Yes, a content admin can create ads on LinkedIn. As a content admin, you likely manage your company’s blog, website, social media, and other owned media channels. Creating and managing ads on LinkedIn to promote your content and drive traffic to your sites is a natural extension of your role.
LinkedIn provides a self-serve ad platform that makes it easy for content admins to create and run ads without needing to go through an agency or your company’s marketing team. You don’t need special permissions or access to run LinkedIn ads — any company employee can do it.
Here are some key things to know about creating LinkedIn ads as a content admin:
You need a LinkedIn ad account
The first step is signing up for a LinkedIn ad account if your company doesn’t already have one. You can use your work email address and existing LinkedIn profile to set up an account.
LinkedIn will walk you through the account setup process step-by-step. You’ll need to agree to LinkedIn’s advertising policies and provide billing information.
Once your account is approved, you’ll have full access to LinkedIn’s self-serve ad platform to create, target, and analyze campaigns.
Choose your campaign objective
When creating a new ad campaign in LinkedIn, you’ll need to select a campaign objective. Common choices for content admins include:
– Website visits – Drive traffic to your blog, articles, or other content
– Follower growth – Gain more followers for your LinkedIn Company Page
– Engagement – Get more likes, comments, and shares on your posts
The objective you choose will impact the ad formats, targeting options, and bidding models available.
Select your ad format
LinkedIn offers a variety of ad formats to choose from. Here are some top options for content marketers:
– Sponsored content – Promote your best articles, reports, and other content by publishing it as a sponsored post in the LinkedIn feed. You can tailor the headline and description.
– Text ads – Create simple text-based ads ideal for driving website traffic. You have a title, headlines, URLs, and up to 75 characters of text.
– Dynamic ads – Highlight specific products, content offers, events, and more. The ads automatically pull fresh content from a feed you provide.
– Message ads – Send targeted LinkedIn messages to your ideal audience to promote content.
Target your audience
One of LinkedIn’s strengths is its depth of audience targeting options. You can target your ads by criteria like:
– Job title, seniority level, and department
– Company (including company size and industry)
– Groups and interests
– Location
– Demographic info
– LinkedIn engagement and account settings
Take time to really define your target audience and who you want to reach with your ads. Leverage LinkedIn’s audience insights tool to estimate your audience size and optimize targeting.
Set your budget and bidding
With LinkedIn ads, you have flexibility in how much you spend and your pricing model. Options include:
– Daily budget – Set a maximum daily spend cap across your campaigns
– Lifetime budget – Cap your total spend for the duration of the campaign
– Cost per click (CPC) – Pay each time someone clicks your ad
– Cost per impression (CPM – Pay each time your ad is shown
Start conservatively with daily/lifetime budgets of $10-$50 per ad to test performance. You can adjust bids and budgets later as needed.
Measure performance
LinkedIn provides robust reporting and analytics so you can see how your ads are performing. Important metrics to track include:
– Clicks, clickthrough rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC)
– Impressions
– Website visits, conversions, leads, sales
– Bounce rate for website traffic
– Audience engagement (likes, follows, shares, post clicks)
Use the performance data to identify top-performing ads, audiences, and strategies to optimize your efforts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are answers to some common questions content admins have about creating LinkedIn ads:
Do I need marketing approval to run LinkedIn ads?
That depends on your company. Some businesses require all advertising to be managed by the marketing team. Others empower individual departments and employees to run their own ads. Check your company’s marketing policies or connect with your marketing team to understand the guidelines for your organization.
What ad spend limits do I have on LinkedIn?
When you first create a LinkedIn ads account, there will be initial daily and monthly spending caps applied ($10-$50 per day typically). You can request an increase by contacting LinkedIn sales. Work with your finance team to determine appropriate spend limits based on your budget.
Can I reuse content from my blog and website in the ads?
Absolutely. LinkedIn highly recommends featuring your best-performing content assets in your ads. You can directly upload infographics, videos, PDFs, and other content to use in Sponsored Content or Dynamic Ads. For text ads, summarize key information and use links to drive traffic to your content.
What’s the approval process for LinkedIn ads?
Ads usually start running within a day after you create them. LinkedIn reviews all ads for quality and relevance before delivering them. Ads need to meet LinkedIn’s policies around content and targeting. Expect a 24-48 hour timeframe for ad review and approval, longer for more complex campaigns.
Can I only run ads on LinkedIn? What about Facebook or Google?
LinkedIn is a great place to start for B2B companies targeting professionals. But you aren’t limited to just LinkedIn. As a content marketer, look at running paid ads on other channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google/Youtube, Reddit, Pinterest, and more. Lead generation ads tend to work well across the major platforms. Experiment to see where you get the best results.
What level of expertise do I need to run LinkedIn ads?
The nice thing about LinkedIn’s self-serve platform is you don’t need to be an expert to run ads successfully. The interface is intuitive and they provide guidance along the way. Focus on your goals, target audience, and content – LinkedIn will handle the rest. Don’t be afraid to test small campaigns and learn as you go. Ad performance typically improves over time as you optimize.
How much budget do I need for LinkedIn ads?
You can achieve solid results on LinkedIn with a modest daily budget. For lead generation and branded content campaigns, start with $10-$50 per day. For more aggressive lead gen, allow $100-$300+ per day. Set maximums and adjust up or down based on performance. Take advantage of LinkedIn’s bidding models to help automate budget management.
What type of content should I avoid in LinkedIn ads?
Stay away from content that is overtly promotional, comes across as spammy, or violates LinkedIn’s policies. Focus on relevant, engaging content that provides value for your target audience. Avoid hard sells, misleading info, inappropriate/offensive content, or repetition across ads. LinkedIn aims for high-quality user experiences.
How often should I monitor and optimize my LinkedIn ads?
Plan to check your ad metrics and fine-tune targeting at least 2-3 times per week. Turn off underperforming ads, raise bids on winners, update targeting, edit copy, etc. The more hands on you are, the better results you will see over time. Don’t just “set and forget” your LinkedIn ads.
Benefits of LinkedIn Ads for Content Admins
Here are some of the key reasons content admins should consider running ads on LinkedIn:
Reach your target professional audiences
LinkedIn offers unparalleled targeting capabilities to engage B2B professionals wherever they are most active online. You can reach audiences by industry, job role, groups, and more.
Amplify your best content
Too often great content doesn’t get the exposure it deserves. LinkedIn ads let you prominently promote and distribute your top blog posts, reports, videos, and other content assets.
Capture more website traffic
Want more people visiting and sharing your content? LinkedIn ads are a proven tactic for driving traffic and leads back to your site from targeted professionals.
Build your follower base
Grow your Company Page followers and expand your LinkedIn audience reach through follower-focused ad campaigns.
Low barrier to entry
LinkedIn’s self-serve ad platform makes it fast and easy for content admins to launch campaigns without relying on marketing resources and support.
Proven results
78% of B2B marketers say LinkedIn generates the best ROI for them compared to other social platforms. LinkedIn ads get results for content marketing objectives.
Valuable audience and performance data
LinkedIn Campaign Manager provides deep reporting and analytics into your ads. See which audiences and strategies are most effective to inform your approach.
Case Studies
Here are a few real-world examples of content admins running successful ad campaigns on LinkedIn:
Case Study #1 – Software Company
A mid-sized SaaS company wanted to increase subscribers and downloads for their weekly blog newsletter. The content admin created a LinkedIn Sponsored Content campaign highlighting their most popular posts along with a call-to-action to subscribe to the newsletter.
By geo-targeting LinkedIn members in IT roles at mid-market companies, the campaign generated over 1,200 new newsletter subscribers in just 2 months.
Case Study #2 – Digital Marketing Agency
A digital marketing agency hoped to use LinkedIn ads to build up their follower base and increase engagement on their Company Page. The content admin ran a follower-focused Text Ad campaign targeting marketing professionals in their city.
Within 3 months, the agency increased their followers from 3,100 to over 6,200. Engagement on their page also rose 35%+ over the same period.
Case Study #3 – Accounting Association
A trade association for CPAs wanted to increase attendance for their annual conference. The content admin created a set of LinkedIn Message Ads that delivered personalized invites and exclusive discounts to accountants in their membership database.
The Message Ad campaign drove a 24% increase in early bird conference ticket sales compared to email alone. Hundreds of new members also joined the association as a result.
Tips for Content Admins
Here are some top tips for content marketers and admins looking to maximize results from LinkedIn ads:
– Set specific goals and track ROI – Don’t run ads without a clear purpose and ways to measure impact.
– Limit text, focus on visuals – Visual content performs much better. Videos, graphics, and images drive more clicks and engagement.
– Target narrowly – Targeted campaigns convert better than broad-based blasting.
– Promote gated assets – Lead gen offers and downloads convert better than plain blog links.
– Retarget engaged visitors – Remarket to people who already visited your site or content.
– Automate bidding strategies – Use automation to optimize bids and control spend efficiently.
– A/B test ad variations – Try different messages, images, offers, etc. and see what resonates.
– Monitor daily, tweak frequently – Ad optimization is a hands-on, always-on process.
– Re-use top content assets – Repurpose your best blogs, videos, etc. into multiple ads.
Conclusion
With LinkedIn’s user-friendly self-serve platform, content admins can quickly launch and manage effective ad campaigns to support their content marketing goals.
LinkedIn advertising enables content teams to promote their best assets, drive high-value website traffic, generate leads, and grow their follower base. And you can start seeing results with a relatively modest daily ad budget.
Success comes down to:
– Clearly defining your goals
– Understanding your target audiences
– Creating relevant, engaging ads
– Continuously monitoring and optimizing performance
Try running a small LinkedIn ad campaign promoting some of your top-performing blog posts or content offers. Track the results and then expand from there. Used strategically, LinkedIn ads can significantly amplify the impact of your content marketing.
| Ad Format | Best Use Cases | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sponsored Content | Promoting blog posts, reports, videos | High visibility, native format | Limited targeting and creative flexibility |
| Text Ads | Traffic to blog/site, lead gen, brand awareness | Flexible, great ROI potential | Easy to overlook in crowded feed |
| Dynamic Ads | Promoting fresh content, gated offers | Automated, low maintenance | Less control over messaging |
| Message Ads | Highly targeted outreach and lead gen | Personalized, high open rates | One-to-one messaging limits scale |