LinkedIn Ads can be a great way to reach more of your target audience, generate traffic to your website, and thus leads.
However, setting up LinkedIn Ads isn’t that simple.
How to do LinkedIn Ads well? What is the price of advertising on LinkedIn? What are the stakes for companies? Is it really effective?
In this guide, we will show you how to create LinkedIn ads and lead gen forms to maximize your ROI. Let’s go!
What are LinkedIn Ads?
LinkedIn Ads are targeted ads that you can pay for to gain visibility at various levels on the professional social network LinkedIn.
Like most other social media platforms, LinkedIn Ads allows you to target your audience by criteria, including location, behavior, interests, and much more.
Combined with LinkedIn prospecting, Ads are therefore an excellent way to reach professionals online and drive qualified traffic to your website, especially for a B2B clientele.
Broadly speaking, the campaign manager looks like this:
There are 4 types of advertising content offered by LinkedIn:
1. Sponsored Content
Sponsored content is a form of Ads that increases your reach on a classic LinkedIn post. It’s an interesting form of Ads if your goal is to gain visibility on a particular post.
2. InMails
InMails are private messages that you can send to LinkedIn users with a premium Business account. They are similar to emails, but with a few extra features.
3. Text Ads
Text ads are the classic advertisements you see on most websites and social media platforms. They are usually short ads with a title, description, and image.
4. Dynamic Ads
Dynamic Ads are an advanced form of advertising that uses AI and machine learning to allow you to target the right people with the right message at the right time. As their name suggests, these LinkedIn ads are data-driven and adapt based on user behavior on the social network.
Now that we’ve covered the definition and the different LinkedIn Ads formats, let’s see how they can be useful for your business!
If you have experience in Growth, Marketing, or Sales, you know it: diversification is key!
In parallel with your LinkedIn advertising efforts, you can also run a sales outreach campaign with LaGrowthMachine: our prospecting tool allows you to create automated message sequences that enable you to convert much more, in much less time!
You can play with many parameters and several channels for a result as natural as a manual prospecting action… but for as many leads as you want!
Why Advertise on LinkedIn?
There are several good reasons to advertise on LinkedIn:
- LinkedIn Ads allows you to reach a qualified professional audience. With 675 million active users in 200 countries, LinkedIn is the largest professional social network. Advertising on LinkedIn offers excellent visibility for your company.
- As seen in the Sales Navigator solution, LinkedIn’s advertising targeting is very precise. You can target your audience based on criteria such as industry, location, gender, age, interests, and many other filters. Furthermore, LinkedIn Ads allows you to target people who are already customers or prospects.
- Advertising in addition to your organic reach efforts optimizes your lead generation on LinkedIn. The platform is considered one of the best tools for generating high-quality B2B leads.
- If you want to build brand awareness or image, LinkedIn Ads is also an excellent way to make your company known, increase your market visibility, and work on your brand positioning.
- Compared to other advertising platforms (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.), LinkedIn ads have an excellent click-through rate (CTR). According to a study, the average CTR for LinkedIn ads is 0.5%.
- If you set up your campaign correctly, LinkedIn Ads are profitable and allow you to maximize your ROI based on your specific objectives.
Advertising should not replace your other social media efforts like LinkedIn posts and profile optimization (banner, photo, etc…).
How to do LinkedIn Ads well?
Here are some tips for successful LinkedIn advertising campaigns:
Step 1: Clearly define your objectives.
Before creating an advertising campaign, it’s important to clearly define your objectives. LinkedIn Ads offers different types of advertising objectives, such as website traffic, contact requests, or lead generation. Before any operational action, think strategy: do I want to grow my audience? Do I want to convert more prospects? Do I want to increase traffic to my website?
Step 2: Target your audience.
As we mentioned earlier, LinkedIn Ads allows you to target your audience based on several criteria such as:
- industry;
- location;
- gender;
- age;
- interests;
- job title;
- keywords in the summary;
- and much more!
To optimize your ROI, it is therefore important to target your audience well so as not to spend your money on people who do not fit your scope.
Note that you can import or exclude audiences: in other words, you can also set up retargeting on LinkedIn Ads!
Step 3: Choose the right ad format.
LinkedIn Ads offers different types of ad formats, such as InMails, text ads, and display ads. Each format corresponds to an objective, a message, and a target audience. It is important to choose the right ad format based on these criteria.
At each stage of campaign creation, you will see the predicted results provided by the algorithm based on the parameters you have set.
Step 4: Use high-quality images and videos.
For some formats, the ad editor allows you to add images and videos to your ads. We won’t tell you anything new: use high-quality images, videos, and creatives to capture your target audience’s attention.
Step 5: Pay attention to your budget.
LinkedIn Ads is an excellent way to drive traffic to your website or generate well-scored leads, but it’s important to always operate with ROI or ROAS in mind. For this reason, it’s important to set a budget and track your spending to avoid jeopardizing your marketing efforts on other channels (email campaigns, social ads, SEO, SEA, inbound strategy, etc…).
Don’t panic! As with any advertising campaign builder, you can limit your budget based on a range you’ve decided on beforehand. Obviously, the larger your budget, the more effective your campaign will be!
Step 6: Track your performance.
As with any marketing effort, it’s important to track your performance to know if your advertising campaign is effective or not. LinkedIn Ads has integrated reporting directly into its business center (also called LinkedIn Campaign Manager) to allow you to track several KPIs, such as:
- the number of clicks;
- the conversion rate;
- the cost per click (CPC);
- and the cost per lead (CPL).
If you follow these steps chronologically, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t succeed with your LinkedIn advertising campaigns!
How much does LinkedIn advertising cost?
The cost of advertising on LinkedIn varies depending on several factors, such as the type of ad, the ad format, the number of clicks, and the number of leads generated.
The average cost per click (CPC) for LinkedIn ads is $2.50. The average cost per lead (CPL) is $25.
The prices are therefore quite high, but if you set up your advertising campaign correctly and target your audience well, advertising on LinkedIn can be very profitable.
Conclusion
When well-integrated into a B2B marketing strategy, LinkedIn’s advertising platform is an excellent way to drive qualified traffic to your website or improve your lead generation performance. However, be careful: before implementing LinkedIn Ads campaigns, make sure to optimize your LinkedIn profile!
Finally, if you don’t have the in-house skills for setting up LinkedIn ads, we highly recommend you to undergo training or hire competent external professionals.