As one of the top networks for business-to-business marketing, LinkedIn offers brands powerful advertising functions to reach audiences in a niche industry. While many marketers invest in Facebook and Twitter advertising, a social business platform such as LinkedIn can best target a precise marketing mix. By running LinkedIn ads, marketers will easily infer their campaign’s effectiveness and evaluate its ROI. Here’s how you further facilitate business growth when creating and managing LinkedIn ads.
Targeting for LinkedIn Ads
Before creating a LinkedIn ad, strategize how you will target your audience. You can do this by identifying both the key constituents in your target market and the format that will best apply to your audience. Targeting options range from the job title, status, company name, class, location, education level, gender, and age. This step can prove to be tricky since some LinkedIn users display superfluous information on their profiles. For this reason, try to target in this order: job title, job function and job class, skills, and group targeting.
By targeting broad to narrow, your job title search will be pretty precise for a “broad” method of targeting. While thousands of professionals will have similar job titles, this method will simplify the targeting process. You will have access to the largest audiences for targeting by job function and job class, but with less specificity. Moreover, you can use this method to reach professionals with both experience and job title if you have a big enough budget.
Filter By Skills
Skills search filters professionals who volunteer the most information on their LinkedIn profile. You will have a mass of large, self-selected audiences and learn more about each person. Beware that this method can be too broad at times; alternatively, you can narrow your search down as specific as you want to become acquainted with individual professionals.
Group Targeting
Group targeting results find active, relevant audiences with a genuine interest in the topic at hand. You can create a group from any interest that professionals list. This creates a specific market of driven professionals and industry thought leaders. While this method may reduce your audience size, it allows you to find your ideal customers, instead of dead leads; which will slowly deplete your budget.
To find the most effective target audience, layer all these different search methods. The best way to find this information involves testing various methods, audiences, and comparing your results. Ask yourself “who is my buyer persona?” and fine-tune your ad audience accordingly.
Types of LinkedIn Advertisements
After funneling down your target audience, you must decide which type of LinkedIn advertisement will best appeal to that target audience. LinkedIn correctly offers two types of ads – text ads and sponsored content.
Text ads appear on the right sidebar of the main LinkedIn interface. On average, three text ads appear per page on LinkedIn. Text ads tend to have a low click through rate (CTR) because most users simply ignore such ads that they associate with banners. Try using text ads for difficult call-to-action offers since text ads receive many views but low click-through-rates. While a low click-through-rate may appear counterproductive, this ad type can help to strengthen brand image and brand association.
Sponsored content ads originated in 2013 and appear in mobile news feeds. More specifically, when scrolling, sponsored content ads appear in the second column. These ads appear as “Sponsored.” The true selling point for sponsored content advertising is ad customization including video formatting, images, or text links. Sponsored content ads look similar to Facebook ads, but expand to 200 pixels on a page. Regarding ad spend; you pay each time a sponsored content ads receives clicks, which can generate high revenue for well-known businesses.
Budgeting For LinkedIn Ads
The most common question surrounding LinkedIn ads involves the cost per ad. Your budget will depend on your business’ budget and what your business is striving to achieve. Currently, a LinkedIn ad costs between $6 and $8 a click. Statistics show users spend an average of 17 minutes on LinkedIn each day, as opposed to leading social media platforms such as Facebook, which consumes over four hours.
“Integrative Therapeutics Connects Through Comprehensive Strategy” is a small business that successfully used LinkedIn ads to help grow their business. By targeting titles and skill sets to discover LinkedIn users benefiting from their product, they used Sponsored content in the forms of Sponsored InMail and display ads. Since they took the time to create a highly targeted audience, email subscriber list increased by 25% and achieved high click-through-rates on their ads.
LinkedIn Ads: Analytics
Like any other digital marketing platform, analyzing your data will help you evaluate your ad success. You can run several types of analytic testing to find out how your target market reacts to your ads. The two main types of analytics that LinkedIn offers include campaign-level and ad-level reports. Each has its advantages and disadvantages suited for different business models. Once again, knowing your target market’s habits will save time when it comes to choosing the type of analytics report best suited for your business.
Audience Insights is another tool LinkedIn offers. This tracks professionals clicking on your ads and places them into graphs of different targeting aspects. This can help you determine what works best for a certain part of your target market and allows you to narrow your target even further.
Why You Should Advertise On LinkedIn
Using LinkedIn ads to help drive business growth when used strategically. Business-to-business is where professional network. By shifting your business marketing efforts LinkedIn you can begin defining your target audience to ultimately boost your business. For a step-by-step guide to creating a LinkedIn ad, check out our blog article, How to Create a LinkedIn Ad. Want to incorporate LinkedIn ads into your marketing strategy? Contact the experts at Premiere Creative today and give us a call at (973) 346-8100!