LinkedIn Advertising: How-To Guide

We continue our series of Digital Ads How-To guides. For this article we will be covering the LinkedIn platform.

We are going to dive right in:

Pros

• The best in the business at B2B. Nobody does it better than LinkedIn.
• Advanced B2B Targeting – LinkedIn can take you deep into targeting for the B2B industries.
• InMail – A perfect way to get directly to your target audience and give them gated offers to help increase conversions.
• The Variety – The amount of different ways to advertise is legit. Sponsored Content, Sponsored Mail, Videos Ads, Dynamic Ads, Carousel Ads and Display Ads.
• Accelerator – LinkedIn goes past the first touchpoint and allows by allowing users to track the big dogs (high priority leads) and even give them follow up ads.
• Conversions – The average conversion rate for Google is 2.58%. LinkedIn can get up to 9% if you know what you are doing.

Cons

• Money – LinkedIn is more expensive than any other platform. The average Cost Per Conversion is $3.35 and LinkedIn is over $5.00
• Analytics – LinkedIn has the least sophisticated reporting and analytics features out of all the social platforms.
• User Experience – It is a rough ride compared to other platforms. It is getting better with each new update…but it can be trying at times. Don’t blame your computer…they didn’t develop the program.

Now that you have the good, the bad and even the ugly…we are going to dive in here and lay out how to run digital ads on LinkedIn.

Value Proposition and Goals

Before starting any advertising campaign you should understand what you are offering your audience and as a business what you are trying to accomplish. If you are confused or do not have a clear picture it is going to be very hard to convince others.

So before spending thousands of dollars on advertising, make sure you can concisely explain the value proposition and the goal you want to achieve with your digital ad campaign.

Objective

You figured this out in the previous step. So when it opens up in the LinkedIn platform it will be easy for you to choose the right objective.

If needed LinkedIn will give you more information about each objective if you hover your mouse over each button, but you should already know.

As soon as you click on an objective another screen will appear for you to interact with. LinkedIn jumps straight into the audience. It looks like the following:

You can name the audience if you would like. We recommend you do this if you think this audience will have more than one campaign sent to it. It will save time when sending out your next advertisement to them.

Pick the locations you would like to advertise to. Then hit your audiences and the attributes of that target audience. You will be able to type in specific dataset points you want to attack. Such as CEOs, Product Management, Marketing, Executive Management, etc. It can be very specific.

Once you have finished picking your audience, you will get into picking the type of ad you would like to use. You will see:

Pick what you feel is best. If you are just using images I would recommend the single image approach. Video ads will get the highest engagement.

Next you will get “Placement” as shown below:

If you find that there are specific categories you would really like to not market to, then you have the option to put that into the ad. They are basically negative keywords. LinkedIn explains all the other options.

Next we will move onto the Budget. This is laid out below:

You can pick a daily or lifetime budget. The lifetime budget should be used for campaigns that have a specific time factor involved. The daily budget should be used for ongoing campaigns.

You can schedule when to start and end your campaigns. You really won’t be ending a campaign unless you are using your lifetime budget.

Bidding strategy. Until you get more experience doing paid advertising campaigns we recommend you stick with the Maximum delivery.

Now the last step is conversion tracking as shown below:

I could sit here and write a very long drawn out explanation of how to set this up, but I’m gonna let LinkedIn do that. Hit the link.

Now hit the button on the bottom right and it will take you to the next page.

This is where you are going to upload the images or video and put the copy. This is the ad itself.

Here are some good tips for LinkedIn advertising:

Be real. Actual experiences or stories from within your industry or business. Products or services in action.

Use impinging copy over text image to get your message across.

Consider adding a CTA to get conversions.

 I would create two ads about the same thing and then A/B test the ads continually. Work on improving performance for each ad.

Watch your analytics. Mess with the audience. Change up the CTAs. Always be working on improving that conversion rate.

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