LinkedIn Marketing for Business

LinkedIn as a social network is seen as a trustworthy source with strictly professional profiles, making it particularly valuable for B2B marketing. Its trustworthy nature makes it a great opportunity for marketing through sponsored content, sponsored inmail and ads. These ads include text ads, dynamic ads and display ads.

We can aim to achieve three different things:

• Raise awareness with native ads to let people know about your brand.
• Reach people interested in your type of business through sponsored content.
• Build relationships by letting people know about upcoming events.
• Drive leads using complex targeting to get the right people to your website.

Targeting

LinkedIn offers comprehensive targeting options, making it a preferred platform for B2B advertising over Facebook and Twitter. This helps in creating a detailed demographic of people that you want to target.

Targeting options include:

• Location
• Company name
• Company industry
• Company size
• Job title
• Job function
• Job seniority
• Member schools
• Fields of study
• Degrees
• Member skills
• Member groups
• Member gender
• Member age

Conversion tracking

This allows you to see how many leads you get from your campaigns. It works in a similar way to PPC tracking, allowing you to use UTM parameters with your URLs and Google Analytics. This tracks website conversions tied to Sponsored Content or Text Ads campaigns. This helps you to:

• Understand advertising ROI.
• Measure the true value from advertising on LinkedIn on desktop and mobile, including return on ad spend, cost per conversion, and conversion rate.
• Optimize the results to improve each campaign.

Sponsored updates

What you can do with Sponsored Content:

• Show company updates to more people and attract new followers.
• Reach just the right audience with comprehensive targeting options.
• Get messages out on every device: desktop, tablet, and mobile.
• Set budgets and choose from cost per click, or cost per impression options.
• Use Direct Sponsored Content to easily test messaging.
• Track the number of leads from your ads on LinkedIn with conversion tracking.

With sponsored content you can either create a new update to sponsor, or sponsor an existing update.  These show in your newsfeed as ‘normal’ updates, just with the word ‘sponsored’ in pale grey underneath the company title. An example is outlined in red below.

Sponsored InMail

These are described as highly targeted messages to people that matter most to your business, delivered to their LinkedIn inboxes. A Sponsored InMail only gets delivered when members are active on LinkedIn. This allows you to:

• Reach active members through tailored messages with 100% deliverability
• Keep key target audiences engaged across desktop and mobile
• Drive conversions with more personalized messages

See the below example of how sponsored InMail appears:

Text ads

These are designed to drive new customers to your business, with a pay per click (PPC) advertising platform.

What you can do with Text Ads:

• Choose the professional audience you want to reach.
• Easily create your own ads.
• Set your own budget – without contracts or long-term commitments. This includes bids for CPCs and daily budgets.
• Track the number of leads you're getting from your ads on LinkedIn with conversion tracking.

Dynamic ads

These are well suited to growing your company following. These allow you to target with a highly relevant and customizable creative. You’ll need to create your ad copy, choose your call to action (CTA) and leverage dynamically generated images from LinkedIn member profiles.

Display ads

These are very similar to display ads on PPC. These are best for raising awareness of the brand, instead of driving business.

The cost of LinkedIn marketing

It seems that LinkedIn advertising costs more per click when compared to Facebook and Twitter – the exact cost per click will vary depending on the target audience you’re aiming to reach. Facebook and Twitter are also generally more expensive than advertising on Google. 

For more information on how we can manage your business's LinkedIn profile, please get in touch!