LinkedIn has over 645 million users across the globe.
If you market your business to other businesses, there are many LinkedIn benefits you can gain when using their ads.
However, you have to have a great strategy in place if you want your campaigns to get results.
We want to show you some of the benefits you can gain by using LinkedIn ads and give you some tips you can start using today to build a better ad strategy on this popular social media platform.
Keep reading to learn more about how to use LinkedIn ads.
How Does LinkedIn Advertise?
Before we get into the benefits and details of how to plan LinkedIn ad campaigns, let’s take a moment to look at exactly how LinkedIn ads work.
This will help you better understand what you’re working with.
Like many digital marketing ads today, LinkedIn works with a bidding system. You set up your target audience, a budget, and create an ad.
The system then allows your ads to compete for space until your budget is gone.
What are Some LinkedIn Benefits?
Now let’s take a closer look at some of the benefits you can gain from using LinkedIn ads.
Great ROI
One of the reasons so many digital marketers are using LinkedIn ads today is they get a great return on their investment (ROI).
This is in a large part because there is less competition within this space.
Less competition means you will pay less per ad than if you were to use Google or even Facebook ads.
Another reason you get a better ROI on LinkedIn compared to other platforms is that the site is less cluttered.
This increases the chances of your ad being seen since there is less ad blindness on LinkedIn.
Built-in Reporting Software
To track your ROI, you need to have reporting software that shows you exactly where your leads are coming from.
With LinkedIn, you get this built into the platform so you can easily see how your ads are performing.
This allows you to easily run split tests to figure out what’s working and what’s not working.
Split testing not only improves your ROI but also helps you avoid wasting money when you see a certain ad is not generating clicks or leads.
Easy to Set Up Ad Campaign
Despite the number of steps involved, setting up an ad campaign on LinkedIn is easy.
The system will take you through each step one at a time until you’ve crafted the perfect ad that’s targeted at the right audience.
Generate Quality Leads
When placing ads on Google, your potential audience involves most of the world.
This could be end consumers looking for information on your products, or lower-level employees performing tasks for upper-level management.
Either way, it’s impossible to ensure you’re going to reach the people in the right positions with most other ad platforms.
With LinkedIn ads, you can target people based on their position within a company.
That means your ads will land in the hands of the decision-makers that you want to connect with.
This is by far the biggest benefit of using LinkedIn ads because of how easily you can gain access to upper-level management and others in the correct position so that you can quickly and easily show them what you have to offer their business.
How to Plan Your LinkedIn Ads Campaign
Now we’re going to get into details about how to plan out a LinkedIn ad campaign so you get the best possible results from it.
1. Determine Your Objective
The first thing you have to do is figure out what the goal of your ad campaign is.
Are you looking to generate leads for a specific product? Do you want to get people to check out your company’s website? How do I Post on Linkedin?
As you start your campaign, LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager system will ask you to specify your objective.
This objective-based advertising changes the way LinkedIn bids for your ads while keeping you focused.
2. Know Your Audience
A large part of setting up an ad campaign on LinkedIn is knowing who it’s going to target.
For that reason, you have to know in advance who you want seeing your ads.
Some of the decisions you’ll need to make about your audience include:
- Company size
- Industry
- Job title
- Job function
- Seniority
Another option is to target people based on company name.
By loading your own list of up to 300,000 companies on the Campaign Manager, you can cut your costs compared to allowing LinkedIn to do the work for you.
3. Set Your Budget
Whether or not you use automatic bidding, you’ll need to set your overall budget for the campaign as well as a daily budget.
When determining how much you’re willing to spend, you’ll have three options:
- Pay per click (spend a certain amount for each person that opens your ad)
- Pay per views (spend a certain amount for every 1,000 people that see your ad, whether or not they interact with it)
- Pay per video view (spend a certain amount for every view a video gets)
Keep in mind while bidding that spending more will get you faster results but will also mean your campaigns will be shorter.
4. Choose Placement Options
The last major decision you have to make is where your ad will be shown. Here’s a quick glance at each of the options you have for your ad:
- Sponsored Content (appears in the feed)
- Text Ads (appears on the righthand side of the screen on desktop only)
- Sponsored InMail (appears in the inbox of your target audience)
Once you’ve made this final choice, it’s time to write up your LinkedIn ad and start tracking your results!
Learn More About Social Media Marketing
Now you know about how to set up ads on LinkedIn along with some LinkedIn benefits that can help your business grow.
As you can see, planning ads is a fairly straightforward process that makes it easy to target your audience.
If you want to learn more about how to use LinkedIn and other platforms for your business, check out our post on social media marketing trends.
These tips will help you no matter what platform you’re using to reach your audience.
