LinkedIn ads have become increasingly popular over the last few years. With over 560 million users, LinkedIn provides access to a massive professional network. This makes it very tempting for marketers to want to advertise on LinkedIn. However, despite the large user base, LinkedIn ads come with some major drawbacks that make them ineffective for most businesses. In this article, we will look at some of the main reasons why LinkedIn ads don’t work and how you can improve your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
High Cost Per Click
One of the biggest issues with LinkedIn ads is that they can be very expensive, especially when it comes to cost per click (CPC). The average CPC on LinkedIn is around $8-$12. This is significantly higher than other social platforms like Facebook and Instagram where you can get clicks for $1 or less.
The high CPC is driven by a few factors:
- Highly competitive keywords – Terms related to professional services and software can cost $50 or more per click.
- Targeting decision makers – Marketers bid up prices trying to target CXOs, managers, etc.
- Low organic reach – You need ads to reach users unlike Facebook where you can grow organically.
This makes it very difficult to get a positive ROI from LinkedIn ads in many cases. You need a high lifetime value customer to make the math work.
Low Click Through Rates
In addition to the high CPC, LinkedIn also suffers from low click through rates (CTR) compared to other platforms. The average CTR on LinkedIn ads is around 0.5-1%.
Whereas on Facebook and Instagram you can routinely achieve CTRs of 2-3% or higher for well-targeted ads.
The lower engagement on LinkedIn ads can be attributed to:
- Audience mindset – Users aren’t browsing LinkedIn to be entertained or shop like other social networks.
- Ad blindness – Many users ignore ads because they are focused on professional content.
- Cluttered feeds – The feed design results in low visibility for ads.
This further diminishes the value of LinkedIn advertising, forcing you to show the ad many more times to achieve results.
Irrelevant Targeting Options
LinkedIn offers demographic, job role, company and interests targeting options for ads. However, many of these targeting options are too broad or irrelevant to maximize campaign performance.
For example, targeting by job title or company name can be imprecise. Just because someone works at a certain company doesn’t mean they are a good fit. And job titles often don’t tell you enough about the specific responsibilities of the person.
Interest targeting is also hit or miss. Someone may be pegged with an interest in “social media marketing” but have no budget or need for your specific solution.
This lack of precision with LinkedIn targeting results in low relevance scores for ads. You end up wasting budget showing ads to users that will never convert.
Poor Ad Relevance
As we just discussed, the targeting options available make it difficult to hone in on your perfect audience on LinkedIn. But another issue is that even if your targeting is on point, the ad creative itself often seems irrelevant to users.
Some of the reasons LinkedIn ads have lower relevance include:
- Too salesy or promotional – Users expect a certain decorum aligned with professional networking.
- Perception as “ads” vs useful content – Users inbox floods make them ignore ads.
- Extremely high CTR benchmark – You need improbable CTR just to meet minimum relevance.
Ad creative that might work wonders on Facebook or Instagram just bombs on LinkedIn. This further limits your ability to spend advertising dollars effectively.
How to Improve Your LinkedIn Marketing Strategy
Based on these limitations, here are some tips on how you can improve your overall strategy:
Leverage Organic Content
Posting free content on your LinkedIn Company Page is essential. You want to build credibility through valuable articles, infographics, case studies and videos optimized for LinkedIn. This helps increase organic visibility and engagement.
You can also encourage employees to actively post and engage on LinkedIn to further expand your reach.
Focus on Quality Over Quantity With Ads
The most successful approach is to create highly targeted and hyper-relevant ads for a niche professional audience. Avoid broad targeting and generic messaging. Have a clear call-to-action tailored to the specific segment.
Prioritize quality over quantity – it’s better to have a smaller well-targeted campaign over a broad spray and pray approach. Define a clear goal and track ROI closely.
Retarget Website Visitors
One of the best tactics is to build an audience of people who have already visited your website. This allows you to deliver ads specifically to users who have expressed an initial interest. The relevance is significantly higher.
Work on getting visitors to your site or blog using organic efforts, then set up a retargeting ad campaign to reconnect with them on LinkedIn.
Promote Content Downloads
Content downloads like whitepapers, ebooks and tip sheets are very popular on LinkedIn. You can advertise directly to professionals who have viewed a particular piece of content on your site.
This allows you to serve them other top of funnel offers they are likely to be interested in. Just make sure to gate downloads with lead capture forms to collect data.
Utilize Lead Gen Forms
LinkedIn now allows you to include lead gen forms directly in your ads. This gives you a way to gather prospect information and deliver ads in one.
Consider boosting posts with lead gen forms promoting webinars, content downloads and product demos. The lead data can then be used for targeted outreach.
Drive Traffic to Your Website
At the end of the day, your website is where you can really educate prospects and convert them into leads. So it’s usually a better investment to drive traffic directly to your site instead of keeping users within LinkedIn.
That allows you to capture visitor data, set cookies for retargeting and guide them through your sales funnel. Avoid sending LinkedIn traffic to generic company homepages and instead use specific landing pages.
Conclusion
Despite having a massive audience, LinkedIn has intrinsic disadvantages when it comes to advertising. The platform is better suited for organic content marketing to build relationships with professionals. When using ads, you must ensure extreme targeting precision and relevance to see a positive return. With the right strategy focused on quality over quantity, it’s possible to make LinkedIn ads work as part of a comprehensive marketing plan. But overall, investing budget into other avenues like Google and Facebook tends to be most effective for lead generation.
