The Ins and Outs of LinkedIn Advertising

Are you advertising on LinkedIn? You should be.

LinkedIn Ads provides some of the best targeting options if your industry goals are B2B, education, or employment-related. With its wide range of creative options and targeting, you’ll find it’s a great channel to expand your school or business’s audience reach and find the right prospects.

LinkedIn audience targeting

In addition to being able to target many of the same demographics as Facebook & Google (like age, gender, and personal interests) you’re also able to target users by several highly specific and important attributes. These include:

• Job title
• Skills
• Company name
• Industry
• School
• Professional interests and groups 
• i.e. “Open to Education,” “Job Seeker”

With LinkedIn, you can be a lot more confident that these details are updated regularly and reflect users’ experience and interests in real-time. This is because users are much more incentivized to keep their LinkedIn profile details up to date than their employment, schooling, and professional interests on Facebook.

Imagine you’re a B2B with an incredibly specific goal: you want to reach business leaders interested in developing a gift card rewards program for their customers or employees. What are your options?

On LinkedIn, you could filter for:

• Member skills: Customer Loyalty Management, Customer Loyalty Measurement, Employee Rewards Programs, Loyalty Marketing, Engagement Marketing, Loyalty Programs
• Member groups: Employee Engagement and Benefits, Culture Transformation & Employee Engagement, The Employee Engagement Awards
• Job Function: Marketing or Human Resources
• Job Seniority: Manager, Director, VP, CXO

Overall, LinkedIn gives you access to important decision-makers. Of the 630 million members on LinkedIn, 180 million of those are senior-level influencers, and 10 million are C-level executives. Filtering for these roles can help you get in touch with important decision-makers that can make large scale changes to positively impact your business.

LinkedIn ad design

LinkedIn allows you to advertise on many different formats––from a standard single image, video, or carousel ad on the news feed to text and spotlight ads. What you choose will depend on your business’ objectives and creative resources. 

Among these ad formats, there is one unique option really worth checking out: LinkedIn Message Ads.

LinkedIn message ads

The best way to influence change and make an impact with your ad messaging is to personalize it to the receiving user so that the information feels relevant to them at that moment. With LinkedIn message ads, this becomes a reality.

Message ads allow you to create an ad that appears in users’ inboxes and addresses them by name––making each user feel special and hand-selected for the message. 

We tend to see significantly higher conversion rates for users through these direct in-mail ads. Pairing this creative with LinkedIn’s comprehensive targeting options, you can really make an impact with this homerun. 

Professional context is key

LinkedIn is a professional locale that users turn to for career development. Here, you wouldn’t be sending an ad about shoes to a user browsing for news or watching TV. You’re sending an ad about future work, education, or business opportunity to a user that is likely on the platform looking for the exact thing you’re offering. 

Ad messaging hits harder when the message is in the right context––no message falls in a vacuum. If your business goals align with what users are looking for when they sign into LinkedIn, you’ll have a winning advertisement.

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For the best LinkedIn ad management, turn to the experts. Our team will write, design, test, optimize, and test some more in order to achieve your advertising goals. Request an audit from Perfect Search today!

Wondering what Facebook Ads can do for your e-commerce business? Head to our blog to find out.