LinkedIn Advertising – The most important in a nutshell |
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For a long time, LinkedIn was considered the underdog among social networks. In contrast to the relaxed and informal atmosphere of Instagram and the like, the content there seemed rather formal and dry. With a focus on jobs and careers, many used the network as a digital resume, an extended job portal, and to build (professional) contacts. But that has changed a bit in the meantime: We show you what concrete potential LinkedIn has and what you need to keep in mind when placing LinkedIn ads in order to successfully market on the platform.
With 830 million members worldwide and 18 million in the DACH region alone, the clear answer is: Yes! – Almost every third person in the DACH region is registered on LinkedIn, including many decision-makers from major companies in a wide range of industries. This means that the platform holds immense potential, especially for companies in the B2B sector, which can lead to booster effects for generating leads and thus increasing sales. This is exactly what you can realize through LinkedIn advertising, among other things.
The precise definition of the target group is probably the most serious advantage of LinkedIn advertising. Filtering options range from industry, company name and size to personal details such as job title, field of activity, career level, university attended, subjects studied, degrees obtained, knowledge, groups joined, gender, age or previous years of work experience. You see: The variants for target group delimitation are manifold.
LinkedIn Ads are billed either per click (CPC = cost-per-click) or per 1000 impressions (CPM = cost-per-1000-impressions). When budgeting, you can decide between a total budget (budget to be spent over the entire duration of a campaign), a daily budget (budget to be spent per day for a campaign) and a bid amount (set maximum amount). You can also set a start and end date for the ad/campaign.
With LinkedIn advertising, there is an option to measure all data using a conversion pixel. This allows you to track what actions users take on your website after seeing or clicking on your ad. Based on this knowledge, audiences, i.e. specific target groups, can in turn be created and existing customers can be addressed again in the course of so-called retargeting.
Anyone who has a standard account can place ads on LinkedIn – no premium account is necessary. As previously touched upon, a wide variety of campaigns can be created to draw the user’s attention to the company and what it has to offer. This directs more people to the company page, which in turn increases the number of clicks, reactions and followers. The format of the ads can be chosen quite differently – depending on the goal you are pursuing with your LinkedIn Ad (e.g. website clicks or video views).
The different ad formats offer a lot of scope to design and place your LinkedIn ads individually and in a varied way, such as:
Ad formats for LinkedIn advertising
Sponsored Content are ads in the newsfeed in a wide variety of ad formats. They are mostly promoted LinkedIn posts in the newsfeed, created as a simple image (Single Image Ad), video (Video Ad) or as a chain of display elements (Carousel Ad).
Unlike “normal” Sponsored Content, Direct Sponsored Content does not appear as an update on the company or focus page before it appears as an ad in the newsfeed. Nevertheless, Direct Sponsored Content looks like a regular LinkedIn post.
With a Carousel Ad, users can swipe through a chain of display elements. When choosing this format, advertisers have the option to tell stories or present different offers and detailed information. The movement and interaction of the Carousel Ad is ideal for attracting attention (keyword “eye-catcher”).
With Conversation Ads, integrated call-to-actions can be used to increase the engagement of the target group. Since it is possible to insert several CTA buttons, the potential customer has the choice of which action to take. Due to the many selection options, increased interactions take place. Such call-to-actions can be, for example, “Subscribe to newsletter”, “Register for webinar”, or “Get demo”.
Dynamic Ads (Follower Ads, Spotlight Ads, Content Ads, and Job Ads) can be used to target users personally. Ads are individualized to the user based on LinkedIn profile data by addressing them by name and displaying their profile picture. Dynamic Ads appear on LinkedIn in the right sidebar.
LinkedIn Advertising: Example for Dynamic Ads
Text Ads are small ads with a headline, a short ad text and a small image. They are also located in the right sidebar next to the newsfeed in the desktop view and are similar to Dynamic Ads. Unlike these, however, Text Ads cannot be personalized. Text Ads are billed through PPC (pay per click) bids or CPM (cost per impression) bids.
Despite the aforementioned potential and diverse opportunities, there are also disadvantageous factors, which is why the integration of LinkedIn into the marketing mix is not equally suitable for every company.
While it is possible to run LinkedIn Ads locally, the radius is very imprecise. In addition, many small cities are not available for selection. This problem highlights the need for our ad localization product. With the help of LocalUp, it is possible to precisely localize your ads to a location or radius that is accurate to the mile. We currently offer this service primarily for ads on Facebook, Instagram and Google.
When comparing the costs of an ad on LinkedIn with an ad on Facebook as an example, clear differences can be seen. The advertising costs on LinkedIn are comparatively higher. Although the target group on the business network is all the more high-quality for it, the target group on Facebook can also be determined very precisely if LocalUp is involved.
(B2B) companies should generally not make the mistake of focusing exclusively on advertising measures to increase their sales with LinkedIn. The algorithm usually favors content from people, not from the company site itself. Therefore, it is important to take a holistic approach to the business network and complement the advertising strategy with corporate influencer content and social selling.
Since LinkedIn specializes in jobs and careers, its user base is different from other social networks. For the most part, people who want to network professionally stay on LinkedIn. So it’s “all about business!” This means that an ad can never completely miss the target group (as is possible on Facebook, for example).
If you as a company know your target group exactly, you can play out the potential of LinkedIn Advertising optimally, because the ads can be perfectly tailored to the needs of the target group and are therefore more promising. However, you should supplement the ads with other marketing measures, since a holistic strategy is most strongly considered by the algorithm.
In addition, on LinkedIn you benefit from a wide range of lead generation, tracking and analysis tools, which gives you a good overview of the ads and audiences. LinkedIn advertising is therefore very exciting for companies and is particularly convincing due to the precise target group targeting.
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