Promoting your business through Social Media is a well-known strategy nowadays, and very much necessary for every business wanting to grow its sales. But what if you own a B2B company and you want to reach other entrepreneurs or decision-making managers through your social media campaigns?

Facebook’s targeting criteria don’t make it easier for any of us in this situation. The platform’s specific isn’t really B2B, as people use Facebook to relax, to see their friends’ life updates and interact with their favourite brands. Well, it’s time to give LinkedIn a try and make the most out of this professional platform’s benefits (the best one being the advanced targeting for B2B Lead Generation ads).

In this article, we will list everything you need to know about LinkedIn promotion, starting from types of ads to strategies, costs and results. Let’s get started!

User Stats in UK

There are over 28 million LinkedIn accounts in the United Kingdom, which means that about 42.7% of the United Kingdom’s population is present on this platform. During the last year only, the number of LinkedIn users has increased by 2 million and this trend will continue in 2020 also. (source: LinkedIn)

B2B Marketers’ Favourite Social Platform

With over 610 million users globally, LinkedIn is the most popular social platform among B2B marketers. According to orbelo.com, 80% of B2B marketing leads from Social Media come from LinkedIn and 92% of B2B marketers prefer to use LinkedIn over the rest of Social Media platforms. That’s why LinkedIn Ads have become a necessary tool for B2B marketers. 

LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn used to have extremely limited advertising targeting options and marketers weren’t able to reach their online promotion goals. Fortunately, this aspect has changed and will continue to improve, offering advertisers the freedom to create ads depending on what they’re trying to achieve. From raising awareness to website visits, interactions, video views, lead generation, website conversions or even job applications, LinkedIn is the place to do B2B ads.

The most popular goals in LinkedIn Ads are lead generation and job applications.

Depending on the goal of your campaign, you can choose between multiple LinkedIn Ads:

Sponsored Content

Think of this type of ad as a boost post on Facebook - you can promote an older content marketing from your feed. The big difference from Facebook’s boost post option is that on LinkedIn you also use this type of if you want to create a post to be used exclusively for campaigns, without showing it on the company’s feed. The same way you would set up ads using Facebook’s Business Manager.

• Single Image Ad / Carousel Ads

These are the most used ad formats in B2B Marketing on LinkedIn, supporting not only photo content, but also video. The cost per click can vary depending on the audience characteristics and the quality of the creatives - if they are attractive, the public will be intrigued to navigate to your website. It is clear as day that a specific targeting will bring a bigger cost (compared with Facebook or Instagram, where the cost per click is usually under 0,3 GBP).

• Text Ads

This type of ad is usually small, and not everyone might notice it. It is placed on the right side of the LinkedIn feed, similar to Facebook’s ads in 2010. This type of ad can also appear under the “People you may know” section. Traditionally, text ads are not the most attractive, and that can cause a higher cost per click.

• Video Ads

Video campaigns are best suited for brand awareness, because the LinkedIn Video Ads format limits the capacity of clicking the video - that means the users have to actually look for the link in the text to go to your website. This type of ad would help you reach more video views, but it’s not recommended for generating new leads, (Lead Gen campaigns) because it limits the ability of the data form to open correctly in different browsers. 

• Sponsored InMail - B2B Lead Generation Ads

You may have seen this type of ad in your own inbox. Sponsored InMails are going directly to the targeted people’s inboxes. If implemented correctly, it will generate higher conversion rate compared to other LinkedIn Ads. This is only because the Sponsored InMail comes from a personal account, not from a company account, giving it a personal touch. This type of advertising is the most popular among recruiters, but also within the B2B event industry. Another use of this type of LinkedIn Ads would be in sales, where the CEO or the sales director of a company can reach more relevant people with a direct message to their inbox - this could be the starting point of a possible conversation.

Note: While the Self-Serve Ads platform on LinkedIn is accessible to any company that wishes to implement LinkedIn Ads, the campaign setting process needs background experience for efficient results - mostly because the cost per click is high, so a big budget can be lost without a professional optimisation.

LinkedIn’s targeting criteria

LinkedIn Ads offers the ability to target users according to criteria such as company, role, seniority of the job, education level, gender, age or location, but also according to the size of the organisation they are a part of.

Truly specific targeting options

LinkedIn’s forte remains the very specific targeting and high quality user data. Unlike other platforms, the user data on LinkedIn is much clearer, so that an advertiser be very specific when targeting an audience that works for a particular type of company, in a particular industry or working in specific roles. Thus, although the cost per click or lead is higher than Facebook, for example, there is a greater guarantee of the quality and relevance of the results.

LinkedIn 2020 campaign trends

For this current year, B2B Lead Generation campaigns will continue to be one of the most performant, especially those implemented from the „Thought Leadership” angle. This type of campaign refers to promoting specialised content to a very filtered public and bringing them added value, in order to build authority in the industry. A common practice is to capture the data of the potential clients in exchange for a report or a whitepaper - with the purpose of getting in direct contact with them and exploring a business or sales partnership. Being carefully implemented according to GDPR, these campaigns will continue to be the main way to achieve B2B clients.

Marketiu’s experience on LinkedIn Ads

Both in the past and in the present, we have run LinkedIn campaigns for a diverse portfolio of clients, which have proved to be very profitable in terms of acquiring new clients - of course, these results wouldn’t have been possible without their internal sales department, which takes on potential leads obtained through LinkedIn to convert them.

Our recommendations

1.Campaign budgets

Being a platform that is more expensive than other Social platforms (but also more efficient), the minimum budget that you should starting investing would be 15 GBP / campaign / day.

2. Target audience and segmentation

Audience-wise, it is recommended to run campaigns that could reach at least 5000 users in order to get relevant results (LinkedIn suggests a bigger number to begin with, but from our experience, 5000 users is a good number to start with, being able to make the most out of the client’s budget).

3. How to run efficient campaigns on LinkedIn

• Keep the ad’s title short and precise, under 150 characters

• The description text should be short, under 70 characters. Try to include a link to the landing page too.

• Call-To-Actions should be direct and clear.

• Photos should be high quality - this type of content has a higher CTR than text-only.

Don’t forget that a successful campaign, not only on LinkedIn,  begins with understanding the target audience and the objectives. After completing this step, everything comes natural - from choosing the Ad type, to implementing the campaigns, depending on the needs and the budget of the business.

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And if you ever need help with implementing LinkedIn campaigns, you can always count on us! All you have to do is send an email at hello@marketiu.com, and we’ll make sure to handle the rest. If you’re interested in finding out more about the 2020 Trends in Digital Marketing, download our free report here