LinkedIn Ads can be the perfect asset to assist any B2B marketing campaign. However, for them to be successful, you must know how to use them effectively. Using them incorrectly can prove to be very costly for your business - and that’s the last thing any business owner wants to hear, isn’t it?
LinkedIn is an amazing platform for businesses to target. It offers direct access to target over 675 million monthly users and over 30 million businesses all in one place. That provides an amazing opportunity for B2B businesses to reach out to their ideal target audience and business professionals.
To take full advantage of the platform’s opportunities, you need to make sure that your LinkedIn Ads are created with various best practices in place. Don’t worry if you’re not sure what these are - we’ve got you covered. This post will explain everything you need to know on how to best position your LinkedIn Ads for B2B marketing success.
We’ll cover:
- What are LinkedIn Ads?
- Set SMART goals
- Monitor and utilise smart bidding
- Target your ideal audience
- Choose the right ad type
- Continue to test and optimise your ads
What are LinkedIn Ads?
LinkedIn Ads are a paid marketing powerhouse to assist any B2B marketing campaign. They give you a competitive edge and present an opportunity to connect with prospects who are most likely to engage with your business. LinkedIn is a totally different ball game to any other social platform and your ads are more likely to be engaged with as users are in a more professional mindset than when scrolling through Facebook, for example.
Image Credit: Merge
LinkedIn Ads is an indispensable tool for B2B marketers and have a serious impact on generating new leads, nurturing existing ones along the buyer’s journey and converting those who are ready to take the next step. There are various types of ads for you to take advantage of, which means that you can effectively target individual customers with the right content to suit their needs and pain points.
As with any other marketing strategy, you need to have a clear strategic plan when it comes to your paid marketing. Otherwise, they won’t align with the rest of your marketing efforts and they’ll all be pulling in different directions. Therefore, you’ll fail to reach your end goal and won’t see the potential results that the platform can present.
Set SMART goals
Before you rush into your LinkedIn ads, you need to carefully think about what goals you’re trying to achieve. If your campaign doesn’t have an end goal, how can you measure its success or failure? You can’t. Which is why you need to set SMART goals before you start, to ensure that you and your team always have an objective to work towards one step at a time.
Firstly, you need to be specific with your goals. There’s no point in having very vague and broad goals as you’ll struggle to break them down and work towards them. For example, “increase revenue” isn’t a goal that allows you to see what specific areas need to be improved. Whereas, the goal “build an extensive contact list and increase brand awareness” allows you to break it down into different parts and tasks.
Your goals must be measurable too - otherwise, you’ll be left in the dark whether what you’re doing is actually successful or not. You could be flitting away money thinking that you’re doing the right thing, when in fact, you can’t be certain whether your ads are successful or not. Make sure that your goals are achievable too - setting goals too high can be unmotivating and daunting to your wider team.
Keep your goals realistic. Sure, reach for the sky but when doing so, set your goals into little chunks so that they’re always realistic. Setting yourself a goal of converting 1000s of new leads in the first month may sound like an ideal situation but is it really going to happen? Put time limits on your goals too, we’d recommend you break down your goals into months or quarters so that they align with your other efforts and a consistent level of focus is obtained.
Monitor and utilise smart bidding
Due to the sheer amount of advertisers on LinkedIn, it means that competition for ad space can be very competitive. This can result in businesses finding themselves in a bidding war for their desired placement. Competition can result in bids reaching high prices, with average cost-per-click (CPC) being £4.26.
Dependent on your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), your conversion goals will need to be a lot higher on LinkedIn than other platforms. However, this shouldn’t pose too much of a worry to businesses who think they can’t keep up with high targets as LinkedIn Ads can reach out to a staggering 12 percent of the world’s population.
So, to make sure that your ad campaigns are completely cost-effective, you need to regularly monitor bid prices and your budget. Otherwise, you can get too caught up in trying to secure as many positions as possible to expand the reach and then realise that you’ve completely overshot your budget. If you spend too much before your campaign gets off the ground, the higher you’re going to have to set your goals to make it worthwhile.
Target your ideal audience
Any marketing campaign has to target its ideal audience’s individual needs to be as successful as possible. FACT. Well, luckily for B2B marketers, LinkedIn is the perfect platform to bring business professionals together all in one place - and it contains handy refinement areas that allow you to dissect a large audience into a super-targeted prospect.
If an ad with generic messaging is released that doesn’t target any particular audience, it’ll likely be low quality and yield poor quality prospects and leads. Targeted content allows the viewer to resonate more with the ad, which improves the chances of engagement. Not only this but they’ll be a more qualified lead once they’re passed through the next stages of the buyer’s journey too.
Some of the filters that LinkedIn allows you to find your ideal target audience are:
- Company and job. You can refine businesses by type and industry, meaning you can exclude all the irrelevant ones that are less likely to engage. This tool also allows you to single out specific people on job title, company name and business size too.
- Demographics. There’s no point reaching out to the wrong demographic. They’ll be totally outpriced or your service may not meet the requirements of their interests and needs.
- Remarketing lists. Interact with those who’ve previously engaged with your site. Remarketing is a great way of following up on those leads who may have had cold feet or need a little more convincing.
- Email lists. Businesses can advertise with other companies that match up to their existing email lists, providing an extra touchpoint for them to engage with. These can also be used to create lookalike audiences, this allows you to target users similar to your existing customers.
Choose the right ad type
As we mentioned earlier, using the right ad type is crucial to the success of your LinkedIn Ads campaigns. If you’re targeting a prospect with the incorrect approach, they’re less likely to interact with your ads and brand. Businesses can choose from three main ad types when creating their campaign. These are:
Sponsored content
These ads resemble typical content that can be found in your LinkedIn feed. They include multiple lines of text and an accompanying image. In this text, be sure to use the correct language to appeal to your audience. If you write the wrong things, you’ll attract the wrong kind of prospect. You can also include a form on your add - this makes sponsored content the ideal ad type for growing a vast contact list.
Text ads
If you’re looking to increase your brand awareness, this is the ad type for you. In this type, you can include a simple brief message that reaches out to your audiences and is accompanied by your brand name and logo. You don’t want to overcomplicate things on this ad type, they’re designed for simple messages and just getting the word out there.
Sponsored InMails
If you’re looking to send a more personalised message to your prospects, then you can hit them directly in their inbox. Audiences respond a lot more effectively to tailored content as it has a personal touch. It makes them feel valued and shows that the business cares about them, not just their custom.
Continue to test and optimise your ads
As with all of your B2B marketing efforts, you should always experiment and try new techniques out with your LinkedIn Ads. It’s important to find the right technique for individual prospects. That way, you can eliminate the ones that don’t work and focus on the ones that have the best engagement rates. You should also keep ad copy fresh - nobody wants to keep reading the same old things.
Take note of how long your ads are running for. If they’re targeted at a select group of people, the chances are that they’re going to see the ad various times. It’s best practice to have a constantly rotating schedule for your efforts, that way, they’re not being presented with the same information repeatedly and your approach doesn’t look one-dimensional. If the group is small, we recommend rotating on a weekly basis. Whereas, bigger groups should be fine on a monthly rotation.
Red-Fern can help with your LinkedIn B2B marketing ads
As you’ve just read, for your campaign to reach the heights that you desire, you need to ensure that your LinkedIn B2B marketing efforts follow best practices - and align with the other facets of your marketing campaign. It can be quite daunting knowing where to start but you needn’t worry, we’ve got you covered.
At Red-Fern, not only can we help with your LinkedIn Ads but our expert team is experienced in delivering holistic marketing campaigns and any web-design or development requirements. We know what it takes to help drive results, improve conversion and get your brand out there. So, if you’re interested in taking your campaigns to the next level, why not book in a discovery call with us? One of our expert team members will be on hand to answer any questions or queries you have.