LinkedIn advertising is a great way to promote your business to a targeted professional audience. With over 722 million users worldwide, LinkedIn provides access to the world’s largest professional network. Using LinkedIn ads allows you to connect with your ideal customers who are actively looking to engage with brands and content within their industry. Here are some tips on how to create effective LinkedIn ads for your business.
Define Your Goals
Before creating your LinkedIn ad campaign, clearly define what you want to achieve. Common goals for LinkedIn ads include:
- Generate leads and sales
- Increase brand awareness
- Drive traffic to your website
- Promote content and events
Setting specific goals will allow you to properly target your ads, choose the right campaign objective and metrics to track success.
Target Your Audience
One of the major benefits of LinkedIn advertising is the ability to precisely target your ideal audience using professional demographic data. You can target by:
- Job title – target people with relevant job titles like “Marketing Manager” or “Small Business Owner”
- Company – target employees at specific companies you want to reach
- Industry – target people who work in your industry like “Information Technology” or “Accounting”
- Skills – target people who have listed skills relevant to your business like “Social Media Marketing” or “Website Design”
- Location – target people located in specific cities, regions or countries
- Age – target specific age ranges like “25-34” or “35-44”
- Gender – target men or women
The more precisely you can define your target audience, the better your ad results will be. Leverage LinkedIn’s detailed professional data to reach your ideal customers.
Choose the Right Campaign Objective
LinkedIn offers a range of campaign objectives to match your goals. The campaign objective you choose determines how your ads are optimized, targeted and charged.
| Objective | Best For |
|---|---|
| Awareness | Increasing brand awareness and reach |
| Consideration | Driving consideration and early-stage demand |
| Leads | Generating quality leads by encouraging clicks and conversions |
| Website Visits | Increasing site traffic through clicks |
| Video Views | Promoting video content to gain views |
For most small businesses, “Leads” and “Website Visits” are good choices to drive direct response. Make sure to select the objective that aligns with your goals.
Create Attention-Grabbing Ads
Your visuals and copy must grab attention and persuade the viewer if you want them to engage with your ad. Follow these best practices when designing LinkedIn ads:
- Use eye-catching images that connect with your message
- Keep the copy succinct, relevant and scannable
- Highlight benefits and value over features
- Use strong, clear call-to-action buttons like “Sign Up Now”
- Leverage LinkedIn’s automated A/B testing to find what works
- Personalize ads when possible to improve relevancy
Well-designed ads aligned with your goals and audience will drive much better results. Take the time to create polished, professional ads.
Utilize Targeted Sponsored Content
Sponsored content allows you to publish relevant content to your target audience and achieve non-sales focused goals like:
- Educating potential customers
- Establishing thought leadership
- Raising brand awareness
- Sharing valuable material
This is a great way to provide value, build relationships and position your business as an authority. Use a mix of blog posts, whitepapers, ebooks and infographics.
Retarget Website Visitors
Retargeting allows you to display ads specifically to people who have already visited your website. This “warms up” previous visitors and nudges them back to complete a desired action like:
- Completing a purchase
- Downloading content
- Signing up for a free trial
- Subscribing to a newsletter
Retargeting converts significantly better than untargeted ads since they reach previously interested prospects when they are most receptive.
Track and Optimize Results
Continuously monitor your LinkedIn ads to understand what is working well and identify areas for improvement. Important metrics to analyze include:
- Clicks
- Clickthrough rate (CTR)
- Cost per click (CPC)
- Impressions
- Leads or conversions
- Return on investment (ROI)
Experiment with different targeting options, bids, placements and ad creative to boost results over time. Use LinkedIn’s analytics to double down on what converts.
Conclusion
With proper planning and optimization, LinkedIn advertising provides an extremely effective way to reach B2B audiences, generate quality leads and grow your business. Define your goals, target your audience precisely, create compelling ads, leverage LinkedIn’s options like sponsored content and retargeting, and relentlessly analyze performance.
Investing in LinkedIn ads allows you to engage professional audiences when they are proactively looking to discover solutions like yours. If you have additional questions on optimizing your LinkedIn ads, please contact us.