In this chapter we are going to learn How to do ads on LinkedIn. First of all, LinkedIn is the largest professional social network in the world. One of the biggest challenges of other social networking sites such as quality, authenticity & user intent is addressed by LinkedIn. That’s the reason i believe advertising cost in LinkedIn is conveniently high.
However, LinkedIn is still growing in terms of user growth and advertisement. It got acquired by Microsoft recently.
LinkedIn ads is more or less similar to Facebook. It also one of the forms of display advertisement. Similarly LinkedIn ads uses demographics & interests to target users. Though it is similar to Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads has its own peculiar ad types and objectives.
By and large, LinkedIn ads offers three variety of campaigns:
Sponsored contents
Text ads
Sponsored In-mail
For any type of digital marketing campaign there two critical elements
- Ad Creative or Ad delivery
- Targeting
All the three types of campaigns, how you you target users will be same and ad delivery changes based on the campaigns.
Let’s have how each campaign types works and how you can use
Sponsored contents (Promote your content with targeted native advertising)
This is the news feed equivalent of Facebook ads. In this type you will create a content that will have a caption text, image creative, headline & description.
Sponsored content will be show in the news feed, by which LinkedIn guarantee that this type will receive most engagement than other types. Similar to Facebook, users can like, share & comments on the sponsored post. Sponsored content has the highest cost per click or cost per 1000 impressions among others.
Sponsored post won’t be shown in the company pages.
Upon clicking the sponsored content, user will be redirected to your website or homepage. Sponsored content can be used for cold audience and warn audience as well.
You can use sponsored content ad type to re target the users using the list.
LinkedIn Text Ads
Text ads are the right side column equivalent of Facebook. As the ad type implies these are the text ads, it contains only text. Similarly text ads is the primitive version of google search ads.
This ad creative will be served on the right column of LinkedIn. Text ads will not be available on news feed. User can’t engage with this ads, cost per click will be low for this kind of ad.
Sponsored in-mail
In this type of campaign, your LinkedIn message will be ad copy. You can vary message to see if it improves the engagement.
Targeting is same across all the campaign formats. This won’t be display on news feed or right column. It will be delivered as message in your target audience inbox.
How to create creatives for LinkedIn Ads
Creating ad creative for LinkedIn is similar to creating ad creative for any other display channels. Creative will be largely graphic and hence the importance of color in the image.
The ad copy creation process is identical to Facebook ad creation best practices ( interlink)
However, here’s the best practices for creating LinkedIn ad creatives:
Caption :
This is the text area above the image.Caption should include information which are preliminary like when the offer ends, discount information etc.
Ad-image :
This one is very important component of the ad copy which influences almost all of the key performance metrics of the ads. Color of the image is very important.
Color shouldn’t be same color of LinkedIn background. Using same color as LinkedIn cause the ad copy to merge with news feed, failing to stand out and hence how engagement with high cost.
Also, it’s recommended to have less text over the image or no text. High text ration on image will spoil user experience.
Having real person in the image also helps in increasing the engagement. Even Though you follow best practices, it’s harder to get it right first time. So i’d encourage you to have 3-4 ad copies and run all those serially and pick the best one.
Headline
Headline is a prominent text area, you can mention one of the following items :
- Benefits product/service will yield
- Call out your target audience
- Mention offer
- Mention what goal customer can achieve using your product or service
- Use numbers instead of text.( if have opportunity)
Above all, you can use title case to have text stand out.
Description :
You can use this text area to explain things that are important but can’t be mentioned in the headline. Things like free delivery, 30-day returns , 24*7 customer support may seem basic but customer will still need that information to make a decision.
LinkedIn ads targeting:
As mentioned earlier, LinkedIn uses demographics and interest to target people. In LinkedIn targeting contains following sections :
- Locations
- Skills
- Job functions
- Professional demographics
The above mentioned four elements are the basic layers of targeting.
Locations :
Location is the physical location of the user. You can target continent ,country, state and city specifically.
You can also both include and exclude audience based on the location.
Skills based targeting:
You can target people based on the skills that required for using your product or service. If you’re offering a product or service that can enhance their current skills you also target specific skills.
One of the shortcoming with this targeting is that it can be very broad sometimes. This results in less intent users or no intent users.
Job title targeting :
LinkedIn offers you to target based on job titles. Unlike Facebook, this is a real job title a real people having. Job titles in Facebook is vague and such is quality.
But LinkedIn quality and precision is impeccable. You can target people by job titles which is a great deal for advertisers ( specifically B2B guys) . Also, this is one of the high intent yet very straightforward display targeting option available.
Job function targeting :
This is a broader version of job title targeting. If you’re promoting a service or product which would be needed by all the people in that job function, you can use this.
Job function is broader. Hence intent will be lesser than the job title targeting.
Groups targeting
This targeting is kind of exclusive to LinkedIn. Facebook has bigger groups. But due to privacy policies of groups, you can’t target users based on the groups they are in on advertisements.
But LinkedIn offers you such targeting. Since i haven’t tried this myself yet, i can’t say much about it.
Besides from these basic targeting, LinkedIn also offers ways to target users based on the
- Job seniority
- Company industry
- Company size
- Company name
- Schools
- Field of study
- Degrees
- Age
- Gender
- Years of experience
Therefore with all these options , if done right, LinkedIn budget spend is worth every penny!
