Why You Need a LinkedIn Advertising Strategy

by Lauren Glover
  |  October 22, 2020  |  
October 22, 2020

A smartphone, mac-style desktop, and tablet with blue checkmarks on their screens | LinkedIn Advertising Strategy

If you want to reach an influential business audience, you need a LinkedIn advertising strategy. Decision-makers, with twice the buying power of average audiences, flock to LinkedIn to share stories about their professional lives and digest tips to better their careers. That makes LinkedIn the most valuable social media platform for B2B marketers.

Why You Need a LinkedIn Advertising Strategy 

LinkedIn should be a central channel of your demand generation marketing strategy. With 4 out of 5 LinkedIn members driving business decisions for their companies and 80 percent of B2B leads originating from LinkedIn, it’s no surprise that LinkedIn is known as the primary social media platform for professionals. If it’s not already, here’s why your company should consider building a LinkedIn advertising strategy in 2020 and how to make it successful.

Use LinkedIn Advertising to Reach Business Goals

LinkedIn advertising boasts higher engagement rates, conversion rates, and a 13.5% lower cost per acquisition when using LinkedIn’s conversion tracking tool. Better results and lower costs are precisely why LinkedIn advertising needs to be part of your overall marketing strategy.

Do you want to build brand awareness? Perhaps you’re focusing on lead generation? Or maybe you want to increase engagement? LinkedIn recently revamped its advertising platform, called Campaign Manager, and added a whole host of new tools to your marketer toolbox, including better targeting options and the switch to objective-based advertising. No matter your marketing goal, you can use LinkedIn advertising to help you get there.

What is LinkedIn Advertising?

LinkedIn Advertising operates through LinkedIn’s all-in-one advertising platform, Campaign Manager. Set up your ad accounts, your objective, audience, format, budget, and campaign schedule.

Selecting your advertising objective is the first step to setting up a LinkedIn ad. Whether it’s awareness, consideration, or conversions, your objective determines the strategies and tactics required to achieve your business goals. These include brand awareness, website visits, engagement, video views, lead generation, website conversions, and job applicants. Next, you’ll select an ad format. These ad formats differ based on the chosen objective but can include video, single-image, carousel (several images), InMail (internal LinkedIn email), and others. 

Target the Right Audience For Your Business

LinkedIn has over 600 million members, and 40% of them visit the professional social network each day. It’s an opportunity to reach your target audience when they’re most engaged. For B2B companies, LinkedIn is the most effective platform for delivering content and securing audience engagement. Marketers can engage with a community of professionals, including influencers, decision-makers, and executives, driving actions that are relevant to your business. Through LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities, you can target an audience based on location, company, industry, age, gender, education, job experience, job title, and more.

Targeting who can see your ad is the next step for building an ad and fulfilling your campaign objective. In general, the more specific and relevant the content is to your audience, the better it will perform.

Promote Your Business

Promote your organization’s ad to targeted audiences across desktop, mobile, and tablet. After you’ve selected your objective and built your audience, you’ll need to choose an ad format for your campaign. Depending on your campaign objective, you will select from Sponsored Content formats, Message Ads, or Text Ads.

  • Sponsored Content ads are promoted LinkedIn posts and can be single image, video, and carousel formats. These campaigns can run as native news feed ads and are a good fit if your goals include engagement. Leveraging sponsored content ads is an excellent way to ensure consumption of your content by your ideal customer. 
  • Message Ads, also called LinkedIn InMail, are targeted messaged delivered directly to LinkedIn-member inboxes. These ads offer an open rate of over 50% and LinkedIn reports they are more successful at driving conversions than emails.
  • Text ads are available as a pay per click (PPC) advertising option. These ads appear in the right rail and top banner on desktop and include a short headline, blurb, and a small square image.

After selecting appropriate creative, assigning a budget, and launching your ad, the most important part of your marketing strategy can begin, tracking your progress and analytics. Measure your ad performance through key performance indicators (KPIs) like clicks, expenditures, and conversions, all through your Campaign Manager dashboard.

Remember that every advertising campaign takes tweaking and testing to get it right. LinkedIn has a powerful advertising platform, and with the right strategy, your LinkedIn ad campaigns can be a huge factor in your B2B company’s marketing success. As a full-service B2B digital agency, Vende Digital is here to help you grow your business. Contact us to schedule your complimentary 1-on-1 planning session.

LinkedIn Advertising Strategy: What to Know Now

  • While LinkedIn’s ad platform is a great choice for any B2B company wanting to reach targeted buyers, be sure to avoid these LinkedIn advertising pitfalls.
  • LinkedIn’s new Campaign Manager offers objective-based advertising.
  • LinkedIn is the most effective platform for delivering content and securing audience engagement for B2B companies.
  • LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities allow marketers to target an audience based on location, company, industry, age, gender, education, job experience, job title, and more.
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