How to Grow Your Business with LinkedIn Advertising? [Ultimate Guide]

If you are thinking of a new channel for advertising your business, LinkedIn can be under your consideration. The huge number of users using the professional network and features can help you in raising awareness of your brand, bringing in leads or converting leads to sales.

This blog is a beginners’ guide on how to advertise on LinkedIn. You will be provided with steps on setting up Campaign Manager, deciding the parameters for your ads, creating the ad itself and how to measure ad performance.

Are LinkedIn Ads effective?

The short answer is, “Yes!” Advertising on LinkedIn is undoubtedly very effective. There are nearly 660 million users on this network.

Also, as it is a site for professionals, your ads are going to reach important decision-makers. LinkedIn is considered the top advertising platform by B2B marketers.

Moreover, LinkedIn provides features such as Audience Targeting which can help your ads reach your target customers as specific as possible. It’s a step-by-step process also helps you create an ad very easily.

If you are struggling with your Ads and Funnel setup for your business, I recommend you go to a Digital Marketing Consultant and setup your funnel for upcoming audiences and engaging visitors.

Even experts agree with LinkedIn’s effectiveness

If you are still not convinced about why you should not advertise on LinkedIn, experts’ opinions can change that. Many marketing experts have recommended advertising on LinkedIn due to its unique features, diverse options, and easy process.

• Alan Santillan, marketing specialist at G2 Crowd believes LinkedIn advertising is effective as it appears authentic to the audience: “With so many connections promoting their business on LinkedIn day to day, a regular software advertisement that is promoting a social event, webinar, or product, can look fairly organic and non-spammy.”
• Brian Byer, VP of Content and Commerce at Blue Fountain Media finds LinkedIn’s Audience Target feature unique among all other social media platforms as it allows a “targeted audience broken down by some pretty unique and powerful data points like education, skillset, employer and industry.”
• According to Neil Patel: LinkedIn is an amazing advertising platform to utilize if you want to get your web site in front of a B2B audience.

Getting started- setting up Campaign Manager

To start your first ad on LinkedIn, you need to set up a Campaign Manager at first. Here are the few steps you need to do to set up Campaign Manager and set up your ads:

• Step-1: Go to LinkedIn Marketing Solutions

• Step-2: Click on the ‘Create Ad’ box on the top right

• Step-3: You will be directed to create a LinkedIn Campaign Manager account. Enter Account Name, the currency you want to transact for ads and the name of your company’s LinkedIn Page.
• Step-4: You will then land on the Campaign Manager dashboard. Provide your billing information.
• Step-5: Click on the “Create Campaign” to start creating your first LinkedIn Ad

Deciding your ad objective

After setting up the campaign manager, you need to set the objective for your ads. This step is very important as it helps you decide the ad format which you will use, the budget and the content of the ad.

When creating an ad for LinkedIn, you will be provided with the option to choose from the following seven objectives:

1. Brand Awareness: Increase your reach and get more followers to your page
2. Website Visits: Promote a new blog post, an offering or signing up for a free trial
3. Engagement: Encourage users to follow, comment and share your content
4. Video views: Raise views and engagement of your business’s video content
5. Lead Generation: Sign up prospects to an offer you are providing
6. Website Conversions: Convert leads to sales in your website
7. Job Applications: Find the best talent for your company

Targeting the ad audience

In the next step, you set your target audience. The more targeted your audience is (that is, the audience is more specified), the better your ROI will be.

Luckily, LinkedIn Ads provides you with the right audience targeting options. It has a vast amount of information regarding users’ education, job experience, and skillsets. This huge collection can help you pinpoint your target audience.

With LinkedIn, you can target audience according to the following factors:

• Location: Where the audience is located, You can more specify the audience by adding cities. You can also use exclude feature to exclude from targeting a specific GEO audience.

• Language: Language(s) in which you would like the ad to appear

• Company: Name, size or industry of the company of the target audience

• Demographics: Age and gender of the target

• Education: Degree, the field of study and school attended

• Job experience: Job title, years of experience and skills possessed

• Interests: Groups joined by the target audience and their interests.

You can target the audience based on all or some of the factors. You can also include and exclude certain criteria as well.

As you list the factors, LinkedIn will display the reach of your planned ad on the right.

Deciding the ad format

Setting the ad objective will help you select the ad format. LinkedIn provides several ad formats:

These several ad formats can be categorized into two types:

• Sponsored Content: As simple as it sounds, Sponsored Contents are promotions of your content. Posts from your company’s LinkedIn page or website appears in the middle of a user’s Newsfeed. You can post blog posts, images, videos, carousel images, and even send event invitations through Sponsored Content.
• Text Ads: These ads appear on the right side, top of the newsfeed or below the “People You May Know” suggestions. True to its name, these ads only contain text. These ads have a lower cost per click than Sponsored Content.
• Sponsored InMail: Sponsored InMail is a personal message sent directly to the inbox of the target audience. It is mainly used by B2Bs for generating high-quality leads.

Bidding

After deciding the target audience, you need to set the budget, schedule, and place the bidding offer. Setting the budget and the duration of the ad schedule will depend entirely upon you. In bidding, choose the option that optimizes ad exposure and your ad budget.

There are two types of Bid Types in LinkedIn advertising:

• Cost per Click (CPC) bid: In this type of bidding, you are charged for every time a user clicks your ads.

• Cost per impression (CPM) bid: You are charged an amount each time 1000 users view your ads.

Creating an ad

Once you set the various parameters of your ad (objective, ad format, audience, and bidding), you can create your LinkedIn ad. LinkedIn will direct you on how to make one ad, how it will be displayed and how your various ads will rotate.

Basic Ad Guidelines

What you will write in your ad depends on the type of ad you have selected. However, there are some guidelines you must maintain while writing the copy of your ad:

• Concise Headlines: The headline must be no more than 70 characters (for Sponsored Content) and no more than 25 characters (for Text Ads).
• Short and clear description: The main copy of your ad should be under 150 (for Sponsored Content) and 75 characters (for Text Ads).
• Image: The image must help express the copy of your ad. For Text Ads, an eye-catching image can help you grab the attention of your audience who might otherwise ignore you.
• Landing page: Ensure that the URL that opens after a user clicks on the ad is accurate.

Measuring your ad performance:

Read all the major LinkedIn ad campaign performance indicators here.