LinkedIn is one of the most salient B2B (Business-to-Business) advertising platforms for transactions between businesses, such as one involving a manufacturer and wholesaler, or a wholesaler and a retailer. Business-to-business refers to a business that is conducted between companies, rather than between a company and individual consumer.
About 645 million B2B professionals across the globe use LinkedIn for lead spawning and creating brand awareness. Putting brand advertising on LinkedIn is a very effective way to reach a huge number of audiences. If we refer to the research consumer purchase intention, we see that it increases by 33% after watching various ads on LinkedIn. But it’s never easy since LinkedIn may prove to be a very complex platform. There may be a situation like you are running LinkedIn ads often but still the results are not up to the mark.
So, now, we will be talking about how to set up advertisements in an efficient way and how to achieve the most effective results. Let’s get started.
1. Setting up an advertisement ad
To create an ad account, navigate to your marketing page, and at the top right corner below, View as member button, you can find the Admin Tools menu. From the dropdown menu, select the Sponsor your updates option.
The campaign manager page will open in front. Assign a name to your ad account, choose the appropriate currency and link your actual branding page. Click on Create Account and you have just created your own LinkedIn advertisement account. LinkedIn ad accounts help us to sort and scrutinize all your campaigns and don’t interrupt anything on your brand page.
2. Give your ad account its objectives and goals
LinkedIn says– “choosing an objective helps them customize your campaign creation, deliver the best ROI for your stated goal, & show you relevant reporting”. Here, you will be given the authority to set your goals i.e., what you want to display before the viewers when the ad pops up in their news feed.
So, you can see three categories of objectives – Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. Below, there are various options:
1. Awareness
- Brand Awareness – We find this under Awareness category. Choosing this one helps it reach more audience and give a brief picture of your brand and its services.
2. Consideration
- Website Visits – This enables people who are most likely to click on your ads and land on your website.
- Engagement – Prioritizes engagement by help reaching your ads to more people and make them follow your business.
- Video Views – Enhances the chances of showing your videos to people who are most likely to watch.
3. Conversions
- Lead Generation – This objective shows your ad to people who are hypothetically going to fill out a lead generation form.
- Website Conversion – Leads people to take actions on your website which may add value to your business.
- Job Applicants – Displays the ad before audiences who are seemingly looking for jobs to apply for.
Choose the requisite objectives after some good research.
3. Create target audience
Customize your audience settings. LinkedIn gives us the freedom to target indubitable users on the basis of Education, Company, Profession, Skills, etc.
On clicking the Audience option. In the drop-down menu under Audiences, select relevant categories which you prefer to accept audience interaction from various attributes like Members with a Bachelor Degree, Expertise in Biotechnology, Expertise in Bitcoin or Blockchain, Corporate HR Professionals, and many more.
If you want to browse through more attributes, expand your search by selecting Add more attributes (OR)+.
Sort out the best options and avoid a wide target as it helps you remain concise.
4. Select a Format for your ads
Choose the most pertinent format. You can see here that LinkedIn offers eight kinds of formats. So, what’s each one represents? Let’s talk about it:
- Single image Ad – Creates a single image ad that will just pop up in the customer’s news feed. This is one of the most simpler and primitive LinkedIn ad formats.
- Carousal Image Ad – Creates ad with two or multiple images based on your ad account’s objective.
- Video Ad – As the name says, it creates an ad with a video.
- Text Ad – This format produces text-based ads that are displayed in the top right corner of LinkedIn pages.
- Spotlight Ad – Uses profile data for promotion and formatting ads.
- Follower Ad – Promotes your brand page by formatting ads using profile data.
- Message Ad – Creates an ad and sends it into target audience’s LinkedIn inbox.
- Job Ad – Promotes your page with job opportunities for the numerous job-seeking audience out there.
5. Setting up the ad budget
To set up the daily budget or total budget, from the Budget & Schedule option, find the drop-down menu and make appropriate setups.
Schedule your budget too because it’s very important to keep a record of all the spending.
6. Select the bid type
This is basically a brief of how you want your ad budget to be spent. We are offered three types of bidding alternatives:
- Automated bid– Everything is handled by LinkedIn on the grounds of your history and information.
- Enhanced CPC bid– You have the authority to set it up and is charged only by impressions.
- Maximum CPM bid– Charges every time your ad appears 1000 times on a LinkedIn feed.
7. Set conversion tracking
Measure the actions that members take on your website after clicking or viewing your LinkedIn ad.
Add LinkedIn Insight Tag to your page to sustain this thing better. Click +Add conversion button and enter the relevant settings for your conversion and exemplify how you want to track your conversion. Click on the Next button if everything is alright as you cannot change it if once saved.
8. Start producing personalised ads
Add a new advertisement by clicking on Create a new ad and then in the following window, name the ad, define the introductory text, destination URL, image, header, and set a suitable CTA (Call-to-Action).
And so, this is all about creating and running LinkedIn ads. Now if you are here as a person who has been running LinkedIn ads for a while, but still hasn’t got effective results, for you, now we will be sharing some tips and tricks which might help your page acquire better results.
- Keep a smaller audience size– Smaller audience means precise results. Larger audience size is too much of a hassle.
- Break larger budgets into smaller campaigns- Spend intelligently. Larger budget doesn’t mean larger audience. Target testing smaller audiences.
- Implement “exclude” filters- Try to include and exclude similar modules at one time.
- Take A/B Test
- Add UTM parameters– Add parameters to all your campaigns. This is helpful in tracking formats, channels, etc.
- Double-check every campaign element before launching
- Don’t set an earlier end date– It might take a little longer than expected to reach the whole bulk of your audience since LinkedIn shows ads only to active users. That is why, don’t set an earlier end date.
- Use manual bidding vs automated options– If you have set an automated budget, there is a possibility that your CPC might look to have no bounds at all. To have better control, select Manual bidding + the option “Enable bid adjustment for high-value clicks”.
- Use real performance data to make improvements– Take help from LinkedIn Performance chart and Demographic data to study your campaigns and contribute towards the betterment of your marketing business to fetch the best results.
- Pause low performing ads– Check your overall performance and find which ads are not doing well. Try replacing them with new ones with new banners or CTAs.
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