Every social media platform has its forte, and you need to choose the right one to achieve your target goals. LinkedIn is famous for targeting specific demographics, mostly professionals, job seekers, business people and c-level executives. LinkedIn Ads target professionals and help in lead generation, drive traffic, build thought leadership and more. When using LinkedIn advertising, you need to work on an optimization strategy to know which of your ads are performing better. With LinkedIn ads optimization, you can target a large audience within your niche, improve CTR, increase your advertising ROI, generate quality leads, etc. and going ahead; there will be discussions on the same.
Social media marketing for B2B businesses has become an essential part of the paid advertising puzzle. LinkedIn has over 800 million members in more than 200 countries and digital marketing agencies cannot miss the opportunity to advertise on the social media platform with the highest ROI. The various social networks have own advantages, like Twitter for news updates, Facebook to connect with friends and family, etc. With different social media platforms available, choosing the right platform to achieve your business goals is of utmost importance.
With the increase in the ease of technology, social media is accessible at the comfort of fingertips. As social media becomes more ingrained in our daily lives, you should work on advertising on these platforms to increase leads, boost sales, etc. LinkedIn is especially popular in the B2B space and you should work on monitoring LinkedIn ads cost so that your advertising budget does not get wasted. When running ads in the LinkedIn campaign manager tool, you need a solid strategy to optimize LinkedIn ads to maximize your paid ad efforts. To know more about LinkedIn ads, you can read our guide on introduction to LinkedIn ads.
Why advertise on LinkedIn?
When it comes to social media marketing, running Facebook ads, YouTube ads, advertising on Instagram, etc., primarily comes to mind, but LinkedIn ads provide you with the best ROI till date. Advertising on LinkedIn provides you with the opportunity to reach a wide range of audiences and increase sales for your business. As the world’s largest professional network, LinkedIn generate leads 227% more effectively than Facebook and Twitter; thus, it becomes an important platform to run social media ads.
LinkedIn was launched in 2003 with a focus on networking, providing career opportunities and sharing ideas. The platform offers a chance to connect and share content with other professionals, employers, business partners, etc., which makes it a great marketing platform. Since LinkedIn ads are PPC ads so this helps in driving quick results and you need to work on bid strategy to make the most of your ad budget. With a proper strategy on LinkedIn ads management, you can have multiple advantages of advertising on this social media platform, some of which are discussed below.
1. Unique audience-targeting – LinkedIn advertising offers unique audience segmentation, which is hard to find on any other social media platform. However, all platforms collect their unique set of data which later can be worked upon to target the ideal audience. The advantage of LinkedIn audience targeting is that it already has a segmented set of audience in the form of professionals, job seekers, industry experts, etc. In fact, LinkedIn allows you to target ads very exclusively, which is hard to find elsewhere like company name, degrees, job title, job seniority, skills, member groups, etc.
2. Retargeting possibilities - With LinkedIn advertising, you have the opportunity to remarket your target audience and move them down the marketing funnel. LinkedIn ads provide you with the option of matched audiences so that you can work on targeting the audience based on the match type. You can use this to get in touch with the target audience once they have interacted with your business. They may have reached your landing page and did not end up taking the intended action for one reason or another. The next time you approach the target audience, you can send more personalized messages depending on which stage of the marketing action they are at. Some forms of retargeting may be website retargeting, contact retargeting, account retargeting, etc.
3. High–quality leads – One of the prime reasons of LinkedIn advertising is that you have the opportunity to generate high-quality leads and increase your brand awareness, have insights into user’s activity, etc. In the B2B industry, reaching the right decision-makers is more important than in the B2C sector. It helps generate new business ideas, discuss digital marketing plans, and increase sales. This is where LinkedIn advertising is important, as the platform provides you with the opportunity to connect with industry experts, professionals and even CEOs of big companies. When they find the ad relevant and seek any good opportunity, the chances of them clicking on the ad increases, thus generating high-quality leads for your business.
LinkedIn Ads optimization tips
With LinkedIn ad optimization, you will be able to build connections, boost campaign performance, earn more impressions and clicks, leads, etc. Some of the LinkedIn ads optimization tips are discussed below:
1. Build buyer persona – You need to clearly understand your target audience and determine what best suits the individual user. So, after having launched a LinkedIn campaign, you need to perform a PPC audit and work on a PPC plan & strategy to outline who your buyer is and what characteristics define them. You may consider focusing on some of the undermentioned points:
• Defining specific job functions
• Defining job locations
• Defining job skills
• Work experience(if any)
• Do they belong to any LinkedIn groups?
You may consider running a different LinkedIn campaign to target the relevant users. The various ad campaigns may be in different forms as:
Campaign one
• Targeting based on job function: Selecting a user with a job function such as sales, marketing, etc.
• Targeting based on seniority level: Selecting users based on seniority level such as manager, team leader, etc.
Campaign two
• Targeting users based on skills such as planning, management, research & development, etc.
• Targeting users who are a part of LinkedIn business groups.
By understanding the intent of the target audience, you would be much better equipped to pinpoint the targeting options in LinkedIn campaigns.
2. Optimize landing page – Since LinkedIn nearly has 774+ million users so, you cannot miss the opportunity to increase brand awareness, target professionals within your niche, improve b2b marketing, etc. As LinkedIn has a massive number of industry groups, professionals, job seekers, etc., the platform provides you with the opportunity to showcase your product or services. Thus, optimizing landing pages becomes very crucial in LinkedIn Ads optimization strategy.
Landing pages are standalone pages where ideal visitors can take action like signing up to create an account, navigating through different sections to reach other desired sections, registering for a webinar, etc. You need to have a strong call-to-action so that the relevant audience can take intended actions which help in improving your PPC ads ROI.
To run a strong LinkedIn campaign, you may consider using a message match where the LinkedIn ad and the corresponding landing page share headline text, images, etc. As a LinkedIn advertising agency, you need to optimize images, create engaging short videos, provide users to fill the form, etc., and have great content that creates an urgency to convert.
3. Bid adjustment – When working on LinkedIn advertising in the LinkedIn campaign manager tool, the prime focus of a LinkedIn advertising agency should be to work on bid adjustment. Working on bid adjustment in Linked Ads is similar to PPC ads. You will be able to decide how much you can spend on every campaign, adjust the cost per click that will help lower CPA(cost per acquisition), etc. LinkedIn ads management helps you to choose the type of LinkedIn ad that best suits your business goals and target the relevant audience to reach your landing page.
In the LinkedIn campaign manager tool, you can adjust the LinkedIn ads cost manually and even consider setting a daily or lifetime budget depending on your bidding strategy. LinkedIn ads have a minimum daily budget of $10 for any ad format in the LinkedIn campaign manager tool, while the minimum LinkedIn Ads cost lifetime budget is $100.
In your LinkedIn ads optimization strategy, you should aim to lower the budget to average daily spending to achieve the desired results. You should take a closer look at your LinkedIn campaign and consider pausing those with a lower click-through rate.
4. Writing great content – You should always focus on writing great content for your ads, regardless of which social media ads, PPC ads, search engine optimization, etc., you have in your digital marketing strategy. All social media ads have different forms of content and LinkedIn ads content should be optimized accordingly, keeping the target users in mind. You need to put great content into your ads so that the target user finds the PPC ad relevant on reaching your landing page. With exceptional content, your LinkedIn ads have a better engagement rate, increase in impressions, etc. To improve the content on your landing page, you should focus on conducting proper keyword research and then write the appropriate content accordingly to target the relevant users. You should consider writing engaging ad copies to keep the user’s intent engaged and convert the user into a customer on the landing page. Some points to optimize the content are:
• Cover industry topics
• Post content regularly - Blogs, surveys and polls, etc.
• Always comment back – the more comments, the more visibility
• Make the most of your headline as the first line is important
• Focus on personalizing the content
• Add relevant images and videos, i.e., you, your employees, partners, or clients.
• Consider updating statistics
5. A/B testing – A/B testing is a tactic used in any marketing campaign to analyze which version of your ad is performing better than the rest. A/B testing your LinkedIn campaign should be a practice you should perform consistently to improve your LinkedIn ads ROI. Since so many factors can affect the LinkedIn campaign, you need to analyze various KPIs that help to improve the PPC ad performance.
To a/b test the LinkedIn campaign performance, you need to create two versions of the LinkedIn ad with some changes like image size, testing different designs, headline descriptions, etc. You can then prepare a PPC report to figure out the important PPC metrics like clicks, keyword quality score, the average cost per click, cost per acquisition, etc.
LinkedIn suggests running an ad campaign for at least two weeks and then move to a/b testing. A/B testing can be performed on various types of LinkedIn ads and you need to figure out what type of ads you wish to run to achieve your target goals. With a/b testing, you would monitor what KPIs need to be optimized and what to leave out. This would help to improve your click-through rate, have increased impressions, improve conversion rate, etc. A/B testing demonstrates the efficacy of potential changes that need to be done to improve the LinkedIn campaign performance.
Tips to building a LinkedIn Ad campaign
LinkedIn users tend to be educated, affluent and career-oriented. Users on LinkedIn are mostly focused on their career, are leaders of different business groups, influencers, decision-makers, executives, etc. Since 4 out of 5 people drive business decisions on LinkedIn, you cannot miss the opportunity to use this social media platform to increase sales for your business. This social media ad has the best ROI till date and provides you with the opportunity to reach a wide range of target audiences. As the Omni-channel marketing approach is increasing, the LinkedIn campaign can be a great paid advertising place to drive traffic to your landing page.
1. Capture viewer’s attention – Since LinkedIn advertising mostly targets educated and industry-oriented users, you need to focus on capturing the viewer’s attention so that they make a click and reach your landing page. If the user does not find the ad relevant, they move to the competitors’ ad and then you will have to work on retargeting to attract the user to your product or services. To make the user reach your landing page, you should keep the ad language simple, converting language with demographic targeting, engaging video content, etc. To grab the user’s attention, you can focus on conducting quizzes, asking questions, etc., so that the user are engaged with your ad and the visitor takes the intended action.
2. Select your advertising objective - You need to be crystal clear about what your objectives are with the LinkedIn campaign and how much is your LinkedIn ads cost that you wish to spend. This would help you choose the type of LinkedIn ad you need to work on to achieve the desired ROI. Some of the objectives are stated below:
• Brand awareness – To let more and more people know more about your products or services, you should focus on building brand awareness in LinkedIn advertising.
• Website visits – To get the relevant users reach your landing page and finally take the intended action,you should focus on increasing website visits in LinkedIn advertising.
• Engagement – You with the opportunity to engage more people with your ad and make them reach your landing page, start following your company page, etc.
• Lead generation–If your objective is to generate leads for your business, you need to focus on the target audience to fill out the lead generation form.
• Job applicants – If your objective is to recruit job seekers, you should focus on this section to make the users click on the job post.
3. Ad placement – There are various types of LinkedIn ads and differ in shape, positioning, purpose. Since your business has different target goals, you need to work on LinkedIn ads management to display the relevant ads to the target audience. Some of the ad positions of LinkedIn ads are discussed below:
• Text ads and dynamic ads appear on the LinkedIn website at the top of the page.
• Carousel image ads and video ads appear in the LinkedIn feed, both on desktop and mobile.
• Sponsored messaging ads appear only in LinkedIn messenger.
• LinkedIn ads appear on the LinkedIn Audience network, which contains thousands of mobile sites, mobile apps and ad exchanges.
Round off
Digital advertising has a lot to offer. You must have got an idea of why LinkedIn ads optimization is important for a LinkedIn advertising agency. Optimization of LinkedIn ads is an ongoing process where you need to keep analyzing the performance of your ads on a regular interval. With LinkedIn ads management, you can work on different PPC strategies to generate B2B leads, reach target professionals, etc. With proper LinkedIn ads optimization, the marketing spend gradually gets lower, has higher conversion rate and many other benefits. To optimize LinkedIn ads, you need to properly understand what points to touch and what to leave. A digital marketing company that has expertise in LinkedIn ads optimization, search ads, video ads, display ads, mobile ads, campaign analysis, market research, etc. can help you get the desired ROI.
References:
• How to run LinkedIn Ad campaigns: A beginner’s guide
• Start to finish guide: How to use LinkedIn Ads to generate sales