How to use LinkedIn Ads to Promote Your Business
Marketing your business online requires an advertising budget as part of your strategy. Whether your goal is to drive traffic to your website, create brand awareness, promote content or convert to sales. Organic reach has become smaller and that means if you want to get in front of more people you have to pay for that right. This article provides details on LinkedIn advertising and how to get started.
First thing to know is that a company page is required to set-up an ad account. There are several benefits to setting up a company page, first you get the advantage of being found in search by company name and keywords. Second, it helps others learn more about your business, brand, products and services, and job opportunities. Third, you and your employees can link to the company page from your personal profile when you add the company name to your experience section. This pulls the logo from your company enhancing the professional appearance and perception of your brand.
Setting Up a Company Page
Setting up a LinkedIn company page is fairly simple and I encourage business owners of any size to do so as this is the hub of your business and adds credibility to your brand and the people. I would be sure that the owner of the company is added to the account along with anyone who will admin the account. I have seen countless examples of people who did not add an owner and the admin left the company and no one had access to the company page. Don’t make this mistake.
1. Click the Work icon in the top right corner of your LinkedIn homepage.
2. Click Create a Company Page.
3. Enter your Company Name and choose a URL. All Company Page URLs will structured as linkedin.com/company/[YOUR COMPANY NAME].
a. While the name of your Company Page doesn’t need to be unique, the public URL for your page cannot be the same as one that exists on LinkedIn. LinkedIn members and search engines will use this unique URL to find your page.
b. Please review the Company Page URL requirements below.
4. Check the verification box to confirm you have the right to act on behalf of that company in the creation of the page.
5. Click the Create page button.
a. If you don’t have a confirmed email address associated with your LinkedIn account, you’ll be prompted to add and verify your email address.
b. A red error message may appear if your LinkedIn account has recently been created or you don’t have enough connections.
6. Click Get started on the welcome screen to begin editing your Company Page.
How to Set-up a LinkedIn Ad Account
After you have setup your company page you can then set-up an advertising account known as Campaign Manager.
To start the ad process, this page will walk you through each step: https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/ads
You can access Campaign Manager from your LinkedIn homepage once you are set-up.
Once inside the campaign manager you will see the image below indicating the types of advertising goals. Choose your option based on how your objective aligns with you marketing goals.
Promote Your Content
Because we meet our prospects online most often before we meet them offline, your goal is to build credibility and trust before pitching your services and the best way to do that is through a LinkedIn content marketing strategy.
Gaining a competitive advantage can be fairly simple with a content strategy particularly if your competition is not creating content or more importantly, content that has no real value.
1. Publish your content in the location most viewed by LinkedIn visitors – the LinkedIn feed
2. Target your audience based on accurate, first-party data in the professional profile
3. Raise awareness, drive quality leads, and build customer relationships
Types of content you could share:
Article/infographic
Whitepaper – short
Ebooks – longer than whitepaper
Webinars
Products
Audience targeting options are detailed giving you the opportunity to hyper focus on who you want your ad to reach. You can target anything in a LinkedIn profile from title, company, geographic area, roles, seniority, skills and more – all information people don’t put on Facebook so this is ideal for B2B sales.
These ads appear in the newsfeed – front and center visibility! You can select an ad budget that is far below where LinkedIn started with a 25K minimum for those of you who considered LinkedIn advertising some time ago, you will remember that big number.
$5-$8 CPC is pretty normal so products with higher price points are best for LinkedIn versus a product under $100 because of the higher CPC. Before you start comparing this to Facebook advertising costs, consider the audience. LinkedIn audiences are professionals looking to do business!
LinkedIn recently rolled out automated bidding for sponsored content. This is based on machine learning and pacing algorithms which is what Facebook offers. The idea is that you are trusting LinkedIn to learn your audience and over time the cost per click should go down as it works for you. As in all advertising, you should test your ads. I suggest a minimum of 5 business days at a minimum and see of the cost per click decreases.
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LinkedIn Dynamic Ads
A dynamic ad is pretty exciting because it automatically personalizes your ad based on publicly available information from LinkedIn’s member profiles. In other words, it puts a profile picture onto the ad!
NOTE: these ads are only showing up on desktop and in the right side bar at this time. I would recommend using dynamic ads for brand awareness and for follower campaigns for your company page or showcase page to grow your influence when they see and engage with the organic content you share on LinkedIn.
Benefits of dynamic ads are:
1. Capture attention with personalized ads featuring each professional’s own LinkedIn profile data, like photo, company name, job title, and more.
2. Launch campaigns quickly using automatically and individually populated Dynamic Ads throughout the LinkedIn desktop.
3. Tailor your ads to build brand awareness, drive traffic, and convert prospects, and measure and optimize your results directly in Campaign Manager.
LinkedIn Text Only Ads
What you can do with Text Only Ads: (without images)
1. Easy to create your ads
2. Drive quality traffic and leads
3. Pay for only the ads that work – per click or per impression
LinkedIn Sponsored InMail Ads
This type of ad allows you to send targeted messages directly to the people who matter most to your business. This is a unique form of advertising that is worth testing in my opinion because your message goes directly into the persons in-box.
What you can do with Sponsored InMail:
1. Drive conversions with personalized messages
2. Reach audiences that matter most to your business across desktop and mobile
3. A/B test to measure what messaging resonates with target audience
Managing Your LinkedIn Ad in Campaign Manager
Campaign groups is a new feature in the Campaign Manager tool that lets advertisers organize related campaigns. For example, advertisers might create a campaign group for various target audiences, marketing objectives, or marketing programs.
Campaign groups give advertisers an easier way to control budget, run dates, run status, and reporting across multiple campaigns. With campaign groups, you can set a total budget. You can also pause or activate the campaign group, which will pause or activate all campaigns in that campaign group.
You can turn your campaign on and off by adjusting the running status. The running status of your campaign can be paused, activated, and archived as needed.
Once you’ve created a campaign, it can’t be moved to another account. However, you can duplicate the campaign into another account. You can also duplicate a campaign within the same account.
Ad Tracking
LinkedIn does not have conversion tracking pixels that Facebook has. You can track to cost per click on the platform, cost per lead you need Google analytics. You can also gain data from your CRM such as sales force on things such as calls coming in.
CONCLUSION
If you are looking for ways to generate leads on LinkedIn, implementing a LinkedIn advertising strategy could be a great move. LinkedIn works best for B2B audiences and allows you to target by filters such as job title, seniority, company, skills, specific group membership, geography, and years in business.
**Originally posted on my blog