How to use LinkedIn for advertising and how to do it effectively

LinkedIn is the most popular network in the global business environment. Users’ profiles are full of stories about positions they’ve held, and customer reviews. They also share opinions on current trends and search for employees and business partners. LinkedIn is the largest networking site with over 660 million personal accounts and over 30 million company accounts.

And while users share personal content on Facebook and Instagram, things like brand stories, case studies, infographics, and various business events are popular on LinkedIn. The areas with the greatest involvement here are recruiting, finance, consulting, and online media.

Here you can most often find HR managers, marketers, sales managers, and specialists in development and consulting. If your target audience is made of regular LinkedIn users, you can get their attention with targeted ads. We’ll talk about setting it up further on.

Preparation

You can go directly to the ad manager from your account.

It’s worth mentioning that LinkedIn is ideal for targeting a narrow professional audience in the B2B segment. The social network provides high CPM and CPC rates, although advertising is expensive here. Therefore, before moving on to customization, it’s important for you to clearly define your target audience. If the audience is too broad, the cost of advertising could exceed the ROI.

Goals

The first step in setting up advertising is choosing the right target audience. Similar to Facebook, on LinkedIn you can customize ads for brand awareness, gaining visitors, video views, and conversions.

A unique goal for LinkedIn is to attract people looking for jobs.

Audiences

Before setting audience parameters, you need to specify geotargeting. In the audience settings, you can specify the following parameters:

• Company (a wide range of settings is available, ranging from the field of activity and the size of the company to its growth rate). You can also set it to target employees of specific companies.
• Demographics (gender, age).
• Education (educational level, name of educational institution).
• Experience work (Responsibilities, skills, experience).
• Interests (you can target the interests specified by users or the communities they belong to).

You can also use ready-made lists of audiences here such as lookalike or retargeting.

Choosing an ad format

After setting the targeting, specify the desired ad format. It could be:

• Standard in-feed post with a single image
• Carousel
• Video ads
• Text ad-block displayed to the right of the feed
• Spotlight ad – customized advertising using profile data
• Message ad – advertising email that recipients will receive in private messages.
• Conversation ad – interactive advertising message, which users will see in the inbox and can respond to by clicking the button “find out more” or “subscribe.”

If necessary, you can also expand your audience through partner sites and applications which are part of the Linkedin Audience Network. These can increase reach by 25%, but the cost of advertising will also increase.

Budget and Bidding Strategies

As with setting up Facebook ads, here you can specify a daily budget as well as a budget for the entire duration of the ad campaign. Depending on the previously selected settings, different bidding strategies become available. You can also set the rate manually. Automatic strategies are only active for standard ad formats (post, carousel, video, and text). If you’re setting up customized ads or post ads, you’ll need to set bids manually.

Setting up ads on LinkedIn is pretty quick, but the effectiveness largely depends on the preparation you do. A good understanding of the audience will help to competently take advantage of the unique opportunities that the platform offers. Before launching an ad, it is important to collect as much information as possible on your audience. In addition to demography and interests, sector, position, and any companies the audience is associated with are all important here.

The more carefully the preparation is done, the more useful LinkedIn advertising tools will be and the greater the benefit that the advertising will bring. Here at the Internet Marketing Agency Web-Sci we wish you good and effective advertising on Linkedin!