Guide To LinkedIn Advertising To Drive Insane Brand Growth

Reach 700M professionals using LinkedIn advertising for your business. 93% of B2B advertisers use LinkedIn Advertisement to unlock high ROI. Learn how to do LinkedIn ads in this article.                        

LinkedIn advertising can assist your business reach an influential professional audience. According to research, around 41% of millionaires use LinkedIn. Not only are LinkedIn members significant, but they also have two times the buying power of the average web crowd.

And still, you are pondering about what will LinkedIn provide?

The most notable difference between LinkedIn and other social networks is its audience. LinkedIn has more experienced, more educated, and more influential audiences than other platforms. 

In addition to sharper targeting options, the platform promotes objective-based advertising. That means advertisers can now run campaigns around clearly defined goals, such as brand awareness, lead generation, and engagement.

Apart from this, LinkedIn sponsored content, retargeting, LinkedIn ad targeting, etc., are some of the prominent features of LinkedIn advertising. These features audiences aware of your company, develop their interest in your brand, and finally, convert that interest into action.

Read on, and we will guide you through your journey to demystify LinkedIn Advertising.

Also, read my blog on The ultimate guide to audio ads with some mind-blowing case studies

Is LinkedIn For You?

Source: Unsplash

LinkedIn is definitely for you.

I can tell this very confidently without even knowing your professional background.

50% of LinkedIn members reported that they are more likely to buy from a company they engage with on LinkedIn.  

93% of B2B marketers consider LinkedIn to be the most effective site for lead generation.

LinkedIn has many professionals from different backgrounds. Having varying products, advertisers have found the opportunity to tap these audiences with the aid of LinkedIn.                                                               

But the question is.

Can you find the right people for your business?

The best way to demystify the solution is by seeking LinkedIn stats.

According to the studies conducted by oberlo, LinkedIn lists more than 30 million companies. (Source: Oberlo)

And in the survey conducted by Khoros, it was found that LinkedIn is the most popular platform among B2B advertisers. (Source: Khoros)

LinkedIn offers interest-based professional groups that can be an excellent hub for connecting with like-minded people and share your thoughts or ask for counsel.

Later, you can leverage these professional groups to promote products or for brand empowerment.

LinkedIn also allows others to recommend and endorse you for your skills and work. When others support you, it shows that you have expertise backing up your claims to have a specific skill. The testimonials will be a significant boost to your brand’s credibility.

Why LinkedIn Advertising and not organic LinkedIn Marketing?

Source: Pexel

You are probably thinking if LinkedIn marketing is organically performing so well, then why bear LinkedIn advertising cost?

The answer is, the LinkedIn audience includes more than 60 million decision-makers, 90 million senior-level influencers, and 10 million members of the C-suite. It’s an important platform that companies can’t ignore, especially those in the business-to-business (B2B) sector.

Also, Organic LinkedIn marketing provides exposure to brands/companies only to an extent.

Whereas LinkedIn paid ads bring forth leads through its facilities like LinkedIn Adwords, LinkedIn sponsored content, LinkedIn retargeting, etc.

For example, if you have posted on LinkedIn, it will undoubtedly bring more visibility to your post than other sites. But LinkedIn marketing limits the number of people who can view your post, which can be improved using LinkedIn Advertising.

So the best way to leverage LinkedIn is to use LinkedIn advertisements for your brands and companies.

 If you have not created your linked profile yet, don’t worry. You can visit the video given below to create a kickass LinkedIn profile in 10 steps from scratch.

Let’s dive in to know more about creating ads on LinkedIn:

1. LinkedIn ad campaign objective

Choosing your objective is the first and foremost step in the new objective-driven advertising.

An objective is an action you want your customers to take after watching your ad. LinkedIn supports the full-funnel marketing goal from awareness to conversion.

There are three stages of objectives in funnel advertising methodology:

• Awareness campaigns increase your brand’s/company’s share of voice through impressions.
• Consideration campaigns encourage your customer to take action to treasure more about your business. The involvement is generally by clicking ads to reach a landing page or other engagement such as video views.
• Conversion campaigns focus on lead generation and the ability to track actions on your sites, such as whitepaper downloads.

Here’s a description of the available objectives in a nutshell.

• Brand awareness is simple impression-based campaigns. These campaigns are great for the awareness part of the funnel brand building.

• Website visits are the one-way process to your websites. It will increase the traffic to your website.

• Engagement is all about how your customers are interacting with your posts by clicking your ad, liking it, commenting on it, and sharing it.

• Video Views provides you with the choice to bid based on cost per view. It will be available in an additional format.

• Lead generation employs LinkedIn forms pre-filled with LinkedIn member’s profile data. It is one of the effective ways to capture more leads on the LinkedIn platform.

• Website Conversion optimizes your website’s actions that you define as necessary, such as downloading whitepapers or filling out lead generation forms.  

PRO TIP: Test Everything, regardless of which products you’re using, your campaign size, or your budget. Then monitor and continuously optimize the performance. 

2. Targeting Your LinkedIn Ad Audience

Choosing the right objective is not enough.

You know, what will work?

Your choosing the right objective for the right audience.

Source: Business Insider

According to a research, audience conversion is more straightforward when visitor trusts the site. And LinkedIn has ranked 1^st in digital trust ranking in 3 consecutive years.

So it will be a smarter move to find out your targeting sweet spot on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn accedes your request to target according to a few different categories that I have mentioned below.

The more specific your targeting criteria will be, the more likely it will add value to the audience you select and, therefore, the more likely you are to have a better ROI.

Different targeting criteria:

Company

LinkedIn members are far more likely to keep their employment info up-to-date. LinkedIn advertising provides the best targeting by company option than other platforms (Twitter or Facebook).

Further, there are few options in company targeting like,

Company Connections: In LinkedIn, you will target the first in line connections of selected companies.

Company followers: It will allow you to target the company followers.

Industries: You can tap the LinkedIn members employed in specific industries.

Names: You can easily reach the employees based on the company name listed on their profile.

Size: According to the company’s specific size, you can reach the employees of that company.

Demographic

Targeting based on demography is one of the unique features that LinkedIn provides to its customers. You can target audience belonging to only a particular gender or age group.

Education

One of LinkedIn ads’ best virtues that makes it exclusive is choosing the audience based on their educational background.

Job Experience

The audience’s job profiles and skills like financial planning, blog writing, or email writing can be targeted in LinkedIn ad targeting. Let’s suppose your product or service is best for CEOs. Filtering only people with “CEO” in their titles will boost your conversions and, eventually, prove to be more economical. From the companies’ CEO to the entry-level engineers, you can target a specific group of people for your ads.

Interests

LinkedIn recently presented interest-based targeting. Now, you can choose people whose interests align with your business.

Targeting is a powerful LinkedIn tool because of its accuracy, based on first-party data, otherwise known as self-reporting.     

PRO TIP: You want a large enough audience to be significant but small enough to be still relevant. Most successful campaigns have an audience range between 60k and 400k. 

 

3. Get a Good LinkedIn Ad Format

  You must have seen ads like these on LinkedIn.

• 

• 

Source: R Interactives

Now, the question is, How do you know which one to choose? I’m going to provide you with a quick run-through on the different self-service advertising formats to assist you in making that decision:

LinkedIn Message Ads:

It is like an email campaign, a personalized message that you can mail to LinkedIn’s inbox. But there is a catch here; you can only send these to a member once every 60 days. It helps to minimize spam on LinkedIn to an extent.

Text Ads:

If you are looking for cheap and profitable advertising, you are hovering around the right option.  Text ads are a traditional advertising format, which comes on a low budget, and appears on the top of the page.

Carousel Ads:

Carousel ads are generally used to tell the story or promote a stream of products. These are sponsored content comprised of a collage of images.

Video Ads:

There are tons of content out there, so you have to woo and hold your audience’s attention within the first couple of seconds. And what is the best way other than videos?

Video ads are a Sponsored Content ad format that displays in the LinkedIn feed. 

You can sponsor posts with videos from your LinkedIn page or create new video ads within the campaign manager.

Conversation Ads:

Do you want to send a mail but with some added spices to it? Conversation Ads will help you to achieve it. Rather than sending an email-type message, you can put some conditional logic.

A well-decorated LinkedIn ad can be an excellent resource for your advertising strategy. You can unlock new ROI levels from your LinkedIn campaigns if your campaign objectives and ad formats complement each other.

PRO TIP: Use Sponsored Content and Sponsored InMails Together. The boost in awareness from using multiple channels is undeniable. LinkedIn saw a 25% increase in open rates and a 95% increase in CTR. 

4. Add your Ad budget

Source: Economic times

Do you want to put thousands of dollars into an ad that doesn’t resonate with your target audience?

Obviously, No!

Therefore you should test and measure the success of different campaigns and ad variations at a smaller level before investing a lot into one type of ad.

Let’s say you are the head of marketing at a reported dating start-up. You assume that most of your target market consists of users between 27 to 37 years of age. But after paying thousands of dollars, you only generated 25% of the leads you were hoping for.

After research, your company concluded that the move was wrong. And you later learn that maximum traffic you are getting from people in the age group of 18 to 27. It would have been good to know this before spending a large amount.

So be cautious in the beginning.  If your campaign is doing well, then you can opt for a larger budget.                                  

5. Choose the correct Bid Type

It seems you have gained some insights into allocating budgets for your ads.

But wait a minute, job is not yet done. Specifying a budget without selecting a bid type is a battle half-won. A good bidding strategy on LinkedIn is the key to boost your results with the same budget.

Now we will surf through all the possible LinkedIn Bid types and know which will best align with your advertising goals.

If you are new to digital bidding, don’t panic.  

In digital marketing, bidding is quite similar to traditional bidding. When you are looking to buy ad space from the digital channel, you place a bid. Usually, in conventional bidding, the one who is willing to pay the maximum amount is the one who gets the space.

However, the digital marketing case is different. Since various companies have infinite budgets while others have limited ones, LinkedIn never lets the big guys win every time.

LinkedIn considers three things-

• Bidding Strategy.
• The maximum amount that you want to pay.
• The quality score of your ad.

Let’s jump to the types of bidding.

• Automated Bid: LinkedIn will select the maximum amount you are willing to pay per action in an automated bid.
• Maximum Cost per Click (Maximum CPC): If you want maximum control over your spending, maximum CPC is for you, and it is known as manual bidding. It permits you to set the maximum amount manually.
• Enhanced Cost per Click (Enhanced CPC): It’s similar to the maximum CPC. It allows you to put your own highest amount that you want to spend per click, but the system optimizes itself and gets a leeway of 30%.
• Maximum CPM BID: In this bid, you will be charged per 1,000 impressions. This is the number of times that LinkedIn members viewed your ad.
•  Maximum CPV BID: In this, you are bidding on the highest amount that you are willing to pay for a single video view.
• Maximum Cost per Send (Maximum CPS): It allows you to send ads directly to your target audience’s inbox. That’s why the full cost per send is charged for it.

Go and test different bids and see which one gets you the most return for your dollars.

PRO TIP: Bid within the suggested range (by LinkedIn) for Improved ROI. LinkedIn saw a 33% higher ROI on campaigns when bidding within the recommended range. 

6. Apply Conversion tracking

I am a massive proponent of properly tracking anything that you do online.

The reason is that you need to find out where your conversions are coming from, and you need to be able to retarget your audience.

Conversion tracking will track and measure the actions people take after clicking on your ads.

Although it’s optional to add conversion tracking, it’s highly imperative for your business.

PRO TIP: For Higher CTR and Conversions, Bid above the Suggested Range. LinkedIn saw a 15% lift in CTR and a 27% lift in conversions by bidding 10% above the range. 

Congratulations! You have officially understood LinkedIn Ads.

Read my blog on  how to create a professional LinkedIn profile.

Here are five tips to help you create effective LinkedIn ads for your business.

1. Lay your expertise in simple terms

If you are portraying your product in simple terms, then it will reach many people. And more people will be able to understand your product. Eventually, it will help in brand empowerment. Unnecessary jargon usage in presenting your product will lead to a poor understanding of your product among the audience.

The simple way of portraying a product without jargon makes the content seem more accessible, reflects its expertise, and inspires people to click on them.

2.  Target Your Ads

You can target by job type, company, skills, location, gender, and age on LinkedIn. You should also try to make ads that will appeal to your target audience. The best way to get the desired action from the audience is by inspiring advertising.

3. Use Variations

LinkedIn has recommended creating at least three ads per campaign, but it provides you the ease to create 15 different variations. The advantage of creating various ads for a single drive is that it allows you to look at which versions are performing best, giving you insight into how to structure your ads.

The site will automatically display the ads that have the highest click-through rates. You can also manually monitor your ads and pause ones that aren’t performing as well.

4. Smartly Budget your ads

LinkedIn aids you to set daily budgets and put bids for your advertising campaigns. Your budget is the money you’re willing to spend on an ad daily. How often your ad gets seen is determined by your bid. An auction occurs every time someone visits a LinkedIn page, and the advertiser with the highest bid wins and displays their ads.

In-demand audiences are more expensive. There are lots of strategies for effective and affordable bidding. Bidding on more specific audiences is one of them. This is because there will be less competition.

5. Evaluate Your Performance

You should monitor and periodically check the ad’s progress throughout your LinkedIn campaign as a marketing initiative. To see which ads are most effective, look at stats like click-through rates, CTR, and leads. According to LinkedIn, a CTR of 0.025 percent is good. The right time to replace your ad with a new one is when you see a drop in the ad’s performance.

As you get more insight into what works and what doesn’t after analyzing your campaigns’ performance, you make your ads more effective over time.

Its Summary Time

1. LinkedIn is the most productive social networking site. It has more millionaires than any other social networking site.

2. It provides an excellent platform for professionals. The average IQ of users of LinkedIn is more than the average IQ of users of other sites.

3. LinkedIn targeting is an excellent feature. Especially demographic selection is an exclusive feature that LinkedIn provides to its advertisers.

4. Remember to choose the right LinkedIn ad campaign objective according to your brand requirement.

5. Search out for well-suited ad formats that complement your LinkedIn ad campaign objective.

6. Place your ad smartly and choose the right bid type according to your budget and requirements.

7. Stay up to date with the LinkedIn conversion tracking.

Do use above mentioned tricks, and you will see your lead pool start to improve.

Are there any challenges you have faced with your LinkedIn advertising? It’d be great to hear about your experience. Do comment down below.