Accelerate Growth through LinkedIn Advertising — Review

If you are a B2B Marketer, LinkedIn is naturally your first go to platform, simply because you have all your businesses and different personas that you would like to target, on one platform.

LinkedIn is a professional network and is a fair playing field for all marketers. When LinkedIn came out with advertising tools, it was no surprise that every B2B (and even most B2C) marketers wanted a piece. When I started using LinkedIn for social media marketing from my organisation, I learnt early on that a valuable metric for measuring our social media impact came by checking the quality of leads we attracted. Unlike other social channels, LinkedIn gives you a good enough preview of the lead generated and this was quite a game changer.

LinkedIn as a social media channel was pretty simple to crack. The features are intuitive, the algorithms for reach are easy to understand and the overall quality of posts you find are much more professional. However, when it came to LinkedIn advertising, things became a little more complex. If you are familiar with Google Ads, a striking feature in SEM advertising is the different levels to optimise your budget. LinkedIn, however, is notorious for being quite expensive. This was something that actively dissuaded me from exploring it because unlike Google, there is no room for experimentation, especially for a mid-size business with a small budget.

Recently, I started CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing Mini-Degree and came across an entire chapter on LinkedIn Advertising. This course really helped me understand the intricacies of LinkedIn advertising and also gave me the right set of tools to go about my campaigns. So here’s a summary of what I learned over the week.

Why LinkedIn Ads?

We, as users tend to keep our own profiles up to date, that’s because we’re pretty proud of what we achieve professionally. Users thus tend to keep their LinkedIn quite updated — I personally believe this to be something of a humble brag. LinkedIn as a professional platform has promoted the idea of professional achievements and to many people this is more socially acceptable over hollow brags on other social media channels, because let’s be real — people are more supportive of your new job over posting what smoothie you tried out today. Since we keep the data up to date, this means that advertisers aren’t wasting a whole bunch of data or a whole bunch of impressions on outdated potential leads.

When someone is on LinkedIn they’re either thinking about their job or their career which makes for a great business mindset.So when you give someone an offer that augments one of those two things you’re going to tend to have a much higher conversion rate than with other platforms. It’s a known fact that LinkedIn always closes the largest deal sizes and Google Ads always closes deals the fastest. So depending on what your preference is for how you do business, LinkedIn is probably going to bring in your largest deals.

While we’ve spoken about the pros, LinkedIn is not all sunshine and rainbows.The platform is very far from perfect and the number one complaint is something I mentioned earlier as well- the cost is high. We pay $6 to $9 dollars per click on average which is two to six times more expensive than a lot of the times that we see on Facebook for instance. There’s also no day-parting which means that you can’t really target your audience during the tried and tested business parts of the day, instead this is something that needs to be done manually and is quite tedious or alternatively you’ve got to use a third party platform to do dayparting. There’s also no device-level bidding which is rough when your offer has very different conversion rates between mobile and desktop you may want to funnel most of your clicks to one or the other. LinkedIn doesn’t let you do that.It’s kind of a one size fits all experience.And then finally there’s no exposed relevancy score. So LinkedIn’s relevancy score is much likeFacebook Ads relevance score or Google Ads quality score.And this is basically helping you understand how you stack up to the average as an advertiser in getting people to actually take action. LinkedIn definitely tracks this.And you’re definitely held to it.But they don’t tell you what it is. So you just kind of have to guess.

So because of the cons that we’ve talked about it means some people are priced out of the market or aren’t good fits. So who is a good fit for LinkedIn ads?

• A B2B product or services company who’s doing lead gen and you have a high lifetime value (above 15k) .
• If you’re recruiting for a PhD or an MBA program LinkedIn’s targeting is really good around education and so it tends to also work well.

The Checklist to go about LinkedIn Ads

Since LinkedIn Ads is a vast topic, I thought it better to help you with a summary of the checklist I received from the course. Here, we will just go about the basics to cover while you start your ad campaigns. You can download the full checklist here.

• Create your Ad
• Name your Ad Campaign
• Choose the Goal, Media Type, Language etc

• Enter the Ad Destination (Website, Landing Page, LinkedIn page of each)
• Create Headline, Description and Text of Each Ad
• Choose the image for each ad- stick to the dimensions
• Target your ad professionals who will be most responsive to this message

• Input your Bid per Click or Per Impression
• Set Daily Budget for maximum clicks, or impressions or automate it
• Establish the time period for it to run
• Monitor the effectiveness.

There are many topics that are yet to be covered when it comes to LinkedIn ads and while this is a brief summary of only the basics, I do think it would be helpful in understanding how to go about LinkedIn Ads, or at the very least, I hope this blog helps you to make an informed decision on whether LinkedIn ads is right for your business.

For a detailed lesson on LinkedIn Ads, check out CXL Institute’s LinkedIn Ads course. This course will help you learn about al the topics I have covered here, in detail.