In the dynamic landscape of digital marketing, staying ahead of the curve is paramount. For businesses aiming to reach a professional audience with precision and impact, there is no better platform than LinkedIn. Among its suite of advertising options, LinkedIn Spotlight Ads stand out as a potent tool for driving brand visibility, engagement, and conversions. In this article, we look at the benefits of Spotlight Ads and offer insights on integrating them seamlessly into your marketing strategy to drive results.
What are LinkedIn Spotlight Ads?
Spotlight Ads are a native, desktop-only placement that lives alongside the user’s main feed. This ensures maximum visibility as a user browses through content related to their followers and industry. At its core, Spotlight Ads are simple text placements with a short headline and description. However, the placement can also include the target user’s profile picture next to an image of the advertiser’s logo, which helps draw attention as well as a connection with the user. It’s these details that make Spotlight Ads effective at showcasing offers, events, and expertise.
Examples:
Benefits of Spotlight Ads
Targeted Reach: One of the primary benefits of LinkedIn is its ability to reach a highly targeted audience using 1st party data like user job titles, company names, industry, size, and more. For a full list of targeting, refer to my guide to LinkedIn. This precision targeting ensures that you are reaching individuals that are aligned with your target audience.
Enhanced Visibility: With prominent placement in the user’s feed, Spotlight Ads are much more visible than traditional display or sponsored content. This is because as a user scrolls down the page, the Spotlight Ad continues to follow with the user’s window. This translates to greater brand exposure, especially with your company logo.
Engagement Opportunities: Spotlight Ads offer many ways to engage with your audience including the opportunity to drive page followers, gain visibility for job listings, or promote action on your site. As the main method of engagement is clicks, these ads offer a chance to facilitate deeper connections with your audience driving brand affinity.
Expedited Testing: Gaining an understanding of what content and offers resonate with your target audience is imperative in marketing. Spotlight Ads boast low CPMs and CPCs compared to other placements on LinkedIn which allows for faster testing. These learnings can be taken into other ad types and channels to further test the proof of concept.
Authority Establishment: For brands looking to establish thought leadership and credibility, Spotlight Ads offer a great opportunity to gain visibility with users browsing top news topics on LinkedIn. By showcasing thought-provoking content right below the trending news section in the user’s feed, brands can position themselves around trusted content, further amplifying credibility.
Implementation Guide
To tap into the full potential of Spotlight Ads, it’s imperative to develop a strategic approach tailored to your objective and goal. Ensure that multiple audiences and offers are tested to get the most out of your marketing budget. Here are a few actionable steps to guide you:
Define Clear Objectives: Typically, a strategy that leverages Spotlight Ads will attempt to drive some actionable response whether that’s driving page followers, sign-ups for an event or webinar, or demos of a product or service, to name a few. Whatever your objectives are will determine what ad copy and call to action are used.
Audience Segmentation: Given the robust nature of LinkedIn audience targeting, it is important to consider a few different audience definitions to determine what works best. For example, you may run a campaign targeting exclusively job titles to reach a very specific audience. This could be tested against interests or skills which are typically more broad. The key is to find what works and build off of that.
Ad Copy Execution: As Spotlight Ads are text-based, it is essential to test several variations of ad copy. The headline allows for 70 characters of text while the description is limited to 50 characters. This means that it is important to be as direct as possible. Try to make your offer as bold and upfront as possible.
For example, a client I’ve worked with sells accounting services for a variety of tax purposes. Copy that has worked well looks like:
Headline: Tax season is approaching. File with confidence.
Description: Get a free consultation today.
Integrate Organic Strategy: Align with your organic content strategy for a cohesive brand experience. Highlight trending topics and industry insights to not only build consideration for your products or services but repurpose content created for your organic strategy. This is especially powerful if you can learn what content is working well organically first.
Continuous Optimization: Closely monitor engagement with your Spotlight Ads to determine what ad copy, content, and offers are working best. LinkedIn audience insights can give you a better understanding of the job titles, companies, and industries that are interacting with your content. Just be sure to set up a pixel that tracks your site visitors.
Troubleshooting Guide
It’s worth noting that Spotlight Ads won’t fit into every marketing strategy. With an emphasis on clicks, this format is much more effective when the objective is to drive traffic whether that be to a landing page or company page on LinkedIn. Here are a few considerations to keep in mind when setting up and managing Spotlight Ads:
Optimize for clicks: There are two bidding strategies available for Spotlight ads, impressions and clicks. There are very few situations where impression-based bidding is optimal, and really should only be considered if the ad is able to drive a click-through rate of greater than 0.50%. For context, the benchmark for click-through rate is 0.10%. Click-based bidding means you won’t pay more than the cost per click bid, usually around $5 to $7.
Bidding: Start with a bid below the recommended amount, typically under $5, and monitor impression volume. If you are not receiving many impressions, progressively increase the bid (typically $0.50 at a time) until you are able to spend your daily budget in full. There is no priority placement associated with the bid, so there is no need to bid any higher than needed to deliver your budget in full.
Conversion tracking: LinkedIn does a great job of tracking any in-platform actions – think things like page follows or clicks to a landing page. To gain the most insight, place pixels (conversion tags) on your site that track things like page views (to analyze the quality of traffic), button clicks (to analyze engagement), and form fills or purchases (to analyze return on investment).
Monitor onsite engagement: The main difference between Spotlight Ads and the other LinkedIn ad formats (single image ads, document ads, in-message ads, etc.) is that Spotlight Ads only run on the desktop platform. This means that the quality of traffic can be far superior to any of the aforementioned placements that also run on mobile devices. Utilize analytics software to compare how long users spend on your site, the number of pages viewed, etc.
Conclusion
LinkedIn Spotlight Ads represent an underutilized placement on a platform that is notoriously expensive for advertisers. This means that it’s possible to reach your target audience for a fraction of the cost compared to other ad formats.
By adopting a strategic approach and the best practices outlined above, brands can take advantage of precise targeting, visibility, and engagement on one of the premier professional platforms. Test Spotlight Ads in your marketing strategy and see how results compare to historical campaigns.