Social Media

LinkedIn Ads: A Complete Guide For Beginners

Designed to facilitate professional connections, LinkedIn ads can be one of the best platforms in your marketing arsenal – if you know how to use them.

Why should you advertise on LinkedIn? The platform has more than 850 million members, with 40% of visitors sharing a page each week. Check out this article for more data from LinkedIn, including paid engagement stats.

Ready to learn how to advertise on LinkedIn? Let’s go.

LinkedIn Advertising Options: An Overview

LinkedIn used to be very limited with its advertising options, which didn’t give marketers many options to achieve their goals.

But that has changed. LinkedIn appears committed to providing advertisers with the freedom they need to create ads based on their specific goals, specifically one of the following:

  • Brand awareness.
  • Site visits.
  • Engagement.
  • video views.
  • lead generation.
  • Website conversions.
  • Job applicants.

The most frequently used goals with LinkedIn ads are lead generation, job applications, video views, and website visits, but you can use the platform successfully for any of these goals.

Why advertise on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn bills itself as “the world’s largest professional network” with more than 875 million members In more than 200 countries and regions.

And as the only social platform focused solely on B2B communications, it’s the perfect place for that B2B Marketing.

No matter what industry you target, you will find the majority of the major players on LinkedIn.

Most importantly, LinkedIn is a platform where you are more likely to find the actual decision makers you are looking for. Need to locate C-suite executives for a manufacturing company? Linkedin is the place to look.

Are you trying to go after small and medium sized business mortgage brokers? LinkedIn allows you to do that.

Are you looking for a new job in sales and only want candidates with 5+ years of experience? You guessed it, LinkedIn is the place to look.

Depending on the platform private search80% of LinkedIn members influence their organization’s purchasing decisions, have twice the buying power of the average web audience, and are six times more likely to convert.

So again, if you’re not already using it, you need to get on the LinkedIn ads train right away.

How do LinkedIn ads work?

Using LinkedIn ads is a fairly easy process, especially if you already have experience with PPC advertising already.

To get started, sign up for LinkedIn Business Manager. This gives you one place where you can manage all of your ad accounts and pages.

In this step, you can invite team members and partners, set permissions, and add assets.

From there, you just choose a goal (awareness, consideration, or conversions), choose your targeting options (location, attributes, etc.), choose your ad format, and set your budget.

LinkedIn ad types

Depending on the objective you choose, you will get four different types of ads that you can use:

Sponsored Content

Think of this as a promotional flyer. You’re promoting an article or post from your company Page that appears in your LinkedIn feed.

Screenshot from LinkedIn, January 2023

These ads have the highest CPC on average, so proceed with caution and make sure that the content you are promoting is well thought out.

Text ads

These are the very small ads that you may or may not notice on the right sidebar of your LinkedIn feed. Think of Facebook ads circa 2010.

Example of text ads.Screenshot from LinkedIn, January 2023

Apart from the right-hand column, these ads may appear under the People You May Know section. This is where text content can really make or break your ad conversions.

Test out a few different strategies but really get to the point with these ads.

Sponsored by InMail

This is a very fun way to spam someone’s LinkedIn inbox. But, when done right, it can actually convert higher than any of the other LinkedIn advertising options.

Since these ads have to come from a personal profile versus a branded business page, people don’t feel sold out and more so since they can virtually communicate with a company representative.

Example of Sponsored InMail.Screenshot from LinkedIn, January 2023

Just please Don’t copy and paste templates into any of your demographics. Make sure to make every InMail personal.

Video ads

It goes without saying a bit here, but LinkedIn video ads help promote your videos to your ideal target market. You must be creating a lot of video content.

Example of video ads.Screenshot from LinkedIn, January 2023

Test various videos to see what type of video (theme, length, real life/animated) gets you the most conversions.

Need help with ad dimensions and specifications? Here’s all the information you’ll need for each ad type and goal when you start creating ads for LinkedIn:

How to track LinkedIn ads conversions

Sitewide Insight tag

This tag gives you a 411 on actions happening on your website, thanks to your LinkedIn ad.

Like the Facebook pixel, you can pin this tag once and see the incoming data.

It won’t ruin your site’s speed either, but it will allow you to track what’s happening on your website as a result of your LinkedIn advertising.

Bonus: You can also set up retargeting ads on LinkedIn once you have installed the Insight tag and a stable number of site visitors.

event-specific pixel

This type of tracking pixel is created more for the target type of lead generation.

Let’s say you have a form you want someone to fill out from your LinkedIn ad, but you don’t have a thank you page set up or connected.

You can install this code and still have a “conversion event” that gets tracked each time a form is completed.

You can also add conversion tracking to existing campaigns – so don’t be intimidated by those who haven’t set up conversion tracking.

LinkedIn Advertising Best Practices

Now that you know how you can use LinkedIn ads, let’s dive into the nitty-gritty of how to use LinkedIn and discuss some best practices to help you get the best results.

Determine your target audience

To help you identify and pursue targets who are most likely to act, you need to ask a few questions such as:

  • Who is your demographic, more than just male/female, your age/location?
  • Have they worked in the same industry their entire lives?
  • Are they generally from lower management or upper management?
  • Do they keep their jobs for two to four years per position?
  • Do they follow Richard Branson on linkedin?

You should already know the answers to all these questions, and if for some reason you don’t know them, look for the answers.

LinkedIn offers B2B marketers amazing targeting options, but it can only help convert your ads if you really know the professional side of your demographic.

Knowing how they drink their coffee is great for Facebook, but on LinkedIn today, you need to know what they studied in college, even if they did go to college, and identify those relevant factors as targeting options.

Determine your target audience

NB: You can attract much more than just CEOs with ads on LinkedIn. Many companies assume that targeting LinkedIn ads is only good for targeting the big player, but it is not.

Those who are looking for jobs or in lower-level jobs with less experience, even those who have just graduated from high school or college, are ideal targeting options for LinkedIn ads.

Use LinkedIn content suggestions

LinkedIn provides content suggestions for business pages to help guide them on what to write about.

Think outside the box on this topic and use trending topic ideas for your ad titles and descriptions.

The content suggestions are very easy to use, and you can even target those directors and executives that you’ve been piqued.

Simply choose the industry, location, and seniority you’re targeting, and LinkedIn will generate the latest trending topics for those custom filters.

Use LinkedIn content suggestions

Results in:

LinkedIn Ads: A Complete Beginner's Guide

If we just take the first article published in this empirical research, “Layoffs suck. Be less enthusiastic,” we can easily find a few different headline ideas:

  • Tired of dealing with layoffs? So we were until we tried this.
  • Have you been to be a jerk? To lay off people? click here.
  • What we found from the layoffs – click here

If an article is trending, it is because people liked it and engaged with it.

Don’t you want the same people to like and engage with your ad as well? Of course you do.

Create lead gen forms

One of the best reasons to use LinkedIn advertising is that it allows you to generate quality leads with a proven return on investment (ROI).

And the best way to do this is to use the built-in platform General forms of lead.

Available for both message ads and sponsored content, they are Easy to set up It can only be targeted by adding a call-to-action (CTA) to your ad. Once the user clicks on the advertisement, they will see a pre-filled form that already includes their name and relevant information.

When submitting the form, LinkedIn members can be directed to a “Thank you!” Pages that link to your own website, e-book download site, or other destination.

And because marketers love numbers, Lead Gen Forms makes it really easy to measure the impact of campaigns.

Via your campaign manager or third-party platform of choice, you can generate reports on important metrics like cost per lead, form fill rate, and audience information.

If you are in B2B then you must be using LinkedIn Ads

For professional or B2B marketing, there’s nothing quite like LinkedIn.

By providing the flexibility you want in social media advertising, along with a good return on investment, it can help you reach decision makers like never before.

But, like most things related to marketing, you can’t expect miracles to happen overnight. It will probably take some experimentation and fine tuning before you settle on the best approach for your organization’s needs.

Just have some patience and a clear strategy, and you’ll have this powerful social platform reaping its rewards before you know it.


Featured image: ZacoDot/Shutterstock

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