LinkedIn Ads: How to Advertise on Linkedin in 5 Simple Steps – Your advertising strategy on Google Ads is stalling, while your ad campaigns with Facebook are not delivering the return on investment you expected.
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Have you ever tried ads on LinkedIn Ads?
If you’re looking for a new advertising channel to drive traffic, leads, and customers, LinkedIn might just be the social network for you, especially if you work in an industry related to B2B (business-to-business) commerce.
According to 2021 data, nearly 70% of B2B marketing teams worldwide have already acquired customers using a marketing strategy based on advertising campaigns with LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Ads, the advertising platform of the professional social network created in 2002 in Mountain View, California, has its own specificities, like the other main advertising agencies, such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads. With LinkedIn Ads, we are not exactly in SEM (Search Engine Marketing) type advertising , nor in display or the usual Social Advertising.
LinkedIn ads have their own characteristics and ways of working, as we will see later in this article.
Before deciding whether LinkedIn’s advertising platform is worth trying out for your company, you should first ask yourself the following question: “Would a professional, in front of his computer screen at the office, be likely to be interested in my product or service offer? »
The answer to this question is essential to know if your target audience is likely to be present on the professional social network, and if therefore the implementation of an advertising strategy with LinkedIn Ads can be synonymous with success.
How to Advertise on Linkedin in 2022: A Beginner’s Guide
But, as we said before, the LinkedIn Ads advertising platform is generally perfectly suited for B2B marketing.
So if you’re selling something that appeals to business owners and professionals, you should look into LinkedIn’s possibilities and test its capabilities.
In this guide, we’ll take you through the five essential steps to setting up effective advertising campaigns on the LinkedIn social media advertising platform, and explain everything you need to know in order to create and manage self-service advertising campaigns on LinkedIn, thanks to its different types of ads, whether Sponsored Content, Message Ads, Dynamic Ads or Text Ads.
This is all done from Campaign Manager, LinkedIn’s advertising platform.
Before you start launching your LinkedIn advertising campaigns, you simply need to create a LinkedIn Campaign Manager account.
This is done very quickly, by clicking here.
Campaign Manager is a practical tool with an easy-to-use dashboard that will allow you to define a budget, target audience, determine specific objectives and have full control over the progress and timing of your campaigns. online advertising.
In addition, the LinkedIn Ads platform has several features that will help you improve your campaigns and achieve your advertising and sales objectives, the details of which are as follows:
- Dynamic visual statistics and data that match only the criteria, search and filter preferences you set.
- A summary of all actions generated by your campaigns, including clicks, likes, shares, and comments, as well as new followers to your LinkedIn account.
- Details of the demographic categories of LinkedIn members who clicked on your ads, available for each of your campaigns and ads.
Once you’ve created your LinkedIn Campaign Manager account and completed an overview of the tool’s capabilities, it’s time to create your LinkedIn advertising campaigns.
Step No. 1: Choose specific goals
For each campaign that you will create with LinkedIn Ads, you must choose your main objectives.
The professional social network offers you 3 main options:
1- Awareness
With an objective related to what is called brand awareness, you aim to create awareness of your brand through campaigns focused on the number of impressions.
2- Consideration
So-called “consideration” campaigns can relate to the number of visits to your website. In this case, you will want to entice more people to visit your website.
It can also be engagement, a type of goal related to increasing the number of clicks or followers on your LinkedIn Page.
Finally, the video format can help you tell the story of your product or your brand and therefore enter into this type of objective.
3- Conversion
By conversion objective, we are talking about lead generation. With LinkedIn Ads, you will be able to generate leads using pre-populated forms that include LinkedIn member data.
But it can also be other types of conversions on your website, which LinkedIn calls “website conversion”. This ranges from acquiring leads to downloading white papers.
Step No. 2: Select your targeting Audience
Selecting your targeting criteria, what LinkedIn calls “audience”, works the same regardless of the type of ad you’ve chosen, which we’ll see in the next step.
Remember that targeting is a crucial element of any successful advertising campaign, and not just with LinkedIn, which will strongly influence your engagement and conversion rates.
To reach your audience/target audience, a sine qua non for the success of your LinkedIn advertising campaigns, the social network and its advertising platform provide you with effective targeting tools.
You will be able to choose from more than twenty categories of “audience attributes”.
Here are the main ones:
- size of the company
- Company Name
- Hobbies
- LinkedIn Groups
- Job
- Hierarchical level
- Skills
- Schools
- Etc.
Step No. 3: Select your LinkedIn ad format
Now that you have your Campaign Manager account, chosen objectives, and completed audience voting targeting, it’s time to create ads and manage your ad campaigns, using different ad formats.
You can use Sponsored Content, Message Ads, Dynamic Ads or Text Ads, or a combination of all these types of advertising.
Let’s see what are the specificities of each of them:
Sponsored Content
Sponsored Content ads are a very effective way to reach your target audience and connect with professionals who matter to your business.
This type of ad appears directly in the News Feed of the LinkedIn professionals you want to target.
It comes in three different formats:
- Single Image Ads
- Video Ads
- Carousel ads.
Thanks to Sponsored Content ads, you will be able to achieve the following objectives:
- Build brand awareness, capture leads and “nurture” them at every stage of your sales cycle
- Target a quality audience with accurate and reliable data from LinkedIn profiles
- Deliver native advertising to highly engaged publishes, both on desktop and mobile, directly to your targets’ business newsfeeds.
Post Ads
As its name suggests, Message Ads allow you to reach your prospects directly in their LinkedIn messaging service, a place of professional exchange par excellence where people on the social network usually spend a lot of time.
If you create Message Ads, you will be able to do the following three things:
- Send messages directly to your prospects to encourage them to take action
- Measure the effectiveness of your campaign by analyzing which companies react to your messages
- Achieve optimal engagement and higher response rates than with a traditional email marketing campaign
Dynamic Ads
LinkedIn’s Dynamic Ads allow you to reach leads by delivering personalized ads based on the information provided on your target’s profile.
By selecting a Dynamic Ad format, you will be able to personalize your LinkedIn advertising campaigns for each member of your target audience, on a large scale.
This type of ad uses certain data from the prospect’s LinkedIn profile, such as company name, job title, and photo to personalize ads, and ultimately boost your ad engagement rates.
Here are the three formats available with Dynamic Ads:
- Spotlight Ad: this option is ideal for driving traffic to your website or encouraging visitors to take action
- Follower Ad: With Follower Ads, you can promote your LinkedIn page and encourage members of the social network to follow it with a simple click on your ad
- Jobs Ad: as its name suggests, Jobs Ads will help you increase the number of relevant candidates for your job offers by personalizing the advertisements seen by the talents you are looking for as much as possible.
Text Ads
Text Ads come in the form of simple advertisements, but they are actually very effective.
They are billed on a cost-per-click or cost-per-impression basis.
Here is what Text Ads will allow you to do:
- Easily create ads and launch a campaign with just a few mouse clicks
- Pay only for ads that work, per click or impression
- Personalize your messages and advertising content, according to the profile of the professionals you wish to reach
Step No. 4: Set your budget and timeline
Before putting your campaign on track, you still need to define two major elements: the budget and the schedule.
Three options are available to you:
- Cost per click (CPC), which is most commonly used in actionable campaigns, such as lead generation or event registration
- The cost per impression (CPM) is totally suitable for advertising campaigns whose main objective is awareness
- Cost per send (CPS) is used for campaigns where messages are sent. Each message sent is billed.
Apart from the above options, you also need to adjust your bid proposal, your daily budget, your total budget and the start and end dates of your campaign.
Step No. 5: Measure the results of your campaign and make any necessary adjustments.
As soon as your LinkedIn advertising campaign is launched, you must observe and analyze its performance. Access the statistics of your advertisements on the dashboard provided for this purpose in your Campaign Manager account, simply by selecting the campaign to evaluate.
You will be able to track crucial data such as the number of impressions, clicks, and the “social actions” of your campaign.
So-called social actions on social networks are the actions performed by LinkedIn members who freely interact with your content. It is therefore an organic commitment.
It is by relying on this data that you will be able to improve your LinkedIn Ads campaigns and your performance, by refining your targeting, adjusting your budget, and testing several types of advertisements.
Conclusion
With a potential audience of nearly 660 million LinkedIn members in more than 200 countries around the world, the LinkedIn Ads advertising platform is designed to ensure the success of companies, regardless of their marketing objectives and advertising budget.
By following the 5 steps we have presented in this article, you should be able to create effective B2B campaigns that can support your marketing and sales objectives.