Tips and Tricks for Targeted Advertising on LinkedIn
It’s been a while since I’ve written a guide on Medium, so I figured this would be a good time to dust off my content writing cobwebs!
So let’s set the scene. We’re working in a B2B vertical market. We’re targeting decision-makers. We’ve got a great piece of content or promotion to get in front of people (I’ll just say here that offering free trials with paid LinkedIn promotions simply doesn’t work anymore). So we’ve come to LinkedIn because that’s one of the best ways to get our brand and offer in front of the right target audience.
Now here is the catch. LinkedIn advertising is expensive!
According to webfx.com on average, the cost of LinkedIn ads is $5.26 per click, $6.59 per 1000 impressions, and $0.80 per send.
Naturally, costs will depend on several factors, including target audience, campaign objective, and bid levels, but I can say that at cube19 we have seen costs in close proximity to those listed above.
Hyper Targeting on LinkedIn
One size does not fit all when it comes to marketing and when you’re spending serious ad dollars, you need to remember that. The best possible thing you can do is put the right content in front of the right people, and that’s why you need Hyper Targeting!
When I run campaigns on LinkedIn, I like to Target Contacts (not Companys*) and I segment the LinkedIn audience using five primary factors.
Locations
Member Skills
Job Seniorities
Company Size
Company Industries
*It’s difficult to do persona-targetted messaging using LinkedIns ‘Company’ advertising model which is built for ABM. If you’re doing larger budget full-scale ABM marketing, this is not the right blog for you!
Here’s a real-life example:
Locations
You’ll see here I’m targeting English speaking countries. In actual fact, I’m targeting the countries where cube19 has sales operations!
Member Skills
Here’s an easy and valuable exercise for you to carry out. Pick 30 customers who fit your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). Look at all the people who were involved with the deal on the customer side and find their LinkedIn profiles. Write down all the Skills they list on their profile.
You’ll notice a couple of things. Firstly, I got my senior sales reps to tell me the ICP’s names and companies. Secondly, ICP’s have a range of job titles. If I was targeting by Job Title, it’s fairly likely that I’m going to miss out on some of them eg Talent Acquisition Director and Operations.
All the contacts do, however, list the same skills over and over again. You simply need to deduplicate your skills column and then you’ll be all set for targeting by Skills.
Job Seniorities
Without this unique LinkedIn targeting attribute, we wouldn't be able to target by Skills (because we’d pick up tens of thousands of junior recruiters in our audience). In my opinion, this is why LinkedIn is an invaluable advertising medium for B2B SaaS companies.
Company Size
… is obvious.
Company Industry
Company industry is worth thinking about from an inclusion and suppression point of view. For instance, my company cube19 only services the staffing industry, so I only want to target people who work for a company in that industry.
However, if I was selling a Corporate Recruiting Platform to Talent and HR professions, I may well exclude everyone in the Staffing Industry because both audience sets are likely to list the same skills on their LinkedIn profiles.
Other Attributes
It’s worth saying there are tonnes of other attributes you can segment by. Job Function could be helpful if you want to specifically target Finance, Marketing or Salespeople for instance. If you are going to do that you may want to have a think about the seniority levels to target (you may want to go down to Manager level).
You also have segmentation attributes like Education, Age and Interests where you can target things like Member Groups (if you're going to do this, you should go through the same Skills exercise above for Groups).
Always bear in mind that if your audience is too small, you’re unlikely to get the desired outcome of your campaign — and that applies across most advertising platforms and networks, not just LinkedIn.
One other learning I’ve picked up along the way targeting UK and US LinkedIn Users is that they take a different approach to how they list skills, the types of groups they join etc — so just be aware of that.
Clicks versus Impressions
When you sponsor posts on LinkedIn you are offered two cost models and it pays dividends to get this right.
Clicks
Clicks (otherwise know as CPC on Google/Facebook) mean you only pay when people click on your sponsored post. You’ll need to set a bid level (and LinkedIn will recommend one), and you need to remember this is based on the number of advertisers who are trying to reach the same audience. Bid too low and you’re unlikely to achieve your desired result.
Impressions
Impressions (otherwise know as CPM on Google/Facebook etc) mean you pay for people to see your sponsored post. Once again a bid level will be recommended by LinkedIn, and again will be based on the number of advertisers who are trying to reach the same audience.
The primary difference between Clicks and Impressions, once you get your head around how they work, are the costs.
Let’s say Clicks are $5/click, Impressions are $10/1000 impressions and your budget is $1000.
For your click campaign, you can expect 200 clicks from your budget.
For your impressions campaign, you can expect 100,000 impressions.
You need to ask yourself “Is the LinkedIn advertising algorithm going to need 100,000 impressions to generate 200 clicks ?”
Or to put it in a different way “Can I get more than 200 clicks with 100,000 impressions?”
Asking these questions, should deliver you to the right advertising cost model. Generally speaking, CPM should be more cost-effective if the sponsored post is of high quality and the audience is large enough.
There are also other benefits to CPM when your running campaigns alongside regional outbound sales efforts or localised campaigns.
An example might be you’re running a roadshow in Chicago. You could support your email marketing and outbound sales efforts with a short sharp local CPM campaign on LinkedIn which could get you massive brand exposure and make your sales and email efforts more effective, without requiring too many clicks.
Sponsored Post Material/Content
As I said at the start, free trials and demo requests haven’t worked for me for years. Promoting events has worked for me but generally speaking, I see the best results for high-value pieces of content.
When it comes to marketing to executives, directors and CXO personas, I feel that brand exposure with strong relevant case studies is worth its weight in gold. These often don’t translate to clicks and performance is difficult to track, but we regularly bring on larger clients who say to our Customer Success team “Your brand is everywhere” (and it really isn’t!). Retargeting campaigns help with that too!
Naturally, there are a heap of other LinkedIn advertising bells and whistles and I could do a whole other post on Campaign Types but for me, getting your targeting and bidding right, is the best place to start.
I hope you found this guide useful.
