LinkedIn Ads are among the most powerful advertising formats available to marketers in the B2B space. From awareness all the way to lead generation, LinkedIn had been proven effective (if you can afford them). This article will explore the strategic benefits and drawbacks and then provide you with a tactical implementation plan if you’re ready to get started.
The first step in any ad campaign is to isolate your unique selling proposition(s). For some companies, the USP is obvious and may already be established. For example, Unbounce is a B2B company that has both a simple and great USP: convert more. Landing pages are their game, and the result they drive is simple.
However, for other companies, USPs can become much more complicated to determine. If you are one of those companies, there is a general process that can help you isolate your USP(s).
First things first, choose your ad objective. Being that most B2B leads aren’t as willing to convert on lead ads, we’ve often found that a “Website visits” objective can be as effective or more effective than other conversion objectives.
There are a couple of ways to isolate your audience on LinkedIn. Firstly, you can use the tools and segmentation variables that are built into the Campaign Manager to target prospective customers. Secondly, you can create custom audiences leveraging lookalike and audience expansion style strategies. And lastly, you can upload a list to target specific LinkedIn accounts/companies. For an expansion on the list approach, visit section 3 under Account-Based Tactics and Strategies.
Here’s how to build an audience on LinkedIn:
Note: LinkedIn also has audience templates available if it’s your first time creating an audience.
Here are a couple of ways to use AI to create custom targeting on LinkedIn:
LinkedIn offers three ad formats that can all be effective if paired with the right content and the right audience. The three choices include sponsored posts, message ads, and dynamic ads. Your choice in ad format will also serve to help you identify your CTA (and vice versa).
Sponsored content appears in the newsfeed and resembles an organic post with the exception of a “Promoted” designation and a CTA button.
Source: SproutSocial
Benefits to sponsored posts:
Message ads are ads that are delivered via LinkedIn InMail. They are delivered in a similar fashion that a DM to a connection would be, but they are accompanied by a sponsored designation.
Source: SproutSocial
Benefits to message ads:
Text and dynamic ads are banners that appear on the side carousels of various LinkedIn pages. These are a little different than your standard banner ad, however, as they allow marketers to personalize them to address users by name and profile picture.
Source: SproutSocial
Benefits to text and dynamic ads:
Depending on your chosen ad format(s), you will want to either create graphics or video content. These are general insights to help guide your content creation, but the reality is that the only way to know for sure what will perform best for your brand is to test both formats with different messaging against different audiences.
Here are some tips for LinkedIn ad graphics
Here are some tips for LinkedIn ad videos:
It’s important that you always start every LinkedIn campaign with four ad variants. This gives you a chance to test different graphics, different text, and different CTAs while also optimizing your ad rotation (LinkedIn rotates four ads per day). It’s best practice to do a two-image/video, two-text split so that you can determine the best performing combinations before you introduce new challenger ads.
Pro-tip: If you are running blog ads, try removing the CTA button entirely so that the ad looks organic when it appears in the newsfeed.
After your campaign has been running for some time and has generated leads, clicks, or otherwise, then you can begin to tweak your ads to optimize your performance.
Here’s how to best optimize your ad performance:
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