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Used by over 500 million professionals around the globe, LinkedIn is a place for brands to create compelling content, hire, and generate interest and exposure whether targeting individuals or brands. If you’re looking to get started on LinkedIn, you’ll need an optimized marketing campaign.
In this guide, you’re going to learn how to:
Then, we’re going to take you through the best way to succeed with LinkedIn Campaign Manager.
To start advertising on LinkedIn, you’ll go through their marketing platform, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. If you don’t already have one, you’ll need to create a LinkedIn Campaign Manager account. To start, choose a Campaign Group and a name. From here, there are a few decisions you need to make based on the campaign you wish to launch:
When seeing your ads, what do you want people to do? While some will be pushing for website visits, others may crave video views, lead generation or engagement. Depending on your goal, you can choose from the three campaign options: Consideration, Awareness and Conversion.
Who do you want to target? You certainly don’t want the wrong people to see your ad. This could be the difference between wasting money and enjoying your best advertising campaign yet. Be detailed for the first campaign, and if possible, find the people who need a specific product/service you offer. If this isn’t possible, don’t feel as though you have to play with every one of the settings—just choose the ones you need and know.
One of the reasons advertisers love LinkedIn is because you can target the employees of specific companies. Whether you have a brand name in mind or want to target employees working in a specific niche, this is something the LinkedIn advertising platform can account for. For example, you might choose to target those in finance or working for a nonprofit organization.
Other targeting options for your campaign include education level, demographics like gender and age, work experience and interests.
How do you want to reach out to people in your audience? LinkedIn has plenty of options including carousel ads, text ads, follower ads, single image ads, job ads, message ads and spotlight ads. When choosing, it’s best to think about your budget as well as what you want to achieve since the different formats lend themselves to different goals.
Most of the work is now done; you just need to set your budget, schedule, placement and some other finishing touches. You have three options for bidding, including automated bidding, maximum pay per 1,000 impressions bidding, and maximum cost per click bidding.
If you’ve used another ad platform, you’ll be familiar with LinkedIn because it uses many of the same features—think ad image, headline, description and destination URL. As always, it’s important to remember the CTA–guide people in the right direction and get them to take the action you want.
The secret to creating an optimized LinkedIn marketing campaign has more to do with the optimization process than the creation process alone. Of course, you need to create an ad that resonates with your target audience. However, the best results come from your continual effort to improve and meet the changing needs people have relative to your brand.
With the ad campaign now running, the worst mistake you can make is to leave it alone (but you know this because you’re here to learn about optimizing a campaign!). Below, we’ve listed some of the ways you can optimize.
Sometimes, marketers find that one campaign is performing stronger or failing to perform as well as the others. Pause any campaign that isn’t living up to expectations, and devote your resources to campaigns that are performing well.
Another mistake we see from marketers is when they scrap an entire campaign just because it isn’t getting results immediately. We recommend instead playing around with the campaign features to see if you can turn things around. Perhaps it’s the copy that needs to change in order to generate a better click-through rate? Otherwise, it could be the main image or the target audience. In most cases, it’s more affordable to tweak an existing campaign than start over with a new one. You could be one change away from a successful ad, so don’t panic and scrap everything.
We know you know that your target audience is always evolving. What works for your marketing campaign one week may struggle to gain traction in the weeks to come. Therefore, we recommend refreshing your audience and targeting once a month. Look at your buyer persona and new research to assess whether or not it’s worth making adjustments to your campaigns. Even the best ad in the world won’t compensate for poor targeting. However, when you’re reaching the right people, even a subpar ad can generate a degree of interest.
Just like Facebook, LinkedIn aims to help users with its Campaign Manager platform. According to LinkedIn, there are many ways to be efficient with Campaign Manager and your ad campaigns.
We often see brands use random campaign names, but LinkedIn suggests creating a strategy so that you know which campaign is which without having to click deeper and look for pertinent information. Use the following within your campaign name:
If you don’t want to include lots of information in the campaign name, give it a unique ID and have a separate document which explains each number in more detail. With this system, every member of the team knows which campaign is which and can quickly make required adjustments for optimization.
LinkedIn makes it easier for marketers to see which campaigns drive conversions through the Conversion Tracking tool. With this tool, you can measure purchases, leads, content downloads, sign-ups and whatever else you’re trying to generate. With all conversions counted, you see everything from mobile and desktop. Depending on the situation, the conversion may have come directly from the ad itself or after viewing the ad.
While targeting is typically a difficult monster to manage, LinkedIn helps marketers with the Campaign Demographics tool. It measures conversions, impressions and clicks and breaks down the results by demographics, which include:
If you really don’t have experience but want to start advertising on LinkedIn, a good tip is to start with a broad audience. Once this is in place, you can then use the Campaign Demographics tool to see which demographics are considered ‘high performing.’ If you don’t fully know your exact audience, this will give an indication of your key audience and their information.
As a light JavaScript code, Insight Tag is another great tool because it unlocks deeper insights, campaign reporting and retargeting. Once added to your website, you can sync analytical tools with website conversion goals including email signups, form fills and even eBook downloads. This is all manageable within the Campaign Manager.
With ad campaigns, the goal for marketers is to reduce the cost per acquisition (CPA). With LinkedIn, this is made easier through the Auto-Bidding feature. Working alongside Conversion Tracking, you enter a desired cost per click and LinkedIn will adjust your bidding based on the likeliness to convert. There will be a slight fluctuation in CPC, but your main goal of CPA is now achievable.
Just when you think LinkedIn has done enough, it also has a Website Demographics tool available for those who install the Insight Tag. With this, you get a better understanding of exactly who is reaching your website from its platform. Rather than the usual standard demographics, it’s easy to learn seniority, job title, location, industry, company size, job function and much more. With Website Demographics, you understand each target audience better, which helps with targeting and ad optimization.
You should now be in a good position to create an optimized LinkedIn marketing campaign. Take advantage of the many tools that LinkedIn offers marketers who use its advertising platform.
