Ben Miller As search evolves beyond keywords and towards a more conversational, AI-powered experience, understanding how to effectively reach your target audience on platforms like LinkedIn becomes increasingly crucial.
LinkedIn can be an incredibly powerful tool in today’s world of B2B advertising. It’s safe to say that the number one selling point of the platform is the powerful targeting it offers. You can hone right in on your audience based on demographics, job experience and education, to name a few. But this comes at a premium, with CPCs commonly reaching £10 or above, making LinkedIn either an invaluable asset in your media plan or an expensive burden with high associated costs.
Here, I’ll take you through some of my top tips to set yourself up for LinkedIn B2B advertising success, so you can ensure your precious marketing budget is used as effectively as possible.
Target the right audience on LinkedIn
The first step to LinkedIn success is making sure you’re reaching the right audience. Sounds obvious? The challenge is that with so many targeting options available, it can be difficult to know where to start and it’s easy to end up with an audience size which is way too small, or something which is just too broad and generic to really make enough of a splash with the people you want to engage.
<p>Spend some time getting to grips with exactly who you want your campaign to engage, then start off by being as specific as possible when building out your audience. A good place to start is with a list of company names and job titles – you can either manually select these in the platform (but this can be time-consuming if you have lots of them!) Or upload a list from an Excel sheet. If you choose to upload the list, keep an eye out for any which haven’t matched to make sure you’re not missing out on essential targets.
Now, LinkedIn recommends a minimum audience size of 50,000, but I’d take this with a pinch of salt as it really depends on your budget and duration. I’ve run some very successful, small-scale campaigns with audience sizes of 10,000 so this might give a better base-level benchmark. If your audience size is looking too small, here are a few things you can do next:
- Search for variations of job titles. E.g. instead of just targetting ‘marketing managers’ you could also target ‘digital marketing manager’, ‘marketing project manager’, and ‘senior marketing manager’. There are often lots of variations on job titles so this can be an effective way to scale up without compromising on relevance
- Move towards targeting by categories rather than specifics. For example, you could try using Job Function instead of Job Title, or Company Industry instead of Company Name. This will increase your audience size quickly
Choosing campaign settings
So, you’ve decided on your target audience and your campaign build is underway. But there are a few hacks which I’ve found have given a head-start with performance, especially in the early stages of a new campaign:
- Bidding strategy. Set to ‘manual bidding’. Then choose a CPC which is just a bit below the recommended minimum. I’ve found that choosing the automated ‘maximise delivery’ option often just leads to extremely high CPCs, whereas setting a manual CPC actually end up meaning you drive more traffic for your spend
- Steer clear of audience expansion at first. Unless you’re working with enormous budgets, I’ve generally found that it’s best to focus your spend on your target audience instead of handing the reigns over to LinkedIn straight away
- Set up conversion tracking. Sounds obvious, but it’s incredibly important to make sure you have LinkedIn conversion tags set up and tested before hitting live
- Add clear UTMs. This can now be done dynamically at campaign level, or manually at ad level. The dynamic option works well and is a real time-saver, so make sure this is set up before launching
Serving the right ad content
Perhaps most important to the success of your campaign is making sure that you are delivering the right content to your target audience.
The golden rule for LinkedIn is you need to make sure that your content adds value for your audience. The direct-response approach rarely works for cold audiences on LinkedIn, so really you need to be thinking: “what does my audience care about and how can I create content which helps them out?”
Blog articles and whitepapers are a great way to go for B2B on LinkedIn. A good approach might look something like this:
- Choose a piece of content to promote which is relevant to your audience and their job role
- Pull out some key stats or insights to sit within the ad asset and ad copy. Focus on adding value. Try to be thought-provoking. You want your ad to make your audience stop scrolling and think, “That’s interesting”
- Include a call to action to ‘find out more’ or ‘read the full report’. Your ad should act as a teaser to get them through to the site to explore more about that piece of content
- On the landing page, you should have a clear call to action. A good one to go for is to encourage people to sign up or subscribe for more content. Once they’ve signed up, it’s essential to have a good CRM strategy to keep them warm while your outreach team start to get in touch with them to start the longer-term conversation
But what is the right ad format? This isn’t a simple one to answer, it can vary massively by campaign. Typically, static ads see the best click-through rate on LinkedIn, but video ads can be a great way to convey more information in a short space of time. The answer in my opinion is a mixture of both:
- Snappy statics which pull out key insights or stats, with a clear call-to-action within the creative
- Short-form video content which illustrates some of the themes in a bit more detail. GIFs with animated text can work well, but also think about snippets of interviews or discussion pieces
High-impact vs low-impact LinkedIn ad formats
Building a B2B lead generation pipeline with LinkedIn
So, you have your targeting and your ad content nailed, but now comes the tricky bit: driving leads.
The key here is not to be too direct – again, adding value is crucial. Giving people the opportunity to sign up for more of your content is a great way to build up a pipeline of potential leads who fit within your target audience. There are a few ways of doing this:
- Add a clear ‘subscribe’ button on your side alongside your content, so that they can sign up to get more of your amazing content
- For whitepapers and more in-depth pieces, you can make these gated so that users have to sign up to download, this is called a document ad. This can be effective, but keep a close eye on sign-up rates to make sure you’re not putting people off by capturing data too early on
B2B LinkedIn document ads example
Example of a document ad from Employment hero
Another option is to retarget users who have visited your articles without signing up and target them with a lead ad so that they can sign up to hear updates and more. Again, try to focus on insights and examples within the ad itself and then hint towards signing up as a next step instead of just going straight in for the hard sell.
An important point to remember with LinkedIn is that reaching someone once and then dropping off the radar just won’t get you where you want to be. It’s essential to build rapport with your audience over time so that they feel inclined to start a longer-term conversation with you. This takes time and effort and means an ongoing ‘always on’ approach works best. The best way to achieve this is to continue to drip-feed content over time to keep reaching and engaging that audience. This should work hand-in-hand with a solid CRM content strategy and you should liaise closely with your sales teams to make sure people who’ve signed up are being reached out to directly and nurtured over time.
The future of search will emphasise building long-term relationships with customers. By nurturing leads through valuable content and personalised communication, you can establish yourself as a trusted advisor and cultivate lasting customer loyalty, even as search evolves.
Optimising LinkedIn B2B ad performance
Once your campaign is live, as ever you’ll need to optimise to make sure it’s living up to its full potential. For at least the first week, try to avoid making any big changes unless it’s really necessary. Use this time to get a read on results and build up some data. You’ll then have a much better idea of what is and isn’t working.
Analysing LinkedIn campaign reports
LinkedIn has some really great reports which let you find out more about who you are reaching with your ads, and you can use these to refine or expand your audience. The report in question is called ‘Professional Demographics’ and is clickable in the top right corner of the results tables in the campaign group, campaign, or ad views.
I would recommend monitoring this on a weekly basis and adding audience exclusions for any irrelevant targets you’re seeing, or if any are showing good click-through rate then adding these into your campaigns or considering building out a new target audience.
Remember, it’s important to be as specific as possible to your audience’s job role, so if you’re branching out into different roles it’s best to build out a new campaign and think about what kind of content would be most relevant to them.
Final thoughts on maximising LinkedIn advertising ROI
In conclusion, LinkedIn advertising can be a highly effective but also expensive channel for B2B marketers. By carefully crafting your targeting, choosing the right campaign settings and creating engaging, valuable content, you can maximise your ROI and build strong relationships with your ideal customers. Remember to prioritise continuous optimisation and a long-term approach to nurture leads and build a successful pipeline.