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Especially for B2B marketers, LinkedIn presents itself as a strong advertising opportunity. As of the end of 2020, the platform had 760 million users with around one-third of these active each month. Although these numbers don’t quite live up to Facebook standards, they’re still mightily impressive. Let’s face it, no platform on the internet competes with Facebook in many regards .
However, there’s something unique about LinkedIn. 60% of all users are between 25 and 34, around 45% earn over $75,000 each year, and half of all Americans with a college degree have an account on the platform. The old adage that LinkedIn is a platform for professionals is still true even in 2021. As a result, businesses targeting this demographic or businesses themselves use it as part of their marketing strategy.
LinkedIn recognizes this fact, and it has now launched Marketing Labs to help marketers to gain extra value from the platform.
Recently revealed by LinkedIn, Marketing Labs is a new training platform for all businesses and marketers using the platform for advertising purposes. If you’re looking to improve the performance of LinkedIn campaigns, you’ll have access to curated courses and events on specific topics. Taking part, you’ll learn how to get better results on LinkedIn as well as the best strategies to adopt for your business.
According to LinkedIn, Marketing Labs is suited to everybody, whether they want to gain exposure, generate leads, or achieve a different goal. Also, we should note that the courses are designed to help people of all experience levels. Even for those with 30 years of experience, you may lack knowledge when it comes to LinkedIn. For others, it’s a case of advertising on LinkedIn for the first time. Either way, you’ll find value in the resources.
What can you expect from Marketing Labs on LinkedIn? First up, we like the look of the live events since this offers interaction with LinkedIn specialists. As time goes on, these will change so you need to pay attention to upcoming dates.
If lead generation is your goal, this event is designed to help you achieve exactly that from LinkedIn ads. During this event, you’ll learn about message ads, sponsored content, lead gen forms, and conversion tracking. By the end, you’ll feel more confident in creating ads to boost lead generation.
Of course, advertising on a social media platform isn’t all about paid ads. Instead, LinkedIn is a valuable platform for content too. With strong content, professionals build an affinity with the brand and view the service as a leader in the market. Therefore, this event is all about content (video in particular). How can you use video to grow the prominence of the brand and attract interest from users? How can you use video to compete with other services in your niche?
This is one of the most common events, and it’s designed to help marketers who have just started on the platform and need to know the basics. Alternatively, it might help those who have been away for some time and need a reminder of how everything works. Essentially, the event goes through Campaign Manager and how it all works. After this, you’ll learn the best practices for marketing campaigns and how your decisions affect the likelihood of meeting the designated marketing objectives.
As a live session, one of the benefits is that you can ask questions and get answers from the LinkedIn team in real-time. Before attending the session, play around with the Campaign Manager and write down any questions you want to ask. In all likelihood, the team will address most concerns while delivering the session. Then, ask any remaining questions when the time comes.
Finally, we like the look of the Audience and Optimizations event because there are millions of professionals and thousands of marketers on LinkedIn. If you aren’t targeting correctly, campaigns fall by the wayside and you waste investment. After attending this event, you’ll have a better idea of the optimization process with your campaigns.
In addition to the events, LinkedIn frequently updates the courses and guides available through Marketing Labs. When on the website, you’ll notice the optional learning routes. With this, you tailor the learning around the areas you need most. Through the different learning paths, it helps to hone your craft and invest more wisely on LinkedIn.
According to LinkedIn, in-house experts created the different courses. So far, the response from users has been a positive one, and we look forward to more reviews as time goes on. To offer true value, these in-house experts have experience in numerous industries and customer bases. With this in mind, don’t think that Marketing Labs can’t help your business.
During our time on Marketing Labs, we found all types of content from video to text. Also, we found that they reached people of all experience levels. With some websites, they manage to go above beginners and underneath experts. Thankfully, LinkedIn has found a good balance between beginner, intermediate, and expert.
Click through the different paths and you’ll find the following courses:
Generally speaking, these courses take around 45 minutes to complete. Bring a notebook and pen to remember some of the key details from the course - you can also return whenever required.
Should you invest time in these events and courses? It might take a while to get through them all, but we highly recommend doing so if you want a deeper understanding of the advertising opportunities on LinkedIn. Especially if you lack experience in this area, we believe it’s one of the best resources around for gaining knowledge. Over time, we expect Marketing Labs to grow and more courses and events to enter the platform.
Some readers want to understand the merits of advertising on LinkedIn before investing all of this time (we don’t blame you!). In the current COVID-affected market, we appreciate that every dollar spent on advertising has an opportunity cost.
Consequently, we’ve listed some of the benefits of including LinkedIn in a marketing strategy!
When LinkedIn first entered the market, it was quickly labeled as a grown-up version of other social media websites. Now, we’re in 2021 and nothing has changed in this regard. As we’ve already seen, the user base is educated and professional. If this is the ideal customer of your business, there’s no reason why you can’t advertise, create content, and become a leader in the niche using LinkedIn as a linchpin of the strategy.
You must understand the intricacies of LinkedIn because the platform has some advanced capabilities for advertising. Depending on your campaign, it’s possible to target based on education, location, company name, job role/title, professional interests, and industry. For most LinkedIn users, they keep their profiles updated regularly which makes it more efficient at times than Facebook (if you chose interests on Facebook when you were 16 years old and haven’t checked them since you know what we mean!).
LinkedIn isn’t just a platform for professional employees of businesses, it’s for the businesses themselves too. According to LinkedIn, around 80% of users are in a position within their respective companies to make decisions. As an advertiser, this means you reach out to the people who can actually spend money on the spot and make large decisions. LinkedIn also states that users have twice the buying power compared to the average web user.
By reaching those who make decisions and have the buying power to choose your service on the spot, this should increase conversion rates.
Advertise on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and other social media platforms and you’ll notice that all the same ad types continue to arise. On the other hand, LinkedIn has some unique ad types, and this means new opportunities for marketers. For instance, this includes Sponsored InMail campaigns. Using the messaging system on LinkedIn, both click-through rates and open rates are higher than standard email.
To finish, the final reason to choose this platform (although it won’t be a surprise) is because of the new Marketing Labs feature. In the past, advertising was restricted to those in the know. Thanks to the advanced resources in Marketing Labs, businesses and marketers of all ages and experience levels can improve their LinkedIn advertising knowledge, spend money more wisely, and generate a positive ROI (while generating leads, boosting awareness, and even making sales!).
