Even though online advertising can be extremely effective, choosing to advertise on certain platforms might just not work with the vision of your brand or business. Our focus of today is different. It offers you access to an audience that is purely professional in nature, unlike more casual means of online advertising such as Instagram and Facebook. In other words, not only is LinkedIn advertising suitable for B2C, but it’s also perfect for B2B businesses.
According to LinkedIn themselves, the platform currently has more than 770 million members from over 200 countries. Additionally, it’s estimated that four out of every five LinkedIn members have some sort of influence on the decision-making of a business. And of course, there is also the fact that LinkedIn is home to members with 2X the purchasing power of an average online user.
Statistics aside, in order for you to properly reach your audience, regardless of whether they are other businesses or regular customers, you need to know the ABCs of the LinkedIn Campaign Manager.
In this article, we will explain to you how to use LinkedIn Campaign Manager and all the elements that surround it, such as the types of LinkedIn Ads, and more.
Types of LinkedIn Ads
Before we get into how to use LinkedIn Campaign Manager, we will first briefly explain the different types of LinkedIn ads that you can use to reach your preferred audience.
Sponsored Content
First off, we have sponsored content, also known as native ads. These ads will be displayed to your target audience on their LinkedIn feed, on both the desktop version and the mobile. These ads will be labelled as “promoted” in order to be distinguishable from the normal content.
If you choose to use sponsored content ads, LinkedIn allows you to choose between three different kinds: single image ads, video ads, or carousel ads.
Sponsored Messaging
Sponsored Messaging, known to the old-timers as Sponsored InMail, allows you to advertise your products and services directly to LinkedIn users through their inboxes.
In order to avoid spam, LinkedIn has set up a limit on the number of sponsored message ads that members will receive per month. In other words, members won’t receive your ads more than twice within a determined timeframe.
Most regular consumers on LinkedIn appreciate this feature. Businesses, however, are 50/50 about being approached this way.
Dynamic Ads
These ads will run on the right side of LinkedIn and are usually tailored to the individual members who receive them. Details such as the user’s name, job title, and photo can be reflected back to them in a dynamic ad to make the marketer’s case stronger.
However, members can find these ads a tad bit too personal sometimes, and LinkedIn allows them to hide such details from you in the future.
Text Ads
As the name suggests, text ads are perhaps the most basic type of ads of LinkedIn. They are basically a few sentences of text that can either show up along the top of a LinkedIn’s desktop feed or on the right-hand side of it.
They are great for attracting leads from a highly professional demographic if that’s what you’re mainly seeking from marketing on LinkedIn.
How to Use LinkedIn Campaign Manager
1. Setting up your LinkedIn campaign manager account
Your LinkedIn ad campaigns reside on a platform that is separate from the LinkedIn you’re used to. Simply head to the LinkedIn Campaign Manager and create an account in case you haven’t yet. While creating the account, make sure to associate it with your LinkedIn company page if you have one.
Once you’re done creating the account, you will be led to a member dashboard, where you will be prompted to enter your billing information. Note that you can’t go any further without entering your billing information. Don’t worry, though; you’ll only be charged once your campaign is up and running.
2. Creating your LinkedIn Ad Campaign
You will notice a button that says Create Campaign in your campaign manager. Click on it, and you will be redirected to a new page where you’d set up your campaign.
First off, pick a campaign group for your campaign and a name. Campaign groups, as the name suggests, help you to organise your different campaigns. You can obviously leave it in the default group or create a new one.
Then, you get to pick a name for your campaign, which will only be visible to you, obviously. Still, if you have a few people working on the marketing campaign, we recommend that you pick an informative name and not something random.
3. Choose your ad campaign objective
The objective of your LinkedIn ad campaign is basically what you expect people to do when they view your ads. According to the people over at LinkedIn, choosing an objective for your campaign helps them to properly customise the creation process of your campaign and to ensure that you get the best ROI possible.
LinkedIn currently offers three main themes for your ad campaign goals, which are: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversions.
4. How to Use LinkedIn Campaign Manager: Picking your LinkedIn Ad audience
This is perhaps the most important step in our journey to answer the question of how to use LinkedIn campaign manager. It basically determines who sees your ads, and of course, if you pick the wrong people, your whole campaign will be a waste.
LinkedIn gives you the option to target people according to a few different criteria, such as:
- Locations
- Demographics (member age and gender)
- Education (fields of study, member schools, degrees)
- Job Experience (title, function, seniority, years of experience, skills)
- Interests and Traits (member groups, interests, traits)
- Company Name, Industry, Size, Connections, and Followers
- Etc.
The more specific your targeting criteria is, the higher the chances are of you getting the most out of your target audience (a positive ROI).
5. Choosing your LinkedIn Ad format
Next up, you get to choose the format of your ad. We have already explained the different types of LinkedIn ads above.
When going through the different ad types, you will notice the Forecasted Results box changing. This feature basically puts into consideration your different campaign parameters, such as targeting, start/end dates, budget, and more and generates helpful numbers.
Keep close attention to this box since it will provide you with almost accurate numbers for your ad campaign.
6. Choosing your LinkedIn Ad placement
Yet another important step in our how to use LinkedIn Campaign Manager guide, choosing the placement of your ad is crucial. This option basically allows you to display your ad(s) on the LinkedIn Audience Network, a fancy word for a network of third-party sites and platforms with strong ties to LinkedIn.
This is a great option because it allows your campaign to gain more reach and exposure than what it’d get if you solely run it on LinkedIn. However, it doesn’t support all ad formats.
7. Set your ad schedule and budget
When it comes to the schedule of your ad, simply choose a date for it to start and have it run continuously or end on a specific date.
Then we have the budget, a key factor for many out there. We recommend that you set a daily budget that works best for your needs and capabilities. Avoid investing too much into a single campaign. Instead, carefully test the waters of every campaign you start and see how it goes. If it seems to be working well, then put more money into it.
In other words, when it comes to determining how much an ad campaign will cost you, experimentation is key. Never invest a large sum of money in a campaign just because you think it will work. Test it thoroughly by editing the format of the ads, changing the targeting parameters, and more.
8. How to Use LinkedIn Campaign Manager: Bidding
When it comes to bidding, LinkedIn offers you three options:
- Maximum cost-per-click (CPC) Bid: This refers to you being charged every time a user clicks on your ad. When choosing your maximum CPC bid, LinkedIn will suggest a range depending on your budget and the competition. The more competition there is, the higher you will have to bid.
- Maximum cost-per-mille (CPM) Bid: LinkedIn will charge you a certain amount of money once every 1000 views of your ad. You cannot choose this option if you are relying on the LinkedIn Audience Network option.
- Automated Bid: As the name suggests, automated bidding is basically you giving LinkedIn the green light to determine whatever funds are needed for your campaign ads to reach its objectives (clicks, impressions, conversions).
9. Conversion Tracking
Last but not least in our how to use LinkedIn Campaign manager guide is setting up your conversion tracking. This step is essential because it allows you to closely keep track and measure the actions LinkedIn users take after clicking on an ad of yours.
We insist that you do this simply because it is an optional feature, and some brands just gloss over it without realising its true value and potential in your LinkedIn marketing journey.
The LinkedIn campaign manager reports a variety of different metrics for every ad campaign you run on the platform. These metrics include the number of clicks, impressions, click-through rate, conversions, cost-per-conversion, and more.
You can use these metrics to measure how well your campaign is performing and your overall ROI (return on investment). Improving the latter should be one of your main objectives.
Talk with a LinkedIn expert
LinkedIn can be a great advertising platform to generate high-quality leads and close big deals, but only if you run LinkedIn ads the right way. Contact us today, and we’ll help you with that.
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