How to Set Up LinkedIn Advertising for B2B Marketing Success

LinkedIn is where professionals browse to get fresh industry insights and connect with potential partners, clients, and team members. This makes it an important social media channel for professional services marketing. It is fertile ground for outreach and prospecting. This article will help with Getting Started With LinkedIn Paid Advertising .

Marketers often use tools to run automated workflows and scale their operations. However, LinkedIn has strict rules regarding 3rd party automation — particularly for messaging — which many of these tools violate. If you're caught using them you will likely face sanctions that can damage your standing, such as being banned from the platform.

Fortunately, there are ways of using LinkedIn for mass communication that doesn’t break their terms of service.

One such method is using paid advertising to get your brand in front of the right people at the right time. This helps you to start developing familiarity so you can initiate contact.

We’ve previously discussed important LinkedIn advertising strategies to consider. When done correctly, paid advertising centres on the needs of your audience and integrates into your overall marketing strategy. After all, irrelevant, pushy, and obnoxious marketing does you no favours when you’re trying to build relationships with prospects and clients.

In this article, we’re taking a deep dive into the more technical elements of LinkedIn Ads. At the end you'll have the lowdown on a variety of options and some steps to take to set yourself up for success. 

How to Set Up LinkedIn Advertising for B2B Marketing Success

The LinkedIn Campaign Manager

To advertise on LinkedIn, you’ll need to create an account on their Campaign Manager platform. Having a LinkedIn company page is not required to create an account. However, it IS required for running certain ad formats — namely sponsored content, dynamic ad, and lead gen forms.

A Campaign Manager account only takes a few moments to create. Once done, you can:

• Set up and control advertising campaigns

• Manage your creative assets

• Pull dynamic visual reporting with detailed performance breakouts

• Set up conversion tracking and create custom target audiences

After you create a Campaign Manager account, you can add team members or partners and assign appropriate permission levels. Depending on your advertising needs, you can also create multiple ad accounts and manage the billing separately for each one.

Setting a Relevant Ad Objective

The next step is to select an objective. Currently, LinkedIn offers the three categories of awareness, consideration or conversions. Under these objectives are the specific goals of:

• Brand awareness

• Website visits

• Engagement

• Video views

• Lead generation

• Website conversions

• Job applications

The goal you select will determine the recommendations LinkedIn will provide to maximise performance during the rest of your campaign creation experience.

Targeting and Retargeting Options

After defining your objective, targeting the right audience is a foundational element of running a successful ad campaign. Your ads must be relevant to the people viewing them. Relevance leads to higher engagement, and ultimately, better conversion rates.

LinkedIn offers some incredibly powerful targeting options for B2B marketers. You can choose from over 20 different audience attribute categories, including:

• Demographic information

• Member groups

• Education

• Job experience

• Functions or skills

• Seniority, job title, or experience

• Interests

You should also explore LinkedIn’s Matched Audience program. Their ‘Company Targeting’ feature allows you to serve ads to the decision-makers at the companies of your choice — perfect for ABM.

You can use marketing automation to dynamically segment targeting lists and import them into LinkedIn using their ‘Contact Targeting’ tool. This allows you to create highly tailored audiences using factors such as lead score. You can also use retargeting to deliver ads based on actions they have taken with your brand.

Another option is to use marketing automation segmentation and CRM data to identify your ideal customer traits. You can then create a ‘Lookalike Audience’ which combine this information with LinkedIn’s rich member and company data. This feature can help you reach targeted audiences similar to your existing customer demographics, website visitors and target accounts.

When setting up your audiences, you’ll see a feature called ‘Audience Expansion’ which is enabled by default. As the name suggests, this feature expands your audience by including other LinkedIn members with similar attributes to your target group. This might be something you want to test. 

Just be aware that information about people reached via your targeting criteria and through Audience Expansion will be reported together. If you want to experiment, you might want to disable Audience Expansion and run an independent Lookalike Audience campaign instead. Doing so allows you to get separate performance data and have more control over testing variables. 

Conveniently, setting up your audience targeting works the same way regardless of which advertising objective you choose. Even better, once you set your targeting criteria, you can save it as a template for future campaigns. 

Keep the audience size within optimal range between 50,000 to 300,000

Available Ad Formats on LinkedIn

There are four different types of ads you can use in your campaigns:

Text Ads

Text ads are pay-per-click (PPC) ads that show up at the top or right side of the page. They are the most basic LinkedIn advertising option, but can still an effective one for boosting awareness. One important caveat — at the time of writing this article, text ads only run on desktop platforms. 

Sponsored Content

Sponsored content comes in three different formats: single image ads, video ads, and carousel ads. These native ads will show up directly in news feeds among organic content. Sponsored content can appear on both desktop and mobile devices.

Important note: LinkedIn currently automatically enables its Audience Network feature for image and video format campaigns. When turned on, this option will place your ads on third-party sites that are part of LinkedIn’s Audience Network. 

Keep an eye on the statistics for your organic content. If it performs well and starts to become popular, it could be a good idea to sponsor it so that it reaches a broader audience and provides more opportunities for people outside of your network to engage with your brand.

A good rule of thumb is to run 4 ads in each campaign to capitalize on our platform’s frequency caps. Members can see up to 4 unique sponsored content creatives per advertiser in a 48 hour period. Ad variations can be simple tweaks (e.g. all ads have the same photo but slightly different copy, or vice versa). Since it takes members multiple impressions before they take action, optimizing your number of ads is an easy way to improve performance

InMail Message Ads

Also called ‘Sponsored InMail’, these ads are displayed in members’ LinkedIn messaging inbox — both on desktop and on mobile devices. Unlike standard messaging, which is a one-to-one affair, with message ads you can target audience segments to send mass communications. Just keep in mind that people can opt-out of receiving message ads. Make sure you serve relevant content and don’t overwhelm them with constant messages, otherwise, your audience will cut the connection.

Dynamic Ads

Dynamic ads use LinkedIn profile data to personalise ad creative for each member of your target audience at scale. There are several formats under the dynamic ad family:

• Follower ads — which promote your LinkedIn company page

• Spotlight ads — which highlight special offerings

• Job ads — which promote job openings

If you work with a LinkedIn representative, you can also run ‘content ads’ which automatically generate leads when someone downloads your content. 

As with text ads, dynamic ads currently only run on desktop platforms.

Setting Your Budget and Schedule

Next, is setting up the financial and scheduling options that work best for you. 

First, indicate if you will have a specific start and end date, or if the ad will run continuously. Then set your budget. You can choose to use a lifetime budget, a daily budget, or a combination of the two. 

• A daily budget is the average amount you’d like to spend per day for your campaign. Repeat: this is an average. LinkedIn’s algorithm will optimise your daily spend to compete in ad auctions. The actual spend for any given day may be up to 50% higher than the budget amount you set.

• A lifetime budget is the total amount that LinkedIn will spend for the entirety of your campaign. The daily spend will be paced to try and ensure your ads run over the entire duration of the campaign.

In addition to budget and schedule, you’ll need to select your bid type. LinkedIn currently offers three bidding models, depending on ad format: 

• Cost per click (CPC)

• Cost per impression (CPM)

• Cost per send (CPS) — used for message ads

After you select a bid type, LinkedIn will suggest a bid range based on the targeted audience. You can also decide if you want to set manual bids or automate the bidding process. 

Something to keep in mind: LinkedIn’s system takes past campaign performance into account during each auction. Ads with higher engagement rates get a boost in the auction process. So, you can potentially win an auction without being the highest bidder if you run quality, relevant creatives.

Also, LinkedIn uses a second-price system. In others words, if you win the auction you only pay the minimum needed to beat the second-highest bidder.

Measuring and Optimise Your Campaign

Experienced B2B marketers know that it takes some time and experimentation to optimise advertising performance. Each organisation will have a unique formula of ad format, audience, and budget that works best for them. Therefore, it’s important to continuously test and measure the success of each campaign.

Use the Campaign Manager to track your campaign’s engagement metrics, monitor spend, and compare different variants. This data will help you to refine your targeting, adjust your budget, and edit ad creatives to further optimise performance. 

Linkedin Ads Best Practices

While it’s important to know the technical aspects of LinkedIn advertising, just as important is understanding how to leverage this information. To help you on your way, here are four best practices to consider as you develop your campaigns.

Map Ads to Your Customer Journey

Different LinkedIn ad types are more appropriate at different points of a relationship. As such, you want to map your ads to your customer journey. This will help you figure out what should go where to create a more relevant brand experience for your audience.

For instance, Messenger ads aren’t necessarily a good choice for initial contact (where they can come across as over-familiar and invasive). However, they can be incredibly effective once a relationship has been established through commenting on and liking someone's posts.

Customer journey mapping your advertising is also important from an ABM perspective. It helps you create ad campaigns to address the changing needs of decision-makers as they loop through the research and consideration process.

Tell a Story With Your Ads

Like other forms of content, your ads need to convey something meaningful to get people’s attention. They don’t just have to be used for overt promotion. For instance, you can use ads to highlight your brand culture or social mission. 

Pay Attention to Visual Details

Social media is a highly visual medium, so you want to pay attention to copy and creative. Create beautiful, shareable graphics, and use video to grab attention. Consider how design elements, such as font and colour, will help tell your story and test out different people centric visuals.

Maintain the Correct Ad Specs

As a general rule, your ad copy should be concise, personal and relevant. Be upfront with your message and choose a clear call to action. 

Sponsored Content

Headlines should be under 150 characters. Descriptive copy should be under 70 characters (else you risk it getting truncated). Make sure image files are compressed to load quickly on mobile. 

Sponsored Video

According to LinkedIn research, videos created for brand awareness and brand consideration goals should be kept under 30 seconds. However, test out longer-form videos (90 seconds and above) for objectives like lead generation and conversions. By that point, your audience is engaged and interested in hearing a more complex product or brand story.

Message Ads

LinkedIn recommends that message ad copy under 500 characters drives a 46% higher click-through rate (CTR) on average. They also suggest including hyperlinks (shown to lift CTR by 21%).

Dynamic Ads

Keep ad copy short, simple, and to the point. Don’t use the secondary headline if you don't need to. You want to keep things flexible so that your copy can blend naturally with dynamically generated text fields.

Use Lead Gen Forms

Similar to Facebook Ads, you have the option of including lead gen forms in your Sponsored Content or Message Ad campaigns. When a LinkedIn member clicks on the call-to-action button, the form is automatically filled with their profile information. This makes it exceptionally easy for them to complete and submit the form.

Expert Advertising Campaign Planning

LinkedIn offers a powerful advertising platform. A well-built optimised campaign can be an important factor in your organisation's B2B digital marketing success. 

1827 Marketing can help you design customer centric LinkedIn advertising campaigns that integrate with your overall marketing strategy.

Contact us today to learn more!