The Basics of LinkedIn Advertising and Why B2B Brands Should Use it?

6th Jan, 2021

More than 660 million subscribers world-wide, a solid professional consumer base, and the goodness of a well-designed advertising platform - LinkedIn has it all. It’s a rapidly growing social media platform that B2B brands are eyeing to leverage business benefits. Therefore, we have come up with a post dedicated entirely to understanding LinkedIn advertising. Let’s get into the content and get acquainted with LinkedIn advertising for the B2B sector.

What is LinkedIn Advertising?

LinkedIn ads are paid advertisements that run on one of the most successful social media networks, LinkedIn. It has helped brands reach a professional audience or run highly targeted B2B campaigns. Once you have figured out your marketing goals, you should ensure you use LinkedIn if you need to attract and connect with a professional, well-defined, and specified target audience. Let’s learn how LinkedIn advertising works.

How LinkedIn Advertising Works?

To advertise successfully on LinkedIn, all you have to do is follow these five simple steps. Let’s learn about these steps in brief.

1. Create a Campaign Manager

Set up your campaign manager account to access features like budget setting, goal setting, reporting, analysis, and to ensure you have complete control over your ad campaigns.

2. Choose Advertising Objective

Begin your campaign by choosing the right objective. There are three main objectives - Brand Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. Under Consideration, you will get website visits, engagement, and video views. Under Conversion, you get lead generation, website conversions, job applicants, and other sub-objectives.

3. Select Targeting Criteria

Select your audience using attributes like company size, company name, member schools, member interests, member groups, skills, job title, job seniority, and more. A well-targeted audience is the backbone of a LinkedIn advertising campaign.

4. Choose Ad Format

There are various kinds of ad formats available on LinkedIn - Sponsored Content, Message Ads, Dynamic Ads, Text Ads, Video Ads, Single Image Ads, Carousel Ads, and more.

5. Set Budget and Schedule

You will need to choose from three different budget options - Cost Per Send (CPS) for Message Ads, Cost Per Click (CPC) for action-oriented campaigns, and Cost Per Impression (CPM) for brand awareness.

6. Measure and Analyze

Lastly, monitor your campaigns and get insights through analytics. Optimize your campaigns accordingly.

Why LinkedIn is a Powerful B2B Advertising Platform?

There are several reasons why LinkedIn has become one of the most powerful B2B advertising platforms. Here we discuss the top five reasons why your B2B brand should never miss the opportunity to advertise on LinkedIn.

1. Contextual Advertising

The context of LinkedIn is quite clear. Unlike other social media platforms, people come on LinkedIn to only make professional connections. They are there to consume industry news, get expert advice, insights, and recommendations. This makes it super lucrative for B2B brands that are looking to leverage a professional B2B audience.

2. Precision Targeting

Targeting an audience on LinkedIn is effective. You have enough attributes to define a target audience and make your campaigns more precise. We highly recommend you create your ideal customer person before beginning with LinkedIn advertising.

3. Use Data for Maximum Effect

If you happen to know your target audience well in advance, you can just upload your customer list and LinkedIn will do its best to reach new customers that share the same attributes as that of your existing customers. You can also make LinkedIn match the emails with the user profiles on the network.

4. Variety of Ad Formats and Objectives

As we mentioned earlier, there are many ad objectives and formats to choose from. You can choose from brand awareness, website visits, engagement, video views, lead generation, website conversions, job applicants, and more ad objectives are in the making. Then you have formats like the single-image ad, carousel ad, video ad, text ad, and spotlight ad.

5. Helps Leverage Employees 

Finally, one of the best and quite practical reasons to use LinkedIn is that it allows B2B brands to leverage their employees. Once you ensure your employees have well-optimized profiles, you can make them spokespeople for your brand. This will significantly help you boost your B2B brand’s search result visibility.

Wrapping Up On LinkedIn Advertising

There you have it. LinkedIn is a solid B2B advertising tool that gives all the benefits of being on a social media network. However, there is definitely a learning curve involved with LinkedIn ads. Want access to our LinkedIn for B2B marketing framework? Connect with us today!