LinkedIn Ads: the guide to ads that work!

If you don't know what LinkedIn Ads is, why advertise on this professional social network and how to create the best sponsored posts... Well, it's high time to go through our guide! Here, we explain to you how to get started and perform well. Let's go!

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Linkedin Ads: why start?

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LinkedIn Ads brings a number of benefits to businesses, such as:

👉 Reach a specific professional audience : With LinkedIn, you can reach 828.1 million people through ads. In a single quarter, ad reach grew by 2.3%, or 18 million more people. It is very easy to segment your audience using criteria such as industry, age, gender, or function.

👉 Generate qualified leads : According to LinkedIn statistics, it is the number one platform for generating leads. LinkedIn Ads helps you enrich your database by collecting information about your audience, for example by adding a contact form. This allows you to find new and interesting prospects.

👉 Promote your brand on a network with a large audience : LinkedIn Ads reinforces the reputation and image of your company. Ads help you promote your website or content from your Inbound Marketing strategy. LinkedIn generates over 50% of social traffic to B2B websites and blogs.

👉 Reengaging prospects : 92% of marketers integrate LinkedIn into their digital strategy. The platform, with its targeted and personalized advertising, is an excellent way to reactivate prospects who are still hesitant in their buying journey.

But to take full advantage of all these benefits offered by LinkedIn Ads, you need to choose the right advertising objective, the right audience, and the right format. Easy, no? We explain everything to you here:

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The right objective for your Linkedin Ads advertising campaign

3 Linkedin advertising goals

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To create a successful advertising campaign, the first step is choosing the right objective. By connecting to Campaign Manager, you have the choice between different types of objectives:

1 awareness-raising;

2 ️ consideration;

3 ️ conversion.

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⭐️ At Growth Room, we advise marketing teams to focus especially on the goals of Consideration And of Conversion. These two stages of the sales funnel facilitate the qualification of leads and their conversion into customers. Here are three examples of goals you might be interested in:

👉 Website visits (Consideration) : ideal for generating traffic to your website and presenting your business and offers.

👉 Lead Generation (Conversion) : this objective aims to obtain leads, in particular by using a lead generation form pre-filled with information from the LinkedIn profile.

👉 Website conversions : this is the best objective for collecting leads directly on your website.

Choosing THE right objective means creating THE right campaign. With a specific objective, you also optimize your costs. The budget spent will vary depending on the objective (cost per view, cost per click, etc.), but also on the advertising formats available.

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LinkedIn LeadGen form VS website conversions: what to choose?

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If conversion is your objective, you will no doubt find yourself facing a dilemma: opt for the LinkedIn LeadGen form or focus on conversions on your website.

⭐️ Our opinion? Both options are worth it. The LeadGen form greatly facilitates conversion since it is pre-filled with LinkedIn profile information (company, position, email, phone). The cost per lead (CPL) is therefore lower.

But be careful, this LinkedIn Ads feature does not allow you to direct people to your landing pages. If your campaign requires giving prospects more information than what a LinkedIn ad can contain... It's better to go your own way. And remember: you will only collect the email address that users have entered on their LinkedIn account. Often, it's a personal address (Gmail type), so it's less interesting for your marketing teams and for qualifying contacts.

Obviously, this is just our opinion: at Growth Room, we tested both types of campaigns. And here's what we can tell you: by connecting LinkedIn Ads to Growth Room via Zapier, lead retrieval and follow-up is very easy. However, today we have chosen to focus on conversion campaigns on the website...

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Determining your advertising audience on LinkedIn Ads

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To define your audience on LinkedIn, it's simple! You can use various criteria directly in Campaign Manager. If this is your first campaign, LinkedIn recommends targeting at least 50,000 people (and up to 150,000) for sponsored content and text ads. For sponsored email ads, a target audience of 15,000 people is ideal.

Here are the steps to follow to define your Linkedin Ads audience:

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Audience attributes

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LinkedIn allows you to reach professionals who don't yet know your business through the feature Audience attributes. You then access a list of targeting categories, with criteria such as:

👉Society

👉Demographics

👉Teaching

👉Professional experience

👉Centers of interest

👉specifications

By combining these criteria, you should be able to recreate your buyer personas. For example, at Growth Room, we rely on a mix of interests or skills, hierarchical levels, company size, age and functions.

At this stage, carefully select the criteria that best fit your offer, your personas and your marketing strategy. You can do up to 100 selections per targeting option based on demographics.

But be careful to find the right balance! If you choose too many criteria, you risk over-segmenting your audience, and your ad won't be seen. On the other hand, targeting an audience that is too large does not allow you to reach the right people... And you risk throwing money down the drain.

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Hearings

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Then, you can create custom audience segments for your campaigns. We call it the”Matched Audiences”, and that includes the following options:

👉 Similar audience : this feature allows you to use your marketing data to find “twin” prospects. In other words, you can download a list of customers or prospects from your marketing software. This “source audience” will be used to create a similar audience directly on LinkedIn Ads, in order to reach people who are most similar to your target audience.

👉 Loading a contact list : you can build an audience segment based on a list of businesses or contact email addresses. You can also refine your targeting using LinkedIn demographic criteria, such as the position or hierarchy of the targeted contacts.

👉 Retargeting : This option allows you to create audiences of LinkedIn members who have performed one or more actions. For example: visit a page on your website, watch an advertising video, open and send a LeadGen form, interact with your LinkedIn Company page, participate in a webinar organized on LinkedIn... Once the audience is created with the “Retargeting” feature, it will begin to be built up by identifying LinkedIn members who meet the required criteria.

👉 Third parties : this feature allows you to create lists of segments thanks to the integration of third-party data, from a tool like Zapier. Target audiences must be at least 300 members to launch advertising campaigns.

These options are really interesting for your retargeting campaigns. At Growth Room, we particularly like the first option (Similar audience), to generate new leads that look like your current customers.

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Audience exclusion criteria

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Finally, you can use exclusion criteria to remove certain people from your audience. For example:

👉Your current customers

👉People who have already converted on your site (via a retargeting list)

👉People in positions you're not interested in

👉People working for competing businesses

👉Hierarchical levels or functions outside of your target

It's up to you to set the rules of the game to define the best audience!

📌 For even more tips for successful Linkedin advertising, read another of our articles on the subject: Linkedin Ads: everything you need to know to launch your ads !

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Linkedin Ads: the right advertising campaign format

4 Linkedin Ads formats

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Once you've defined your purpose and audience, it's time to choose the format for your LinkedIn ad. In Campaign Manager, you can choose between several types of formats:

👉 Sponsored Content : these are sponsored posts, also called native ads, that appear directly in users' news feeds. The format? Carousels, posts with an image, advertising videos... It's up to you to choose.

👉 Sponsored Messaging : This format is for sponsored messages sent directly to users' LinkedIn inboxes. It facilitates discussion and creates a direct link. Moreover, 89% of Internet users prefer that businesses communicate with them via messaging. In this category, a distinction is made between Message Ads (private messages sent from a personal profile) and Conversation Ads (sponsored private messages with chatbot features and automated exchanges).

👉 Text Ads : Text ads appear at the top right of the LinkedIn news feed. Visible by a large number of users, they allow you to reach a wider audience with a smaller budget.

👉 Spotlight Ads : this type of sponsored advertising combines, in a visual, the profile photo of the targeted prospect and that of your business page, with a promotional message and a clickable call-to-action.

Not sure what type of advertising to choose? At Growth Room, we suggest that you start with the most popular formats: the ones that appear directly in the LinkedIn news feed. For example, carousels and videos easily increase reach and engagement. Very effective in generating clicks and conversions!

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Linkedin Audience Network

When choosing where to place your ads, you have the option of using the LinkedIn Audience Network. It is a network of partner sites where your ads can appear. By activating it, you can Increase your reach by +25% on average. This option requires a bit more customization, as you may need to exclude site categories that you don't want to associate your brand with.

Some users have noticed a drop in cost per click (CPC) by activating the LinkedIn Audience Network. But the best thing is to test this option on your account and see what impact it has, to find out if it's worth it!

🔍 Do you want to learn Linkedin Ads to boost your sales? Read our article on the subject: Linkedin Ads training: the complete guide to training !

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How do you find your advertising budget on LinkedIn Ads?

The programming

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Let's talk little, let's talk well, let's talk about budget. At this stage, you have several options:

👉Set a daily and maximum budget

👉Set a daily budget

👉Set a maximum budget

If you manage a campaign with no end date that will run continuously, choosing a daily budget is the best solution. On the other hand, The maximum budget is interesting if you want quick results over a given period of time.

With a daily budget, you set how much you plan to spend each day for a certain period of time. This method is more suitable for slow and regular advertising, when you want your business to resonate with a specific target audience. In the program section, we also leave the “run an uninterrupted campaign” option activated.

🔍Final advice : the first 2 to 4 weeks are generally considered as a learning period to see what works (and what doesn't). During this test period, LinkedIn Ads recommends a daily budget of at least $100 or a monthly budget of $5,000.

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The auctions

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When you create an advertising campaign in Campaign Manager, you have several bidding strategies at your disposal. Before making your choice, start by selecting your optimization objective (for example, conversions on your website).

Then, you can choose from various auction types: manual distribution, cost ceiling or maximum distribution. At Growth Room, we advise you to opt for themanual auction. The platform will automatically recommend a specific auction and a price range on which similar advertisers bid. To start, we suggest that you bid slightly above the low value of this range. You will thus be able to be visible, while keeping your costs low.

But be careful: if you notice that you are not meeting your daily expenses, do not hesitate to increase your bid.

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The budget to plan for your Linkedin Ads

According to a recent study, the average cost per click (CPC) on LinkedIn is $5.74, with a conversion rate of 6.1%. In concrete terms, with a budget of $1,000, you pay for about 174 clicks and get 11 conversions.

We're not going to lie to ourselves: advertising on LinkedIn is more expensive than on other channels. But this amount varies depending on the advertiser, the target audience, the quality of your campaign and the competition. Instead of trying to minimize your expenses, think about the impact that advertising can have on the growth of your business.

⭐️ To get started, at Growth Room, we recommend that you Be inspired by the 70/30 rule : Allocate 70% of your budget to campaigns that generate leads or conversions at the bottom of the sales funnel, and 30% (or less) to campaigns that build brand awareness at the top of the funnel. During the experimentation phase, this strategy already allows you to have a more ROI-oriented approach!

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Some best practices for managing your Linkedin Ads budget

You are now ready to create your ads! But before you take action, here are a few of best practices for your Linkedin ads :

👉When the stats say reach and impressions are low, increase your daily budget. Don't worry, you can always cut back on expenses later.

👉If the money disappears too quickly, cut back on the daily campaign budget. Simple and effective.

👉If you have a lot of budget left, set more ambitious and competitive auctions. Go for it!

👉If your conversion campaign generates a click rate of more than 1% **, change the optimization to generate clicks, it will lower the CPC.

There you go, you have all the keys in hand to best manage your LinkedIn Ads budget. It's up to you to play!

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Create a good Linkedin Ads

Without good advertising, all the previous settings will be useless. But... How to create a “good” LinkedIn ad ?

Above all, keep this in mind: “B2B social network” does not mean “Boring to Boring publications.” On LinkedIn, your ads don't have to be generic, boring, or overly serious. Get noticed by following these best practices:

👉 Be authentic : show the unique personality of your company. People are drawn to brands that are genuine and genuine.

👉 Use compelling visuals : Get attention with high-quality images or videos that stand out in the news feed.

👉 Write a clear and concise message : get right to the point. Your audience should immediately understand what you're offering.

👉 Offer value : Offer something useful to your audience, such as an ebook, webinar, or practical advice.

👉 Add a strong call to action : Encourage your audience to take action with a clear and engaging CTA.

👉 Personalize your content : speak directly to your audience using a warm and close tone.

👉 Test and optimize : feel free to try different formats and messages to see what works best.

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By applying these tips, you'll increase your chances of creating effective and memorable LinkedIn ads. So, ready to get started?

The best way to ensure that your Linkedin ads are effective is to trust an agency that is an expert in ads! Here is the Top 5 best Linkedin Ads agencies !

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