Why Should You Advertise On LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is actually a B2B gold mine!
According to the latest Linkedin stats, 590 million professionals use the platform with 2 new members joining every second from more than 200 countries. Today, LinkedIn is the most valuable asset for both the general users and the B2B marketers promoting their businesses/groups.
And the best part?
Everyone – from freshers to CEOs are spending a significant part of their time on LinkedIn to find relevant content related to their skills, interest, passion or business. It’s either the need to acquire new skills or connect to identify and establish new business opportunities – all of which generates 9 billion content impressions on LinkedIn’s weekly feed.
The game doesn’t stop here. The platform’s advertising options (Text Ads, Sponsored Content, InMails and more) are helping startups and enterprises, promoting their brand to the relevant target audience. In fact, 79% of marketers think that LinkedIn as a very good source of leads. However, the same marketers are unsure about the best practices to source these leads.
Through our various Digital Marketing projects, we have been able to build on our knowledge of LinkedIn and the commercial viability of its advertising options. The advertising features are new but it has got some awesome targeting features which can help you win the game.
The blog explores five steps to optimize LinkedIn Marketing and Advertising.
STEP 1 – Decide A Clear Objective With LinkedIn Ads.
While LinkedIn Advertising can be used for multiple reasons such to drive traffic to your website, Video views, generate leads, promote events or share gated content, you have to first decide upon your end objective.
A marketer should map the LinkedIn advertising strategy aligning the same with the brand objective and the marketing goals. Accordingly, the desired outcomes out of the ad campaigns will differ from marketer to marketer.
For a startup, website clicks will be more valuable to drive targeted traffic and generate leads. As such, promoters would focus on lead generation campaigns eyeing conversions by driving traffic to their website.
On the other hand, campaigns like recruitment drives will encompass a broader objective – to reach the masses for mega drives rather than looking for specific roles or niche specializations. In such a case, a recruiter will require to reach out to a wider target universe. Hence, recruiters can consider brand awareness as an avenue to meet recruitment goals.
STEP 2 – Choose The Right Type of LinkedIn Ad Format
LinkedIn Advertising gives various options in terms of the type of ads that a marketer would want to run. According to different objective and requirement, one has to select the right ad format.
Currently, there are four types of Linkedin ads to choose from:
- Sponsored Content
- Text Ads
- Sponsored InMail
- Video Ads
Marketers should decide early what type of ad format to run on LinkedIn. Herein, we have consulted our clients to select the best possible ad formats to succeed in their campaign efforts.
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Sponsored Content
Sponsored Content can help you promote content to the LinkedIn members directly on the feed, the user sees the ad while scrolling through their feed. This type of ad can help target people of a professional mindset through content marketing on LinkedIn.
This type of ad gives an ability to interact with the audience using appealing visuals. Also, it can provide a broad reach to the audience. Many are unaware if this is an ad or normal content when they see it on their feed because the “Promoted” text is tiny and intelligently placed just below the creative.
Promoters looking to start a campaign which adds a visual impact and shows directly into the news feed of the users, this is the right type of advert delivering the desired awareness and conversions.
LinkedIn Sponsored Content ads have the highest Cost Per Click (CPC) among all other ad formats. Marketers would need to factor it in their budget when planning a campaign around it.
- Sponsored InMail
Are the lead-gen teams still dependent on email campaigns for business development activities? Sometimes it can be a time-consuming process to find work email ids of professionals and communication with them. And this is a major challenge when it comes to prospecting.
Sponsored InMails come handy and are an important tool to make outbound campaigns successful. The concept behind it is very simple – marketers can send short emails on LinkedIn and same will be delivered to users directly on their inbox.
This is an awesome advertising option on LinkedIn for B2B space which needs a personalized approach to generate leads. Since the InMails are sent from personal profiles, the open and conversion rates are normally high in this type of campaign. This works well for one-to-one promotion of Services, Products. We have also tested this for recruitment campaigns and it worked well.
These type of ads are cost-effective and budget on Cost Per Send basis and are less costly than sponsored content.
- Text Ads
LinkedIn text ads are quick to set up and easily manageable. This can help drive personalized traffic to the intended website or landing pages. One can define and target the ideal audience and generate quality leads.
Text ads are displayed in two places –
- The sidebar of the newsfeed even when one’s scrolling through the feed
- On the right corner below the “People, you may know” section.
Text ads can be used to promote gated content, services or product features on LinkedIn by writing meaningful copies lines that are delivered to thousands of ideal audience. One important thing marketers should remember is that Text Ads only run on the desktop.
These ads are less costly because CPC is low compared to the sponsored content, the impressions are high and hence the CTR (Click Through Ration) will be low due to a repetitive appearance of the ad.
According to HubSpot, with LinkedIn Text Ads, they’ve been able to generate a click-through rate that is 60% higher than their average across other social networks. At the same time, the quality of leads generated through LinkedIn was better than those sourced through other social media channels.
- LinkedIn Video Ads
LinkedIn is constantly working on improving its Advertising Platform and recently they launched a new feature interface for the ad platform and added a new type of ad – LinkedIn Video Ads.
LinkedIn Video Ads can build brand awareness, drive traffic to website/landing pages, or generate leads in an interactive and informative fashion. This can help build and/or establish a brand in the professional world and with the ability to track detailed engagement metrics like video views, video completion rates and conversions.
STEP 3 – Target the Right Audience
This will be the most important step because here we have to select the prospect universe who will see the ad. LinkedIn offers various detailed targeting options for the ads, but while selecting marketers need to target only the most important criteria as per the campaign objective.
Targeting can be based on Company details, Demographics, Education, Job Details and Interest. Also, specific people can be targeted who have visited a particular page on the brand website (Retargeting). Marketers can also upload their target list for the campaign.
Sometimes, widening audience at the initial campaign stages might be necessary to see results faster. However but the more relevant the targeting is, the better it is for the overall campaign success.
Random targeting the audience as it is does not help and a strategic plan is necessary. Planned and carefully selected targeting strategies have helped us establish the right kind of campaign reaching the right kind of audience.
STEP 4 – Create Engaging Ads & Awesome Landing Pages
Sponsored ads are what the audience will see and marketers only have a fraction of second to incite them to click. This is chance and the necessity to create that ‘Ahhhhh..’ moment. Accordingly, ad creatives or video needs to be that engaging so that it will help to bring desired CTR and conversions.
A good ad copy helps visitors get an idea of what they can expect. And the same, supported with a well-designed and personalized landing page helps them remain interested and take valuable actions.
A strong study of persona needs to be done before working on the ad copies. According to a study, 48% of landing pages have multiple offers which make user confused and the conversion ratio decreases. One has to be very specific while promoting ad copies and building landing pages for a good return on the advertising spent.
Creating multiple variations of the ad and landing page is important initially to A/B test things and spend only there where chances of ROI are higher than the rest.
As a creative agency, we understand this and use a Commercially Viable approach for strategizing and executing LinkedIn campaigns. We support that with Storytelling for creating engaging LinkedIn Ads or Landing Pages to drive traffic through campaigns.
STEP 5 – Analyze. Rework. Repeat.
Once successfully launched, the campaign and its success will need to be asses with Analytics. Herein, LinkedIn campaign monitor contains detailed and informative engagement metrics for Reporting and Analytics.
Daily monitoring and reports covering the most important data such as Impression, Clicks, Demographics of the audience, Conversions, Avg CTR, CPM and CPC are available.
Also, marketers can check which type of ad or landing page is performing better than other and take necessary corrective actions.
The campaign monitor is not just a metric rather a benchmark of advertisement to analyze and optimally leverage. We have done so for multiple projects and continue the same for our present and future clients.
To know more about how best to work out and optimally leverage LinkedIn Ads Connect with our consultants to discuss further.
