LinkedIn Ads has offered advertisers a chance to put content in front of their target audience on the platform for close to 20 years now. From those humble beginnings in 2003, LinkedIn has expanded to reach over 1 billion active users in 200 countries. In the US alone, LinkedIn reaches over 221M users or roughly 66% of the population. Look deeper and you will find that 60% of their user base is within the 25-34 demographic. As this demo continues to age and fill key decision-maker roles within businesses of all sizes, LinkedIn will become an increasingly important channel for B2B marketers.
As such, it’s not surprising to find that 97% of B2B marketers are using LinkedIn for content marketing, and 78% are using LinkedIn for paid ads. There are obvious benefits like robust user profiles that include company names, job titles, interests, skills, etc. These data points allow marketers to target their audience with a level of accuracy not available on many platforms – this is particularly attractive to B2B marketers where oftentimes it’s like trying to find the proverbial ‘needle in the haystack’.
Defining a target audience and developing engaging messaging/content are of utmost importance. Let’s break down some of the most common targeting and messaging strategies, then look at what works.
Targeting Best Practices
- Job Titles: Granular targeting that limits reach to a specific role. This can significantly reduce the size of the audience, but has the benefit of allowing for hyper-relevant messaging.
- Job Function: Broad targeting that buckets job titles into industry-specific groups. For example, CMO, VP or marketing, marketing director, etc. would all be bucketed into ‘Marketing’.
- Company Names: Reach users that are currently working at the company specified. Great for account-based marketing where efforts need to be focused on specific companies.
- Company Size: Target companies based on number of employees. Ranges from 0-10 employees at the low end to 10,000+ at the high end. Similar to company names, this is great for account-based marketing where the target audience is small, mid, or enterprise level businesses.
- Member Interests: User-defined interests that include broad categories. These are less granular, but work well when layered on top of other segments.
- Member Skills: Similar to interests, these are also user-defined. Skills often relate to the user’s job experience and can be closely related to the type of work a user was responsible for in their role.
- Member Groups: User-created communities that share a common interest. Typically, groups are very niche, but can be a very effective way to reach highly active users with specific interests.
While these are some of the most popular, there are many additional segments including demographics and education. LinkedIn provides a full list of targeting segments that I highly recommend checking out.
B2B marketing, especially on a social platform like LinkedIn, requires high quality content for two prevalent reasons. Demanding schedules, especially with decision-makers, means there is no time to be wasted on content that doesn’t provide value. Also, business purchase decisions carry the additional burden of someone’s reputation – jobs can be lost or reputations sullied over products or services that don’t meet the expectations of leadership. It’s no surprise that upwards of 60% of deals in the pipeline are lost to ‘no decision’.
How you frame your product or service to a cold audience matters.
Content Best Practices
- Report/Whitepaper: The most popular form of promotion on LinkedIn due to its high value and ability to capture user information – these are usually gated to require a least an email submission in exchange for access to the content. This is a good mid-funnel tactic for a cold audience that shares some interest.
- Webinar: Similar to reports, webinars offer users an opportunity to gain valuable information in a digestible format – video. Most content is gated to capture user data. This is a good prospecting tactic to an audience with related interests.
- Article/Blog: Typically focused on a trending industry topic, this can be a good way to introduce a cold audience to the problem your product or service solves. These work particularly well in prospecting campaigns.
- Promotional Landing Page: Focused on a product or service, this acts as a sale-focused page providing specific details about the benefits, attributes, and unique features of said product or service. These work best in retargeting campaigns.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but rather some content types that work well at different stages of the purchase funnel. However, that’s not the whole puzzle. Figuring out what placements to use to deliver this content is key.
Ad Types
- Image/Video Ads: Similar to what you would run on Facebook or Instagram, these placements appear in a user’s feed and include an image (square, rectangle, or portrait) or video, primary text above, and a headline below. These are the most popular placements on the platform.
- Text Ads: Short text-only ads that appear in the top right corner of the desktop platform. These placements drive low click-through rates, as they are not on the side of the page, but typically only run a $1 CPM.
- Spotlight Ad: Text-based ads that incorporate slightly longer character limits than text ads. The main difference being spotlight ads can incorporate the user’s profile pic next to your brand logo, helping draw attention to the placement. These ads also only deliver on desktop and run low CPMs averaging $2-4.
- Document Ad: Similar to an image ad in that this serves in a user’s feed, downloadable content is required as this ad type looks to capture user data in exchange for a document download (typically a report or whitepaper). This ad type does well to differentiate from organic posts in the feed which helps with ad engagement. Furthermore, the use of an in-platform lead form allows for a more seamless user experience, and typically higher conversion rates.
- Conversation Ad: In-message ad format that populates in a user’s inbox with some value proposition (e.g. ‘read more about’, ‘you might be interested in’). While the in-message ad is not new, conversation ads take this concept one step further by allowing the advertiser to create several prompted responses which allow the user to provide feedback. This is great if you want to gauge the interest of your audience for a particular topic that may not drive conversions.
But where do you start? While these placements can work at any stage of the purchase funnel, there are best practices when leveraging which placements to run and with what content.
How to get leads on LinkedIn Ads
Due to the high cost of LinkedIn ad inventory, it’s recommended to start with the most efficient means of capturing an audience. On most social media platforms, this means running video ads using a reach/awareness objective. Not only can you tell a richer story, but you can track the duration of the video watched to create audiences with varying levels of engagement.
What you want to avoid is running single image ads to a cold audience. Sure you may drive some view-through conversions, but this is a cost inefficient way to generate awareness. This is because LinkedIn gives you three optimization options:
- Impressions (CPM): Pay per impression and set the max you are willing to pay for 1,000 impressions with the aim to deliver as many impressions as possible.
- Traffic (CPC): Pay per click and set the max you are willing to pay for one click. Ads reach users that are most likely to click.
- Website Conversions (CPC): Pay per click and bid manually or automated. Ads are targeted using interest and behavior signals to find users that are most likely to take a specific action on your site.
Impression-based optimization works to impressions wherever your audience is browsing. We’ll get back to what advantage this holds.
Click-based optimization will find as many clicks as possible, typically increasing your click-through rate. Great, right? Not when you’re paying per click. Traffic and website conversion optimization are essentially the same, unless you choose automated bidding (only available with website conversions). The drawback is that it starts by bidding very aggressively, and can blow through your budget very quickly. At this rate, it’s harder to drive the conversions needed to properly optimize your campaign, so I only recommended using it with a daily budget of $250 or more.
Impression-based optimization holds the unique benefit of not prioritizing a device type, as its goal is to drive as many impressions as possible. This means that a portion of impression delivery is allocated to desktop users. Here we can see the impression distribution from two campaigns that ran on impression optimization.
Impressions by Device Type
Image Ad Campaign 1 (CPM optimized)
Image Ad Campaign 2 (CPM optimized)
Not very efficient when you compare to CPMs on platforms like Google or Facebook. When compared to a campaign that ran with a click-optimized model, we can see the difference in prioritization within LinkedIn’s ad engine.
Image Ad Campaign 1 (CPC optimized)
Image Ad Campaign 2 (CPC optimized)
Click-optimized campaigns favor mobile traffic as it generates higher click-through rates. This would be great if we saw similar onsite engagement from mobile and desktop traffic. That however is not the case.
Looking at two separate client accounts. We can see the disparity in traffic quality from mobile vs desktop.
Site Engagement by Device Type
Client 1
Client 2
For any campaign trying to drive leads or conversions, you will want to take steps to minimize mobile traffic at the top of the funnel. Fortunately, there are some placements that take advantage of LinkedIn’s desktop platform.
Namely, Spotlight Ads and Text Ads. Both formats are desktop-exclusive placements meaning you can eliminate the risk of overdelivering on mobile devices altogether. For this reason, it’s recommended to incorporate both ad units into prospecting efforts whenever possible.
Keep in mind, the click-through rate with these placements is very low, roughly equivalent to a display ad. You’ll also notice that the text ad cost per click can get pricey.
Text Ads & Spotlight Ads Performance
For this reason, you will need to keep your audience size broad or risk not spending through your budget. I’ve found audiences ranging from 500K – 1M users work well. You should hit a high frequency (5+/month), but don’t worry. Even though the placement has good visibility, most users aren’t going to see and process the ad each time an impression is served. Don’t worry, using a CPC bid model minimizes the impact of wasted impressions.
Another option is not sending traffic off of LinkedIn. Originally, a lead gen form could be attached to a single image ad, but has more recently been replaced by Document Ads. Instead of a single image, users can now preview a specified number of pages of the PDF before deciding if they want to submit the lead form.
This means that no landing page or creative is required, a lead gen form and a PDF are all that is required. In a world where approvals can take weeks if not months, this is invaluable to quick and efficient testing.
Similarly, we can see the difference between quality of traffic from mobile and desktop. There is no option to remove mobile traffic from targeting, but careful consideration of ad placements can help boost desktop traffic.
Document Ad Performance
A few additional considerations when setting up a campaign:
LinkedIn Audience Network is a collection of 3rd party sites that LinkedIn ads serve on via display placements. I recommend including this targeting unless you are running an awareness campaign, or if your landing page is strong.
This is because traffic from the audience network is much more cost-effective than on LinkedIn as there is more available inventory. This means your cost per click will look very good, but little action on site will be taken.
Ad Delivery by Source
Audience Expansion is a feature that allows you to reach outside of your designated audience to users with similar attributes. For example, you may target marketing managers explicitly, but with audience expansion, ads could be served to marketing directors or VPs of marketing.
It’s recommended to keep this setting off on any campaign that uses company, job, or interest targeting. This will allow you to keep better control over audience and messaging testing.
However, in the case of retargeting or any list based audience, this feature can be very useful as it allows your campaigns to reach additional users which can improve efficiency. Think retargeting audiences with less than 10,000 users.
URL tracking parameters are a very recent development in LinkedIn Ads. This has been table steaks in Google Ads and Meta Ads for the better part of the last decade, but has only recently been added to LinkedIn Ads. This means that UTM parameters can be assigned at the campaign level instead of the ad level (about time!).
Whether you’re using LinkedIn for lead generation or reach and awareness, there is a campaign type and creative execution that can work for you. If you’re struggling, don’t worry. It’s not the most intuitive platform and can take some testing to get working. Please reach out with any questions, or things I might have missed 🙂
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