Let’s talk about a topic that has been growing in popularity lately, LinkedIn advertising. Most companies have heard of social media advertising, whether it was through platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. Each of these platforms offers a unique audience and advertising options. LinkedIn is especially great for B2B marketing and professionals.
Before you begin posting, your company will need to have a LinkedIn company page to advertise with them. If you haven’t set that up, this needs to be your first step.
From there, let’s discuss a few of the minimum requirements LinkedIn has for its advertisers:
- You have to have a daily minimum budget of $10/campaign.
- You have to have a minimum of a $10 budget for a campaign.
- For CPC and text add campaigns, you need to have a minimum of a $2 bid.
Now that you know the minimum financial commitment you’ll need to make let’s dig deeper.
Choosing Your Advertising Objective
One helpful tool that LinkedIn offers is its different objectives. An objective for these purposes is the end goal of your advertising campaign. It’s so intelligent having your end goal in mind from the very beginning so you can craft your ad to generate the results you’re seeking.
They’ve broken them down into three different categories, each with its own subcategories:
- Awareness- brand awareness
- Consideration- website visits, engagement, and video view
- Conversions- lead generation, website conversions, and job applications.
Each different type of ad targets a different audience. LinkedIn follows their users closely to determine who is best suited for each type of ad. With that said, we’ll break down each of these main objective categories more to help you gain a deeper understanding of them.
Awareness Objective
The awareness objective is all about introducing your brand to people. Here it doesn’t matter as much if you’re getting website clicks or conversions. It’s all about the sheer number of impressions you get.
This objective is best for newer companies or those who need to reach a much larger audience. This is also the type of advertising where you won’t have to do as many cold-connects! Companies use this type of ad by getting people to know their company and recognize their name/brand before they try more invasive advertising methods. It helps build trust and warm up potential customers before you ever try to make a sale.
Consideration Campaigns
Consideration campaigns are all about getting engagement. This is great for generating action: website clicks, likes, follows, etc. As we said, this particular objective type is broken down into even more subcategories: website clicks, engagement, and video views. Really, these are fairly self-explanatory.
Website clicks are purely about getting people to your website. This could be getting them to head to a blog post, learn more about your product/service, or check out your company’s online store.
Engagement is about getting people to interact with your content on LinkedIn. From liking to sharing and commenting, all of this is considered engagement. This is a helpful tool in increasing the quality of your LinkedIn page! More engagement means LinkedIn will prioritize showing your content to more users more often. What company doesn’t want that?
Video views are exactly what it sounds like. Video is such a powerful marketing tool today. In fact, studies have proven that video content leads to higher engagement rates and higher quality of leads generated. This is especially powerful if you’re looking to build traffic acquisition brand awareness through video content.
Conversion Objectives
Conversion objectives are a special type. These are best done when you have already laid the groundwork and warmed up your audience. They have to have a more expensive cost per click, but that’s for a good reason. This is the type of objective where you ask your audience to take a specific action. Whether that is signing up for your email list, starting a trial, or downloading a pdf, it’s asking more of your audience.
This objective type is also broken down into smaller subcategories, starting with lead generating. One startling and powerful statistic is that almost 80% of LinkedIn users are decision-makers. That makes them 270% more likely to be converted into leads than on other leading platforms.
One powerful way they do this is by letting you generate leads directly from their website. This eliminates the extra step of them having to jump to your site and possibly lose interest.
The next subcategory is website conversions. This is just like lead generation but with the main goal of leading people to your website.
Finally, the last subcategory is job applicants. If your company is looking for new employees, this can be the perfect little boost! LinkedIn advertising will actually optimize your post, so the right people and those most likely to click on it will see it.
Using Targeting
Targeting is simply the way LinkedIn determines who will see each ad. You can hone in your LinkedIn Advertisement through a variety of different variables. In fact, there are 5 specific categories.
- Company- Company connections, followers, industry, name, and size
- Demographics- Age and gender of the specific people to whom you want to contact
- Education- Degrees, fields of study, and member schools
- Job Experience- Job function, seniority, job title, skills, and years of experience
- Interests- Groups the user is part of and their interests
You’ll have the opportunity to “include,” “exclude,” or “narrow by” each of these different variables to make your ad as powerful and effective as possible. Each different combination can narrow or widen your results to help you achieve your ultimate goal.
Forecasted Results
Once you’ve finished targeting your audience, LinkedIn will show the predicted reach and anticipated traffic volume for your campaign. These are called the forecasted results.
Ultimately, these forecasted numbers will be affected by your daily budgets and bids. They are a great way to track your campaign’s actual performance vs. their forecast.
So far, we’ve walked through a lot of the process of creating your first LinkedIn Advertisement. Next time, we’ll dig deeper into the different types of LinkedIn advertising options and which one is the best fit for your company’s campaign, as well as budgeting for them. Until then, feel free to drop any questions in the comments or reach out to us through our contact page.