LinkedIn is an employment-oriented social network that allows individuals and companies to showcase their professional credentials, employment history, and aspirations. According to company reports, LinkedIn currently has 630 million members across 200 countries. Although LinkedIn is less known in the marketing world, compared to the mainstream social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, it presents a few substantial advantages. In this article, Ben Givon looks at the ins and outs of LinkedIn advertising.
Why should you advertise on LinkedIn?
In a nutshell, you should definitely advertise on LinkedIn if your brand appeals to an audience of skilled and educated professionals
A skilled demographic. As a network for young professionals, the LinkedIn audience is characterized by older, more educated, and higher earning individuals compared to other social media platforms.
Occupational targeting variables. Most social media allow advertisers to target audiences based on demographic variables. Some, like Facebook, excel in segmenting their users by behaviors, interests and attitudes. LinkedIn stands out in that it provides marketers the opportunity to target audience through occupational and industry related variable such as job title, seniority in position, sector, company name, company size, skills, and educational attainment.
The unique InMail format. LinkedIn is similar to other social media in offering advertising formats like sponsored posts and sidebar ads. However, it also offers distinct advertising formats. For example, its sponsored InMail, which presents an interesting hybrid between advertisements and email marketing, allows you to send personalized content, promotions, and invites to targeted individuals. Sponsored InMail messages are only delivered to members who are active on the network at the moment, ant it presents impressive click-through rates.
High conversion rates. A study conducted by HubSpot found that LinkedIn ads yielded a 6.1% conversation rate, well above the standard on other social media (e.g., Google Search ads yield 2.58% conversion rate).
How is it done?
To setup an advertisement campaign on LinkedIn, follow these steps by Ben Givon:
- Create a page on LinkedIn for your company and link it to a Campaign Manager account.
- Choose from LinkedIn’s various ad formats and create a corpus of informative and visually appealing ads. It is advisable to initially create several ad variants so that you can track and compare their success.
- Set a target audience using the occupational criteria described above and determine your budget.
- Launch your campaign
- Use your Campaign Manager account to analyze your performance and tweak your ads and audience parameters if need be.
For more detail on setup and best practices, consult LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager guide.
