LinkedIn Advertising basics:
Do you want your company to grow on the Internet? Have you ever done a PPC or paid campaign on LinkedIn? The time has come to create your first campaign on this professional social network.
Why advertise on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is without a doubt, an excellent communication channel to get in touch with companies and professionals that interest you. In fact, job offers are also posted! Look at some of the metrics:
We've helped hundreds of companies of all sizes achieve their goals advertising on LinkedIn, many of them clients but also, many on our free 30 min consultation. Feel free to get in touch and we'll be happy to arrange a call and help you for a bit.
Some of LinkedIn Advertising benefits
Segment a unique audience: There are more than 700 million professionals on LinkedIn. We can segment them by title, role, industry, and much more.
Create effective ads with ease: Whether your goal is to generate leads, publicize your brand or get registrations for your events, LinkedIn can help.
Control your budget and spending: Manage your spending with the different flexible pricing options. You can start with any budget and stop your ads whenever you want.
Making a strong page on LinkedIn
Before we start working on our ads, we need to make sure we've created a strong business presence by working on our LinkedIn page. The page incorporates any representation of your company on LinkedIn from an informative and consistent company page posting to employee activity and profiles.
By maintaining an updated page profile and posting organic content consistently, you’ll drive traffic, sales and grow the "brand" awareness.
A few things to pay attention to:
Company logo: On LinkedIn, this is the first visual representation of your business and brand. Use your logo or a very recognizable image and make it look perfect, no blurry repurposed image (optimal size is 300x300 pixels).
Company overview and Organization info: Here is where you tell the world who you are as a business, what you do, what you care about, and how you can help. The information we provide is going to be read by any prospect so fill in every piece of information LinkedIn asks, including website, location, contact info, service hours and languages.
Cover image: The cover image shows up right behind your logo. Make sure to take advantage of this banner to showcase something important to your future clients, maybe a picture of your friendly team or a city picture where your located with a snippet of information from your sector or company. Also, make sure its the right size and it looks good, nobody likes badly cropped blurry images!
Recent page updates Your recent updates section is the timeline where all of your company content updates live. Make sure you’re regularly posting content (at least weekly, to see 2x better engagement, according to LinkedIn) to drive traffic to your blog posts, promotions, offers, and job opportunities.
Company photos: We recommend to post from time to time photos of your employees, company culture and office space, it helps a lot when people can connect to you and your team, the people behind the logo.
Identifying and building a perfect Audience
For our clients at BausLabs, we sit down with each client and work to understand their business, their clients and their need. Having this information allows you to structure your audience.
Here are some of the questions you can answer to understand your audience, by thinking of a standard customer. Feel free to make assumptions if your starting out, in the future, analytics will either confirm your assumptions or correct them.
What is their job function or company title?
Where are they located? City, country or region.
What sector and industry do they work in?
What is their seniority?
What interests could they have?
What content would they like?
What questions can we answer for them?
What are they struggling with? Pain points.
While organic content shows up in your followers’ feeds, Sponsored Content and other ad formats are shown to everybody in the audience you create or automate. If you already have a campaign running or a big LinkedIn audience, we recommend turning on a LinkedIn audience listener so that LinkedIn can build one based on your website visitors. Contact us for more information if you need to.
We always recommend an editorial calendar that organizes the types of content you’re posting so that you can limit the time it takes you so that you can focus on what's important, running your business.
Preparing an effective LinkedIn Ads campaign
When starting, t’s important to think carefully about who you’re advertising to, and how you can maximize the budget you have.
Configuring our first Ad Campaign, we'll have to set up your target audience and bid, so it’s good to have a handle on what those are and what to choose.
When creating LinkedIn Ads, you’ll use the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions platform. If it’s your first time using this platform, you’ll need to create a Campaign Manager account. It's very simple, just follow the steps and ad your payment details.
Now that the setup is done (let us know if you need assistance), lets get into the ad campaign details.
Identifying a target audience for LinkedIn Ads
Within LinkedIn, there are many ways to establish an audience for your ads, that's why its always a good idea to check the premade audience templates that LinkedIn created. We never find them as useful for our clients but check them out either way.
If we decide to create our own audience, we have many things to choose from and pay attention to the "AND" and "OR" option, you can select many categories to mix or target independently.
Location: Required by LinkedIn. You can choose a city or metro area, a state, or a country. This data is based on what’s in a user’s profile or their IP address.
Company information: Including company connections, followers, industry, name, and size.
Demographics: Include age and gender.
Education: Target based on degrees, fields of study, and/or schools.
Job experience: Including job function, seniority, title, member skills, and years of experience.
Interests: Target certain LinkedIn groups or member interests.
As we said, hone in on your desired audience by combining targeting features. And at the end, you'll have to decide if you want to switch on "Audience Expansion" which we do not recommend for caped budgets and first timers. First see if your audience targeting is correct and working, then you can always do enhancing experiments.
After completing the Audience part, we'll have to select our budget, not every type of campaign offers all of them but the main options on any PPC campaign are: CPC, CPM and CPS:
Cost-per-click (CPC): pay when someone clicks on your ad.
Cost-per-1,000-impressions (CPM): pay when your target audience sees your ad.
Cost-per-send (CPS): pay when Message Ads are delivered successfully.
Ad type and best practices
After you’ve chosen your campaign objective and audience, it’s time to answer the " which type of LinkedIn Ad will be the most effective?" question. LinkedIn offers several different types of ad formats but remember, no matter what format you choose, always be testing!
Sponsored Content Single Image Ad
Sponsored Content appears natively in the LinkedIn feed of your target audience. This includes single image ads, Carousel Ads, and Video Ads.
Sponsored Content Carousel Ad
Carousel Ads, a type of Sponsored Content, hold up to 10 images to show a story, showcase a product, or drive registrations for events.
Sponsored Content Video Ad
Video ads can drive leads, build brand awareness, or promote a new product and offer video metrics and data on the types of professionals interacting with your ad.
Message Ads
Message Ads (InMail) are a direct line to your network and with a more than 50% open rate, are more effective than email! Try Message Ads for recruiting, event registration, and lead generation.
Text Ads
Text Ads are a self-service, pay-per-click (or per impression) option from LinkedIn similar to Google AdWords. You can advertise for leads, job opportunities, or groups to the audience of your choosing.
Get the right partner for the job
In this article, we tried to go over the basics of a LinkedIn campaign structure but if your planning to use LinkedIn marketing as a main source of leads, you should consider hiring a specialized Agency or an in-house PPC expert.
Creating and managing Ad campaigns on LinkedIn should include conversion tracking, constant optimization, correct attribution and a dedicated person that connects the dots and walks with you all the way.
At BausLabs we proud ourselves in becoming part of your team, by understanding your business, your team, structure and objectives, we can provide the best services that will get you where you want to go from Barcelona, Tel Aviv and Zurich to the world. .
Get in touch! We'll audit your website and advice you for free on a zoom call. And if for any reason we're not a match at the end, we'll happily refer you to someone that can help and make the introduction :)
Cheers!
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