Getting Started Guide To Successful LinkedIn Ads

• Did you find LinkedIn the most effective platform for paid campaigns or demand generations?
• Want to reach the professional audience through the paid-visual ads or messages?

   LinkedIn ad is all you require to reach professional audience and this is the most effective way to present your message to increase the visibility of your brand or demand generation for your product. It is often said, that a creative content abreast visual effect will give your post an added advantage. Now a days, marketers are using distinctive ad networks i.e Google, Yahoo!, Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest, to render the information pertaining to their services or products. In this article, I'll enlighten the common features that LinkedIn ad has; how it helps showcase your expertise to the professional audience and aids increase the visibility of your product.

1. Why LinkedIn ads?
2. Getting Started.
3. Creating sponsored/text ad.
4. Selecting the target audience.
5. Setting the daily budget.
6. Monitoring and optimizing the insights from LinkedIn Analytic.

Why LinkedIn Ads?

Regardless to what industry you serve, you will always find people who are concomitant to your business theme in some ways and you will always find those professionals over LinkedIn network. With over 'Four Hundred Million users' who are mostly professionally acquainted, your product has better chance of getting promoted with the help of LinkedIn ads. Business is always build on trust and trust enhance the visibility of the brand.

There are distinctive features that LinkedIn ad offers: Sponsored Updates; Professional audience; Precise B2B Targeting; Ads format and Premium advertising tools.

• Sponsored Updates: Helps reaching the LinkedIn feeds, stories across web and mobile view. 
• Professional Audience: Most advantageous feature to let showcase what you have gotten for the professional audience and influential professionals.
• Precise B2B Targeting:  Helps you to find right targeted audience among the group of professional people. For instance: Your product is meant for ICT sector, you have a chance to tailor your audience whose 'Job Title or Industry' lie under 'ICT' mark. 
• Ads Format: This is yet another common feature alike other ad networks which aids you design the ad on your preferences -- Text ads; Video ads and Text or Images ads.
• Premium Advertising Tool: LinkedIn offers premium advertising tools. For instance: Display ads; Lead accelerator; Sponsored group with more integrated options and Sponsored InMails for those whose quarterly budget exceeds to $25,000.

LinkedIn tends to be more expensive platform than Google or Facebook, but for medium and small business owners 'Sponsored Content' and 'text ads' are best way to reach the target audience. Sponsored contents are like sponsored tweets or Facebook sponsored ads on the Facebook feeds and text ads are identical to Google ads or Facebook ads. However, if ads are targeted accurately and precisely this ad network becomes the least expensive. 

"Sponsored contents on Twitter and Facebook"

                               

Out of other ad networks, LinkedIn allows to tailor the target audience based on companies, educations, industries, title or respective posts. The more you're precisely targeting the less money will be spent as you're reaching those who want your product not those who prefer to circumvent to avoid it. Breaking down of big campaigns seldom result on a common occasion when targeted big audience nevertheless to segregate big campaigns in smaller one will give definitive outcomes.

Getting Started

Before you get embarked with any type of advertisement, you have got to proactively research as to how you are likely to let your audience watch your ads: Text or Video, secondly you must make sure that you've chosen right target audience to permeate your brand and increase it's visibility. For instance: If you're working for ICT Industry -- you'd probably want to check that your ads are on basis of correct demographics; title of the job; industry; relevant education background or by job seniority.

Whilst choosing your audience, be prepping the list of right audience and try to be as specific as possible. If you're vaguely ambiguous about the exact information pertaining to the business theme of the company, you can visit their company page and at the bottom of company's page you will find the essential information. In addition to this, you may want to find the list of the professionals through whom your connection to that company has been made.

To initiate your campaign on LinkedIn, you must have your company's page because that way ads will be better triggered. To create a business page just click the 'interest' tab and select 'companies' from drop-down menu. Describe your business and other relevant details accompany with logo and head titles and your page will become professional. For LinkedIn Ads go the website www.linkedin.com/ads/  and create a campaign of your choice.

Creating Sponsored/Text Ad

To create an ad, just click Sponsor content/Create ad. I am clicking on 'Creating an ad' and filling out general information. Make sure that when you do this please choose the name which can be easily recalled later when opening up the campaign's insight to facilitate the optimisation process.

Once you've chosen the campaign type and name, the next section is                 'Ad variation'. In particular, LinkedIn offers 15 variations-tab in which you can test which ad photo and text suits the best and looks more appealing and accordingly choose the desired action.

"Ad Variation tab to enter the details of the ad"

                            

"Preview of the ad in three ways: Square; Tall and Long"

                      

There are some basic tips which you need to comprehend when running an ad and deciding the target audience for your ad.

• Strong words that define your business - LinkedIn ads serve distinctive approach hence use the words that grab the professionals attention.
• Include Image/Video - for better engagement and conversions always put an image that best advocate your brand and helps pervade it.

Selecting Target Audience

Now that you have optimised the ad and concluded which ad will be played as a final one, the next section is to select the audience. Once you embark taking the plunge to tailor the target audience, be specific as much as possible. Specific tailored target-audience process is indispensable for the ad campaign and particularly serve the purpose by showing them to the selected audience. 

You can target your audience on the basis of 'Location'; be specific with the location because it plays a pivotal role in choosing the right person at the right location. Once that you have decided the location field, 2 more field to be used to segregate your targeted audience: 'Companies'; 'Job Title'. Your focus should be on Job Titles or Job Seniority. You can also make it more specific with the help of 'advanced targeting' and you can make notches at the school, field of study, groups, degrees, skills and gender preferences.

If you're targeting specific group of people, you can select it by naming the group field with that specific keyword. In addition to this, you may have an option to exclude any certain company or set of companies, people, job titles and specific geographic region. You can also base your target audience on skill set and you may exclude specific skill (as you don't want to show your ads to the specific skill which is not listed and of course it will go in the air or too intricate to apprehend the ad).

"Target audience on basis of Location, Companies, Job Title, groups or skills"

     

"Target audience on basis of Degree, Gender, Age and Field of Study"

      

You might have seen there is a box "Audience Expansion" at the bottom; clicking that feature will increase your reach as 'LinkedIn helps reaching people similar to the targeted audience'. In first phase of your campaign, it is recommended that you 'uncheck' that box as it helps limiting the audience and if you don't get your desired result you may check that box and optimise the result later.

Setting Daily Budget and Bids

Now that I have already set my target audience, it's a turn for paying the amount. Make sure when you are running Sponsor Ads select CPC as a payment option and CPM for Text Ads. However, CPC is relatively lesser expensive than CPM. 

LinkedIn will show you minimum bid and suggest the bid range. Try to put your bid for 'per 1000 impression' in the bid range as it likely to get your ads prioritise before your counterparts. After setting the bid, it's time to set the daily budget, your campaign will require a daily budget to be spent. Set the daily budget which is more than the minimum threshold set by LinkedIn. This is the amount which you're likely to spend over a day. Always tell LinkedIn that how long would you like to run the campaign -- if the campaign is for 'Brand Awareness' it should set to a minimum of 2 months. 

                      " The campaign's details along with the payments"

Once you have accomplished it successfully the next option is the 'checkout' where you enter the details of your credit/debit card along with the billing address and other relevant information pertaining to the authenticity of the card holder. Unfortunately, I could have not clicked the image with filled form as it's infringes the agreement between my bank and me. :)

Once that you have reviewed your order and you have paid for the campaign--the analytics takes into place. Now it can be saved. 

Monitoring and Optimizing the Insights from LinkedIn Analytics

LinkedIn analytics are best as it tells everything about the campaign effectiveness right starting from Status; Clicks, Budget Impression CTR, Social Action, Average CPC and Total Value. 

"Campaign insight 'brand awareness' it continued for 1 month"

The above campaign's screenshots were randomly created to garner the initial protocols and process of LinkedIn ads and now that I am going to show you the instance with the help of my previous LinkedIn campaigns. Once you're running up and getting the social analytics results on your dashboard page, you can optimise it the way you want. 

In this campaign the total number clicks were recorded to be '400' which according to the target audience was a great result. We made the payment on CPC basis. Had we paid on the basis of CPM (Mille), we would have costed more than CPC. 

Here is another instance when I am going to tell you the distinction between the 'Total Budget' and 'Total Spent' LinkedIn rendered special benefits to those ads which were popular among your target audience. Somehow, you will be astonish to see that when my total budget is $50, how am I entitle to pay $175 but in this case I am not charged with additional $125 because LinkedIn never charge you beyond the limit you set for your campaign. Sometimes, LinkedIn aids additional benefits with no extra charge. In here, $125 clicks were utterly free of cost. Though, the reason behind this is still not affirmed but it happened more seldom in my campaigns. 

 "Total Spent Vs Total Budget"

                                        

You can say there is one more hidden option alike Twitter where it asks you to targets your own followers as well. Here is an example for Twitter first.

Go in the settings of the campaign and select the specified audience with the help of this feature. I have always checked the box when I have run a Twitter campaign. Alike Twitter, LinkedIn has this option to get your ads shown in the connection. There is a section called "Network Update" once you check the box, LinkedIn will send the ad to your connection as well for free.

 "Go in the setting tab and check the box 'network Updates'"

             

Alike Google, I like one more thing about LinkedIn ad that they also offer a credit amount to run the ad for the first time. You have got to enter the right credit/debit card details and you're good to go.

Once you start running LinkedIn ads, you would probably know the area from where the traffic is generated and I am sure that you'd love posting on LinkedIn and the insights relative to other ad network will give you firm determination that which ad network is precise and render better result.

I hope you'd certainly like what I have shared. I will keep sharing new and disruptive technologies with you. Any comment pertaining to this post can be asked to me directly or through mail. 'nikhilmisra@outlook.com'

Did you like the post? Did you use LinkedIn ads? What is the successful rate of your LinkedIn ads? Please share your comments.