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LinkedIn ads are one of the best business-to-business (B2B) marketing moves you can make to reach industry leaders. Why? Your ads have way more chances of converting on the professional identity site than other social platforms.
Discover how to wield these LinkedIn B2B marketing tools effectively. We'll cover:
LinkedIn advertising options cater to diverse B2B marketing needs. To find the right ad for you and run a campaign successfully, you need to know all the types of ads and how they work in detail.
We'll review the juiciest types of LinkedIn ads so you can implement them to get the results that you want for your company as well as all the ingredients you need to launch your first campaign.
Basically, this is a sponsored post that gets an extra promotion. You can format it either as a text post, with a single picture, as a carousel with many pictures or as an in-feed video.
This type of ad is dynamite to generate engagement. Even though it may have the highest cost-per-click (CPC) from all the ad types, it blends unobtrusively in your audience feed — and that’s a bonus.
Within the world of sponsored content ads, there are 2 types:
These ads are your classic social media advertising: the square at the top of your screen with text and visuals. It’s a less intrusive option and will only attract audiences that are actually interested in what you're specifically offering. These types of ads include a headline, a succinct bit of text and a square image.
You can preview your text ad and see how it will look like in these formats:
An important feature of these types of ads is that you don’t need to create a company page to run them.
This ad arrives directly to your targeted audience’s LinkedIn inbox. This kind of ad gives you direct contact with your prospects and an even easier way of contacting you right away.
These ads are more likely to create conversions than your typical e-mail ad campaign because they feel super personalized. One downside of message ads is that LinkedIn members can choose to opt out of them.
A dynamic ad looks similar to a LinkedIn text ad. It appears on the rail as well, but it lets you personalize your creations for each individual.
To customize the experience to the max, these ads need to access LinkedIn profile data, such as a company name, a photo or a job title.
There are 3 formats available:
All 3 work on desktop and mobile versions.
Note: The creation of these ads, in particular, will require you to contact a LinkedIn representative.
There are a number of aspects to take into account to run ads well. At first, it can feel a bit overwhelming.
No worries. We’ve put together 7 best-practice tactics to get sponsored content and text ads right from the start.
When you have your first winning campaign of text ads try the Audience Expansion feature. Audience Expansion is the equivalent of Lookalike Audiences on Facebook. It targets related audiences to the one you originally set up. This will help you scale your campaign, reaching more people.
Your metrics will change this way: While Audience Expansion will affect clicks and impressions, it isn’t the case with your audience count, which excludes users from Audience Expansion.
To start running ads on LinkedIn, you'll first need to create an account on the platform.
Here are the 5 core elements of a LinkedIn advertising campaign:
This is what you want the viewers to do when coming across your ad. LinkedIn lets you customize your campaign within 3 main categories: awareness, consideration and conversions. Within that division, you will find specific goals such as Website Visits, Engagement, Video Views or Lead Generation.
Having a solid customer journey map is necessary to provide the right content for them at the right time.
This is your opportunity to segment the audience that interests you the most with more than 20 categories at your disposal. You aren’t obliged to select all the options, but the more you personalize your targeting criteria, the more relevant your campaign will be to your desired audience.
Here are 4 targeting criteria tips:
For example, you could include in your ad "consultants" and "coaches" to find someone who is both a consultant and a coach. Or you could add "consultants" or "coaches" to find different B2B leaders in both fields.
An extra advantage of the targeting process is that you can save all your selections as a template, to easily use it later for future campaigns.
In this step, you will choose which ad format you want to design first.
You can add more than one type of ad to your campaign. The ad formats are:
About your budget, you can choose among these 3 cost options:
It may be a good idea to try out some slight adjustments to your campaign, such as the ad format or audience targeting, before committing to high campaign budgets. In any case, LinkedIn will allow you to cancel a B2B advertising campaign at any moment, even if the amount of money you chose to spend isn’t met. As for the timing, you can find all the scheduling options, such as start date, end date or the option to show your ad repeatedly.
Performance data is always crucial to understanding how your campaign is faring. With the LinkedIn Campaign Manager you can easily track:
This aspect is paramount to retarget and adjust for further campaigns. Also, if you opt into conversion tracking, a new window will pop up with options and steps to choose the kind of data you wish to monitor from your campaign.
Time is the main reason you should target like a pro on LinkedIn. The B2B arena is always on the go and needs very specific results. Time is such a scarce resource when it comes to doing company research to find new places to work or think about new partnerships to forge.
A thorough and well-targeted LinkedIn campaign is perfect for reaching B2B leaders because they’re already in a working mindset when navigating the platforms. Ads directly on their feeds can have a high impact.
The most important facet of the targeting criteria is the overall goal of your LinkedIn campaign. Don’t forget to name your campaign and to create campaign groups. And keep in mind LinkedIn ads cover all the stages of the funnel.
If we start with the glass half empty, it's important to know that LinkedIn advertising costs are higher than other social networks, as is the case with Facebook. But the good news is that LinkedIn ads are definitely a solid value for the money, especially when you segment your audience well.
Here are the major benefits of running LinkedIn ads campaigns:
By trying out the different kinds of ads you can get a variety of advantages that fit your specific needs, but you may face some disadvantages that may change the way you organize your campaign.
LinkedIn B2B marketing tools provide you with ads that can be an essential ingredient of your digital advertising stew.
You can optimize LinkedIn for B2B sales by getting help from an experienced digital marketing agency. Kantaloupe helps brands plan and follow personalized marketing strategies that drive results on social media and other channels, such as organic search and paid advertising.
Drop us a line through our free online form to get a proposal and talk about how you can achieve your marketing goals within your budget.
Ines Da Pieve is a business-to-business copywriter from Buenos Aires, Argentina. She writes about technology, education and digital marketing.
