Cost per view)
Conversion objectives
This is where your idea is put to the test. It’s all about getting people whom you have engaged before to take any action that you require them to make. The action you need your viewer to make could be an information exchange for lead generation, a subscription, a sign-up, or a job application.
LinkedIn has three objectives which you can see below:
Lead generation
If you want to build a prospect list for your products or services, lead generation is the absolute objective for you. Lead generation campaigns work better when executed in harmony with campaigns focused on brand awareness and engagement. This is because the engagement data from those campaigns helps target the conversion-focused messages with better precision.
Website conversions
Lead gen is fantastic, but sometimes you want people to react, which is why website conversions are another great option. You can optimize for any conversion ranging from product purchase, a trial demo to a webinar sign-up with Insight Tag.
Once you sort out the campaign with the conversion objective, LinkedIn will optimize for people most likely to complete a conversion. The more data LinkedIn collects on the types of people that complete your on-site conversion, the easier and better it will optimize the ads to show to users with similar profiles.
Job applicants
If you need more applicants for your job posting, opt for this objective. LinkedIn optimizes your ads for users who are more likely to click on your job post. With this, you will get more applicants. You will also bid for genuine applicants.
Step 2: LinkedIn ads targeting
When it comes to B2B sales and marketing, LinkedIn advertising has a distinctive strong point over other ad platforms. You can narrow down your criteria as precisely as you want them to be. Let’s say you’re looking for a Web Designer at a design company with more than 400 hundred employees. You can easily do that. The platform can provide you with the accurate employee and company data.
You can create exceptionally unique targeting using the “include,” “exclude,” or “narrow by” options.
LinkedIn’s targeting options let you build exact B2B marketing campaigns that you can use to attract the right users.
Besides primary data such as Location and Language, there are five other targeting options:
- Company: Company connections, followers, industry, name, and size
- Demographics: Age and gender of the specific user that you want to reach
- Education: Qualifications, fields of study, schools
- Job Experience: Job specifications, seniority levels, job title, skills, and years of experience
- Interests: Groups or what is the user’s interests
Use audience expansion to increase reach
Once you have a set audience that is perfect for your advertising campaigns, you can generate a new campaign that targets other similar audiences.
Like Facebook Lookalike Audience, LinkedIn’s algorithms help find and reach people with similar characteristics to the audience you set.
You can also use LinkedIn’s internal data to expand your reach, a feature that LinkedIn describes as “audience expansion” to retarget users who are already familiar with your business. This feature is also known as “matched audience.”
Use matched audiences for retargeting
If you’re continuously targeting new people who are not familiar with your brand, you’ll be wasting many potential opportunities. Matched audiences let you target people who have visited your site and reacted to your call-to-action. They already know you, so they respond to your ads.
Two of the most common uses of matched audiences are retargeting website visitors based on your pixel’s data or targeting your email list.
Step 3: How to choose the right LinkedIn ad type
There are various LinkedIn ad options to choose from. How do you know which is the right one for your campaign? The answer relies on your needs, budget, and expertise.
Without understanding what your business’s goal is, no one can tell which LinkedIn ad type serves your brand the best.
Sponsored content
Sponsored content is a type of ad that allows businesses to deliver Page updates beyond their current LinkedIn Page followers. Targeted LinkedIn Page updates are visible and accessible on the LinkedIn Page or in the feed of existing connections or followers only. It can be content like a blog post, a webinar, or a white paper, and you want your followers to view them.
Single image ads
Single image ads are the usual type of sponsored content. It will promote any post you publish to a broader audience with a single landscape image.
Video ads
Video ads are similar to single image ads, except the ad creative is a video instead of a static image.
Like Facebook, the video will auto-play when a user scrolls over it in their feed. The sound will be set to mute by default, so it’s best to add subtitles to the video.
Carousel ads
Sometimes you will need to showcase more than one image in your post. Carousel ads allow you to add multiple pictures and maximize the effect of your campaign.
Carousel ads are convenient to narrate a story so you can gain your audience’s attention and connect via the power of storytelling.
Lead generation ads
Lead gen form sanctions you to pre-fill your ads with your target audience’s data so you can acquire a lead directly from the ad.
To make it easier for people to convert, you can instantly improve your ad conversion rate. If you have helpful content like an ebook or a report, a lead-gen form is the best marketing strategy you should be paying attention to.
Dynamic ads
Dynamic ads let you initiate an ad that targets a specific audience. For instance, if you want to showcase an advertisement to a marketing director, dynamic ads distribute targeted messages that individually relate to that audience group.
Text ads
Text ads promote a message in the right column of the newsfeed. It will appear smaller and less intrusive in comparison to sponsored content. It also tends to have less CTR.
You can place these ads inside a user’s inbox or on the side of the LinkedIn main page. A thumbnail goes with the following snippet to attract your target audience’s attention. And since they are small, their reach doesn’t go far.
The ads look like the conventional Google Ads, as it has a headline, a description, and a CTA.
Sponsored InMail
If you have received a message from someone you don’t know and it seems promotional, that is sponsored by InMail. LinkedIn allows its users to send a message to people who are within their network. If you try to promote your content and have hundreds of connections, you’ll get great results.
You can’t send thousands of messages at once to your target audience unless you are using InMail.
InMail is a premium feature that allows you to send bulk messages to anyone you want, regardless of whether you’re connected with them or not.
Sponsored InMail allows you to promote a message to appear at the top of the recipient’s inbox. This can be beneficial when complemented with a retargeting campaign.
Step 4: LinkedIn Ad costs, bids, & budgets
When you advertise on LinkedIn, you’re competing against other advertisers to get your ad seen. If you’re targeting a high-demand audience, you should expect higher costs because of the audience’s value and increased competition for the specific audience’s attention.
And when it comes to the cost, ad relevance scores play a significant role. High relevance score can lower your expense as LinkedIn wants to fulfill its users’ relevancy with engaging ads.
It can be challenging to balance out the ad costs, especially if it’s your first time advertising or when LinkedIn’s algorithm doesn’t have enough data to optimize your ads precisely.
There are two types of bids you can go from depending on your campaign objective:
- Maximum cost bid: you can choose the maximum amount of money you’re willing to bid by providing a CPC, CPM, or CPV.
- Automated bid: LinkedIn uses archival campaign data and user information to automatically set and adjust the bid, optimizing your chosen campaign objective.
You’ll know what strategy to use when you have a clear set of goals.
If you want to get more impressions, clicks, and conversions, you should opt for the automated bid. Since LinkedIn optimizes your bid with the intent of maximizing your objective, they will make sure you get the results you want. The only con is that you might overspend.
If you’re careful about how much you spend, the maximum cost bid is an excellent option. But the problem with the maximum cost bid is that you could underbid. You’ll bid at a lesser cost than the amount you need to get exposure.
With an automated bid, you’re allowing LinkedIn to gather data for you and set out with a daily budget cap to assure your spending is controlled.
Once you know how much each bid costs, you can optimize your campaigns according to the data.
Step 5: How to create a high-performing LinkedIn ad
The ad you create will rely on your LinkedIn ad type and format. There are three ad types and eight ad formats with 24 different variations that are available.
But to make things simple, here are the most basic formats for creating the best-sponsored ads, the best-sponsored InMail, and the best text ads.
Creating a high-converting LinkedIn sponsored ad
Sponsored ads are chronicle advertising. The content will appear naturally in the LinkedIn feed amidst the non-sponsored content your target audience is looking for.
Sponsored ads are native advertising—that is, the content fits naturally in the LinkedIn feed among the non-sponsored content your target audience is browsing.
As ads that fit perfectly into the user experience, they’re more contextual than other forms of digital advertising. And native ads are becoming more popular, accounting for almost two-thirds of all digital display ad spend. Native ads imitate the look, feel, and function of a medium’s content, making it look more natural that your audience will trust them.
Your headline should be about 70 characters, and the shorter, the better. Concise copy tends to perform better. Ensure that your headlines are fewer than 60 characters and your intro text be somewhere between 70 to 159 characters.
The image you use should enhance the idea of your content. Use high-quality photos so it’ll look much more appealing to your audience. Make sure it fits with what you’re offering in your ad. It also has to work with your site’s white background and pixel parameters.
You can use video as well, which tends to be more engaging than images or text. Video ads are an easy method to differentiate your ads from your competitors.
Creating a high-converting LinkedIn text ad
Text ads are the most straightforward ads on LinkedIn. It consists of a short bit of text and optionally a small image. It usually displays on the top or right side of the user’s screen. It has less ad space to play with, so you need to maximize the words to entice your audience. You won’t have enough room for creativity as it is all about positioning the ads correctly with the right words and expressions.
Text ads have four crucial elements that you should know:
- Headline
- Ad Copy
- Ad Destination
- Image
Find the right text ad combination and test it to see whether it’s perfect for your ads. You never know what people are looking for or resonate with so it’s best to test every element.
Step 6: Optimize, optimize, optimize until you find the best- converting ad
As with any digital marketing strategy, you should oversee and consistently evaluate the progress throughout your LinkedIn campaign. Look at stats like CTR and leads to see which ads are the most effective.
LinkedIn considers a CTR of 0.0025 percent as good. If you see a drop in your ad’s performance, it may be time to jazz it up with fresh content.
Analyzing your campaign’s performance should make your ads more effective over time as you gain more data into what works and what doesn’t.
In the LinkedIn Ads Dashboard, you can see all the insights from your ads, like impressions, clicks, and CTR, as well as a performance chart that showcases a graph of the results of your campaign.
Besides the standard analytics dashboard, the platform also provides a demographic chart that breaks down your campaign engagement by your audience’s job function, job title industry, and many more.
Let’s Create Your First Linkedin Ads
As vital as it is to know the technical aspects of LinkedIn advertising, all the information we’ve shared with you is pretty much wasted if you don’t know how to leverage it to build a successful campaign.
There’s no shortage of LinkedIn advertising options. As a digital marketer or business owner, you should be thrilled about this. More targeting options mean more valuable opportunities for your business. And it’s also vital that you get a strong sense of what LinkedIn looks like in action.
Always remember to start by picking one objective that is crucial to your business. From there, define your target audience and choose your ad type.
It may sound doable and straightforward, but there is no harm in seeking professional guidance to guide you on LinkedIn advertising. Contact us at One Search Pro and let us assist you in creating engaging and converting ads that can help with your social presence and reach your target audience.
