Advertising endures, through thick and thin.
It enables to reach more customers, which is why research suggests that advertising can reduce the downside in a recession and increase his ray of light in a rally, provided to get it right, of course.
When advertising on LinkedIn, engaging decision makers in the mindset for doing business.
Help to connect with professional audiences on a large scale and generate meaningful interactions in settings that generate results.
Brands have experienced a 33% increase in purchase intent as a result of ad exposure on linkedin.
Audiences exposed to brand and acquisition messages on LinkedIn are 6 times more likely to convert.
Compared to other social channels, 82% of B2B marketers are more successful with linkedin.
Master the way to achieve the results to want.
1. Define the goals:
The ultimate goal of advertising is to drive business growth.
To achieve real and sustainable business impact, need to find the right balance between brand marketing and demand marketing.
On-demand marketing drives short-term growth.
Through demand marketing, building urgency around specific offers to motivate buyers to take action.
Because this captures but does not create demand, the business effects of demand marketing diminish over time.
Brand marketing drives long-term growth.
Through brand marketing, to create memorable links between the brand and relevant buying situations.
Because this creates and captures demand, the business effects of brand marketing increase over time.
Branding takes time, but it’s worth it.
The number one barrier to brand building is the inability to see short-term results.
Research shows that brand campaigns need to run consistently for more than six months to create real impact.
But 75% of marketers do it for six months or less.
Most of the time, this is because marketers are under pressure to produce results.
However, marketers who can protect their brand campaigns from premature ROI judgment are enabling brand awareness to grow in brand fame (or awareness on a grand scale).
This is important because fame brings greater pricing power, lower customer acquisition costs, and better financial performance for the company.
Every business needs a balance between branding and on-demand marketing activity, and more than 50% of marketers on LinkedIn say they want to execute
Brand and demand campaigns together, taking into account the entire buyer’s journey, from the interested visitor to the paying customer.
There is a data-backed magic formula to guide the efforts:
Split the B2B marketing budget to spend 46% on branding and 54% on on-demand marketing to effectively create, capture, and convert demand into revenue.
Defining the goals is the first and most important step in effective advertising.
Provides clarity of purpose and direction, and determines the strategies, tactics, and key performance indicators for the campaign.
While this is true for any advertising campaign, it is vital on LinkedIn because our platform is optimized for goal-based advertising.
Pay close attention to the goals on LinkedIn because each campaign goal is optimized for the members most likely to take the desired action based on previous and anticipated platform data.
For video views, bidding on impressions optimizes impressions (number of times people have seen the ad) while bidding on Video views are optimized for video views (amount of +2 seconds of 50% continuous view on screen or CTA click, whichever comes first).
2. Build a compelling organic presence:
These are the solutions at the disposal:
• LinkedIn pages.
• Live.
• Events.
The higher the organic reach, the more can amplify the paid advertising efforts on LinkedIn.
Optimizing the LinkedIn Page and taking an always-on approach to sharing great content.
An integrated organic and paid strategy can significantly improve the effectiveness of the LinkedIn advertising.
Build followers and engagement.
Build a compelling organic presence.
Test and optimize organic content.
Select the best performing content for paid campaigns.
LinkedIn Page:
It all starts with the LinkedIn Page, the professional home of the LinkedIn brand.
This is where can: develop thought leadership and use storytelling to share inspiring content with the community.
Showcase the corporate culture, strengthen the employer brand, and engage the employees as integral members of the online community.
Promote the work by sharing updates that the community can act on immediately.
Make it work by completing the page because pages with complete information get 30% more weekly visits and are more likely to find them.
when members search on LinkedIn, Tap the Content Suggestions feature to discover hot topics and articles that can share or leverage for the own content strategy.
Go ahead and associate up to 3 hashtags with the page to expose the brand to a wider audience.
Engage and re-engage the community with ongoing conversations.
Businesses with full, active pages are more successful in achieving growth goals, which include:
5-fold increase in page views.
7x increase in the average number of impressions per follower.
11x increase in clicks per follower.
Businesses that post weekly see a twofold increase in engagement with their content.
Images usually have a 2 times higher interaction rate.
Custom 3-4 image collages work especially well for organizations.
Once the page reaches 150 followers, the opportunity for growth is exponential.
Add the LinkedIn Follow button to the website to attract relevant followers to the page.
Engage the employees to share posts from the page to increase the organic reach posts and increase the organic reach.
Page checklist:
As a page administrator, to configure the page to be successful.
Organize internally.
Decide who requires administrator access.
It’s about 1-2 representatives from the corporate brand, talent brand, analytics team, external agency, and key regions, perhaps.
Train the page administrators.
Create an internal playbook with examples of best-of-breed publications.
Set up a centralized communication channel. Black, Teams, and SharePoint work fine.
Synchronize regularly.
Align monthly with different teams (e.g. regional localization teams) and weekly with the leads on social media in cross-platform social strategy.
Strategize for the content:
Try to post to the page every day to establish a trustworthy voice.
Plan a week in advance, but try to schedule the posts 24-48 hours before launch.
Central publishing platforms like Hootsuite or Sprinklr can be helpful.
Use content suggestions to understand trends in the target audience.
Share the best @mentions of the brand.
Find them on the Activity tab.
Take advantage of the hashtags in the Communities panel. Update them weekly and interact with the feeds.
Respond to member comments in a timely manner using the mobile manager.
Manage product pages:
Build product pages around major product categories.
Don’t create one for each of the products, services, or regions.
Grant access to the product pages, usually to corporate social teams or product marketing managers.
Create a social media intake form to streamline content requests for all pages.
Check employee defense:
Encourage employees to re-share the posts using a feature that asks them to like, comment, or re-share on the behalf.
Promote the best LinkedIn articles to the employees.
Use content suggestions to find and share the best articles written by the employees.
Ask the executives to @mention the page,
Leverage My Company on Pages (formerly LinkedIn Elevate) to create a unique community experience for employees where they can connect, engage, and grow their internal network through the Page.
LinkedIn Live and LinkedIn events:
With LinkedIn Live, stream live video content to build deeper connections and record engagement with the audience.
This is the opportunity to engage the widest audience and do it in real time.
Also giving the community a platform to interact while consuming the content live!
Use it alone or in combination with LinkedIn Events to bring the community together in real time.
It enables to host targeted and engagement-focused virtual events that can live stream directly to the LinkedIn event.
LinkedIn Live Audience:
• All followers of the page are notified.
• Public to all members.
Best for reaching a broader membership base.
Main use cases.
Breaking news.
General discussions and questions and answers.
Expert panels.
LinkedIn event audience.
All event attendees are notified.
Private for all attendees.
Best for a smaller selected / selected membership base.
The main use cases are
Account-based marketing.
Industry specific events.
Production and
Other educational events.
3. Aim accurately:
LinkedIn targeting is unique because members are incentivized to keep their profiles accurate and up-to-date for networking, personal branding and job opportunities.
When they spend time on LinkedIn sharing and consuming content, celebrating moments, and posting professional updates,
They provide insights about the work experiences, skills, interests, and more that add wealth of behavior to our dataset.
Beware of the hyper-targeting trap:
Segmentation is about delivering relevant and resonant content to the right audiences.
With 69% of marketers believing that hyper phase is more effective than a broad approach, and there are so many.
Targeting filters available on LinkedIn, may be tempted to use all of them.
But beware! Hyper orientation limits the reach.
When targeting too narrowly, may not capture the full circle of purchases and future buyers.
To grow the business and maximize the effectiveness of the advertising, to reach as many people as possible.
LinkedIn is designed to reach a precise audience at scale, so make the most of it.
Profile-based targeting:
On LinkedIn, reach members using a number of profile-based attributes.
In most cases, when using career guidance options, such as interests, traits, abilities, or roles of members, rather than age or gender, it leads to much more robust results.
Remember to avoid the hyper-targeting trap by limiting to two or three more relevant targeting options.
The growth of the company is directed to the companies by their growth rate year after year,
determined by factors such as employee growth or inferred data from other similar companies within the same location and industry.
The company category targets a select list of recognized publications and thought leaders such as Forbes, Fortune, and LinkedIn news publishers.
With this option, to effectively identify the world’s largest, most innovative, or fastest-growing companies.
Use company category in combination with seniority and job function to reach the precise purchasing committee.
Member traits come to members based on their distinctive characteristics, such as frequent travelers, job seekers, being open to education, or the types of devices they can use when spending time on Linkedin.
This generally represents a more limited audience and additional targeting criteria may not be necessary.
Reach a wider audience:
Increase the scale and reach of the campaign quickly and easily with these LinkedIn features.
Before the campaign:
Use matching audiences to create a Target audience with similar interests and demographics for:
Website retargeting.
Contact targeting.
Orientation by account.
Reorientation of commitment.
During the campaign.
As to identify high-performing segments of the campaign, use Audience Expansion to create new lookalike audiences in real time.
After the campaign:
Identify high-performing audience segments and use Lookalike Audiences to find professionals with similar attributes.
Predict the results:
As to configure targeting for the campaigns, learn more about the audiences using Predicted Results.
300 members is the minimum target audience size for a campaign.
If the size of the audience is too.
Small, will be notified with an Audience Too Small message that prevents from saving the orientation and moving to the next step.
To achieve optimal scale for the campaign, target: 50,000+ members for single image, carousel, video, and text ads.
More than 15,000 million embers for message announcements and conversations.
Account-based marketing:
An account-based marketing (ABM) strategy allows to focus on the efforts by engaging the accounts.
with a high degree of purchase intention.
A LinkedIn survey found that, globally, 54% of marketers already use ABM and 80% plan to increase their budget investment in this area.
To achieve their ABM goals, marketers must overcome unreliable data, personalize content at scale and showcase the program and campaign results.
That’s where LinkedIn can come into play.
The first person data generated by members on LinkedIn is more accurate and highly differentiated in the market noise of audience data. More,
LinkedIn’s innovative products help to navigate the complex B2B buying process, where multiple touchpoints influence each sale.
Whether the goal of the campaign is awareness or conversion, can use company targeting to focus the ABM campaign on high-value companies and reach decision-makers throughout the organization.
Use company name targeting to precisely define the accounts to nurture.
Upload the list of target companies and use Matched Audiences to expand the reach to similar companies on more than 8 million LinkedIn pages.
Identify the people who make and influence purchasing decisions on the highest-value accounts.
Define and create specific campaigns for these accounts.
Deliver personalized content and nurture audiences throughout the buyer’s journey.
Reach up to 200 different organizations using the Company Name option.
To target an even larger list, use Matching Audiences to upload a list of up to 300,000 companies.
Tested Lead Gen Forms retargeting against normal targeting tactics and found the CTR to be 2-3 times higher.
Although still early in the process, found that the leads generated from the retargeting have a higher qualification rate from MQL to SQL.
4. Choose the mix of formats:.
Ready to develop a combination of formats.
The choice of LinkedIn advertising formats will depend on the role the ads to play.
Start by understanding the choices and how they can contribute to the goals.
Reach the LinkedIn target audience also through premium publishers, such as Business Insider, with the LinkedIn Audience Network.
The LinkedIn Audience Network is currently only available for sponsored content video and image ads.
Single image ads are a sponsored content ad format.
These ads feature an image and appear directly on the target audience’s LinkedIn feed.
Keep the ad text concise for increased engagement.
Aim for less than 150.
Characters for headlines and 70 characters for descriptive text.
Use larger images for click-through rates up to 38% higher.
An image size of 1200×627 pixels is recommended.
Highlight an action game so the audience knows how to act based on their interests.
Carousel ads are a multi-card ad format that gives more ad space and therefore more flexibility to achieve the advertising goals.
In brand marketing, use it to:
History of Tell the brand.
Provide information to establish the thought leadership position.
Share customer successes.
In demand marketing, use it to:
Show multiple products or services.
It presents a single solution in detail.
Highlight opportunities like resources and events.
Video ads are compelling way to engage the audience on LinkedIn, especially since people engage with video ads almost 3 times more than a static ad.
Include captions to engage and engage the audience, particularly those who silently watch videos.
Treasure the first 10 seconds Show the audience what to see before the viewer’s attention diminishes.
Short videos (5-15 s):
Try looping videos similar to animated gifs or take a teaser approach to encourage the audience to learn more.
Videos of average duration (30 s):
Make the point in the first 5 seconds, then take it home with quick product descriptions or “talking heads” interviews.
Long videos (1min +):
Weave a richer story that establishes an emotional connection or imparts insight.
Message ads allows to deliver targeted messages directly to the audience in an uncluttered environment.
Messages are delivered in real time, only when the audience is active on LinkedIn, to increase the likelihood of engagement.
Conversation ads are the next generation of message ads.
Use this format to engage the audience in a personalized way as they control the conversation path with their responses.
Write an attractive subject to attract the public to read.
Always introduce and make the purpose clear.
Limit messages to less than 500 characters.
Add hyperlinks to make it easier for the prospect to interact with the ad.
Focus on a call to action.
Add a Lead Gen form to generate up to 4x more leads.
Make the first sentence count.
There is no subject line in a conversation ad, so the first line can determine the open rate.
Use two or three call-to-action opportunities to guide the audience to learn more.
Generate higher quality leads by asking qualifying questions and including a lead generation form to make it easier to collect leads.
Right lane ads are displayed in the side lane of the LinkedIn home page and include:
Content matters in brand marketing.
The content marketing strategy can significantly boost the paid advertising efforts, especially when use it to build trust in the business.
Adopt a full funnel content marketing strategy to guide the content creation in a way that is anticipated and resolved the needs of the audience at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Spotlight Ads where the ads are visually personalized for the target audience.
Grab attention by selecting the option for the profile photo to appear in the ad.
Follower ads encourage audiences to follow the page or product page and display the photo and company logo.
Text ads are simple yet versatile ads.
Make them stand out by targeting the audience directly in the ad copy or by adding an optional image.
Because LinkedIn ad formats are designed to work in harmony and help to achieve the goals,
To increase the effectiveness of the advertising by combining them in various ways.
The right mix for the campaign would necessarily depend on a number of factors,
as the nature of the business, but these proven combinations offer an excellent starting point.
Use them in parallel to highlight engaging and interactive customer stories in testimonial videos while promoting
Examples of case studies with single image ads.
Retarget those who saw 25% or more of the video ad with another video ad or
a single image ad to deepen engagement and give them the information they need at this early stage.
Deliver personalized stories at scale and let the audiences guide the conversation flow with multiple calls to action.
5. Measure, track and optimize:
Once the campaign is up and running, needs to make sure to reach the audience in the most effective way.
The commitment to measure and optimize is an important aspect of better advertising on LinkedIn.
Campaign Manager, the advertising platform on LinkedIn, reports a wide range of metrics for each campaign to run.
By tracking and comparing the key metrics based on the goals, learn which ad creatives and campaigns are most effective.
Use these 3 tips to improve the way Campaign Manager works.
Measuring the performance of the ad and therefore the impact of the ad spend is critical.
On LinkedIn, do this in seven easy steps:
1. Identify the key metrics based on the goals.
2. Set up the LinkedIn information tag to take advantage of conversion tracking.
3. Put lead generation forms to work.
Lead generation forms allows to measure bottom-of-the-funnel metrics such as number of leads and cost per lead.
Get more detailed information on the demographics of the leads have successfully converted.
4. Let the campaigns run for at least 7 days before checking the campaign performance.
It takes at least 7 days for the LinkedIn algorithm to know the campaign.
So give it some time to get it working before starting optimizing towards the campaign goals.
5. Use campaign demographics to analyze which audiences respond best to the ads.
Based on these statistics, |create new target audiences or direct the ad spend to better performing areas.
6. Use Performance Insights to get recommendations on how to improve the bids and budgets.
Campaign Manager provides information about the total budget, daily budget, and bids to help to increase the competitiveness of the ads.
7. Test A / B testing to identify the best performing creative, text, and targeting options.
By testing two similar campaigns with a small variation in creative, copy, or targeting options, find out which combination is most effective.
Discover the LinkedIn information tag.
The LinkedIn information tag is a code snippet for the website.
It lets to see how the ads are driving valuable actions, including content downloads, sign-ups, purchases, and more.
Track website conversions linked to all of the LinkedIn ads, and then let LinkedIn automatically optimize the campaigns for even more conversions.
It also unlocks demographic information about the website visitors and allows to re-engage them by retargeting them with LinkedIn ads.
Demonstrate the value of marketing with LinkedIn:
Analytic Partners, an industry-leading provider of measurement and optimization solutions, evaluated LinkedIn’s performance in three verticals:
Technology, financial services and education.
Media Mix Modeling (MMM) and Multi-Touch Attribution Modeling (MTA) take into account the entire sales cycle and determine business drivers.
Performance in traditional and digital media.
This long-term view of ROI highlighted the value of LinkedIn:
In technology, LinkedIn generated a ROAS (return on advertising investment) that is 2 to 5 times higher than other social media platforms.
In financial services, 7 times more incremental customer registrations than Display.
Within education, 2-4 times more effective than other display media.
However, to achieve true measurement nirvana, to track the marketing campaigns through the sales funnel.
Use leading metrics to measure initial impact, such as CTR, website traffic, and engagement, for an early read on advertising effectiveness.
Use lagging metrics as revenue-focused long-term indicators of success, such as how many opportunities came from advertising.
To help , LinkedIn continues to invest in brand measurement, performance and business results through partnerships with leading vendors such as: Google, Moat, Adobe, ..
Simply put, to better advertise on LinkedIn, must:
Step 1. Define the goals with a healthy balance between branding and demand marketing.
Step 2. Build a compelling organic presence to amplify the paid advertising efforts.
Step 3. Target accurately with profile-based targeting, company name targeting, contact targeting, or website retargeting.
Step 4. Choose the combination of formats using powerful combinations to achieve the goals.
Step 5. Measure, track, and optimize using LinkedIn’s wide range of metrics, as well as demographic and performance information.