Advertising on LinkedIn: A Beginner's Guide

LinkedIn is a unique social platform founded back in 2002, with over 260 million users each month and a total of 760 million users in over 200 countries, according to Kinsa statistics. On this social platform, there are huge opportunities for those looking to expand in B2B and build a professional network. On average, LinkedIn users spend 17 minutes daily. Of all active users, 40 million job seek via the platform each month.

Development of paid marketing.

For ten years, we've been able to utilize paid marketing. Advertising is a cost-effective way to reach more people than just your followers and prospect new potential clients. Advertising on social channels has opened new business opportunities by aiding the growth of e-commerce and providing new ways to recruit and find skilled professionals for companies.

Advertising possibilities on LinkedIn.

As an employer, you can target specific roles you wish to fill in your company through recruitment ads. The advantage of LinkedIn is that through your network, you can discover the right talent to fill your positions even if they're not actively job hunting. You can also create ads to help generate leads, acquire new customers, increase brand awareness, or get people to sign up for your webinar.

Getting started - Advertising on LinkedIn.

To advertise on LinkedIn, you first need to create an account on LinkedIn, then set up an ad account in Campaign Manager, which is LinkedIn's ad platform. You'll also need a company page to get started.

LinkedIn Insight Tag.

To measure your ads and analyze your audience, we recommend setting up your technical implementation before your campaign goes live. Much like Facebook's pixels, you can install a LinkedIn Insight Tag to track your audience.

Strategy - Advertising on LinkedIn

This is a basic strategy for your advertising on the platform. Further down, we go step by step through what you need to consider when kicking off your advertising.

Goals

You need to set a goal for your campaign based on where your target audience is in the customer journey and which step you want to target. Choose between these goals:

• Brand awareness

• Consideration

• Conversion

Audience.

LinkedIn's ad platform differs from other channels as you can reach specific roles using exact employee and company data LinkedIn has. Choosing the right audience is crucial for successful advertising—if you don't reach the right people, your advertising won't be profitable.

Format.

LinkedIn provides seven different formats to choose from, tailored for image and video, and you select the format based on the content you wish to use in your ads, then see where they fit best. More about formats and placements later in this blog post.

Budget.

In LinkedIn advertising, ads are sold via promotions, meaning you bid against other advertisers aiming for the same audience. Pricing is chosen via CPC or CPM.

Step by step - Advertising on LinkedIn.

In Campaign Manager, create your first ads. Here’s how - step by step:

STEP 1 – CHOOSE A GOAL FOR YOUR CAMPAIGN

Brand awareness. Choose brand awareness to reach a broad spectrum of potential new customers who are not yet familiar with your brand.

Consideration. Choose website visits, activities, video views to engage the audience that has interacted with your brand before.

Conversion. Lead generation, website conversions, job searches are chosen to make your audience convert, which could mean applying for a job in a recruitment ad or filling out a form about your product/service.

STEP 2 – SELECT YOUR TARGET AUDIENCES

As mentioned earlier, this step is the most crucial. You can choose to build your audiences from the following options:

• Company

• Demographics

• Education

• Work experience

• Interests and qualifications

If you're unsure how to build your audiences, you can choose from LinkedIn's pre-existing audiences and complement them with your own selections. LinkedIn provides suggestions, and you can choose if the audience should be connected to, for example, "finance." You can also exclude audiences you don't want to target with your ads, such as those already working at your company.

STEP 3 - FORMAT AND PLACEMENTS

Choose the format according to your choice of goal, and available formats are:

Sponsored content - Boost the content you publish on your company page. You can sponsor your photos, videos, and links. When the ad appears in the target audience’s feed, direct them to a lead-gen form as a "call-to-action," and generate quality leads through your ad.

Image ads - A single static image.

Video ads - A video that auto-plays for the audience as they scroll through their feed.

Lead Generating Ads - This ad allows you to add a form for potential clients, like a report.

Carousel ads - Show multiple images in a sequence in a carousel format, and you can also choose to add a form to generate potential leads.

Dynamic ads - Create ads for a more specific audience, such as followers, job ads, or spotlight ads.

Text ads - This ad appears in the right column of the news feed and aims to drive traffic to your website. With an appealing headline and image, you can create lead-generating ads.

Message ads - This format appears as a message in the inbox. It’s not perceived as an ad like the other formats and offers a premium feature to message anyone you want.

STEP 4 - BUDGET

Advertising on LinkedIn is more expensive than other platforms, and there's particularly high competition among advertisers for the same target audiences. To make your ads as cost-effective as possible, use LinkedIn’s automated bidding system, which adapts to spend the amount wisely without exceeding your set maximum.

You can control your budget in two ways:

Daily budget - Decide the amount you want to spend per day.

Bidding:

• Max cost bid - The maximum amount you're willing to bid via CPC, CPM, or CPS.

• Automatic bidding - LinkedIn uses user data to automatically set and adjust your bids, optimizing for your chosen campaign goal.

STEP 5 - MEASURE YOUR ADVERTISING

Similar to advertising in Facebook Ads Manager, you can measure the following:

Reach - How much exposure do your ads receive?

Click-through rate - How many people click on your ad?

Cost per click - What is the cost of each click on your ad?

Frequency - How often does your audience see your ad each week?

Video engagement rate - How many people engage with your ads based on video view length?

Traffic - How many leads are generated from your website ads?

ROAS - What is your return on ad spend?

Conversions - How many conversions through your ads?

Cost per action - What is the cost per lead?

These metrics help track if your campaign is achieving your desired goals and optimize your ads during the campaign period.

A/B testing Like Facebook advertising, create A/B tests to see what resonates with your target audience. Create two similar ads, changing small details like color, text, language, etc. Then evaluate what attracts your audience and optimize your ads accordingly.

Summary.

As with all social media advertising, it takes time to see results. On LinkedIn, make sure not to get stuck on specific job titles as you can reach very narrowly—remember to use focus for broader reach.

Allocate a good marketing budget for your LinkedIn advertising. It costs more than Facebook, and you compete with other advertisers bidding for the same audience. Invest in a higher budget to win the bid against competitors, and you can adjust the budget during the campaign. Use optimization opportunities.

Advertising requires experimentation. There are only guidelines—no conclusion on how to reach your target audience. So try, learn while doing, and OPTIMIZE more often!

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