5/09/2013

5 LinkedIn Advertising Best Practices

5 LinkedIn Advertising Best Practices:

from B2B Marketing and Lead Generation | Optify 
scratch-headLinkedIn advertising has left a lot of digital marketers scratching their heads.
These brave marketers followed the general rules of PPC and thought they were good to go, but instead they found themselves burning through their budgets at a rate that they had not seen since the early days of advertising on Twitter. Those lucky enough to not waste tons of budget seemed to be unable to get their ads displaying with any sort of regularity. Sound familiar?
I was in the same boat, but through trial and error I’ve been able to determine some best practices for Linkedin advertising.

1. Test, test, and retest


The reason I’m able to write this blog post is because I never gave up. I tested and retested every element of my campaigns. LinkedIn is a developed platform and as such it gives you — the marketer — the ability to sufficiently test your campaigns. To be exact, LinkedIn allows 15 ads per campaign, which translates to 15 tries to dial in your ad.
I shouldn’t have to explain the importance of testing — there isn’t a blog post out there that doesn’t stress this fundamental component of marketing. To our benefit, LinkedIn will take your best performing ads and show them most frequently, so get on it. It’s not just the language that is important, but the combination of language, call-to-action and catchy image working together that will result in the right clicks. So test different combinations and retire your poor performers so that you can try new ads regularly.

2. Hyper-Targeting

Everyone wants to talk about hyper-targeting these days. It’s great for smaller businesses targeting their ideal customers, but it’ll result in low click volume and low performing ads that won’t be served. Remember, you’re not the only brand running ads targeting your ideal audience. Instead of being hyper-targeted, find a wider audience in the 50-500k range. This will result in your target audience actually being served regularly and it’ll also allow you to hit your goals.

3. Provide substance

Don’t just serve an ad, provide value and substance. Make your ad copy compelling enough that people actually want to click on it.
Your target audience gets served ads all day every day, so if you want the clicks, you’ve gotta earn them. What does your target audience value, what pain points can you solve, what can you teach them? Stop thinking about yourself for a minute and ask yourself, “What does my audience care about?”
Once you know what that pain point is, tell your audience in plain language how you can help them solve it. When you’re finished constructing your ad, ask yourself, “Would I click on this? Is it actually interesting, fun, valuable?” If the answer is no, then start over.

4. Price for goals, not for suggested range

Success on LinkedIn requires that the advertiser buy at the high end of a suggested range in order to gain visibility in competitive areas. Going in at the minimum results in seriously poor performance (much more than on other ad platforms). A higher spend combined with clicks will result in high frequency and will allow you to hit your goals.

5. Optimize your ads

Like all social advertising, the content must speak directly to the target audience. Ads with poor creative result in low CTR and, as many LinkedIn advertisers have noticed, CTR below 0.25 get very limited impressions due to poor performance. With LinkedIn, high CTR is paramount to success. It’s also important to note that many advertisers get too specific with their audience, resulting in poor campaign performance. This may seem counter-intuitive, but a wider net will enable your ads to pick up the stragglers who haven’t properly identified themselves on their LinkedIn profiles, resulting in higher campaign performance.

BONUS TIP: Landing pages

As with any social campaign, it’s important to properly direct your clicks to highly relevant and optimized pages. We have a great article on landing page best practices, so check it out for quick tips. Even the best performing LinkedIn ads are a waste if you’re not converting, so be sure to do everything you can to test and modify your landing pages.
I hope this post inspires you to get back on that horse and give LinkedIn advertising another try. If you’re an advertising newbie, I can honestly say that I’m jealous — I wish I knew then what I know now.




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