The beginners guide: How to advertise on LinkedIn

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What is LinkedIn?

Maybe you heard the word "LinkedIn'" uttered by your colleagues at work, mentioned by your business fellas in the business community or spoken by a friend who's on the hunt for a new job. But what is LinkedIn, anyway?


Put simply, LinkedIn is a social network for professionals. It's like Facebook for your career or business.

Despite being one of the most popular social media platforms today, many people still have no idea what LinkedIn is supposed to be used for or how they might benefit from being on it.

It is rumoured that the upcoming advertising player may be LinkedIn in 2019.

Of course, they have been offering advertising services for years now but LinkedIn's craft as an ad services provider and a social media network until recently has really become a reality.

The most helpful thing about LinkedIn advertising is their B2B targeting options apart from other social media advertising platforms (e.g. Facebook). B2B marketers flock to LinkedIn because "all the professionals" are there.

As you know, LinkedIn has optimized its targeting options so that marketers can really connect to these specific professionals.

Would you like to focus on the health sector? With LinkedIn ads, you can target it.

Would you like to reach investment firms CEOs? Yeah, with LinkedIn ads, you can reach them.

Do you want university graduates applications that are managers of natural food grocery stores? With LinkedIn ads, you can come closer to them.

This is why many business owners head to LinkedIn this year with their budgets. They aren't publishing on Facebook, too, but they can be headed to LinkedIn first, depending on their budget.

Be aware that LinkedIn will cost you a lot more than Facebook, so make sure you have the cash to play before you sit at the table.

Have the cash and willing to hand out? First, let's go through some ground rules.

LinkedIn advertising options: An overview

LinkedIn is usually extremely limited with its advertising options, which leaves little room for advertisers to achieve their objectives. This has changed since then and is going to continue to change throughout 2019, giving advertisers more freedom.

You can now create ads based on what you need to achieve with LinkedIn ads.

Don't worry, before advertising, we're not going to spend three paragraphs on how to set your targets. Your goals are in mind and you already know what you need to achieve.

With that said, in order to successfully advertise on LinkedIn, your goal needs to be one of the following:

• Brand awareness.
• Website visits.
• Engagement.
• Video views.
• Lead generation.
• Website conversions.
• Job applicants.

Lead production, employment applications, and a secure relationship between video views and web site visits are the main purposes of LinkedIn advertised.

Organic LinkedIn engagement is already a deck on LinkedIn for nearly everyone.

Because the algorithm of LinkedIn isn't as challenging and finishing as Facebook, it may not be the best or affordable bet for every business to put all your budget to the LinkedIn engagement ads.

The choice of an objective, like job applicants or conversions to websites, is a bit more direct.

You'll usually pay more for each achievement in LinkedIn, so get to the point and be a bit more blunt about your ad objectives in 2019.

You will be given five different types of ads based on your chosen objective:

Sponsored Content Think of it like a post being promoted. You promote an item or post on the LinkedIn feed from your corporate page. These ads have the highest CPC on average, so be careful and ensure that the contents that you promote are well-designed.

Text Ads These are the small ads on the right side of the LinkedIn feed you can or may not notice. Think about Facebook ads circa 2010.

These ads can appear under the "People You May Know" section, apart from the right column. In this case, text content can actually make or break the conversion of your ad.

Test some other strategies, but get to the point with these announcements.

LinkedIn InMail This is a fun way to spam a LinkedIn inbox for somebody. But you can actually convert higher than any other LinkedIn advertising option when done correctly.

As these announcements must be made from a private profile versus a branded company page, people feel less like selling them and more like communicating with a company representative.

Please do not copy and paste templates for me or yours. Ensure and personalize your InMail.

Video Ads Here is some self-explaining, but the video ads by LinkedIn help you promote your videos to the ideal market. It's 2019. You ought to create a ton of video content. Test different videos to see what type of video you can make most conversions (theme, length, real life/animation).

LinkedIn Audience Targeting

Let’s talk business here.

• Who is your demographic, more than just male/female, age/location?
• Have they worked in the same industry their whole lives?
• Are they generally lower management or upper management?
• Do they hold onto their job for 2-4 years each position?
• Do they follow Richard Branson on LinkedIn?

You know the answers to all of these questions, and if for some terrible reason you don’t, find out the answers. LinkedIn gives B2B marketers amazing targeting options, but it can only help your ads convert if you truly know the professional side of your demographic.

Knowing how they take their coffee is great for Facebook, but on LinkedIn in 2019, you need to know what they studied in college, if they even went to college, and select those targeting options.

Note: A lot more than CEOs can be attracted with LinkedIn advertising. Many companies believe that ads aimed at LinkedIn are only great for targeting big boys and girls, but they do not.

Those looking for jobs or less experienced people placed in lower-level positions are also ideal targeting options for LinkedIn ads if they just graduated from high school or college. Every minute, LinkedIn gains more than 120 members to make a variety pool available.

How to Track LinkedIn Ad Conversions

Not everyone needs to know how much success you’re having from advertising on LinkedIn, but you do.

There are tons of different methods in LinkedIn ads to track the success and failures of your ads, but here are some conversions tracking techniques to track your ads.

Site-Wide Insight Tag

This tag gives you the information on what actions your LinkedIn ad takes place on your website.

You can install this tag once, like the Facebook pixel, and you can see data coming in. You will not mess the speed of your website, but as a consequence of your Linkedin ad, you can track what happens on your website.

BONUS: You can also setup LinkedIn retargeting ads once you have the Insight tag installed and a steady amount of site visitors.

Event-Specific Pixel

This type of pixel tracking is more for the lead-gen type objective.

Say you have a form, but you don't have a page setup or connected thank you to somebody from your LinkedIn ad. This code can be installed and each time the form is complete, a conversion event can still be tracked.

You can also add conversion tracking to your existing campaigns-don't worry about those without conversion tracking.

Use LinkedIn Content Suggestions

LinkedIn offers suggestions for content on business pages to guide you on what you should write about. Think of this and use trend ideas for ad titles and descriptions outside the box.

The content suggestions are very easy to use and even the directors and CEOs that you've been looking at can be targeted.

Simply select the sector, place and seniority you are targeting and for the designated filters LinkedIn will create the latest trends.

Let’s take an example for Dentist Ad, “Bad Breath sucks. Be less of bad breath”, we can easily snag a few different ad headline ideas:

• Sick of dealing with bad breath? So Were We Until We Tried This.
• Done Being the bad breath? Over disturbing People Off? Click Here.
• What We Found bad breath – Click Here

If an article is trending it’s because people liked it, they engaged with.

Don’t you want those same people to like and engage with your ad, too? Of course, you do.

Conclusion

LinkedIn is certainly a great advertising option for B2B marketers in 2019.

There’s plenty of different techniques to try with LinkedIn ads, but the most important thing you can do is to really watch what LinkedIn is doing and what new features they continue to roll out throughout the year.

As they increase their objectives, ad types, and add fun features like Content Suggestions, it only opens up the playing field and gives marketers even more chances for success.

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