LinkedIn has gradually grown into a significant instrument of B2B promotion, providing unique benefits for connecting with representatives of various fields. To optimize LinkedIn advertising, you must create the best-performing advertisements that will catch the eye and compel the audience to take action.
Overall, according to the study, more than 2 million organizations across the globe employ the use of advertising on LinkedIn, and more than 75% of the B2B marketers are active on this platform.
LinkedIn ads delivered in 2022 reached 22 million more people than the ads of the previous year, and analytics show that, for instance, you can target over 14 percent of the global adult population using only LinkedIn advertisements. (January 2024)
According to the statistics for April 2024, about 134.5 million users log in to LinkedIn daily for various activities. Additionally, over 48. 5% are active monthly.
But if you need to be more aware of how to add or have second thoughts about how effective advertising is and how much it will cost you, this piece is for you. Keep scrolling down to learn how to successfully present your ads on Instagram, regardless of how much you’re willing to spend.
Have a cup of coffee with Bullzeye Media Marketing and grab the essential steps and practices for setting up LinkedIn ads that get results.
1. Understand Your Audience
It is irritating to have social media accounts and pages filled with advertisements before knowing the targeted audience. LinkedIn’s powerful targeting options allow you to segment your audience based on various parameters:
Job Title: Identify your target professionals and their job titles who are most likely to be interested in your product or service. For example, if you sell a project management tool, you will want to reach Project Managers, Operations Managers, and Product Managers.
Industry: Refine it by the fields of work if you want your ads to be seen by specific professionals from particular industries. This is especially true if your product or service is specific to an industry, such as IT, Healthcare, or Finance.
Company Size: Modifying the targeting depending on the business size is essential. This is advantageous if your products and services focus on small, mid-sized, or large businesses.
Seniority Level: Identify and focus on people who work for a particular company at the bottom rank, middle management, top management, or corporate officers. This assists you in segmenting your communication to reach the right people in an organization who can make a change or persuade others to do so.
Geography: Market your ads in targeted areas so that you can target the professionals in given cities, regions, or countries. This is only important to some local businesses, products, or services in certain areas.
Skills: Select target users based on the skills detailed in the LinkedIn Skill assessments of various professionals. This will enable you to target people with particular competence or knowledge associated with your products or services.
Groups: LinkedIn groups are certainly one of the best options for niche marketing. They can target users of particular groups concerned with the industry or area of interest.
Example: If you are in the process of marketing a new project management software, then some of the audiences of interest in the marketing mix are:
Job Titles: The role of a Project manager, an Operation manager
Industries: IT, Construction, Marketing
Company Size: 50-200 employees
Skills: Agile, Scrum
2. Select the Type of Ad
LinkedIn has several types of ads available, which can be used for different aims and objectives in the marketing process. Ad format selection is quite a critical aspect of your campaign, especially when choosing between banner ads and pop-ups. The expert team of Bullzeye Media Marketing overviews the ad formats available on LinkedIn:
Sponsored Content
Sponsored Content ads are native ads that look like other ads placed within the users’ feeds on LinkedIn. They are handy for promoting blog posts, articles, videos, eBooks, and content for engagement and lead generation purposes.
How It Works: Sponsored Content targets LinkedIn users’ home feeds and is labeled “Promoted.”
Benefits: These ads are more contextually integrated into the page, reducing users’ annoyance. They support image and video as the type of media or rich media.
Use Cases: To produce and enhance thought leadership articles, share industry-related content, generate website visitors’ traffic, and encourage downloads of whitepapers and eBooks.
Example: For the campaign execution, HubSpot used Submit Sponsored Content to advertise an eBook focused on content marketing. Under the ‘What we created’ section, the ad comprised an icon that attracted the reader’s attention, a headline that clearly stated what the reader could learn from the article, and a CTA using a download link for the eBook.
Text Ads
Some of the standard and most straightforward types of advertisement that appear mainly in the sidebar or at the top of the LinkedIn homepage are called Text Ads. They are most suitable for traffic generation to your website or landing pages.
How It Works: Text Ads contain a headline, description, and a small image (optional). They are found on the right sidebar on linked-in pages.
Benefits: These ads are simple and can be generated in the shortest time possible. They are inexpensive and billed either by a pay-per-click or pay-per-impression formula.
Use Cases: Website visitors, boosting attendance of webinars, or collecting leads.
Example: The LinkedIn Text Ad that Salesforce used was “Boost Your Sales Team’s Productivity.” The ad’s description enlarged the features of their CRM and included a call to action that urged the audiences to “Try Salesforce Free for 30 Days.”
Sponsored InMail
Sponsored InMail lets you directly mail the targeted members on LinkedIn in their mailbox. It is very suitable for techniques like direct marketing and direct mail advertising.
How It Works: Sponsored InMail is dropped directly into the LinkedIn inbox of users who have been defined as target interest areas, looking like standard communication.
Benefits: Great open rates because the messages that go out are targeted. They are sent only when users are active, which increases the chances of a response being sent to the user.
Use Cases: Market yourself, extend an invitation to a professional, send an individualized offer, or a ‘come and work for us’ campaign.
Example: Oracle sent a Sponsored Email to different business executives to inform them of an upcoming special webinar. The option with the personal message generated a higher registration ratio than the general email invitation.
Dynamic Ads
Dynamic Ads are targeted ads that use information from a LinkedIn profile to promote product/service offers. They are ideal for driving traffic and gaining brand recognition.
How It Works: Profile data (for example, profile picture, company name) are used for Dynamic Ads to personalize the ad interstitials.
Benefits: It is very involved because one is assigned a specific person to engage with. They can depict the profile owner or some company’s logo that the viewer is associated with.
Use Cases: For instance, reaching LinkedIn page followers, encouraging people to register for an event, or downloading related content.
Example: Microsoft used Dynamic Ads to advertise the “Follow” campaign. Indeed, the ad displayed the viewer’s profile picture and asked them to follow the Microsoft LinkedIn page; thereby, the engagement rate of the ad was higher.
Video Ads
Video Ads are an excellent method of narrating your brand or company, introducing products, or explaining the benefits of using your product based on customers’ experiences. They are posted on LinkedIn and pop up automatically, and those pop-ups grab people’s attention in a very short time.
How It Works: Video Ads are embedded in the LinkedIn feed, and they play when a user rolls over them.
Benefits: The high engagement from the use of the video element is due to its being always dynamic. Videos are particularly appropriate for telling stories and portraying the features of the product.
Use Cases: Sales pitches, success stories, company and product/service narratives, or information for consumers.
Example: Adobe used a 15-second video ad to promote their Creative Cloud line of applications. Since the graphic design was appealing and the information was presented in a video format with some humor, there was increased awareness and desire by the target group of creative professionals.
Carousel Ads
This type of ad enables you to feature one or more images or videos in a single advertisement. This format of layout’s feature makes it suitable for addressing areas of interest when narrating a story or breaking down different aspects of a product.
How It Works: Carousel Ads are displayed in the form of cards that can slide to the left. Each card displays an image or video and a description.
Benefits: It is a more appealing presentation that enables telling a story and presenting several items or functions.
Use Cases: It would be useful for telling a story about a brand, special uses of a product, or several events.
Example: Leveraging on Carousel Ads, Dropbox focused on specific application scenarios of the service offered by the company. Everything shown on the carousel referenced a different case to exemplify how Dropbox can be useful for numerous tasks in a business setting.
3. Craft Compelling Ad Copy
The ad copy you write with must be simple, brief, and yet persuasive. Here are some tips for crafting effective ad copy:
Headline: The headline part also has to be concise. Ideally, it should focus on one or two benefits/unique selling points or exciting pieces of information that would attract the reader’s attention.
Description: Explain the details of the headline from the description section. Express yourself more about what you are selling and why people should buy it. Use bullet points to make it understandable and enable the reader to emphasize the correct areas.
CTA: The last of these is to critically emphasize the call to action. Also, choose action words for the button, such as “Download now,” “Register today,” or “Learn more.” The button should strongly indicate a call to action.
Example: LinkedIn Text Ad: Salesforce advertised on LinkedIn, the business professional social platform. The headline of the advert was “Boost Your Sales Team’s Productivity.” The description was about the organization’s CRM and contained a free trial offer for 30 days.
4. Use High-Quality Visuals
The first of these faces relates to the factor of attention, where visuals are found to be discrete within a text. Incorporating high-quality images or videos related to your brand and the message being passed across is advisable. Here are some tips for choosing the right visuals:
Relevance: It also means that the objects depicted in the picture should correspond to what is said within the advertisement’s limits. They should augment and complement the message that you want to pass across.
Quality: Use high-quality images and videos, which should be at least 720p. Utilizing inferior graphics and animations has a negative effect on your brand’s reception.
Branding: Integrate your brand colors, logos, or any other feature that will enable the audience to maintain the sight line of your brand.
Example: The Sponsored Content ad showed a chaotic picture of a creative space and aimed at presenting Adobe Creative Cloud suite. This was a good image that captured the attention of the target group of professionals, especially artists and designers.
5. A/B Test Your Ads
A/B testing entails using two or more ads with slight differences to establish which has better performance. Try out different headlines, pictures, banners, button messages, or calls to action on your ads. Here’s how to approach A/B testing:
Identify Variables: Decide which attribute issue you wish to put to the test. This could be the headline, picture, text written on the ad, or CTA.
Create Variations: To get a more accurate result, create variants of the ad in which the element you are testing differs across the versions of the different ad spots.
Monitor Performance: Always evaluate each advertisement variant based on factors such as Click-Through Rates (CTR), Conversion Rates, and Cost per Conversion.
Analyze Results: Decide which variation performed better and apply the knowledge gained to increase the ad’s effectiveness.
Example: Microsoft used two headlines for the LinkedIn ads on Office 365: A and B. One focused on efficiency, while the other on cooperation. In this case, they were able to identify which headline would reach the audience they targeted fairly well.
6. Monitor and Optimize Performance
This can be done using LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager, which allows one to track advertising performance on LinkedIn. Pay attention to key metrics such as:
Click-Through Rate (CTR): The number of people who went to your site or store after seeing the ad as a fraction of the total number of people who saw it. Usually, a high CTR means that your ad is attractive and is likely to appeal to the targeted customers.
Conversion Rate: It has been defined as the percentage of consumers who took a specific action an organization wants them to take, e.g., completing a form or downloading a resource after clicking on the ad.
Cost Per Conversion: The number of actual changes per average acquisition cost or the cost of getting a conversion. This helps the implementer know the usefulness of the expenditure on the advertisements.
Engagement Rate: The engagement rate, in simple terms, means how many people like, comment on, or share your ad. A high engagement level is perceived as a good sign and points towards the high relevance of the content shared and the level of interest that the audience holds for the content.
These findings can be used to maximize your advertisement promotions further. For example, if a particular ad’s clicked rate is low, it might be helpful to change the headline or visuals to increase users’ interest.
Example: They pinpointed that based on the CTR data, their own CTR was lower than it should have been for a specific ad campaign. From such data, they noticed that the viewers needed to perceive the picture used in the ad correctly. They substituted for the image with the appropriate one and immediately noted a rise in their performance.
7. LinkedIn’s Retargeting Options
LinkedIn-assisted match options enable you to target audiences engaged with your ads or who have visited your website. This makes the various firms remain relevant to clients and, in the process, increases the chances of making conversions among the targeted firms. Here’s how to use retargeting effectively:
Website Retargeting: Target users who have visited some pages of your website with ads on the LinkedIn portal. This helps continuously remind users of your brand since they are already interested in what you have to offer.
Lead Gen Form Retargeting: Recapture people who have opened but still need to complete your LinkedIn lead gen forms.
Video Ad Retargeting: Now is the time to target the viewers who watched, for example, not less than X % of your video commercials.
Example: Specifically, LinkedIn retargeting engaged the users who had visited Zendesk’s pricing page but still needed to fill out a form. They achieved this objective by making the most of a discount offer that is normally invoked on new customers, hence converting many of them.
8. Utilize LinkedIn’s Insight Tag
LinkedIn Insight Tag is a code that can be placed on your website by which you can get conversion tracking and data counting of who is visiting your site. Here’s how to make the most of the Insight Tag:
Track Conversions: Audience Insights is another feature of LinkedIn that can be used to monitor the efficacy of adverts through the actions taken on your website as a lead generation source, including uploads and downloads, among other actions made by the audience exposed to the adverts.
Gather Audience Insights: Learn more about your website visitors, especially their jobs, the industries they work in, and the companies they work for. Serving the right content needs to the right audience This information should be used to improve the targeting and develop more relevant adverts.
Optimize Campaigns: Use conversion tracking data to understand which advertisements and targeting techniques are most effective. Continuously optimize your campaigns according to the insights gathered.
Example: LinkedIn provided the LinkedIn Insight Tag to formally use on Dropbox’s website to discern which advertisement was most effective in encouraging sign-ups. With this information, they employed data-driven ways to work on the amounts spent on the ads and concentrate on the best-performing ads.
Information on LinkedIn Ad and Its Cost
Facts:
Professional Audience: LinkedIn currently claims to have more than 774 million registered users, most of which are professionals and key decision-makers.
Higher Engagement: LinkedIn ads give better engagement than most social media platforms, especially for B2B businesses.
Effective for Lead Generation: LinkedIn is considered the most favorable site in B2B lead generation; it supplies 80% of B2B leads.
Pricing:
LinkedIn ads work on bidding, and you decide on the bid you want to make for your ads. This element can be more or less high depending on your targeting preferences, several competitors, and ad relevance. Here’s a general idea of LinkedIn ad costs:
CPC (Cost Per Click) usually costs between $2 to $6 per click.
CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions): Normally ranges from $6. 59 to $10 per 1,000 impressions.
CPS (Cost Per Send for Sponsored InMail): A figure under $0. 80 per send.
Daily Minimum Spend: LinkedIn has a minimum spend of $10 per day on ads.
Ask Out of the Box: FAQs
LinkedIn requires a minimum daily budget of $10 for ads. This allows you to start small and scale your campaigns as you see results.
You can measure the success of your LinkedIn ads by tracking key metrics such as click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, cost per conversion, and engagement rates. LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager provides detailed analytics to help you monitor and optimize your ad performance.
Yes, LinkedIn allows you to target specific companies with your ads. You can use the Company Targeting option to reach employees of particular companies, making it easier to tailor your message to the right audience.
Conclusion
Creating high-performing LinkedIn ads involves understanding your audience, choosing the correct ad format, crafting compelling ad copy, using high-quality visuals, and continuously testing and optimizing your ads. By following these best practices and learning from real-world examples, you can create LinkedIn ads that capture attention and drive meaningful results for your business.
Ready to improve your LinkedIn advertising? Implement these strategies today, and watch your engagement and conversions soar!
Let us help you build a robust and effective LinkedIn Ads strategy tailored to your business needs. Trust us, we are just a click away. Have a look at our services- SCAN YOUR WEBSITE FOR FREE and reach out to us at www.thebullzeye.com.
