Since its inception, the social media landscape continues to grow with a rapid pace, providing a platform to connect better and share images, career interest, information and videos. LinkedIn, one of the profound social media platforms, has been getting recognition for its lineage of successful marketing solutions. Recently, it has been acquired by Microsoft and this has opened up many new opportunities to be explored in professional networking. LinkedIn boasts of a user base of over 400 million professionals present across 200 countries. Interestingly, its membership grows by two new signups every second.
However, it is overlooked by marketers and planners may be due to some misconceptions such as:
- Facebook and Twitter has more audience than LinkedIn.
- LinkedIn is mainly for professional networking.
- LinkedIn is used mostly by mid to top profile professionals.
Although this site has professional profiles with relevant information but it also provides self-service ad platform, empowers you to customize your own budget for ad campaigns. You can set your campaign cost in two ways:
- Set the maximum budget limit, you wish to spend per day.
- You can also choose for bidding options which is available in two types, one is Pay-per-click and second is pay-per-1000 impression. For an example, Rs. 10 per click, you have specified the amount you will give on pay-per-click and you can specify the cost for showing your ad 1000 times.
Features in LinkedIn
With a plethora of professionals and their relevant information, LinkedIn advertisement provides potential features to its marketers and planners to launch an ad in minutes.
Professional audience – At LinkedIn social media website, you can connect with the worlds largest number of professional audience and make your ad promotion to targeted audience. For an example, if you are providing a certification in legal services then you can target your ad to legal assistant professionals by filtering the job profiles.
Precision B2B target – Being a highly targeted communication channel, LinkedIn offers marketing planners a great opportunity to target a very precise audience. It gives the ability to target by
- Location
- Job title and function
- Industry and company size
- Skills and interest
- Management level: bottom, medium and top
LinkedIn Ad Formats
You can reach your audience in LinkedIn with its two standard ad formats – Sponsored content and Text & image ads.
Sponsored content: With this ad format you can share, about your companys latest update, upcoming event or conference, with the right audience using comprehensive targeting options. It gives you an opportunity to send your intended message across various platforms including tablet, mobile and computer. For using sponsored content, make sure that you have company or showcase page to interact with your customers.
Text & image ads: This kind of ad format allows you to create your own ad and launch it hassle-free without any long-term commitment and contract. It also allows you to pay for only that ad which works or shows results with provided options of per click and per impression.
How to Create an Ad on LinkedIn
It will take few minutes to create an ad on LinkedIn by following these simple steps:
Before creating an ad, you are requested to have the following:
- LinkedIn profile or account
- Basic understanding of your target audience
- Ad copy
- Video (optional)
- Go to LinkedIn ads website page.
- After getting started, the page will lead you to select the ad formats (sponsored content, and text and images) that suits you most to achieve your marketing goals.
- After choosing the ad format, you will be directed to create your ad where you are required to fill following details: Campaign Name, Ad Language, Media Type, Ad Destination, Ad Design and Ad Variations.
- Completing the ad, LinkedIn allows you to target your audience by location, job title, category, function and more precise filters. This is where you can leverage your ad campaign.
- The next step will be your pricing model as LinkedIn gives you two options to choose: pay-per-click and pay-per 1000 impression. Based on marketing facts, it came out that LinkedIn ads give more results when used for a narrow reach effort. For an example, if I am running 5 ads for a product based on customers differences and target 2000 customers in each ad then I would have a highly targeted audience.
- The final process is to submit your ad and launch it with a click on Launch Campaign. As LinkedIn reviews almost all ads manually, so your campaign will be online after it goes through a quick review process.
Thus, leveraging LinkedIn ads, you can drive your business to a newer height and accomplish your marketing goals with the right audience and budget.