The Campainless Blog
There’s a reason why 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for their content marketing efforts. If you leverage the platform effectively (and don’t steer off course), the results can be truly spectacular. But how can you make LinkedIn work for you and get the most juice out of your investment? Nailing LinkedIn best practices is key. Get a head start with this nifty cheatsheet.
The key to LinkedIn success is a perfectly curated audience and the key to achieving that is layering. Depending on who your audience are and what your overall objective for the campaign is, we’d typically recommend you layer filters such as city, country or continent, seniority, job function and company size.
From here, if you still have scope to narrow down further: consider adding in any interests, skills and groups you’d judge to be relevant to your target audience. The goal is to make the granularity and power of Linkedin targeting work for you, without hampering your opportunity for results.
Have you ever been so keen to get leads coming through the door that you’ve seen the “maximum delivery” bidding option and automatically thought – great, that’s settled? We’d recommend you abandon this mindset immediately.
One of the key LinkedIn best practices we stick by is to bid as low as possible as a starting point and then depending on the data you see coming through, make any necessary adjustments. This way you’re giving yourself the opportunity to get the max number of clicks out of your budget right from the get go.
Like layering, audience segmentation is a critical piece of the puzzle which is LinkedIn success. If a target prospect sees your ads, you want them to immediately identify with your messaging, creative, offer and so on. Segmentation by demographic, by region, function, industry or by seniority allows you to do this.
Beyond the opportunity for personalisation, segmentation enables you to ensure you aren’t spending too much on a cost per click basis due to huge variations in your audience. For example, if you’re bidding on India and Australia in the same campaign, you’ll likely be overbidding in India and underbidding in Australia, neither of which is ideal.
Content is the bread and butter of LinkedIn. If you’re not coming to the table with high quality, well thought-out content, you’ll fail to get a bite. How do you do this? Ensuring the content you created is not only of interest to your target audience (which is crucial) but also aligns with the stage in the funnel that you want to meet them at. Is it a cold, top-of funnel audience? Try something lower commitment like an infographic or a video. Mid-bottom? Try a case study, gated how-to guide or a webinar. Your goal is to meet your audience where they are and provide them with what they need at that point.
This one’s easy. Everything that goes into your campaign – from the creative to the messaging to the offer and the audience – should be consistent. Imagine you have a video ad that sends to a landing page, a thank you page and then triggers a thank you email with a piece of content in it. If any part of this journey doesn’t fit together in a logical, meaningful way – you risk confusion, friction and a missed opportunity for leads. This is one of the most important LinkedIn best practices and is crucial to success.
Just don’t do it.
Any B2B marketer will tell you testing is the secret to every successful digital marketing campaign, and the same is true for LinkedIn. While some tactics, objectives and approaches definitely work best for certain companies, for others the very same strategy could fall short completely. This means there’s no single best way of doing things. If you just stick to just one way of approaching the platform, you’ll never truly know what your true potential for leads is nor where your sweet spot lies. Go forth – test, experiment and learn!
When crafting the perfect set of ad copy to pair with your creative, you need to keep it simple, concise and stay within LinkedIn’s recommended character counts (155 intro text and 70 headline). If you tip over these limits, particularly in the intro text, your copy will be truncated.
Why is this so bad? If someone clicks “see more” – you will pay for the click, even if they don’t go through to your landing page or lead gen form. You’d practically be throwing away hard-earned dollars.
Communication with your sales team is potentially the single most important ingredient to long-term, long-lasting success with LinkedIn. As a best practice, you need to ensure that your marketing team does not operate in a silo and sets up frequent, meaningful dialogues with your sales team. This gives you the opportunity to check that a) the leads you are getting reflect their understanding of what converts and b) they are converting. Plus, any helpful feedback they have.
Once you have your campaign/s set up and running, the hard work begins (not ends). Don’t make the mistake of simply setting and forgetting. We find it helpful to set up a task in your project management tool e.g. Asana that reminds you to check in with your campaigns on a frequent basis. When you head into the account, look for any meaningful variations in performance, collect key insights and act on them to optimize! This is a best practice you should never slack off on.
Need help putting in place any of these Linkedin best practices? You’re in luck! With Campainless, an intuitive LinkedIn SaaS tool – you’ll be sent a notification whenever you’ve gone against best practice to keep you in check and be provided with a steady stream of best practice hints and tips. Registering is the quickest way to getting the very best out of the B2B marketer’s platform of choice.
