So you’re trying to launch your business into the stratosphere with killer marketing? Social media is now, more than ever, the best place to do that.
We’ve all done it. Started by opening our LinkedIn just to check if there are any messages or updates, and then poof! We look up, and an hour has gone by.
Social media ads are a fantastic way for potential clients to be exposed to your business, quickly assess your services, and learn what you can do for them, all thanks to passive viewing and the ease of scrolling through a feed.
LinkedIn’s popularity lends a huge advantage to your marketing campaign by helping you hyper-focus on a target audience. It keeps relevant content about your brand at the forefront of your viewer’s mind. All while they simply enjoy their daily social media time.
Out of all the possible sites to use, LinkedIn is a wonderful platform to get your business out there. Serving over 200 countries and regions with 706 million members worldwide, and nearly 190 million members in the U.S. alone, it’s pretty obvious why it is a great investment of your time and precious advertising budget.
They’ve been around since mid-2003 and have done well to position themselves as a leader in Silicon Valley ever since. They’ve made their name as the leader in professional and employment-based networking.
LinkedIn was founded by Reid Hoffman, a venture capitalist, who collaborated with Allen Blue. They were joined by a product designer, Konstantin Guericke, a marketing professional, and Eric Ly, an engineer. If that isn’t a dream team for business marketing, we don’t know what is.
The platform has seen continuous growth, increasing its user base consistently year after year by the millions.
LinkedIn’s user base, composed of working individuals, only adds to one of its core features: the Business-to-Business (B2B) capabilities. Since the whole platform is designed specifically with business professionals in mind, this will help you create awareness of your company and brand with the kind of clients you want to work with.
Not to mention that adding the advertising function to your existing account is a breeze! LinkedIn has made it super simple to set up your Campaign Manager.
Offering a user-friendly interface and step by step instructions, creating a new campaign couldn’t be easier.
Here we hope to outline why LinkedIn is one of the top platforms for placing ads. This guide will give your brand the ability to aim hyper-targeted ads based on business-related parameters. These strategies will help you get your name out there effectively and efficiently.
A Few Things First About LinkedIn Advertising
You’ll want to jump in headfirst when building up your social media campaign strategy, and that’s an awesome level of enthusiasm. Keep it up! But be wary of being over-eager and ending up with scattered and disjointed ads and business posts. It’s a waste of your time and resources.
Try to decide where and how you’ll spend your money on ads before you dive in and end up in over your head. Have a plan outlined. Be specific. Then, most importantly, stick to the plan!
LinkedIn is a fantastic investment for ad development because it’s not cost-prohibitive and doesn’t take a ton of time to get going. With a little forethought, effort, and some follow-through, you can yield substantial returns.
Also, as just a general rule of thumb, keep it simple. Now simple doesn’t have to mean boring. Your ad’s logo and general brand design can still really pop with great color pairings and fun fonts. Just try not to go overboard and cram a whole bunch of stuff into one ad.
That’s a pretty good rule for most marketing tactics. Get to the point and quickly! No one wants to have to stare at your ad or post for five minutes, figuring out what is being offered.
Nor will they; you have about two or three seconds to get their attention, and that is it.
If you keep those couple of details in mind and follow the tips we’ve outlined below, you should have no problem taking your business to the next level with LinkedIn.
Types of Ads You Should Use When Running Ads on LinkedIn
There are a variety of ad options available through the Campaign Manager build it yourself developer. Knowing which ad is right for your business and its target audience is essential.
Sponsored
These LinkedIn themed ads are designed to fit the platform’s feel and appear as a post directly linked to the company’s feed.
This style is nice because it blends in with your target audience’s LinkedIn feed and should appear native to the site. It makes your ad seem unassuming like it’s a trusted link the viewer can feel safe clicking.
With a sponsored ad, you can have a couple of variations. There is a video ad, which is pretty self-explanatory. Remember, if you go this way, keep it short and to the point. Or you could go with a carousel-style ad that gives you the ability to display several images on one ad. If you go that direction, don’t forget to keep it cohesive with a theme among the photos.
Dynamic Ads on LinkedIn
Now this kind of ad really hones in on creating a personalized advertising experience for each individual viewer. It incorporates your target audience’s account information to build a unique ad with their data.
This gives them a sense of just how easy it is to connect with you and your business on LinkedIn. They literally can already see themselves paired with your brand!
Text Advertisements on LinkedIn
These are the kinds of ads that internet users are most familiar with. They live in a banner along the outside edge of the screen.
These ads are great because they are Pay Per Click. Yes, that means exactly what it sounds like. If no one clicks on your text ad (yikes!), you don’t have to pay for it. You are only going to be charged for the ad when it creates a click-through.
There’s no better ad to be sure that you’re getting the biggest bang for your buck.
LinkedIn InMail Ads
If your goal is to create a personal relationship with your audience, this might be the ad for you. It sends personalized messages straight into the LinkedIn inboxes of your target audience.
Whether you’re informing an existing customer of a new promotion or trying to nail down a new B2B lead, this just might be the right fit for your needs.
Whichever ad type you land on, use the following tips to ensure that they are as effective as possible.
1. Have a Clearly Defined Brand Image For Your LinkedIn Ads
If you’re this far along in the game, you have probably already nailed down what you want your brand to represent. Though honing that in even further for definitive development of your ads can go a long way.
If you’re looking to get into the LinkedIn marketing game as an independent entrepreneur or a larger organization, it’s imperative to have a cohesive brand design and message.
Do you have a particular product or product line that you’d like to advertise? Or are you a new web designer that would like to get their business off the ground? Pick a mission statement and a company goal, then stick with it across the board.
This goes for the whole look and feel, from what your ad says, to the font and the color scheme. Most design experts agree that keeping ads simple is important. The brand design for a business can drastically affect its ability to be effective in marketing.
As we mentioned previously, don’t cram a ton of things into a single ad. Though it is tempting to get the most bang for your buck, it’s visually overstimulating, and it will end up having the opposite effect of what you’re going for.
Make each aspect of your online presence, including ads, unique to you, your company, and your brand. Try to choose something new and expressive that will help you stand out.
For instance, if you’re a graphic designer who develops stylish and functional websites for clients and dabbles in photography, create a simple ad that displays both skills. Creating a customized ad and title that fits exactly what you are all about and gives you a fun eye-catcher to incorporate is a great way to stand out. What is an Artistic Developer? Folks are likely to click to find out.
2. Narrow Your Ad Objectives
Be direct and precise. Take the time to really determine what it is your marketing is trying to strive for. Are you trying to gain new clients, drive web traffic, or stay engaged with existing customers?
Using LinkedIn’s latest and greatest Campaign Manager gives you the power to set your objectives and follow through. In the most recent update of the platform, they shifted to a specifically objective-based marketing strategy.
Narrowing down your goals is a no-brainer with the Campaign Manager’s three core objectives to choose from:
- • Awareness - To showcase your business and brand.
- • Consideration - To encourage engagement and web traffic.
- • Conversion - To increase website conversions and generate leads.
From there, each objective category allows you to select specifics to aid you in narrowing down your advertising campaign even further and helps you build an ad from there. Pretty ingenious, right?
3. Be Honest and Relevant To Your LinkedIn Audience
Online users crave authenticity. They want to know that your brand is being honest and upfront with them. Make sure to share the benefits of your products in a clear and truthful way.
Your ads shouldn’t make outlandish and outrageous claims. Consumers are smart. They can see right through this tactic.
Instead, work to gain their trust. Use a testimonial or your reviews to share why your brand is great in the eyes of other customers.
Make sure you are sharing the benefits that matter to your customers. Are you selling construction services? Your potential customers care most about the quality of work you do.
Use examples of previous jobs in ads to appeal to customers looking for reliability. Your past performance is the biggest indicator of what they can expect from you.
4. Think About Messaging The People Engaging With Your LinkedIn Ads
What conclusion will most people reach when looking at your ads? Keep that in mind when formulating your campaign.
Viewers don’t stare at ads for long on all web-based platforms, and this is no exception. Right off the bat, your LinkedIn ad should tell the user what you want them to know about your brand.
If your company sells women’s shoes, just using the word shoes isn’t going to get your ad noticed but your target market. So try to nail down the specifics to perhaps “Women’s Summer Sandals.” This allows users to immediately know what you’re selling and if it’s right for them.
You may only have a few seconds in front of a viewer’s eyes. Seize that attention and capitalize on it!
5. Looks Matter When It Comes to Advertising on LinkedIn
In this specific instance, aesthetics are everything! You want to design an ad that will catch the viewer’s eye, not distract or scare it off. Like we said before, you’ve got a matter of seconds.
The human brain can process an image 60,000 times faster than it can text. So don’t be too wordy in your ads. Let them speak for themselves.
If you want to snag their attention, choose an image that tells a story. Maybe something that will pull on their heartstrings and simultaneously show them the need for your product or services.
Take a quick minute and do some research on color psychology. Want your target audience to know that your company is trustworthy? Try an ad in blue.
Did you know, if you’re running a business that deals with food, red is probably the smartest color choice for your ads? It subconsciously makes people hungry. Try to name one major fast-food brand whose logo doesn’t include the color red. Go ahead; we’ll wait.
6. Engage with Your LinkedIn Ad Audience
It can take a couple of times to see your brand’s ads for it to stick with clients, even after they have purchased your product or utilized your service. That’s why you want to keep popping up on their feed.
As important as new clients are, holding on to the ones you already have should unquestionably be a priority. You want to cultivate the kind of relationship with your clients that turns them into walking advertisers for your brand.
A staggering 64% of marketers using social media noted that engaging with their audience was mission-critical to their online marketing approach. Customers want to feel like the experience of working with your company is an interactive two-way street.
Extend an offer for something fun to your followers like a free short webinar or video in your ad. They will be more engaged with your brand because they’ll, of course, have to visit your site or product page to participate. This will earn you more web traffic and brand consideration.
Additionally, if you give them something, they will be more likely to want to return the favor. They will be more prone to investigate other services you offer and look around your site for more freebies.
7. Measure Your Advertising Results and Progress
Analyze your results to start catering your advertising efforts to what’s working and eliminate what’s not.
Within your Campaign Manager, there is a Campaign Performance tab. This gives you all the general stats, such as the number of clicks your ad received and the total number of times people saw your ad.
The Performance tab will also calculate for you not only the conversions but also the conversion rate and conversion cost. This allows you to do a cost-benefit analysis determined by the amount paid for the ad divided by the business those conversions will yield.
In addition, LinkedIn’s innovative objective-based marketing is back again, this time for optimization. You can select a particular objective you went with and see how well it performed.
Were you trying to generate leads and want to see if it worked? LinkedIn’s tools will create a Cost Per Lead calculation for you to figure out the cost you spend on an ad and how many leads that turned into.
8. Have a LinkedIn Advertising Strategy
Don’t go throwing together nonsensical ads and posting random things all willy-nilly just because you can, and it’s a lot of fun. Sure, posting away can be amusing and exciting, but ask yourself this: Does sporadic, inconsistent marketing make you look like a trustworthy business professional?
Setting up an ad campaign is not the time to throw a bunch of random ideas at the wall and see what sticks. Sure, you might land some new customers. But you also might seriously turn off some potential leads. You should take the time to formulate a clear plan.
Ask yourself, what are you trying to accomplish with each ad? People are wired to pursue new and fascinating experiences, which means that a viewer’s curiosity plays a fairly large role in their decision making.
Can you take this information and build a strategy around it? Sure! If we know individuals seek novel things, why not create an air of mystery with your ads. Ask compelling questions that require a click-through to your site for the answer.
9. Campaign Consistently but Uniquely
Like with most endeavors, marketing or otherwise, you get back what you put in. Setting up an idle and static campaign won’t do you much good.
With a consistent track record of growth year after year, it’s a guarantee that you will be getting new viewers regularly. So keep your ads fresh!
Especially after you’ve taken so much time to develop your brand’s campaign on the platform, put in the effort to really work the angle and get yourself out there.
Make sure to mix it up every so often to keep your ads feeling unique and new. You don’t want viewers to see them over and over until they become ineffective white noise.
Sure, it’s important to stay true to your brand’s voice and have a consistent message. But just like we revamp our wardrobe from season to season, it’s important that your campaign get a little makeover too from time to time.
LinkedIn Is the Way to Go For Online Advertising
With over 700 million subscribers worldwide and a built-in B2B marketing opportunity, LinkedIn is a top choice for the platform you want to invest in. Remember, trusted business professionals are what this site is all about. Don’t you want your potential clients to know that you fall within that category?
No other social media platform makes it easier to build a fully customized ad campaign, connect it with the target audience, and monitor its efficacy.
It doesn’t matter if this is your first ad campaign or your 500th; with LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager, you have everything you need right at your fingertips to run a successful campaign and boost your business.
With competitive pricing, a focused aim, and a myriad of options to choose from, LinkedIn makes advertising simple and hassle-free. Whether you’ve been in your field for decades or have just launched a new endeavor, your business deserves the chance to shine. Give it that chance by choosing LinkedIn.
Ads through LinkedIn, designed using the tips above, are just what any business needs to make an impact and pull ahead of the pack. Your target audience is out there, ready to discover your business and why it’s right for them. Don’t keep them waiting!
LinkedIn ads aren’t magical fairy dust that can turn your business into something it’s not. At the end of the day, your products, services, and pricing will make or break your relationship with potential clients. But you can’t wow them if they’ve never heard of you before.
