LinkedIn is the go-to platform for businesses looking to advertise services and products for other businesses. The targeting capabilities allow you to target prospects based on industry, job titles, company size, and even professional skills! Find out the best practices for setting up campaigns and you’ll be on your way to effective LinkedIn ad campaigns today.
Build Audiences Around Your Ideal Customer
Whether you’ve done market research, surveyed your customers, or worked with external agencies to build an ideal customer profile, knowing who you’re trying to reach is a key piece of building out a marketing strategy. LinkedIn offers firmographic AND demographic targeting options, so you can build campaigns that specifically target the RIGHT people at the RIGHT companies.
Once you’ve determined what type of companies that you’re interested in working with, we recommend using the job function targeting and layering on skills. For example, if the product that you’re trying to sell is a CRM tool, you could target people who work in “Marketing”, but have skills in CRM tools, CRM implementation, etc.
Leverage Website Retargeting
Installing the LinkedIn InsightTagis the first step that you should take once you’ve set up an advertising account through LinkedIn Campaign Manager. The Insight Tag allows you to retarget your website visitors through the LinkedIn platform and it also enables you to set up conversion tracking, so that you can see which campaigns & adds are driving leads for your business. If you’re planning on running any lead generation campaigns, it’s vital that you set up the tag and conversion tracking to monitor and report on performance.
Get Creative with Your Content
Top of funnel content, like eBooks and guides, perform the best on LinkedIn. This is a social platform with a focus on business, so people expect to see content that educates them or helps them solve a problem. They do NOT want to be sold to. If you don’t have any gated content, starting with blog promotion to increase web traffic and the size of retargeting audiences is a great starting point.
LinkedIn offers a variety of ad formats, ranging from static text ads to carousel images and video. For lead generation, using static images of people with a clear call to action can lead to higher click-through-rates than using images with a lot of text or no clear CTA on them. Video ads are great for brand awareness and engagement, but less effective for lead generation. No matter which format you use, your creative should be eye-catching and original!
Set Yourself Up for Success
When building out your campaigns, it is best to test a couple of different audiences and to run at least two offers to each of those audiences. That way you can see which performs better and determine how to optimize your campaigns from there. LinkedIn recommends running four ads in each Sponsored Content campaign, which is in line with the cap that they put on the number of ads served to an individual. If you’re testing different creative or offers, it’s a best practice to change the ad settings to rotate the ads evenly. If you just want to let the platform optimize for the content that performs the best, that’s the default setting.
The LinkedIn ad platform runs on an auction-based system, so setting bids that are high enough to compete in the auction is important. We recommend setting your bids at the top of the recommended range or slightly above, but you can also use LinkedIn’s auto-bidding tool.
Now that you’ve got your audiences, creative, and campaigns set-up properly, it’s time to launch! Launching a new platform can be scary, but by following best practices you’ll find that LinkedIn might become one of your best performing advertising channels. Just remember to keep it interesting, be open to testing audiences & offers, and get that Insight Tag installed on your website!
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