Now most Business-to-Business (B2B) marketers know that there is a huge opportunity on LinkedIn right now and a lot of people are not taking advantage of it. In this piece, we’ll show you how to set the stage and do your targeting for LinkedIn ads to begin bringing in some leads.
Advertising on LinkedIn
Now there are two types of advertising with LinkedIn – sponsored ads and text ads which appear in different places throughout the website. To start advertising simply look for the “Business Services” tab and click on “Advertise”. Sign in and click on “Manage Ads” and you can then start using LinkedIn to advertise your business.
To begin, you’d want to click on “create campaign” located on the upper right side of the screen which brings you the 2 ads options mentioned previously. Sponsored updates resemble posts or a piece of content while text ads are just that; a few lines of text advertising your business. Choose one depending on the type of marketing that you’re doing. If you want to be recognised as an authority in your market then the sponsored updates will be more useful for you. On the other hand, if you’re trying to drive people from the text ads and onto your landing page to download a report, arrange a consultation or something of that nature then text ads might be better suited for you.
We recommend testing both, depending on the type of offer you have. Fortunately, LinkedIn gives you the option to “Test Ads” simply click on the option and specify a name and language for your campaign. This is where it gets interesting; LinkedIn offers some of the best targeting options for social network advertising. You can target an audience based on location, company name, industry and job title as well as some basic demographics like age and gender. So it’s entirely possible to target people engaged in a specific profession or working for reputable companies like say, Telstra and offer them a job! Joking of course, but this gives you an idea how powerful these ads could be.
As you go through the different options you’ll notice the number of the estimated audience on the right begins to drop, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s only natural as you start to narrow down your audience to come up with a targeted list of people to market your business to with higher chances of conversions. Say you want to target CEOs, founders or managers of businesses based in Australia with 50 to 10,000 or more employees; it’s certainly possible with LinkedIn ads.
It’s a good idea to be as specific as possible when setting up your LinkedIn ads. Make good use of overlays which allows you to further dissect your target audience based on age. CEOs aged 35 to 55+ think differently than those who are at a much younger age and are bound to have a more stable business. Also split up your campaigns and target them based on age or gender if only to ensure that you get your ads in front of people that are at least remotely interested in what your business has to offer. Note that how specific or general you are in setting up your target audience will mean the difference between failure and success.
