6 LinkedIn Paid Advertising Best Practices

LinkedIn Paid Advertising Best Practices

1. Pay Attention to Your Audience

Similar to any other strategy, you should start your LinkedIn advertising campaign by getting full clarity on your target audience. This way, you can personalize your ad messages so they can fully resonate with your audience. 

LinkedIn recommends shooting for an audience size of 50,000 or more. If you do have a smaller audience, tweak your LinkedIn settings to expand. And for sponsored mail messages, you should shoot for 15,000 or more if possible. 

To broaden or narrow your audience, you can use words like “and” and “or.” For example, targeting customers who are “web developers and business owners” is a smaller and more specific audience than people who are “web developers or business owners.” 

Enabling the Campaign Managers Audience Expansion feature will target audiences with attributes similar to the ones you chose. 

Adding a Matched Audience also targets your website visitors and email subscribers by linking your website or uploading your email list. 

2. Choose the Right Ad Type 

There are multiple LinkedIn ads to choose from when running sponsored content. Let’s take a look at your three options.

Sponsored Content

Sponsored content advertisements are native ads appearing directly in a LinkedIn user’s feed. When users scroll through their feed, the ads will appear seamlessly with other content. Additionally, when using sponsored content, your ad will appear on all device types.

These types of ads are best for driving leads, building brand awareness, and nurturing relationships. In addition, sponsored content allows you to target the professionals most interested in your business. 

Sponsored InMail 

Sponsored InMail is a great type of ad for LinkedIn lead generation. The format of Sponsored InMail Ads allows you to deliver personalized and relevant ads to interested leads. When you send a Sponsored InMail message, your ad goes directly into the user’s inbox. 

These are usually text-based messages, and they look like other professional messages you would receive from a business.

Text Ads

Text advertisements work like pay-per-click (PPC) ads. These types of ads appear on the sidebar of LinkedIn’s website and work with two different payment types, PPC and cost per impression. 

Either you pay every time someone clicks your ad or each time 1,000 people view the ad. You have the option of choosing which option is best for your goals and budget. These types of ads are best for driving leads and reaching people interested in your business. 

3. Focus on Content

Keeping your content brief is best for LinkedIn advertising. Here are some general guidelines to follow:

• Keep videos below 30 seconds
• Headlines should be under 150 characters
• Don’t go over 1,000 characters for InMail messages

Providing your audience with useful, industry-related content is a sure way to connect with LinkedIn browsers. You will want to focus on the customer’s point of view. Instead of telling them about your company, talk about their needs. Shift your messages to using “you” instead of “we.”

When dealing with sponsored posts, you should try to make them look as organic as possible. Case studies are popular ads because people enjoy reading about how people in similar situations have solved a common problem. To run a case study advertisement, build a blog post about a customer who benefited from your service and link to a sponsored post with a creative headline. 

For message ads, you will see more success if they are relatively informal, brief, and personalized. Greeting the customer by name is the least you should do. 

LinkedIn also recommends practicing the fundamentals when creating content. Here are some of their tips:

• Understand your customer and employee needs
• Show trustworthiness
• Bring your brand’s value to life
• Be supportive
• Listen intently
• Be human
• Pay attention to tone, timing, and delivery
• Look forward while staying current

4. Use the Insight Tag

The Insight Tag, a snippet of javascript, will allow you to track your results. When you install the tag, you can track visitors’ actions, so you have access to detailed reports.

With this tag, you can track conversions, retarget website visitors, and look at data about how your LinkedIn ad visitors interact with your brand. You can also optimize your ads for different conversion types, like product purchases, demo requests, software trials, or newsletter signup. 

5. Spend Consistently

According to LinkedIn, you should aim to have a steady feed investment by consistently spending money. Spending money consistently each week will allow you to stay at the top of mind as your competitors dip in and out of the feed. 

LinkedIn recommends using 54% of your advertising investments to lead generation and 46% to brand building. If you start to see performance metrics dip in either bucket, don’t be afraid to alter the ratio. 

6. Test Your Ads

Before launching your ads to the public, it’s important you test them. You want to make sure that you are putting out the best copy of your ad, and running A/B tests on them is a great way to make sure your ad is as effective as possible. 

You can run A/B tests on LinkedIn by showing two different ad versions to the same audience and analyzing which one generates clicks, leads, and more. This process can also be used to test different types of LinkedIn ads. For example, you can see if a carousel ad is for you or if a photo ad is a bit more effective for your audience. 

Conclusion

LinkedIn paid advertising is a great opportunity for your business to reach professionals and advertise your business to the people who are most likely to be interested. If you are ready to start tackling more leads, New Target is ready to help. 

New Target’s marketing team has tons of experience with LinkedIn advertising your business will benefit from. Contact us today!