Linked-in’s Complete Advertising Cheat-sheet
I have heard a lot of moaning and complaining about LinkedIn advertising not working. We I admit it: unlike Facebook, LinkedIn is not for every business. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t useful. There are tons of B2B marketers out there leveraging LinkedIn advertising to spread brand awareness and drive lead generation. This is the largest stage for business-minded social interactions. If you are targeting c-suite professionals, providing educational material to marketers, or just spreading brand awareness, LinkedIn advertising is the solution for you. First things first, if you are going to advertise on LinkedIn, your company needs to have a LinkedIn company page to publish content. Once you have that all set up, you can dive into the specifics of LinkedIn Ads. Don’t worry – I’m here to help with those. In this comprehensive LinkedIn advertising guide, I’ll review everything you need to know to get started, including: LinkedIn ad types Like other social advertising platforms, LinkedIn advertising offers you a variety of ad types and formats to play with. And, like other platforms, you should be selecting your ad format based on the overall action you want to drive. Across all their offerings, LinkedIn advertising supports brand awareness, website visits, engagement, video views, lead generation, site conversions, and job applications. LinkedIn sponsored content Sponsored content ads look and feel native to the LinkedIn platform. These are the ads that appear to be “boosted” posts from a company’s own feed. Your ads manager can create a typical post with a headline, image and link to sponsor. Or you can create carousel ads, video ads, and lead generation ads that appear in the same “boosted” format. LinkedIn text ads LinkedIn text ads are the closest to Google or Bing search ads that you can get on the platform. LinkedIn text ads operate on a familiar pay-per-click or impression basis, and they’re featured in the sidebar. These are admittedly kind of boring for a social platform – a basic text block with a headline, next to a company logo. LinkedIn Sponsored InMail Know that feeling when you log into LinkedIn and have 10 new messages? It’s likely that some of those are marketers popping into your inbox through Sponsored InMail for a pretty penny. Marketers or sales teams can curate a list of contacts to send personalized messages to. The content of the messages is largely up to you – you want to invite prospects to events or even attempt to generate an inbound call. LinkedIn programmatic display ads LinkedIn joined the fray of programmatic offerings, which is great news for B2B advertisers who rarely have good options for targeting. With these display ads, you can target the largest professional audience based on intent or personas – but more on LinkedIn advertising targeting options later. In terms of ad creative, it’s your run-of-the-mill display ads. Marketers can choose their preferred demand-side platform or trading desk and buy inventory through open or private auctions. LinkedIn dynamic ads Dynamic ads are basically as personalized as you can get with your LinkedIn advertising. Advertisers can choose to promote job postings, content downloads, their own company page, or drive traffic to a website via spotlight ads, which also appear on the newsfeed. This ad type also has set templates and auto-translation options to make personalizing the ad creative easy for you. Bonus: Elevate Plot twist: Elevate is not an ad, but it works as a LinkedIn advertising solution. Elevate is a platform that a company can pay for their employees to become brand advocates. Basically, it makes it easier for your marketing or sales team to control or suggest content that your employees share on LinkedIn. Should employees be sharing your suggested content anyway? Probably. But this spoon-feeds posts and moves the needle – my company saw three hires learn about us from Elevate posts and had $20k+ in earned media! LinkedIn advertising costs As on other platforms, LinkedIn advertising costs are determined by your bids and budgets. This means that your overall ad spend will vary depending on your business and your goals, because this determines the types of ads that you choose for your campaigns and the budgets that you set. However, LinkedIn advertising does come a few minimums that all advertisers must spend: LinkedIn advertising also has a minimum bid for Sponsored Content campaigns, but the exact for this ad will depend on the audience that you’re targeting. Which brings us to… LinkedIn advertising targeting options This is where LinkedIn advertising gets exciting. The targeting on this social platform is better than most. It’s regularly updated and thorough, because professionals like to brag about all of their promotions and achievements. Members contribute their own job titles, company names, seniority, professional interests, and more. With over 500 million members consisting of 73 million senior-level influencers and 45 million decision makers, it’s extremely likely your LinkedIn ads are going to land in front of the right eyeballs. Matched audiences To get started, you should place a tag on your website to be able to retarget your visitors on LinkedIn, just as you would set up for Facebook or Google. LinkedIn calls their tag an “Insight Tag,” and it can also be used to create lookalike audiences. In addition to targeting your website visitors, you can also upload or integrate email lists and run account-based targeting through LinkedIn. Don’t have enough website visitors or sales prospects to build out a viable campaign audience? No problem! LinkedIn advertising features an audience option that expands your reach through their network of publishers. This is generally brand-safe, but beware – it can make your audience large. Aside from the basic Insight Tag, you can also place conversion tracking on your LinkedIn advertising campaigns. These triggers are great to track unique purchases or other actions on your site, especially if you do not use a marketing automation system to create unique landing pages and forms. Audience options LinkedIn ads come with exhaustive options for targeting, which means that you’re able to make sure your ads are getting served to the right people. If you