In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, LinkedIn has emerged as the world’s largest professional network for connecting with professional audience members and decision-makers. This makes it an ideal channel for businesses aiming to reach a B2B audience or generate high-quality leads.
As experts in the field of digital advertising and lead gen, we understand the significance of crafting impactful campaigns that deliver tangible results.
From targeting the right audience to optimizing ad performance, we’ll walk you through step-by-step strategies to ensure your LinkedIn ad campaigns thrive and drive quality performance. Get ready to elevate your advertising game on LinkedIn with the guidance of Digital Logic.
Let’s dive in and unlock the possibilities of LinkedIn advertising together!
How to Create Ad Campaigns on LinkedIn
Choose Your LinkedIn Ad Type
First, let’s start with campaign creation. You must choose your LinkedIn ad type for your first campaign. There are two campaign types on LinkedIn: self-service and account-managed campaigns. These types of campaigns are optimized for different types of LinkedIn ads and are also managed and controlled differently.
Self-Service LinkedIn Ads
When advertising on LinkedIn with self-service ads, you can control your ad campaign from Campaign Manager, the hub for all of LinkedIn’s targeting controls. From there, you can set your own budget, select from the suggested bid strategies, and also monitor your ads’ success. The types of ad formats supported by self-service ads are:
Sponsored Content on LinkedIn
These are also known as Native Ads. These ads will appear on your audience’s feed (based on targeting criteria) while they’re browsing LinkedIn. Native Ads can include photos and video ads or appear as carousel ads, which have multiple images.
Both native and carousel ads are useful for businesses that benefit from aesthetics.
Sponsored Message Ads on LinkedIn
These are personalized message ads driven toward increasing your conversions and brand awareness. You can use sponsored LinkedIn messaging to advertise business events or simply to reach more LinkedIn members through content distribution.
You can target LinkedIn members by their age, gender, or the industry they work in. Your LinkedIn message ads will only appear in their inboxes when they are active on LinkedIn, and there are strict constraints on how many sponsored message ads can be sent at once, ensuring that your company name and message is seen.
Dynamic Ads on LinkedIn
Dynamic ads will appear along the side of your matched audience’s news feed and will be tailored to each individual. The ad may include their LinkedIn Profile data to draw their attention to your ad.
You can use text and dynamic ads to entice LinkedIn users to follow you on LinkedIn, to drive traffic to your website, or to prompt users to download your content.
For instance, if you are a divorce lawyer and have written a blog post about recent changes in your state regarding child custody laws, you can use a dynamic ads to entice others practicing family law to download or read your blog post. The ad will probably include each individual’s LinkedIn profile picture as well as their name and say something like, “As a divorce attorney, keep up with recent legal developments in your state regarding custody laws!”
LinkedIn Display Ads
Display LinkedIn ads are something Google and Facebook do as well and are extremely effective means of advertising on LinkedIn. These LinkedIn ads appear as banners on websites and pages related to your industry, on and off LinkedIn. In this way, you can put your LinkedIn ad in front of users who are searching for and consuming content related to your business.sel
Text Ads on LinkedIn
Advertising on LinkedIn with text ads is the most common type of advertising. These text ads are most similar to Facebook or Google ads. They are highly targeted and drive website visits.
Using Campaign Manager, you can select bidding strategies, like clicks versus impressions.
Like with all LinkedIn ads, you can target a specific campaign group. You can also still target by age, gender, or by geographic locations.
So, if you’re comfortable paying a premium for account-managed ads on the LinkedIn feed, your work here is done.
However, if you have the time and the inclination to create and manage your own LinkedIn page and ads and most likely save a few dollars in the process, the rest of this guide will focus on advertising on LinkedIn using video ads, follower ads, conversion ads, or text Ads through a self-service campaign.
Explore LinkedIn Advertising Campaign Manager
Creating an account is simple and can be done in a matter of minutes through your personal LinkedIn profile. It is necessary to set up an account in order to advertise on LinkedIn. This is the nervous system of a successful advertising campaign on LinkedIn. Some of the features available on are:- Highly specific visual reporting so you can see exactly which LinkedIn ads are most effective and where.
- A breakdown of the actions your Sponsored Content campaigns generate, including Clicks, Likes, Shares, Comments, and Follows.
- A detailed view of the matched audiences and categories of LinkedIn users that are engaging with your ad variations.
Choose LinkedIn Ad Format
As previously mentioned, the types of ads available in Campaign Manager are:- Sponsored Content
- Sponsored InMail
- Text Ads
Create Your LinkedIn Ads
This is the moment you’ve all been waiting for: how to actually create a LinkedIn ad. Don’t get ahead of yourself, though. There are still a few clicks left before you can start watching your brand awareness and website visits improve.
Creating Sponsored Content on LinkedIn
Once you’ve selected Sponsored Content for your ad campaign, you will have the option to either use an already-created update on your LinkedIn Company Page or to create new Sponsored Content.
What this means is that if you have a popular post that’s gotten a lot of Likes or Shares, you can simply convert it into an advertisement to get more eyes on it. However, it is always beneficial to create multiple variations of the same Sponsored Content so you can test out which messages get better results from which demographics.
When advertising on LinkedIn with new Sponsored Content, it will look very similar to creating any other LinkedIn post. There will be a text box to enter any text you may want to include as well as the ability to attach photos, links, or videos. You can Preview the ad before saving it. Once you’re happy with the Preview, you can save it, return to your Campaign page and select the ad you just created. Then hit the “Sponsor-selected” button, and you’re all set!
Create LinkedIn Sponsored Messaging Ads
So once you choose Sponsored InMail, you can title your Campaign and choose a language for your ads. Next, you will need to:
Select the Sender of the LinkedIn Ad
This can be you or one of your employees. The sender’s first name, last name, and profile picture will appear in the recipient’s inbox.Add Subject Line and Summary of The LinkedIn Ad
The summary is just a sneak peek of your message that will appear to your recipients on your desktop. You should keep your subject lines short and conversational, something like “Thanks!”, “Join us/me,” or “Connect.”Write Your LinkedIn Ad Copy
Make your message conversational. After all, they are conversation ads. LinkedIn also gives you the option to add each recipient’s first name within the Sponsored InMail tool. This is a good idea. Keeping your message under 1000 characters is also advisable; any longer and your recipient may lose interest. After crafting your message, you will be able to add the landing page URL for the appropriate page of your website.
Create a Text Ad on LinkedIn
When advertising on LinkedIn with a text ad, you must first decide where you want the text ad to take your potential customers. This can be your page on LinkedIn or a page on your website. Add an image, such as a company logo, a headline of up to 25 characters, and a description of up to 75 characters. As you add content to your ad, you’ll be able to see a preview on the right-hand side of the page.
You can create up to 15 text ads at a time to see which variations of your advertisement get the best results.
LinkedIn Ad Targeting
No matter what ad format you choose when advertising on LinkedIn, choosing your target audience works the same way. LinkedIn provides a wide variety of criteria from which you can choose your desired audience, including but not limited to the following targeting criteria:- Company Name
- Industry
- Size of the Company
- The Seniority of the Job
- Job Title
- The function of the Job
- Member Schools
- Degrees
- Field of Study
- Member Age
- Member Gender
This is information LinkedIn collects from everyone as part of each member’s profile, information that users may not include on their Facebook or Instagram profiles (pretty fancy lead gen forms, if you ask us!). This gives businesses advertising on LinkedIn some unique opportunities they may not get on other platforms.
You will also be able to see exactly how many users are estimated to belong to your target audience, so you can be sure your target audience is as specific or general as you want it.
Apart from selecting audience criteria, you have other options for targeting with LinkedIn, such as:
LinkedIn Audience Members Expansion
This is a feature that shows your ad to audiences similar to the audiences you’ve selected. This prevents you from missing out on any relevant marketing opportunities from a simple oversight. After all, you can’t be expected to think of everything.
For instance, if you want to target LinkedIn users that list “online advertising” as a skill, Audience Expansion may also choose to show your ad to users with the “interactive marketing” skill on their profile. This way, your ad potentially gets more relevant attention without you being forced to think of every synonym for “online advertising.”
In this scenario, interactive marketing users will not appear in your estimated audience number. So if you have audience expansion enabled, it is always beneficial to remember that the estimated audience number LinkedIn shows you may be a bit on the low side.
You will also be able to see demographics, clicks, impressions, etc., from both your expanded audience and your originally targeted audience.
You can also exclude certain demographics to ensure they will not be included in the Audience Expansion. For instance, if, for any reason you want your ads to appear to online advertising users but not interactive marketing users, you can exclude “interactive marketing” from your audience criteria, and your Audience Expansion will not include interactive marketing users.
You can enable or disable Audience Expansion at the bottom of the page, which allows you to select audience criteria.
LinkedIn Audience Network
If you can believe it, advertising on LinkedIn has even more perks.
LinkedIn has an expansive network of partner audiences. If you have Sponsored Content, and if you have cost per click enabled rather than cost per impression, you can choose to allow your ads to appear on other brand-safe publishers and apps outside of LinkedIn.
LinkedIn will honor the budget you have already set for your ads, so this won’t cost you any extra money; however, your daily budget may not last as long as it did before since it’s likely you’ll be getting more clicks than before.
In Campaign Manager, you will be able to see just how many clicks and impressions are driven by these Audience Network ads so you judge the effectiveness for yourself.
Just like with Audience Expansion, you can also choose to exclude your ads from certain publishers or sites. You can block certain partner audiences based on their category or block specific apps or sites.
Set Your Budget and Schedule for LinkedIn Ad Campaigns
This is usually the first question business owners ask when they’re learning how to advertise, and this is still true when learning how to advertise on LinkedIn. It doesn’t matter if every user on LinkedIn sees your ads; after all: if you bankrupt yourself getting it in front of them, it’s no use.LinkedIn Advertising Cost
Fortunately, LinkedIn has a few pricing options:- Cost per click (CPC). You’re charged every time someone clicks on your ad.
- Cost per impression (CPM). You’re charged every time a certain number of people see your ad, usually 100 or 1000 people.
- Cost per send (CPS). This is used for Sponsored InMail. You’re charged for every successfully delivered message.
Ad Rank for LinkedIn
In a nutshell: LinkedIn has slots for an ad. Obviously, the higher the position, the better. All the ads that could potentially fit into these slots are given a rank based on the amount of money they’re willing to spend per click or per impression, in conjunction with past ad performance.
Due to this process of ranking ads, it isn’t always the highest bidder that wins the auction. The better your past ad performance, the less money you need to achieve the same or a higher ranking when advertising on LinkedIn. However, new advertisers may have to pay a slightly higher premium for their clicks or impressions until they get some positive ad history under their belts.
Maximum bids and daily budgets can all be set from within the Campaign Manager.
Advertising on LinkedIn: Measure and Optimize Your Campaign
So your LinkedIn ads are live now: congratulations! But that isn’t your final step in advertising on LinkedIn.
It is important that you monitor your campaigns and make any changes that need to be made based on the reports you receive. After all, how else will you know if your LinkedIn ads are helping you reach your business’s marketing goals?
These reports can be accessed through Campaign Manager.
Within your Campaign Manager analytics, you will be able to see each individual ad:
- Overall performance
- Branded searches: have Google searches for your brand increased since launching your ads?
- Website traffic: have more people been coming to your website?
- Cost per lead: does the amount of genuine business you’re getting match up with what you’re paying for it?
These are features LinkedIn provides so that you can fully optimize your ad experience when advertising on LinkedIn.
You’ll need to implement Google tracking to gain access to conversion tracking for website conversions.
Work With a Professional Social Media Marketing Agency
If you’re still not sure if you have the time or know-how to pull off an optimized ad campaign on LinkedIn and you’re thinking it’s time to bring in a professional, look no further!
Digital Logic is a full-service marketing company that will help you create and optimize your campaign performance across platforms, including LinkedIn.
We offer social media management services, SEO services, and Google Ads management services.
If you want to jump-start your advertising game, call Digital Logic at 318-678-5020, or request a consultation on our website!
