LinkedIn Ads: Effective advertising campaigns for more business success
LinkedIn currently has 1 billion members worldwide and is known as a platform for recruiting and maintaining existing business contacts as well as making new business connections. The network also offers marketers, among others, the opportunity to place highly targeted advertising. Advertisers can align campaigns with goals such as brand awareness, lead generation or interaction rates. LinkedIn is a particularly interesting advertising platform in the B2B environment, as the network has more in-depth user data than other social networks. Advertisers can make use of this wealth of data to address very specific target groups without wastage. To be able to design ads on LinkedIn, you need an account in the Campaign Manager. This is where ad campaigns can be set up and budgets and targets can be defined. Users also receive dynamic, visual reports on campaign performance. Actions generated by the respective campaign are listed, including likes, shared posts, comments and clicks. It is also possible to display demographic categories of LinkedIn members who click on the ads, broken down into account, campaign and ad level. The first step is to define the campaign objective. Here you can choose between awareness, consideration and conversion. The goal determines how the campaign creation will proceed. Next, the targeting criteria must be adjusted. This is how the target group is selected. In addition to demographic characteristics, LinkedIn offers very extensive targeting options – a very big plus for the community: you can choose from 20 different target group-related attribute categories, including
- Company size
- Company name
- Universities visited by members
- Interests of the members
- Groups of members
- Knowledge and skills
- Job title
- Career level
The budget and schedule are then determined. The selected campaign objective determines which bid types can be selected. At the beginning of the campaign, a bid is placed, which is then used to compete in an auction against bids from other marketers who want to reach the same target group. The bid determines how much is to be spent per click, impression or broadcast, and the attractiveness of the selected target group and the specific offer determine the amount required to win the auction. You can choose between manual, target cost and maximum distribution (automated) bid types. Automated bids can be used for all campaign goals and achieve the best results for the given budget. They also save time and are played out in a targeted manner. Target cost bids are associated with predictable costs, have a targeted playout, are time-saving and achieve the best possible results based on set costs per target.Setting a manual bid is suitable for all targets except brand awareness. The specified maximum bids are not exceeded and the bid is not optimized. Daily or total budgets can be set for all bid types. The ad format is then selected based on these default settings.
Ad types on LinkedIn
Sponsored Content
Sponsored ads represent promoted LinkedIn posts. You can choose between different ad formats: Single Image Ads, Video Ads and Carousel Ads. Sponsored content is suitable for addressing the most important target groups and reaching an active target group with native ads across all devices. Sponsored content can also be used to generate leads, increase brand awareness and strengthen important relationships.
Dynamic Ads
Dynamic ads are visually similar to text ads – but with one difference: with dynamic ads, each ad is personalized and adapted to the viewer’s profile. This is done by addressing the user by their own name and displaying their profile picture. Engagement can be increased with three different formats: Follower Ads, Spotlight Ads and Job Ads. Spotlight ads increase website traffic and motivate users to take action, such as registering for an event. Products can also be placed in the spotlight. Personalized ads in the form of job ads increase the number of applicants: these are displayed to top candidates across all devices.
After the campaign is before the campaign
As with other social media advertising measures, it is important to optimize the campaigns. It is therefore advisable to adjust the budget or bids from time to time. With regard to the budget, daily budgets can be set to slow down the campaign. These should be invested in at the beginning. By setting higher daily budgets, more activity and data can be generated. The relevance of ads also has an impact on the budget. These should be constantly adapted to the target group in order to use the budget more effectively over time.
