Guide to LinkedIn Advertising

Have you ever considered advertising on LinkedIn? If you are looking to diversify your advertising this could be the answer you’ve been looking for. Not many people consider LinkedIn when they think of advertising and most don’t even know it’s a possibility. More than just a networking platform, we’ll be exploring the different options and how they could be incorporated into your advertising strategy.

For LinkedIn Advertising you have four different options, LinkedIn Ads, Dynamic Ads, Sponsored Content and Sponsored InMail. We will walk through each of these different options so you can determine which form of LinkedIn Advertising would be best to accomplish your company’s goals.

We’ll get started with LinkedIn Ads. These ads themselves are simple enough to create and even simpler to design because they are single sentence text ads. It’s a short and sweet way to get your message out to everyone scrolling through their daily feeds. These ads are the low-maintenance option because the only creative you’d have to worry about is copy. These are definitely less dynamic than other advertising tactics, so we would advise to proceed with minimal expectations. They have the ability to distribute your message in an extremely subtle way.

If you’ve ever worked with Facebook Ads, then LinkedIn Dynamic Ads will be very familiar to you. These Dynamic Ads can be used to promote your company page. These ads will appear in the News Feed and can be customized with the user’s profile picture. Dynamic Ads can be Follower Ads that encourage users to follow your page, Spotlight Ads send traffic out to a landing page of your choice, Jobs Ads point potential candidates to your job listing, and Content Ads allow you to generate leads with content downloads. You will be able to customize your Call to Action, Targeting and content specifications while building out your ad.

Sponsored Content is another efficient way to advertise on LinkedIn. These ads are going to be very similar to a boosted post on Facebook. You will build out your audience based on location, industry, company size, etc. and then set your budgets. LinkedIn requires a minimum CPC of $2 and you must have at least a $10 daily budget. When first starting off, it is helpful to begin with A/B testing of separate audiences to gauge what will perform the best.

Finally, you can advertise by using Sponsored InMail. These messages are delivered straight into your audiences inbox, thus distributing your message in an uncluttered environment. You can create a custom Call to Action and Hyperlink within your message and you have the option to include a sidebar image banner to cement your brand with the audience. Sponsored InMail is valuable because it produces a very high open rate, but it does come at a much higher price.

When it comes to Brand to Brand lead generation, LinkedIn is one of the best places to advertise. There is less competition in this advertising as opposed to something like Facebook, and the job titles and company locations that user’s provide allow for more accurate targeting. With that being said, LinkedIn Advertising tends to be more beneficial if you are advertising education or experiences as opposed to services. LinkedIn is full of business minded individuals that are looking for opportunities for career and education development.

Now you might be wondering if LinkedIn Ads are something you’d want to incorporate into your strategy. In exploring all the options, you’ll recognize that these ads are more suited for B2B advertising. Because the nature of the ads are more simplistic it’s important to remember these ads serve as a supplement. You never know where a certain tactic might take you, so there is no harm in trying. Advertising is all about testing the waters of new opportunities to find what is most effective for you and your business.