How To Advertise On LinkedIn And Why Use LinkedIn Ads

Connect your brand with the world’s largest audience of active, influential professionals. At LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, they exist to develop tools that help marketers reach the right audience with the most relevant content. They use these tools every day to grow your business and they want to make sure you know how to use them to their full potential as well.

They recently created a page that takes an in-depth look at how to advertise on LinkedIn. Consider this post your quick-start guide: It’s an overview of the process to get you up and running.

7 Steps to Successful LinkedIn Advertising

Step 1 – Choose Self-Service or Managed Campaigns

Use the Campaign Manager to configure ads, run campaigns, and monitor progress. LinkedIn’s all-in-one advertising platform makes it quick and easy to get started on a self-service campaign with Text Ads and Sponsored Content.

This service pairs you with a dedicated team of LinkedIn experts to help in each stage of the process, from targeting to optimization. For a more strategic approach that tends to attract a premium audience, try LinkedIn’s account-managed advertising.

Step 2 – Get Started with Campaign Manager

It’s worth taking a few minutes to get started with Campaign Manager before you proceed. There you will find detailed results of your ads’ performance, including the demographics of members who clicked on your ads, engagement with Sponsored Content, and more. Campaign Manager is the hub of your LinkedIn advertising activity.

Step 3 – Choose Your Ad Format

Choose whether to create Sponsored Content, Text Ads, or both.

Sponsored content appears natively in LinkedIn member feeds, whether they’re on desktop, laptop, or mobile device. A good way to get started with Sponsored Content is to promote your top-performing updates on your Company Page. Text Ads are simple but effective ads that display on the side, top, or bottom of the LinkedIn member’s feed. Keep your copy short and compelling and use a dynamic visual for the best results.

Step 4 – Create Your Ads

You can run 15 variations of a Text Ad at a time—it’s best to start with a variety, then focus on the top performers. For Text Ads, you can specify a link that clicking the ad will open, then add an image, headline and brief description.

Try creating multiple versions of your Sponsored Content with variations on the creative, to see which gets the best results. For Sponsored Content, you can choose an update to your Company or Showcase Page to promote, or create new Sponsored Content.

Step 5 – Target Your Ads

As you choose criteria, Campaign Manager will show your estimated target audience size in the right sidebar. One of the biggest advantages of advertising on LinkedIn is being able to target based on first-party, self-reported information. At the same time, don’t sacrifice relevancy for bigger numbers. It’s best to choose an audience that is broad enough to generate statistically significant results for the next round of optimization.

It’s a good way to find potential LinkedIn members you might have overlooked. Enable Audience Expansion to let LinkedIn’s algorithm find and target similar audiences to the one that you specified.

Step 6 – Set Your Budget

CPM is more useful for raising brand awareness. Use CPC when the click is directly related to a conversion, like a webinar registration or lead capture. You can choose to bid on cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM).

You will only ever pay just enough to beat the second-highest bidder, which is not necessarily your maximum bid. Campaign Manager will suggest bid ranges for displaying your ad. It’s best to stay on the upper end of the suggested range.

Step 7 – Measure and Optimize

Keep an eye on the metrics provided in Campaign Manager, and continue to test new variations based on your initial results. So it’s important to continually review your results, stop low-performing ads, and promote high-performing ones. The LinkedIn auction system rewards ads with greater engagement.

Use this quick guide to get started, and we’ll continue developing and refining the platform to help you achieve amazing results. The tools we create are designed to help you market to who matters on LinkedIn.

Why Use LinkedIn Ads?

1. Reach a More Professional Audience

Users on the network skew older, more educated, and have a higher income than those on almost all other platforms. That demographic is not relevant if you’re looking to reach teenagers or low-income individuals. But if your core target audience consists of educated professionals with at least some work experience, LinkedIn tends to be your best bet.

2. Target your audience with accuracy

When you launch an ad campaign on LinkedIn, your team can get ultra-specific with your audience targeting. A notable benefit of LinkedIn advertising comes from the ad platform’s advanced targeting options.

For example, you can target users by:

Job title
Location
Company Name
Company size
Degree
Industry
Professional interests
Skill
And more

3 Take Advantage of Unique Advertising Types

For instance, the network also offers Sponsored InMail, which integrates into its internal messaging platform. If you are already advertising on social media, you will likely be familiar with the most commonly available ad types. Another relatively new opportunity is lead ads, which allow you to generate conversions without having to guide your audience to your website first. Like its competitors, LinkedIn offers marketers the opportunity to leverage sponsored posts and sidebar ads in order to generate exposure, clicks, and conversions.

How to Start Setting Up Your Marketing Strategy and Execution on LinkedIn

A thorough LinkedIn setup is beyond the scope of this article, but consists of 6 basic steps:

Create a company page on LinkedIn
Create and sign into a Campaign Manager account that links to your company page.
Choose your ad format, from sponsoring existing content to the above-mentioned sponsored InMail.
Create individual ads, ideally visual and in multiple variations to test for success.
Choose your preferred ad targeting, and set your budget.
Launch your campaign.

Conclusion

Why advertise on LinkedIn? While smaller than other social media networks, it provides a degree of targeting and accuracy that other platforms can’t match. LinkedIn offers dozens of benefits for advertisers, from an expansive audience to multiple ad formats to accurate audience data.

With decades of experience, plus a dedicated team of social media specialists, we’re a trusted choice for businesses in the industrial sector. If you’re ready to take advantage of the benefits of LinkedIn advertising, IndustrialFX can help.