Summary: This article is based on the various features of LinkedIn advertising available for the people through which people can promote their brands and institutions. These features are so easy that you might never need any agency to do it for you. So now, you can use these features by your own and promote your brand throughout the world.
LinkedIn, the social networking website purely oriented to business and professional networking is more professional for Business to Business marketing. Being the largest business oriented website, reaching to people becomes very easy through it. LinkedIn in itself holds traffic of more than 300 million people who are constantly engaged in it.
The only reason to market your product or promote a brand through LinkedIn is the marketing solution initiated by it which serves the consumer profile data as a means of targeting within the audience of more than half a billion. It allows you to filter this huge traffic by industry, seniority, company size, geography, gender, age, number of connections and LinkedIn groups.
Here are some insights of the various options given by LinkedIn through which you can promote or market your brand or institution.
Categories of Advertisements and Advertisers
Initially to start with, you need to understand categories in which LinkedIn classifies the advertisements and the advertisers.
LinkedIn categorizes the advertisers into two categories on the basis of the budget of the advertisement. These categories are:
Large Budget Advertisements
These are the advertisements which have a budget of more than Rs. 15 lakhs. In this category, you have three ways to connect your audience with. These are:
- Run-of-Professionals: This is a way where you filter your audience more specifically with their professional status. Here you have an opportunity where you target only the people of a specific class or status; or even by their industries.
- Custom Targets: Here you have custom targets for your advertisements. This means, whatever your product is, you have the option to customize your target audience in various categories and then target your advertisement or brand on them.
- In-Crowd: The In-Crowd advertisement feature lets you target the whole traffic worldwide; that means your advertisement will reach to millions of users using LinkedIn as soon as the ad is displayed on the site.
With these categories, there is another option for your advertisement, which means in which size and form your advertisement would be displayed Here you go. LinkedIn provides four types of placements on its website where your advertisement can be displayed. These placements are:
- Wide Skyscraper: This gives you the whole space measuring 160 x 600 on the website of LinkedIn itself.
- Leader Board: In this, you will get the space measuring 728×90 on all the profiles of LinkedIn.
- Medium Rectangle: This gives you a rectangular space of 300 x 250 on the profile pages of LinkedIn.
- Text Links: These are the small text links of a maximum 60 characters which are displayed as per the clicks by the user.
These are the spaces and types of advertisement provided by LinkedIn if your budget for advertisement exceeds beyond Rs.15 lakh.
Small Budget Advertisements
This is the category where majority of the advertisers fall in. In this, all the advertisements or campaigns have a small budget as low as Rs. 500.
LinkedIn for this type of paid advertisements, has given the following avenues to its advertisers:
Display Ads of LinkedIn
One of the most efficient ways to reach out to the people with your text, images, presentations, webinars or infographics within a limited budget is through the display ads of LinkedIn.
Here you have the option to filter and modify your target audience constantly and directly display your advertisements on their profile.
Targeted Status Updates by LinkedIn
This is a unique feature provided by LinkedIn to all the marketers and company managers to promote their business. In the targeted status updates, LinkedIn offers custom designs and content options. Here, you as a marketer or the company page managers have the access to deliver status updates to a well-defined group of followers to increase the engagement of the people on the profile.
This means that you now have the ability not only to filter your target audience but also to filter your followers on the basis of their seniority, gender, class and a lot of other factors.
This feature of advertisement offered by LinkedIn was first used by Philips. Within a month, they were able to get more than 100% increase in their engagement on their LinkedIn page.
Recommendations Advertisements
Recommendation Advertisement, as the name suggests is an option to advertise your company on LinkedIn by recommending your company or individuals to others.
You can also ask for recommendations of these kind of advertisements from others and select which category of organizations or individuals advertisements you want to see on your profile page on LinkedIn.
Company Pages Status Updates on LinkedIn
For a company to have a regular engagement on their profile, it is necessary for the company to keep its followers or customers regularly updated.
The company page status updates on LinkedIn is a tool provided for the company pages where they can regularly update their followers with the latest news, press releases, new products and other information which is relevant and specific to their industry.
LinkedIn Today
LinkedIn Today is a homepage where people view articles related to the industry they are working in or the companies which they are following.
In order to market or promote your brand or company, you have the option to customize your articles and news feeds according to the industries, connections, networks and areas of interest.
Partner Messages
In this category of advertising, Inmail is the option available for you. With Inmail, you send messages across all of your followers with a guaranteed response.
If you do not get a response from them within seven days of sending your personalized message, you can send the message again and wait for the response. The respondents of these messages can also be customized on the same filters which I have discussed earlier in this post.
Custom Groups
If you think that your articles, feeds and other information is not reaching your target audience or the audience which is interested in it, then the LinkedIn custom groups is always an option left for you.
It works like this. You create your own community and connect with the followers by categorizing them with the all the filters LinkedIn provides you. Then you share your information; whether it be a product release or any changes in your organization and share it with your own community.
This leads to engage the people within the community only and also enables the people to get all the information about your organization on the same page or community.
LinkedIn Polls
As the name suggests, LinkedIn Polls lets you have a review or a feedback from the customers or the people. This helps you in maintaining a good product of your brand and creating a trust factor for your company or organization.