You’re probably aware that LinkedIn is one of the best places to reach the business market. The network has almost 740 million members and is the most trusted of all the social media sites.
Maybe you already use LinkedIn for recruiting talent. But how else could your business benefit from reaching that audience? If businesspeople are part of your target market, you could use LinkedIn ads to generate traffic to your site and make sales.
LinkedIn advertising
If you don’t spend much time on LinkedIn, you might not be familiar with the ads. But if you’re logged in and visit your homepage at LinkedIn, you’ll see them in your feed.
Mixed in with posts and activity from people and companies you follow, you’ll see posts that are subtly marked as “promoted.” Those are paid LinkedIn ads in the form of sponsored posts or feed ads.
Text and image-based ads also appear in the right rail on your screen when you access the site using a computer. Finally, ads are sometimes delivered straight to your inbox as sponsored InMail.
LinkedIn advertising gets your message in front of people you’ve targeted, even if you don’t share any connections. In that way, it’s a lot like Facebook or Instagram ads.
What makes the LinkedIn audience different from those of other platforms is mindset. When they’re using LinkedIn, people are thinking about their jobs or businesses.
LinkedIn ads cost
LinkedIn ads are priced by auction, so there isn’t a set cost. However, you are in control of your bids and your overall spending.
You place a bid when you launch your campaign, and so do other advertisers who want to reach the same target audience.
The more desirable your target audience is, the higher your bid needs to be for your ad to be seen. If you’ve ever bought Google ads, this process will be familiar to you.
You’ll also specify an objective when you set up your campaign, and that will determine which events you pay for. For example, if you set up a campaign with a website visit objective, you’ll only pay when someone clicks the link in your ad.
You’ll choose one of seven objectives when you set up a campaign:
- Brand Awareness: Get the word out about your product, services, or organization.
- Website Visits: Pay only when someone visits your website or landing page.
- Engagement: Pay when someone likes, comments, shares, clicks to your landing page, or follows your LinkedIn page.
- Video Views: Pay only when people watch your video ad.
- Lead Generation: Capture leads with a LinkedIn form.
- Website Conversions: Capture leads on your website.
- Job Applicants: Drive applicants to your job openings.
- Talent Leads: This objective is specifically for recruiting ads.
On average, LinkedIn ads are one of the best bargains on the internet. The average cost of LinkedIn ads is $5.26 per click, $6.59 per 1000 impressions, and $0.80 per send.
You can control your overall spending by setting a daily budget for your ads. The system will try to buy ads for you at the bidding price you’ve set until your maximum budget has been reached.
The minimum budget is $10 a day, which means that for a very affordable rate, you can start testing some ads to see how they work for you. It’s a good idea to start with the minimum budget until you’ve tried a few different ad formats to see what works well for your business.
LinkedIn ads best practices
1. Audience size
To optimize your target audience, LinkedIn recommends aiming for an audience size of 50,000 or more. If your audience is smaller than that, tweak your settings to expand it. For sponsored mail messages, shoot for 15,000 or more.
You can use the words “or” and “and” to broaden or narrow your audience. For instance, you might target customers who are “business owners and web developers,” which is a smaller and more specific audience than those who are “business owners or web developers.”
If you enable the Campaign Manager’s Audience Expansion feature, it will target audiences with similar attributes to what you choose.
You can also add a Matched Audience that targets your website visitors or email subscribers by simply linking to your site or uploading your mailing list.
2. Ideal content
Keep your content brief. In general, shorter is better.
- Videos: Less than 30 seconds (people will watch longer videos only if they’ve previously engaged with your brand)
- Headlines: Under 150 characters
- Subheads: CTRs are better if you don’t use them at all
- InMail messages: Under 500 characters is ideal; don’t go over 1,000
Use bite-sized messaging to pique interest. Cite an industry statistic, ask a question, or tease just one benefit of your service. People can discover the rest when they click on your link or sign up for your email.
Offering useful industry content is a great way to connect with LinkedIn browsers.
Focus on your customer’s point of view. Don’t tell them about your company. Talk about their needs instead. Eliminate the word “we” from your ads, and shift your messaging to use “you” a lot more.
Try to incorporate people in your images — smiling human faces making eye contact with the viewer are nearly always a good idea. For dynamic ads, saying yes to the option of including a profile picture can increase your results by 100%.
You can use images that aren’t people, too. Just make sure they are high contrast and easy to view at small sizes, like on a mobile device screen. Any text should be readable at a glance.
Sponsored posts should look as much like organic content as possible. Case studies are popular because people love to read about how others in their situation have solved problems.
To run a case study ad, create a blog post about a customer who was helped by your service and link to it in a sponsored post with an enticing headline.
Message ads that will go straight to the reader’s inbox are more successful if they’re informal, brief, and as personalized as possible. At the very least, greet the reader by their first name.
Whatever type of ad you’re creating, make sure your call to action is very clear. What do you want your audience to do, and why — from their perspective — should they do it?
3. Insight tag
Installing a snippet of Javascript called the Insight Tag on your website will allow you to track your results. The tag lets LinkedIn track visitors’ actions on your site so you can read much more detailed reports.
The insight tag will allow you to track conversions, retarget website visitors, and see other data about how visitors from your LinkedIn ads are interacting with your brand.
It also lets you optimize your ads for different types of conversions — like product purchase, demo request, newsletter signup, or software trial.
4. Testing and changing ads
Change up your ads often to keep them fresh — but consider sending the new ads to the same target audience.
People will get more comfortable with your company as they see your messaging over time. You’ve probably experienced this as a consumer — a business that’s been in front of you regularly for months automatically feels more reliable and stable than one you’ve never heard of before.
You can take advantage of that by targeting the same audience with a series of ads. For instance, you might create five ads that each stress one of your product’s benefits. Run each ad for two weeks, and target the same audience the entire time.
Try not to run more than two ads at a time so you can easily track your results.
5. Establish KPIs
Establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is an important step in measuring progress and determining where you can make improvements and adjustments.
Whether you’re a small business owner or a corporate executive, having the right KPIs in place can make a world of difference in driving progress and achieving success.
Below are some of the KPIs you should adhere to as part of LinkedIn ads best practices.
Engagement rates
Whether you’re running an online ad, engagement rates help you understand how effective your messaging is and determine if it’s resonating with your target audience.
High engagement rates demonstrate that your ads are hitting their mark and tailor future campaigns to maximize ROI. According to Adobe, a good engagement rate is 2 percent, although this can reach up to 5-6 percent for some advertisers.
Page views
These metrics essentially measure the number of times your LinkedIn page has been viewed by users during a given time frame.
A great starting place to view your LinkedIn data is on your campaign manager page.
However, plenty of tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, or Social Pilot provide a detailed view of your LinkedIn analytics. These tools give you insights into what content is working and enable you to make informed decisions regarding future content.
Video views
Video views are an important metric for content creators and businesses alike. In the age of digital media, having a steady stream of video views can increase visibility on social media.
For a video view to count, a user must watch the video for a minimum of two continuous seconds, and the video is at least 50 percent on screen.
Post views
Post views on LinkedIn mean someone has viewed your post in the home feed. You can get a detailed look at your stats by going to your LinkedIn profile online.
However, post views don’t mean that a LinkedIn member has read your post, just that they’ve viewed it. If your post views are on the low side, there’s plenty you can do to increase them.
Click-Through rates
Click-through rates are a key indicator of success when it comes to web advertising. They measure the percentage of people who click on an advertisement or link out of all those that have seen it.
To ensure optimal results, track your click-through rates over time so you can quickly identify any changes in behavior from customers or trends in the market that may affect performance.
According to research, the global average click-through rate for sponsored LinkedIn content is 0.44 – 0.65 percent. However, these vary depending on the type of ad. The B2BHouse.com LinkedIn Benchmarks show the following percentages:
- Sponsored content (single image): 0.56%
- Sponsored content (carousel): 0.40%
- Sponsored content (video): 0.44%
- Message ads: 3% with open rates at 30%
- Dynamic ads standard: 0.06%
- Dynamic ads dynamic: 0.08%
- Text ads: 0.02%
Impressions and reach
Impressions measure how many times users see content or a profile in their network feed. Impressions can be made on posts, stories, profiles, and advertisements. You chalk up an impression every time one of your ads appears in the home feed.
Reach measures how many individual users see content or a profile in their network feed; it’s the total of how many individual users get to see your ads in their home feed.
Growing the reach of your page helps spread brand awareness and increase engagement from new potential customers.
Conversion rates
Essentially, your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your LinkedIn ads who take action when they arrive there. It might be making a purchase, clicking to find out more information, or signing up for a newsletter.
Knowing and understanding your conversion rate helps you optimize your ads to drive increased engagement and enhance brand loyalty.
To track your conversion rates and measure your ROI, you can go to LinkedIn’s campaign manager. You can also view your impressions, clicks, leads, and other core data here.
Cost per conversion
CPC can provide insights into how much money you are spending to acquire new customers, and if it’s not within your projected budget, you can look at making adjustments.
To calculate CPC, divide the total cost of your campaign by the number of conversions that you achieved. For instance, if you spent $500 on a campaign and generated 10 conversions, each conversion would have cost $50.
6. Create eye-popping visuals and images
Here are a few tips for creating eye-popping visuals for your LinkedIn ads.
- Keep it simple! Choose one color palette or image style that will be used throughout all of your ads. This helps with brand recognition and makes sure the visuals have a consistent look and feel.
- Use high-quality images that capture attention right away. Think about what type of image would draw potential customers – something colorful, vibrant, or even edgy.
- Inject some humor. Make your visuals funny, and you may be more likely to get a click-through.
- Use images that motivate and inspire, or add credibility with stats and testimonials about your brand.
- Follow LinkedIn ad best practices for images and include images measuring 1200 x 627 pixels.
- LinkedIn also advises you to embed larger images instead of using thumbnails.
7. Track results and make adjustments
As with any ad, you’ll struggle to get people to buy from you right away, especially if they are unfamiliar with your brand. In fact, marketing experts estimate audiences need to see something 7 times before they act.
If you are advertising something for the first time, lower your expectations – but also be ready to optimize each and every lead.
How?
By being prepared.
