LinkedIn advertising - how to do it successfully 

(Tailored tips for the USA from an expert with 10 years in the industry)

These tips will help you succeed in LinkedIn advertising and reach the potential customers of your B2B company. I’ve been working as a digital marketing expert for more than 10 years [soon 20 years in marketing], and you’ll get my fresh tips for LinkedIn advertising. 

In this article, I’ll share what you need to know before starting advertising on LinkedIn and what results you can expect. You’ll also get practical tips on the advertising formats and metrics to use.

Let’s jump in and find out more!

How to get started with LinkedIn advertising

Are you interested in starting LinkedIn advertising for your business? You’ve come to the right place; here’s an in-depth guide on what you need to succeed.

Some of the aspects are more technical, while others are on the more creative side. Whichever camp you fall into, you’re sure to gain a lot of fruitful insights as you set out to advertise on this social channel for business professionals.

Setting up a LinkedIn page for your business.

First, you need a LinkedIn page in your company name. You can’t advertise through a personal profile, but you need to create a LinkedIn account through your company page. Fortunately, setting up a page is easy - and you only need to do it once.

Please note that to create a company page, you must have a company email in place. Here is the direct link: https://www.linkedin.com/company/setup/new/ 

The menu takes you through some fairly specific sections. You will probably spend most of your time creating a banner describing your business and an introductory text. Here are few things you should remember:

• Highlight 1-2 main points, rather than all of your company’s services or products
• Focus on what differentiates you from your competitors.
• Use attention-grabbing details (i.e., caption, images, animation etc.) in the cover photo. Here’s an excellent blog post from my colleague Maria: How to create a good banner ad. You can apply the principles easily. 

To make your business page does not look like the abandoned ones, I highly recommend posting content there. A few topical articles about the latest news, or a couple of customer success cases, will kick-start your content production on your new social media channel.

LinkedIn content production should not be mystified too much; it’s enough to be aware of your target audience when producing it.

You can use the same content ideas in advertising. What distinguishes advertised content from non-advertised content in modern times is very blurred. After all, all content is meant to influence the target audience in some way.

Setting up the LinkedIn account

To be able to advertise on LinkedIn, the company you represent must have an advertising account. Through your LinkedIn account, you can manage your ads and pay for the advertising via your preferred payment method. Click here for detailed step-by-step instructions on how to create a LinkedIn advertising account.

To create an advertising account, first, log in to LinkedIn with your personal account. Then click on “Work” at the top and select “Advertise.” A relatively straightforward tutorial will then guide you through the process of setting up an advertising account.

Now that you’ve got the technical stuff pretty much done, you can start thinking about how to start advertising yourself.

When thinking about advertising, it’s worth keeping a close eye on objectives and measurability - perhaps it’s the measurement that primarily differentiates marketing content from more general content. Here are some metrics to monitor when evaluating the effectiveness of your LinkedIn advertising:

LinkedIn metrics in advertising

Audience size 

Your audience size for your advertising message will influence how much return you can expect in terms of, for example, site visitors

Key Results

This indicator shows how well the main objective of your campaign has worked.

Impressions 

A basic term in digital marketing. Impressions are an essential metric for assessing how well your audience has seen your advertising. 

Unfortunately, LinkedIn does not yet provide information on the outreach metric, i.e., how much coverage the ad has had among the target audience. In this respect, we remain partly in the dark about the range of the advertising message.

Average CTR

Stands for average click-through rate. If the purpose of your ad is to drive visitors to your site, i.e., to get as many clicks as possible on your ads, this is an important metric to guide your campaign optimization. 

If, on the other hand, your goal is to get video views for your product demonstration video, for example, this is not a metric to watch much.

Conversions

You can set specific goals for LinkedIn. Please note that you must activate these goals separately for each campaign.

Average CPM

The price at which you have received 1000 ad impressions. If you have comparative data for Google Display advertising, for example, the figures you see may be depressing (due to their many times the larger size). 

However, the CPM metric on LinkedIn is quite complex: if you can reach just the right target audience with your channel, then it’s worth paying for. It all depends on the metrics you choose.

This brings me to a few misconceptions that I want to clarify in the meantime. These are not just about LinkedIn as an advertising channel for businesses rather about digital marketing in general.

It is the ‘shining silver object’ fallacy that people have, whereby every new thing is expected to be a panacea for all ills.

4 misconceptions about LinkedIn advertising

In other words, what LinkedIn won’t fix in your marketing, no matter how much you want it to:

Misconception 1: Make your site a lead magnet. If your site isn’t already bringing in connections, driving more traffic won’t fix it. 

Sorry about this; I know you didn’t necessarily want to hear this unpleasant truth. To get your site up and running for sales, we recommend that you first do a site conversion optimization and think of ways to get your website visitor in touch.

Misconception 2: Create buyers for your products or services from scratch. You must already have an existing customer base that buys your products or services. We can build one through LinkedIn or some other digital channel.

Misconception 3: Other advertising can be stopped once LinkedIn is up and running. Even if it is so easy to concentrate all your marketing efforts on one channel, it’s always best to use multiple digital media to get the best results. 

In addition, before we start advertising, we can’t know at which stage of the buying journey LinkedIn campaign can fortune for us: building initial awareness, remarketing, or encouraging direct contact.

Misconception 4: Makes your product/service easy to buy. If you can’t convince your customers on why to buy your product/service, LinkedIn advertising won’t make it any easier to buy. 

While we can highlight important selling points that may solve customer’s problem, if your customers aren’t familiar with your company, a new communication channel won’t solve your communication problem. 

A little good news, however: paid advertising is one of the most influential and fastest ways to test different versions of your message and gradually find the message(s) that will hook your customer the most.

Targeting LinkedIn advertising

Advertising targeting is one of our specialties, and we spend a lot of time on this. I won’t go too much “under the hood” to confuse you with technical details, but we make extensive use of different data sources and combine them to achieve the best possible targeting.

When you advertise on LinkedIn yourself, I recommend using at least the following targeting methods:

1. Visitors to your site: Retarget visitors who have visited your site. Remind them about your business with a compelling reminder message and speed up the buying journey. 

You may have come to this article through remarketing, or at least you will see our advertising in different channels in the coming days and weeks. Thanks to retargeting. 🤭

2. Industry targeting: This is one of the most exciting targeting tools on LinkedIn, different from other digital channels and social media channels.

You can read more about targeting in social advertising in our excellent article where we discussed the targeting possibilities for Facebook advertising. Surprisingly, most of these targeting methods are also applicable for LinkedIn also, although the campaign efficiency starts to struggle for the smallest audiences due to the platform’s smaller reach. 

LinkedIn advertising - advertising formats for B2B companies

Now I want to focus specifically on advertising formats that are useful for B2B companies. Here are some formats worth testing; I think several of them will work for you too!

1. B2B Business Message in a LinkedIn Inbox: An InMail ad allows you to appear in the inbox of the person you target. This is a high-profile place, and you pay for it accordingly: prices can be up to 10 times that of Facebook advertising. 

However, don’t be intimidated by this, because by targeting carefully we can avoid loss.

2. Boosting LinkedIn page posts for advertising: The best way to convey the hard-won content on a company’s LinkedIn page is to highlight it in advertising. I’ve found excellent results by targeting this form of advertising to visitors who have visited the blog.
3. Lead capture campaign: Do you have a hook to get leads from your website? The same can be done directly in a LinkedIn lead generation campaign without the customer having to leave LinkedIn. This significantly lowers the threshold for contact and can therefore be a very profitable form of advertising.
4. Video ads: Want to create video content and make it known to your audience? LinkedIn offers its own campaign format for this, optimized for displaying video content.

Is there anything I didn’t mention? Is there anything you’d like to add, or did you get any feedback from the article?

And which point I discussed in the article will you fix next? Leave a comment, and let’s enrich this article together!

Want us to tell you how we could help you with your LinkedIn advertising? You can check it out on our services page.

Contact us