What Are LinkedIn Ads?
LinkedIn Ads is a paid marketing tool that offers access to LinkedIn social networks through various sponsored posts and other methods. Linkedin Ads is a powerful marketing tool for B2B companies to build leads, online recognition, share content, and more.
To grow in the professionals 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.
Being part of LinkedIn can have positive effects on growing organically online.
Why Advertise On LinkedIn, The Social Network For Professionals
LinkedIn is a social media for professionals, and their 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, discover industry news, and much more.
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.
The best benefit of LinkedIn Ads for businesses is the ability to reach specific business-related goals with online advertising easier.
Users on LinkedIn are looking for solutions, and being there, solving problems, and being seen through your ads, you can be ready to solve their problems.
LinkedIn ads as a platform can be compared directly with Facebook, in function, and their 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.
Learn more about Facebook advertising or search engine marketing.
Increase visibility to your brand online LinkedIn Ads
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.
Linkedin Ads should be included in your B2B marketing strategy 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.
When visibility from LinkedIn is optimized correctly, marketing spend will lower, or you’re able to scale advertising profitably.
For example, being present on LinkedIn, will increase your organic searches on Google and improve your search ranking as people start researching for your brand and the content you have created.
Learn more about search engine optimization.
LinkedIn Campaign Ideas To Start LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn Ads 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.
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.
While LinkedIn offers a great advertising platform for B2B companies, B2C companies can utilize LinkedIn Ads to promote job listings, share relevant industry content, or relevant product categories.
Lead Generation With LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn is a powerful tool for generating B2B leads to increase your sales and build connections.
Targeting the right professional demographics that match your audience, to gain high-quality leads, is an opportunity for every business.
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.
Boost The Number of Quality leads with Lead Gen Forms
Choosing a conversion campaign and lead gen forms can drive more leads to your business through advertising.
Lead gen forms are pre-filled forms that are attached to your LinkedIn advertising campaigns, available for sponsored content and message ads.
Lead gen forms improve 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 gen 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.
When using conversion campaigns, the pre-filled forms can be easier to convert users when comparing on a form on your proper website, but both should be implemented.
LinkedIn Ads Targeting
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.
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.
Having your clients analyzed and building a proper buyer persona from the audience, you can utilize it in your LinkedIn advertising.
Targeting specific audiences for specific goals, you can achieve higher returns on your advertisement.
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 attributes to build your audiences from:
- Job title
- Seniority
- Company name
- Company size
- Industry
- Skills
- Degree types
- Group and individual interests
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.
Testing With Targeting Options And Audiences
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.
Start with two similar campaigns and only changing variables within targeting to find what targeting options are for best for the wanted goals. Always keep improving performance by a/b testing new variables with past targeting options that have won.
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.
Matched Audiences And Custom Targeting
Matching audiences enables you to advertise for 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
Uploading CSV of company names allows the targeting of decision-makers to build account-based marketing campaigns.
Website Retargeting
Target the users who have interacted with your website earlier and re-engage them for improving conversions.
Contact Targeting
Uploading 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.
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 ad formats are the most successful for you, always keep in mind:
- Clear Call-to-Actions
- Matching content to targeting
- Promote your business profitably
- Offer value and quality that gives a reason for a read or click.
- Constant testing of combinations of ad formats
- Measure and optimize conversion metrics
Here the following ad formats companies can use to promote themselves on LinkedIn.
Sponsored Content
Sponsored content ads in 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 in every device.
Sponsored content is the default option to achieve 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
- For Announcements
- Collecting user engagements
- Generating leads
- Promoting 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.
LinkedIn Message Ads
Message Ads is a private message sent to your wanted target group and can be seen in users messaging on LinkedIn. The ad can be displayed on all placements and platforms.
Message Ads are more personalized as the users receive messages directly to their inbox. The 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.
Proper use of message ads requires thought, though. Message ads are an effective and personalized form of advertisement and require very targeted audiences, for best results. Untargeted messages will not work as well for the targeted group.
Have a clear message with a clear call-to-action to increase results.
LinkedIn Text Ads
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 your ads, and in a targeted and effective campaign, it can be useful to boost conversions.
LinkedIn Dynamic Ads
Dynamic ads on Linkedin are automatically personalized ads that can be seen by your audience.
Dynamic ads can be used to increase your business page followers and increase views for shared organic content on the platform.
Dynamic ads can be used the same way as the sponsored content posts, as you can send traffic to a website or a landing page to promote products and services.
Four different objectives define the use cases for dynamic ads:
- Follower ads to expand audiences
- Spotlight ads to share content for the target audience
- Job ads to get more applicants for job listings.
- Content ads to gain leads by promoting downloadable content.
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 Costs And Budgeting
LinkedIn is 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 budgets.
LinkedIn Budgets
- Daily – LinkedIn will spend the daily campaign budget given for it. Best for ongoing campaigns.
- Total budget – LinkedIn will spend the total budget given to a campaign. Perfect budgeting model for targeted campaigns with specific spending targets.
- Setting Bids – LinkedIn will spend the amount you define for certain actions, such as click, 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.
Budgets can spend up 20% over the daily budget but will average out over time.
It’s 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.
Spend time in figuring out the goals first.
Other Cost of LinkedIn Ads
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 worth for certain types of businesses.
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.
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.
LinkedIn Ads Analytics
As in other ad platforms, LinkedIn offers in its ad solutions analytics to improve your results and overall performance of your ad campaigns. Utilizing collected data from ad campaigns can improve your overall performance of your other marketing strategies as well.
The data collected with LinkedIn will help you better understand your overall target audience.
By understanding your customer needs more deeply, what makes them interact and eventually convert, will help you build a more successful enterprise.
Utilize data to build better relations, better products, engaging content for content marketing, and more.
LinkedIn Website Demographics
With installing website demographics (LinkedIn Insight Tag), you can see the different user types visiting your website.
You can gain relevant and valuable data of professionals for analysis and improve your marketing with targeted content:
- Job titles
- Job Seniority
- Company names
- Company Size
- Industries
- Country
By 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 for 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.
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.
Key Metrics Of LinkedIn Ads Campaigns
LinkedIn Ads are optimized by analyzing key metrics of campaigns.
Key metrics for optimizing campaign performance:
- Clicks
- Clickthrough rate (CTR)
- Average engagement
- Comments, Shares, and likes
- Conversions
- Conversion Rates
- Leads
- Cost Per Lead
Tracking Conversions In LinkedIn Ads
Tracking custom conversions in LinkedIn Ads requires the installation of 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 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 and seen your ads. The detailed data helps build stronger content, better targeting, and enables further testing of your ad campaigns.
Third-Party Analytics
It is crucial to track your online traffic data from your website and other sources independently from each other. Only by separating data sources, you can see which campaigns are the most impactful in your business.
Tracking LinkedIn Ads data separately, therefore, is important.
Utilizing at least Google Analytics on your website can drastically change your perspective on how your targeted users on your ad campaigns are behaving on landing pages themselves.
Understanding end-user behavioral metrics on your website helps you optimize your advertising campaigns for better results.
Learn more about web analytics.
Conclusion
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 of your industry, LinkedIn ads are the way to go to achieve those goals online.
Engaio Digital is a digital advertising agency willing to help companies to start and scale their LinkedIn advertising and to gain more results online.