As a social network businesses can advertise on, LinkedIn stands apart for one key group: B2B advertisers. No other social network is can better results for businesses reaching out to each other than LinkedIn. No other one has as many professional companies and groups on it looking to hire both employees and service-providers.
Like with all social networks however, how LinkedIn manages ads is unique. Companies need to do plenty of research, maintenance, and dedicated improvement to their LinkedIn ad campaigns to get good results. That’s where Harris Web Works comes in, helping on all three of those fronts and more.
Our years of experience in helping businesses advertise online will help any B2B business find their best options for using LinkedIn ads. We can cover all the bases from writing effective ad copy, making sure they convert first-time viewers to actual customers, and most important, planning and executing a strategy that tailors your company’s strengths to what the LinkedIn ad network offers.
We’ll also take into account your resources, goals, and timeframe for getting results. This way we can get the most positive results from your campaign as possible, from this and creating different ads for each campaign and measuring which ones worked the best.
Important Steps for making LinkedIn ads
First, let’s break down the basic process everyone goes through for advertising on LinkedIn.
Create the key components
All ads on LinkedIn have five parts:
- A headline with up to 25 text characters
- A description with up to 75 text characters
- Your company name
- An 50×50 pixel image
- Your website or LinkedIn page URL
All of these are combined into a small ad usually displayed on the right side of the screen. Popular ads are sometimes placed higher on the page, centered right below the navigation menu – but these only include the headline and URL, nothing else.
Narrow down your audience
Similar to Facebook ads, LinkedIn gives businesses lots of data to narrow down who they target. But unlike Facebook, which offers data on people’s lifestyles, LinkedIn focuses on companies’ business data. This lets ads be targeted on different parameters such as:
- Job titles or functions
- Industry name
- Company names and sizes
- Related LinkedIn groups
Decide how to pay
There are two different ways to pay for LinkedIn advertising: Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Impression (CPM).
CPC ads mean that businesses pay whenever an ad is clicked, and CPM means they pay whenever an ad is seen by a user. Because ads are seen much more than they’re clicked, businesses pay for every 1000 impressions, or times their ad is seen. CPC ads, meanwhile, charge for every individual click on their ads.
Another big difference is that for CPC, businesses don’t pay a set price for every click. Instead they bid on the prices, setting a maximum amount they want to pay for each click. On every page, ads with higher bids are more likely to be shown. This means ads targeting a popular audience will need to pay more in order to stand out.
Obstacles in a LinkedIn ad campaign
The above steps are simple enough, but in order to get the most out of Linked ads businesses need to answer several tough questions. They all concern beating the competition so their ads shine above and capture the most attention. Some of the biggest ones are:
- How will your ad copy get peoples’ attention? With CPC ads, which are the most popular for people using LinkedIn ads, the bidding system can create heavy competition. With so many other companies jostling to get noticed by future clients, how can you win with your limited space? Most focus should go towards the ad description, making sure it has a strong call-to-action, highlighting the company’s unique value to others, and having a small sense of urgency as well.
- How will you narrow down your target audience? This raises the classic advertising dilemma of how far to cast your net. Do you aim for a smaller group that’s more likely to be interested, or a larger one to try and get more leads and results? Balancing these two is a constant question to answer for businesses, especially since their budget, timetable, and other resources will affect what they do.
- Will you try many different kinds of ads? LinkedIn lets companies run several different ads for each campaign, with different images and text. This lets them see which ones get the most results and adjust their strategy accordingly. However, it also requires a lot more work of planning more ads, creating them, and analyzing how to change what they’re doing based on the results. It’s a tougher option but is vital to improving ads over time.
- What types of ads will you chose? Which one greatly affects how you’ll pay. While CPC is the most common, the bidding price for ads will vary depending on how many other businesses are sending similar ads. When they take into account their budget, goals, and timetable, businesses may have a harder time choosing between CPC and CPM.