Just as LinkedIn is a powerful tool for individuals to grow their personal networks, companies are quickly recognizing the applicability of LinkedIn to help grow a brand’s presence and platform. Through both organic and paid options, LinkedIn offers businesses the opportunity to connect with new audiences and create deeper engagement with existing contacts. On the paid side, running LinkedIn ad campaigns can be a fruitful addition to a brand’s digital marketing strategy. Among the social platforms, LinkedIn is proven to be an effective and efficient outreach tool; on average, businesses generate 277% more leads on LinkedIn than Facebook and Twitter. As such, it’s our social-channel-of-choice for clients in the B2B world.
The Right Ad at the Right Time
LinkedIn’s ad platform fosters high-quality engagement and high conversion rates. The social platform’s ad management tool, called the Campaign Manager, is a valuable resource that allows a user to customize a campaign to meet their needs. The ability to adjust targeting criteria allows businesses to home in on precisely the right audience. It’s sort of the anti-billboard approach. With LinkedIn, you can serve ads to highly specific personas at the appropriate stage in the buyer’s journey. With the choice of more than 20 different audience attribution categories—including job title, company name, location, education, and interests—you can hone in on prospects that meet your criteria. As a result, LinkedIn ad campaigns typically yield not only more leads but more quality leads.
Once you’ve determined who you’re targeting and how much they know, or don’t know, about your business, you’ll need to identify the objective that best aligns with your business goal. To launch a campaign in LinkedIn, you’ll need to select an objective from three options: awareness, consideration, and conversion.
Let’s figure out which one is right for you.
Awareness
Is your organization a young business, targeting a new market, or looking to maximize your brand’s voice? If so, your audience is at the top of the funnel waiting to hear from you. In a nutshell, this ad category is focused on building brand awareness through impressions. LinkedIn’s awareness ads aim to increase your brand’s exposure to prospects who aren’t familiar with your organization. Awareness ads should read more high-level and less specific compared to ads further down the funnel.
Consideration
Consideration ads are ideal for targeting an audience with some knowledge of your brand, products, and services. In this category, you’re engaging with a curious group that’s inching closer to becoming your newest customer. With more details than awareness ads, consideration ads help inform the buying decision. Consider including a call-to-action that drives prospects to a landing page with a case study or explainer video.
Conversions
Towards the bottom of the funnel—individuals nearest a buying decision—conversion ads focus on generating leads. Try creating ads that encourage prospects to download a white paper, register for an event, or even schedule a demo. Either way, LinkedIn provides options for the prospect’s next step: send them directly to your website or have them fill out a pre-populated form, allowing them to stay on LinkedIn and receive your premium content. In this category, you can use conversion tracking to measure the impact and optimize for better performance.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat
New ad campaigns can be part-art and part-science. One can thoughtfully consider objectives, audience, and messaging, and still miss the mark. The key to finding the winning combination of ad elements is to conduct a continuous test-measure-revise process. We suggest measuring your key performance indicators (KPIs) against an industry benchmark to see how your outcomes compare. If the ads are underperforming, don’t panic. Step back, analyze the results, adjust, and move forward. Even tweaking one element of your campaign can get you back on track toward meeting your goal.
If this sounds interesting, and complex, that’s okay, and expected. That’s because it is complicated. This brief overview just scrapes the surface of launching a successful LinkedIn ad campaign. There are many, many considerations that go into running a successful ad campaign, far too many for us to review in just a short blog. And even the best laid plans can fall short if the execution is off.
If you’re looking for help with an upcoming LinkedIn ad campaign, we’re here for you. Set up a time to chat today.