Linkedin ads: types, formats and settings | Digital marketing for digital dinosaurs.
Let's continue our analysis of activities we can do online and look at what we can do on LInkedin.
Linkedin is a social media for professionals. People use it mostly to search and apply for jobs as well as trying to build their own brand online.
The platform is a lot smaller in terms of penetration compared to FB, YT and IG but still pretty big with 800 millions users.
Why marketers should be interested in such a specific social media platform? It’s simple: the nature of its audience and their usage and attitude towards the platform.
In linkedin you build your brand reputation either by being very active example posting about your achievements, papers, articles or just posting and keeping your resume updated.
In fact one could argue that information people post about themselves on linkedin are the most updated and truthful. Why? People love to update their professional life and achievements in a platform that most of the time is used for recruitment purposes.
It comes by consequence that, given information tend to be accurate, Linkedin becomes a great place where to precisely target people based on their profession, occupation levels, indirectly wealth and power.
As of late 2021, the platform could claim to reach 65 million decision-makers.
Undoubtedly this is a platform to reach professionals and for B2B more than B2C, still opens opportunities to possible cross marketing activities, for example what about using it to sell car accessories for luxury car owners?
Having said this, advertising on Linkedin is a lot more expensive than FB or YT and it should be carefully planned.As usual the platform starts from setting objectives for which we should be familiar by now:
Awareness, Consideration and Conversion
Once decided the type of objectives, we can dig down in targeting opportunities that, as said is arguably the most important reason why advertise here. At a basic level you can segment by
Location
Job title
Company Name
Industry
Degree
Professional interests
If you become creative with the tool, you can use it to be even more precise (think about targeting those who have just been promoted for example)
In terms of type of ads Likedin offer a variety of possible formats:
Sponsored Content also known as native ads, show up your audiences’ LinkedIn feed, regardless of whether they’re scrolling on mobile or their desktop.
LinkedIn labels these ads as “promoted” to distinguish them from regular content. When advertising with Sponsored Content, you can go with LinkedIn carousel ads, single image ads or video ads.
Sponsored Messaging (previously known as Sponsored InMail) lets you directly advertise to LinkedIn members in their inbox. Note that there’s a cap to the number of times you can reach the same person. It’s a more intrusive but more personalised format
Text Ads show up along the top and right-hand side of LinkedIn’s desktop feed and are a good option if you’re looking to build strong leads with a professional demographic.
Dynamic Ad use personal details, such as target photo, employer’s name and job title, as part of the creative therefore they make the communication very direct and personal. It is very similar to when we receive an email with the opening with our first name
Those the main types of ads that can be executed in different formats according to purposes; the most used are:
video, photo and carousel ads
text ads
job search ads
lead generation ads
LINKEDIN KPI’s Before talking about KPI we should think about why advertisers invest Linkedin.
When using the platform, most marketers’ goals tend to cluster into two categories:
1. they want to build their (own) Brand through Thought Leadership
2. they want to get prospects through Lead Generation
With this in mind, most relevant KPI for the platform are
Page followers growth and their demographics
Impression and reach: how many people have actually seen our ads and how many times each
Engagement rate: The number of clicks, likes, shares, comments, company follows, and downloads are all indicators of audience engagement.
CTR click through rate: While engagements, such as shares and comments, is a sign that your audience is responding to your content, you ultimately want them to take the next step and click through to find out more.
For lead generation campaigns, consider tracking these metrics:
Volume of qualified leads: how many leads your campaign gets and how it stands against other campaigns you ran previously
Cost per lead (CPL) or cost per conversion in general: how much did it cost to acquire that lead or the cost for performing that specific action, whichever you planned for
Conversion rate: this is available for paid ads but you need to add the LinkedIn Insight Tag to your website.
LinkedIn can then track how many of the people who clicked your ad performed the action you intended. This might be making a purchase, but it might also be filling out your contact form, starting a free trial, or downloading a lead magnet.
Better yet, LinkedIn’s analytics can track the people who viewed the ad and then later went to your website and performed the intended action – even if they didn’t click through from the ad itself.
Sources: above material is mainly taken from Linkedin, I will post a series of links to useful sources towards the end of the series of those blog posts.
For now if you want to learn more about Linkedin ads I suggest you to study here
Hope you're enjoying those posts, please get in touch!
Max
