In September LinkedIn released its Spotlight on Best Practices: An Insider’s Guide to Effective LinkedIn Campaigns. The guide is full of great LinkedIn campaign best practices, examples of successful campaigns and tips on how to best leverage LinkedIn – primarily for B2B companies.
It is quite a long report, so here are 3 LinkedIn Advertising Tips that we found in the guide:
1) Content is Key
LinkedIn is quickly becoming the place where professionals go to consume high-quality content related to their field, industry or sector. These professionals are consuming longer form pieces of content like white-papers, guides and studies. In the report they say that there is 15 times more pieces of content being published than job postings on the network. Just make sure you know what the the content marketing objective is for what you’re publishing. Are you trying to build brand awareness, generate leads or show thought leadership?
2) Targeting Correctly Matters
Again, its always best to begin with the end in mind – so ask yourself; what’s my campaign goal? Are you trying to reach a lot of people and aren’t as worried about click-throughs and conversions or are you targeting a smaller, more niche, group that will be more likely to engage and respond to your content? Your answer to this question will inform what LinkedIn tools to take advantage of. For example, if your goal is to reach a lot of people, then you should consider using the Audience Expansion Tool – it works a lot like Facebook’s Look-Alike Audiences. If you want to reach more niche audiences then you can use the following targeting capabilities that LinkedIn offers:
- Rich demographic data from profiles (Title, Company, Industry, Seniority, etc.)
- Interest-based targeting (e.g., Group membership, skills, etc.)
- Member Persona targeting. These audiences are unique to LinkedIn: (Job Searchers, Opinion Leaders, Business Travelers, and more.)
- Integration of your 1st-party audience data (e.g., targeted account lists to support Account Based Marketing) to identify these high-value audiences on LinkedIn.
3) Personalize, Test & Improve
Now that you know marketing objective of the awesome content you’re publishing and know your campaign goal and have targeted appropriately – you can take it a step further and use direct sponsored content to deliver personalized ads. Here is an example that was in the guide:
Here LinkedIn took the same content and tested to see if they could improve engagement with personalized direct sponsored content to Tech and Finance leaders. The results were astounding, the tech creative drove a 185% higher engagement rate than the generic version.
So, there you have it – 3 LinkedIn advertising tips that we gleaned from the Spotlight on Best Practices: An Insider’s Guide to Effective LinkedIn Campaigns. If you get a chance download it and read the full guide – its well worth it.
