LinkedIn is the serious business person’s online marketing search tool. Business executives are not there searching for cute kitten videos or posting pictures from their last vacation. They are looking for solid business content they can use to make their business better, and want to hear from potential partners who can help them meet their goals. They are senior level influencers and decision-makers, and most check their feed every day to get the freshest business insights.

This potential underscores why we here at 1827 Marketing spend so much time educating our readers on this topic. Previous “Smart Thinking” pieces focused on what you can achieve organically on LinkedIn. We provided helpful LinkedIn tips and insights on how to define a target audience, create content, follow best practices, execute a complete strategy, measure impact and engage in conversational marketing. We also cited a few powerful examples of successful LinkedIn marketing strategies.

A strong organic marketing strategy is a great way to begin attracting notice to your company. Now it is time to kick it up a notch with an outbound strategy. You can use your organic foundation to pave the way for a truly powerful paid LinkedIn advertising and retargeting strategy. LinkedIn is THE business social platform, but there are so many more opportunities to interact than just creating a LinkedIn page, building a LinkedIn network and creating great content.

Paid Marketing Strategies on LinkedIn

“We sell in all markets globally and what is really important for us is being able to reach those accounts internationally, and we’ve leaned heavily on LinkedIn to be able to do that because of the amount of data [LinkedIn has] across all regions. So, for the [prospects] that we do target with ads, late stage opportunities, we see 60% higher close rate. For those that are at the middle of the funnel, the ones that were focused on converting, they moved 30% faster.

So, there’s no doubt in my mind that [ABM] is effective.”

~ Nash Haywood, Global Director - Digital Conversion & Paid Media, Genesys

Most business organisations put a great deal of effort into creating the perfect website, and invest a significant portion of the marketing budget on curating the ultimate customer experience. Now it is possible to create a virtual circle of influence by combining LinkedIn marketing and remarketing on your website.

After you have completed the basics, such as creating an information-packed LinkedIn profile, you can then start taking advantage of its many features to really target the businesses you want to work with. This targeting advantage outweighs that of any other social media platform. If members of your target audience show any interest in you at all, you can continue on a course of awareness-building with targeted remarketing ads.

If you want to invest in paid marketing on LinkedIn’s advertising platform, it affords a variety of ad formats and business targeting opportunities.

• Sponsored Content: These are native ads that will appear in the viewer’s LinkedIn feed. They could be a single image, video ad, or carousel ad type. The content will typically include a headline, image and link to your business. Set a daily budget so you can exercise better control over this aspect of your marketing.

• Sponsored Messaging: This enables you to actively engage your audience in the LinkedIn Messaging area with Sponsored InMail. You can deliver a targeted message with a single call to action, and drive stronger engagement than is usually seen with traditional email messaging. The content can be informational or motivational, or can call attention to a webinar or podcast event.

• Text Ads: This option can offer cost-effective pay-per-click or CPM desktop ads, but they are often not very exciting. They are featured on the sidebar, and usually consist of a basic block of text with a headline and company logo.

• Dynamic Ads: This more powerful option allows you to engage prospects with ads that are automatically personalised to them.

The content flexibility is practically endless. You can promote posts, you can produce videos to put out on your page, and you can create other kinds of ads to meet your unique business personality. On top of that, you can also use Lead Gen Forms with Message Ads and Sponsored Content to capture even more quality leads from your paid LinkedIn ads.

LinkedIn seamlessly fills in the fields and provides you with information it already knows about your prospect. The up side of this capability is that it reduces the user's submission time, and also diminishes their friction to signing up for whatever it is you are offering.

Customised account targeting allows you to run account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns, powered by LinkedIn data. To take an extreme example, let's say you have a list of 20 companies that you really want to work with and you have created some tremendously insightful content to share with them. With this targeting capability, you can literally type in those 20 companies as the target audience viewer for your ad.

You have the ability to promote a post right in the timeline of people in your target organisations. You can further refine your targeting by seniority, job function, industry or interests, so you can very precisely target content you think will be of interest to those people. Where else can you find such a high level of targeted advertising capability?

LinkedIn Advertising Best Strategies

Because it can be so confusing to look at all the advertising possibilities on LinkedIn, it is helpful to keep these strategies in mind.

Understand the Stage of the Customer Journey

LinkedIn advertising channels can work differently at various stages of the customer journey. If a prospect is in the very earliest stages of the journey, a Sponsored InMail may be seen as too forward. Customers further along the journey, on the other hand, may not respond well to non-personal text ads that could make them feel you do not value the relationship which has already been established.

Layer Your LinkedIn Targeting Options

The process of targeting business people for communications is rarely as straight-forward as targeting consumers. There may be many levels that are involved in the decision-making process, so your targeting must include more options to get everyone on the same information level. You don’t want it to be so wide as to include those who are not involved in purchasing decisions, but you don’t want it to be so narrow as to exclude an important tier or influencer. A better understanding of the target audience make-up leads to better LinkedIn advertising strategies.

Respect the LinkedIn Environment

Although business people are certainly people, marketing strategies are not entirely the same in the business environment. Understand the reasons why they come to LinkedIn in the first place, be respectful of their needs, and let them know that you want to be helpful in achieving their goals without wasting their time.

Automate Your Social Media Interactions

Use a platform such as SharpSpring to trigger a response and automatically interact with LinkedIn users when a contact likes a post from your LinkedIn page or comments about one of your posts. If you have an e-mail address, you can send a notification to that potential contact, or assign the person to a member of your sales team for further follow-up. You may be able to tag the user to help you better identify opportunities for further information sharing. At the very least, you want to change their status from that of general potential to interested opportunity, so you can update the customer persona you are building.

Website Retargeting on LinkedIn

With all these LinkedIn advertising strategies in place, the hope is that your target prospect will like the information you shared and click a link which takes them to your website. With any luck, they will enter a sales funnel so that you can continue talking with them and make this the start of a beautiful relationship.

But…unfortunately, it is seldom as simple as that. The sales journey can sometimes be a long and circuitous process. Here again, LinkedIn can help with its website retargeting capabilities. These allow you to segment your website visitors based on the pages they visited on your website using the LinkedIn Insight Tag. You can then create audiences to retarget, tailor ad content to reactivate interest by delivering relevant content across the web to remind them about your company, and continue to guide those prospects on a buying journey back to you.

Now that you know there is a spark of interest, the biggest advantage of remarketing is that you can now offer other nuggets of information that might be of interest to them – webinars, fresh content or even new service announcements. This will keep your business top-of-mind for when they are ready to make that all-important buying decision. You may need several interactions and touch points in several kinds of moments to achieve this moment of success. People need to see your brand a few times around the place, before they start to believe and to use it.

Because they have already been positively exposed to information about your company, retargeting can be extremely effective. Click-through rates, or CTRs, for retargeted ads can be as much as 10 times better than those achieved by non-retargeted ads. Secondary response rates have an increased chance of achieving success because they may appear at a time when there is a more pressing need on the targeted prospect’s part.

REMARKETING PLUS: Remarketing is also really affordable. It is a paid way of trying to amplify the pipeline.

Advanced Search Options on LinkedIn

Paid marketing and LinkedIn retargeting ads are two effective ways to communicate with your target audience, but if you really want to expand your reach, you will definitely want to think about accessing the LinkedIn Audience Network. This helps you reach your target audience with Sponsored Content on a premium network of publishers, mobile apps and websites, which go well beyond the general LinkedIn newsfeed. This allows you to:

• Reach exactly the right professionals on a more frequent basis with your targeted Sponsored Content.

• Boost campaign performance and ROI by delivering your message in the feed and on the Network.

• Maintain brand safety standards by controlling ad placement and creating custom block-lists.

Why Use LinkedIn for Business?

The simple answer is, because it works. That really should be the only reason necessary to incorporate LinkedIn into your advertising and marketing strategy, but just take a look at some outstanding results which were obtained from LinkedIn B2B advertising. This should get your imagination in gear about how you can use LinkedIn to achieve even better results for your business:

• IR Prognosis: This computer software company wanted to reduce its cost per lead and accurately track performance across the entire customer journey. They were able to achieve a two-fold increase in their conversion tracking rates when they created a focused target audience with Sponsored Content and made use of LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms.

• Replicon: This California-based information technology and services company in the United States saw their response rates increase eleven times higher when they began using Sponsored InMail, as compared to relying on their traditional email marketing strategies.

• NetBrain Technologies: A computer software company in Burlington, Massachusetts, NetBrain was able to increase their click-through rate by two times, and also saw 94% of leads generated through LinkedIn accepted by sales.

Best of all, you can easily keep track and manage your LinkedIn ads in one place with their Campaign Manager. Another way to easily associate LinkedIn blog posts with campaigns is through a platform such as SharpSpring. This gives you the capability to see exactly which leads have interacted with your LinkedIn social media posts. If they are active and engaged, then you will have a sure sign that it is time to take it to the next step, or bring in sales to ramp it up to a more personalised level.

Join us in our obsession with using LinkedIn for business, and start using these LinkedIn B2B advertising strategies now. The 1827 Marketing platform offers powerful business tools that help you create campaigns and experiences that deliver results.

We can help you use LinkedIn to lead prospects to you, get to know you, and become customers in a more cost-efficient and effective way. The platform can be used to deliver relevant personalised content and experiences at scale, whilst eliminating time and overhead costs, and will keep the content engine running so you can focus on your clients.

1827 Marketing allows your business to tie in our marketing automation platform with behavioural triggers by using advanced techniques such as lead scoring, progressive profiling, and email automation. We bring it all together with strategic planning, content creation, marketing automation and social amplification.