Advertising on LinkedIn
Have you considered advertising on LinkedIn? LinkedIn is the most relevant social media for many B2B companies. You can reach many relevant people by the information they have shared in relation to work and professional situations.
The business-oriented social media
Professionals from around the world can join LinkedIn to expand and strengthen their professional network. Here you can connect with other professionals and receive information about work vacancies, news, read relevant posts and much more. This can be an advantage both professionally and for work development.
Because the users already are on LinkedIn for professional purposes, they are therefore more influential in relation to relevant business ads and campaigns.
Since LinkedIn is a social media for professionals, it is a perfect channel for companies to market themselves and get in touch with other people and companies in the industry.
LinkedIn is a very useful tool for businesses as an advertising platform. Here you can draw attention to your business, products, and services from a segmented and relevant target group. On LinkedIn a company can tell their story, engage with followers, and reach potential clients.
Benefits of LinkedIn advertising
- Ability to reach a wide network for professionals.
- Opportunity for remarketing.
- Ability to communicate to a target audience through text, image, and video.
- Ability to use Lead Gen forms to generate relevant leads.
- Ability to track conversions on their website with LinkedIn Insight tag
- Opportunity for precise segmentation of target group
- You can also use LinkedIn data for remarketing on Facebook, for example.
Advertising on LinkedIn
Earlier you did not have the same opportunities to advertise on this platform. But, since Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016, there are now more opportunities to advertise on LinkedIn.
Sponsored content
With sponsored content you can buy more visibility where your target audience is. Ads with sponsored content are placed directly in the feed of your chosen target audience. The ads are shown as regular updates, the only difference is that the ad is marked with ‘sponsored’.
This type of advertising works on all platforms, which is important as many people use LinkedIn on mobile.
You can set-up sponsored content by promoting a previous post on your LinkedIn company profile or you can create a new post. When you set-up sponsored content you can add a ‘follow’ button on the ad to attract more people to follow your business profile.
Text ads
Text ads on LinkedIn only work on computers so it does not work on mobile devices or tablets. Text ads are placed in the column to the right in LinkedIn and are made up of a small image and text.
With text ads on LinkedIn, companies can lead potential customers to their site for the purpose of creating leads. The text ads are the smallest ad format and often work best as a supplement to other activities on LinkedIn.
Segmentation
All ad formats on LinkedIn have the same opportunity for segmentation.
You can direct your ads to profiles within a particular industry, with a certain competence, position, geographical location, age and gender. The opportunities can be combined and the target group you advertise to controls the price of the advertising.
Budget
When you set up text ads and sponsored updates on LinkedIn you choose whether to pay per click (CPC) or impressions (CPM). Advertising on LinkedIn works like an auction. This means it becomes more expensive if more advertisers bid on the same target audience. LinkedIn uses the principle ‘relevance score’ which means that an ad with high relevance, measured on engagement, can be shown to a lower price than other ads targeting the same audience.
When you set your budget, you decide how much you would like to spend on your campaigns in total. You can always follow your campaigns; see how they perform and continuously change your budget.
Sponsored InMails
Sponsored InMails is an email you send your target audience directly through LinkedIn.
Through sponsored InMails you can share personalised and relevant content with selected users that you pay for if the user opens the mail.
InMails design is responsive, which means that it works on both small and large screens. It secures visibility and button functionality on all devices, computer, tablet and mobile.
Sponsored InMails are only sent when users are online, this way the message is received when the target audience is most interested in reading their email. Sponsored ads are an effective form of marketing on LinkedIn if you understand how to reach the right audience with the right message.
You can generate leads, register sign-ups for events and register downloads of various content with sponsored InMails.
LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms
The Lead Gen form on LinkedIn creates the opportunity to collect high quality leads directly from LinkedIn. When the user clicks an ad, the form is automatically pre-filled with the information the user has registered on LinkedIn. This way the process to complete the form is simplified and you can easily just press the button and send it. When a user has sent a form, you have received the following information: name and contact information, business name, job title, geographic placement and much more.
The advantage of being able to do this on LinkedIn is that all the information that the user has on their profile is often recently updated and more accurate than the information provided on regular web forms where you can fill in false or inaccurate information.
When a form has been sent you can add a ‘thank you’ page with relevant content and/or a link to the website.
Analysis of results
When advertising on LinkedIn it is important to measure results in order to evaluate which campaigns perform best. Also, to be able to optimise on CTR (click-through-rate) and engagement from the target audience. You can also analyse what segment has the highest engagement and edit your ads based on that.
Remarketing on LinkedIn
LinkedIn has not previously had the same opportunities for advertising as Facebook, but after Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016, there are far more opportunities.
Remarketing with LinkedIn Insight Tag
First and foremost, it has become possible to use remarketing on LinkedIn. This means that companies can show ads to the people who have previously visited their site. To do this, you must have a LinkedIn Insight code installed on your website.
LinkedIn Insight tag is a piece of Javascript code that should be placed on all pages of a website.
LinkedIn Insight tag makes it possible to track conversions and optimise accordingly. By using LinkedIn Insight tag, you can track who is clicking on to the website and gain valuable information to use in remarketing. So, you can direct your LinkedIn ads to people who have previously visited the site and are therefore more likely to convert. In addition, LinkedIn Insight tag can be used to analyse which segments visit the site. This is very useful as you can remove and add segments when managing your ads.
Remarketing with contacts – Matched audiences
Another function that has been added is that you now can target contacts from existing company databases. You can upload contact lists you would like to reach. LinkedIn will then match information such as email addresses. You can do the same with business names where you can create a target audience based on a list of businesses with the purpose to match profiles based on their workplace.
Remarketing on Facebook with LinkedIn segmentation
As mentioned, LinkedIn has many opportunities for segmentation, and they can be combined which makes it possible to reach specific target audiences. This is a big advantage when advertising on LinkedIn plus there is a lot of potential in using this segmentation for advertising on Facebook. The target group you segment up to on LinkedIn is also largely on Facebook but you can’t find it based on the same segmentation. You can export your target audience on LinkedIn and then import it for use on Facebook to reach the same target group on both platforms.
Other opportunities on LinkedIn
Video sharing on LinkedIn
Another function that can be relevant to use is LinkedIn video sharing. It is recorded straight from the LinkedIn app on mobiles. Earlier it was only possible to communicate through updates and text messages which has limits in a time when video becomes more and more popular and engaging. The advantage to video is that it can provide the target audience with a better understanding for the brand and the business and this way increase the credibility and trust. Video sharing on LinkedIn is especially interesting for companies in B2B that now have a more niche platform to share video regarding the business than perhaps Facebook or Instagram.
LinkedIn has made it possible for the users to film up to 10 minutes video content on the mobile app that then gets posted. The video can be used in both landscape and portrait format. After creating and posting a video you collect data on views, shares, likes, and comments. You can also get data on who watched the clip, where they work, their title and where they saw the video.
Public messages
In July 2017 LinkedIn made it possible to make posts public to people on and off LinkedIn. Prior to that you had to be logged in to see posts on the platform but now it is possible to make public posts, so that people not logged in, can also view them. This will expand the reach and often the engagement significantly.
Shall we talk further?
We are always ready to have a dialogue about your ambitions, and how we can develop your digital channels and make your company grow.