Creating a LinkedIn Ad Campaign for Your Business

If you want to advertise your products and services to a prime B2B audience, creating a LinkedIn ad campaign is a great place to begin. Business professionals visit LinkedIn to network with other professionals, stay up to date with what’s happening in the business world, and to seek information on how to advance their careers. LinkedIn boasts 756 million members globally, and is considered the most trusted of the social media sites*.

But how effective are LinkedIn ads?

One study from Hubspot found that LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate at 2.74%, almost 3 times higher (277%) than both Twitter (.69%) and Facebook (.77%).** The reason the ads are so effective is because LinkedIn is where decision makers go to find content and information about other companies (like yours!)

Here’s a step by step guide to creating a LinkedIn ad campaign so you can start reaching new customers right away.

Getting Started with LinkedIn Ads

Before you can create ads you have to have a LinkedIn company page. Check to see if someone has already started one by logging into LinkedIn and searching for your company name in the search window. If there is a company page, ask the person who created it to add you as an admin. If you don’t have one, when you’re logged into LinkedIn, look to the top right where it says “Work,” click the arrow, then scroll down to where it says “Create a Company Page.”

LinkedIn Campaign Objectives

Define what the goal of the campaign is.  In LinkedIn's Campaign Manager this is called the “Objective Selection.” The choices are Awareness, Consideration, and Conversions.

Are you making an announcement and want engagement? Promoting a new product or service? Do you want more signups for a webinar? Hover over each option to read the details and choose the one that best serves the purpose of your campaign.

LinkedIn Audience Targeting

When you’re creating your LinkedIn ad campaign, think about who your ideal audience is. Is it C-level executives? Senior managers? What about the size of the companies you’d like to target?

The power behind LinkedIn’s advertising is the ability to target exactly who will see your ad. You can define their interests, region, company, education level, skills, or groups they belong to. LinkedIn allows you to drill down to target a very specific audience for your ads.

The more specific the better.

Types of LinkedIn Ads

The next step in creating a LinkedIn ad campaign is to determine what type of ad you are going to create. LinkedIn gives you a few choices: a Single Image ad, a Carousel Image ad, Spotlight ad, Video ad, Text ad, Message ad, Conversation ad, or an Event ad. Each type of ad is served slightly differently to the audience, and aligns with different types of objectives.

See this chart for more details:

Set Your LinkedIn Ad Budget & Bidding Strategy

Calculate the total budget you want to spend on this ad campaign. You have the option to set a lifetime budget as well as a daily budget so that you will know what you are going to spend each day, or you can set just a lifetime budget only and LinkedIn will pace the spend to optimize performance during the lifetime of the campaign.

The next step in creating your LinkedIn ad campaign is choosing your bidding strategy. LinkedIn Campaign Manager automatically aligns the Optimization Goal with your campaign objective you chose earlier. You can choose Maximum Delivery, Target Cost, and Manual Bidding. The bidding strategy defaults to Maximum Delivery which will serve the ads to get you the most results possible with your full budget.

LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager also populates a Forecasted Results panel to the right of the Bidding Strategy block once you’ve entered your information. This is an estimate based on your campaign’s bid, budget, targeting, and how similar campaigns and advertisers have performed in the past. This can be very useful when estimating what your results might look like.

Conversion Tracking

If your campaign objective is to get more conversions, we recommend you set up conversion tracking. LinkedIn uses a piece of code they call the Insight Tag that you add to your website. Once you set this up you can define a conversion for this particular campaign, such as a download, lead, or sign up. Save this information and you can then choose what your ad creative will look like.

Create Your Ad

You have the choice of either using your existing content, such as a recent post, or you can create a new ad. Campaign Manager will walk you through how to create a headline, description, and a call to action for your ad. On the right hand side of your screen you will see a preview of how your ad will look in the feed. Once you’re satisfied with how it looks, click the “Create” button on the bottom right and you’re ready to launch your campaign!

Now that you have started your LinkedIn ad campaign make sure you watch the results closely. Continue A/B testing different ad headlines and imagery, even the type of ad you use. Just as with other social media sites, users are used to scrolling through content very quickly. Does your image stand out from the rest of the posts in the blink of an eye? Does your headline convey value to your audience? Watch your budget, too. Costs per click for LinkedIn can be higher than other pay per click programs. Make sure you have enough allocated to maximize your reach. Keep testing and measuring your results to make your campaign successful. 

Sources:

*LinkedIn: 5 reasons why LinkedIn is the trusted platform for managing your brand reputation:  https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/corporate-reputation/5-reasons-why-linkedin-is-a-trusted-platform

**Hubspot: LinkedIn 277% More Effective for Lead Generation Than Facebook & Twitter [New Data] https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/30030/linkedin-277-more-effective-for-lead-generation-than-facebook-twitter-new-data.aspx