You’re looking for the ideal target audience to promote your product or service. If you find it, it saves you time and money. You’ll get much better results with your ads campaign. LinkedIn is one of the best places to reach your ideal customer base. But most people don’t know how to tap into its full potential. Knowing the LinkedIn ads best practices will allow you to generate B2B leads with a greater prospect of converting. If you do it right, there are undeniable benefits of running an ads campaign on LinkedIn.

But firstly, what is LinkedIn? It’s a community of working and business professionals. Many hold an influential and decision-making position in a company. However, you must know how to filter a search to go through the vast pool of data to find the most suitable audiences. If you don’t know how to do that and what kind of advertising plan to choose, you can’t make the best out of your investment in ads. Keep reading to learn more.

Best Practices for Launching an Ad Campaign

Define your objectives

What do you want to achieve with your ad campaign? Is it for brand awareness, lead generation, or to drive website traffic? Choosing the right ad objective is critical to driving results. The 6 types of objectives to choose from are;

• Brand Awareness – when your efforts are directed at top-of-funnel brand building using a simple impressions based approach, your objective can be defined as Brand Awareness advertising.

• Website Visits – To draw more relevant traffic to your website, you can create an ads campaign that aims for a higher number of website visits driven from your LinkedIn ads.

• Video views – Once you choose video views as an ads objective, you will have to pay only for those views you get on your video ads. 

You can select the video ad format when running a Sponsored Content campaign. But remember to plan video content based on your objective.

• Engagement – When you want your customers to interact with your posts by taking social actions like comments, likes, shares, and hashtags, you make this your objective. 

• Lead Generation – If the objective is to generate new B2B leads, you can use pre-filled forms with profile data of members, so you automatically get this information when they click your ads.

• Website Conversion – When your ads are optimised to invite actions on your own personal websites, that’s an objective known as website conversion. The conversion tracking tool on the LinkedIn website will tell you how many valuable actions were carried out promoted by the ads.

Building your target audience

Once you know what you want to achieve, the next part is to figure out who could be your potential customer. How do you target people for your ads campaign? You can do so based on their professional traits, personal interests, or you can also use your own email list to retarget them on LinkedIn.

As part of LinkedIn ads best practices, you can choose from the following attributes to narrow down your target audience:

• Demographics – Gender and age
• Education – Schools, degrees, study fields
• Job Experience – Job roles, seniority, skills
• Interests and traits – Member interests
• Company – Industry, company size, followers, connections, etc

If you find it difficult to build your audience, you can select LinkedIn Audience Templates which have many preset values. You will not have to select fill up every value, the template would have done that for you. This can be handy if you are new to LinkedIn.

LinkedIn ads best practices for targeting 

Targeting is perhaps the most important part of creating an ad campaign on LinkedIn. You must make full use of this feature, but you should also avoid overdoing it. Hyper-targeting can be counterproductive. The recommended value for the target audience is 50,000 for Sponsored Content and Text Ads, and over 15,000 for Message Ads.

Once you have created a campaign, you can duplicate it, slightly change the targeting parameters, and launch it. The response would tell you which parameters have a greater impact on the success of an ad campaign. This should allow you to come up with the best Ads campaign for your business.

If you already have a list of potential clients, you can use LinkedIn ads to build a lookalike audience. The matched audience features enable you to customise LinkedIn targeting with your own data.

Choosing the ad format

Now that you have chosen your objective, you need to choose the best type of ad for your purpose. You can choose one of the three types; Sponsored Content formats, Text Ads, and Message Ads.

The sponsored content could be in the form of a single image, carousel, or video ad. Message ads show up in LinkedIn messages, and text ads are positioned in the top banner and right rail.

LinkedIn Best Ads Practices for More Conversions

Find your lowest CPC Bid

LinkedIn’s enhanced CPC Bid feature allows you to get maximum clicks on your ads for the minimum cost possible. So you don’t have to immediately invest all your marketing money on ads. You can gradually increase your bid until you see results. This option ensures that you don’t end up overpaying for your LinkedIn ads. 

You will need to select ‘Enhanced CPC Bid’ in the Bid type option. Now, enter a very small amount and see if you get an error message. If the value is below the minimum amount that you can bid, you will see an error message tell you the minimum bid you can place.

Conversion tracking is essential

When setting up conversion ads on LinkedIn, you must also define how to track those conversions. Also, when you use your site-wide insight tag to track conversions, don’t track an exact URL because you might not be able to track users using an unsecured connection.

In the match a URL section, choose contains instead of equals so it also tracks those users that aren’t using ‘HTTPS’ secured connection. 

Checking demographics to reach the right audience

You want your budget to be spent effectively and not be wasted on unrelated targets. Once you have launched your campaign, you want to confirm that the ads are actually reaching your target audience. You can do this by clicking on the Demographics button by navigating to the campaign tag and selecting the campaign. 

Once you select Demographic, you can monitor detailed information about top impressions, clicks, conversions, etc based on the targeting parameters that you have set. If you notice that impressions and clicks are not coming from your targeted audience and are unrelated, you can reset your targeting criteria. 

Use CRM lists for retargeting 

Another one of the LinkedIn ads best practices includes using your CRM list to create a matched audience for the LinkedIn ads campaign. You just need to upload a CRM list to LinkedIn, and then it would automatically find matches on LinkedIn based on your list. It might take up to 24 hours for LinkedIn to find matches from LinkedIn profiles. 

Use duplicate feature for A/B testing 

To come up with an effective ad campaign strategy, you want to tweak one variable at a time to see how it affects your metrics. Does it get you the impressions and clicks from more of your targeted audience? Do you get more conversions? 

It’s not easy to create multiple ads campaigns for testing which works, so the duplicate feature on LinkedIn helps create a copy of your existing campaign so you can change one or two variables in the second ad campaign to see if it works any better than the first one.

We recommend changing the target fields, an image, or a headline first to see if it improves the results. Make sure you add a unique term to each ad campaign so the results are easier to track. You would need to know which one gets you the most relevant clicks and impressions.

Conclusion

The LinkedIn ads campaign is a wonderful tool to run B2B targeted ads. It is packed with features to improve your ads campaign for more impressions and conversions. However, if you are not following LinkedIn ads best practices, you are missing out on the full benefits of what LinkedIn has to offer.

From planning and targeting to analytics and testing, LinkedIn has plenty of tools to create an effective ads campaign. We have listed some of the top tricks and tips used by our own LinkedIn ads experts. LinkedIn offers the best resources for social network advertising. Once you get the knack of it, it produces results incomparable to any other platform.

We hope that this LinkedIn advertising guide will help you improve your ads campaign and you have to spend less to achieve more leads. However, if you find the entire process too overwhelming for you, our experts are always eager to help.  

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