LinkedIn Advertising - Our Guide

For many companies, LinkedIn is a advertising platform extremely relevant. In recent years, there has been a great development in the platform's popularity and user engagement. Today, the platform has more than 610 million users worldwide and more than 14 million users in Spain. This is precisely why it's obvious that B2B companies market themselves on LinkedIn. In this guide, you can read more about why and how you should advertise on LinkedIn.

Why you should advertise on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social network like Facebook, but with the difference that it stands out for being a network oriented to the professional field. On Facebook, you see photos of your neighbor's children, contests, or similar entertainment. This is not the case on LinkedIn. The platform is a professional network, which means that users have this mentality when using the platform. Users go to LinkedIn to keep up to date on new networks or professional opportunities.

Unlike Facebook, The users they don't visit LinkedIn for entertainment, visit the platform to discover professional opportunities. Therefore, they are also very responsive to relevant advertisements and, at the same time, the platform offers targeted advertising with which you can segment your target audience. This is exactly why your company should consider marketing on LinkedIn.

Many users view their personal LinkedIn profile as an online resume, and their profiles often include information about:

• Workplace
• Job function
• Professional degree
• Company size
• Antiquity
• Interests
• Skills

Therefore, users provide an incredible amount of information about themselves. This is a great advantage because it allows you to create super detailed and relevant target groups for your business.

What should you consider before you start advertising on LinkedIn?

Before diving into advertising, you must first decide if your value proposition is right for LinkedIn. The price of advertising on the platform is higher than on other platforms, so if you are a B2C company that wants to market relatively cheap products, then LinkedIn is not the most optimal platform. But, if, on the other hand, you are a B2B company that wants to reinforce its brand image and sell products or services, LinkedIn is the perfect platform for your marketing.

Create a business page

To advertise on LinkedIn, you must have a company page. It's very easy to create:

• Sign in on LinkedIn with your personal profile.
• Click on the icon of 'work' in the upper right corner.
• Click on 'create business page' and follow the steps.
• When you have a company page, you can create a Campaign Manager linked here.

LinkedIn Campaign Manager is an advertising platform that looks like the sites you probably already know from Facebook and Google.

Once you've created your Campaign Manager, you'll see an overview of the campaign. This is where you can create and manage campaigns, target groups, tracking, and more:

Objective and strategy:

Before you begin, it's a good idea to have a clear goal and strategy for your marketing. First you must think about who the intended recipient is and why. To do this it is It's important to have your buyer persona identified. Then, you need to think about how your LinkedIn ads can be relevant, interesting, and add value for the recipient. Without a clear objective and strategy, advertising on LinkedIn can cost a lot of money and not generate the expected return.

How to advertise on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is, in many ways, a unique social network. Therefore, there are also some unique advertising practices to consider:

• Prepare detailed target groups. Use tracking and retargeting
  
  
• Create retargeting campaigns: It's a good idea because you learn more about the target group and you can get in touch with users who have shown interest in your company. The LinkedIn information tag is a piece of code that you must place on your company's website, it can be installed through Google Tag Manager, track visits to the website and create retargeting campaigns on LinkedIn. This means that you can, for example, make sales announcements to people who have previously visited your website without making a purchase.
  
  
• Consider the frequency algorithm: When creating ads, you should keep in mind that LinkedIn has a frequency algorithm, with which it controls how often a user can be exposed to your ad. The algorithm means, among other things, that users can only be exposed to an advertisement once every 48 hours and a maximum of four times in total. This can be a challenge for your marketing, so it's important to create ad variants.
  
  
• A/B testing: Perform A/B split tests, with which you can easily compare the effectiveness of two campaigns.
  
  
• Boost posts from the company page: you can easily and quickly push the company's organic posts to a selected target group. It may be a good idea to complement paid advertising with a publishing boost and also gain more followers on the company page.

How to create a LinkedIn campaign

When you need to create a campaign, what you should do is:

1. Click on”Create campaign“or”Create campaign“, depending on the language in which your Campaign Manager is configured.

2. At this point you'll have to Decide the objectives of the campaign, The target group, The budget and The ads.

a) Objective of the campaign: It is important that you choose the objective that best suits the benefit you want to obtain from the campaign. Ask yourself what action you want users to take when they see one of your ads. Should they click on a specific landing page? Should they subscribe to the newsletter? Or maybe they need to buy a certain product?

b) Target group of the campaign: You must first consider the location of the target group. Here you can choose which countries or cities the campaign should target. From here you can work on choosing the demography of the target group, in other words, the characteristics that are common to the people in the target group, such as specific interests or roles of the people you want to impact, to the size of the company you work for.

3. Campaign period and budget: at this point you will define on what dates you want the campaign to be active and how much you want to invest in it. Like Facebook and Google, LinkedIn is based on an auction system. Here you bid against those who advertise to the same target group as you.

a) You have the option of choosing the following strategies:

i. Maximum delivery (automated): get the most results possible with your entire budget.
ii. Target cost: get as many results as possible while staying close to your cost objective.
iii. Manual offer: control your bids at the auction.

4. Finally, you must choose what type of advertisement you want it to be shown in the campaign. You can choose between the following types of ads:

How to advertise for LinkedIn?

The very development of advertisements and their content is a science in and of itself. There are a number of recommendations on what to do and what not to do and the best practices that are important to know.

As a small selection, we give you below 7 specific tips for your ads:

1. Images with people work better than images with things.
2. The texts of your ads must be short and precise.
3. The presentation of statistics has a positive effect. For example, "70% of all [...]”
4. Feel free to address your target group directly and explicitly. For example, “Business owners, now is the time [...]”
5. Add +5 variants of the same ad with minor changes to the text or image to “trick” the frequency algorithm.
6. Monitor the performance of your ads and identify which images and messages work best.
7. Try, try, try! Be curious, experiment and know the preferences of your target audience.

How can we help you?

If you need more information do not hesitate to contact us.