The Campainless Blog
LinkedIn Ads can be an incredibly effective channel for B2B marketers. Whether you’re looking to boost brand awareness, generate high quality leads or increase the number of sales calls your getting, LinkedIn advertising can be a great tool to achieve your goals.
But how do you ensure you’re getting the most juice out of your ad spend? In this article, we run through our top 9, most trusted LinkedIn ads tips. With these handy tactics in your toolkit, you’ll be always primed to launch a successful advertising campaign on LinkedIn.
A perfectly curated audience is an incredibly important part of any superb LinkedIn ads campaign. Our number 1 hack for creating the ideal audience is to make sure there is alignment between your set up and the stage of the funnel you’re targeting. If it’s a top funnel, brand awareness campaign – you should be going broad with your audience. This means including as many relevant people as possible and really making use of LinkedIn’s “AND” filters.
If your campaign is mid funnel, you want to focus more on adding more nuance to your audience. This means narrowing it down to the key decision makers you want to focus on. Here we’d suggest using more “OR” combinations and exclusion filters to get your audience as laser-focused as possible.
Finally, if you’re looking at bottom-funnel activity, you’re probably going to want to use more list-based audiences or retargeting audiences. This enables you to target specific people who have already engaged with your brand in some way (whether it be visitors to the website, a specific landing page or people who have opened a lead gen forms).
Whichever way you go, you want to ensure there’s peak alignment between funnel stage and audience.
Our second tip for LinkedIn ads is also audience related: deploy demographic filters strategically. This means using filters like job function, job title, seniority, location, industry and interests. Then, combining them in the most tactical, clever way possible. With this approach, you’ll be able to get the most out of your ad spend (and only reach the target audience who will be most impactful).
We’d also strongly encourage excluding anyone that may fall into your targeting set up, who you don’t want to see your ads e.g. a specific job title like Marketing Manager. This avoids any unnecessary dollars going down the drain on unworthy eyeballs. Warning – there’s likely be a lot of testing involved in this one to get it right and continued tweaking from that point on. However, filters can truly be your best friend if you use them correctly.
Any cutting edge marketers out there? There’s no excuse for this one – you should be experimenting with lists and lookalikes! LinkedIn allows you to upload lists of potential prospects (gathered from your own database, online or intelligence databases like Bombora etc.) and target them with your ads.
By opting for this approach, you can get in front of exactly the right people, in the right way, when they are in a work mindset.
Secondly, you can use these lists, or lists of existing customers, to create a “lookalike.” With this option, LinkedIn finds people who have similar features to those in your existing audience, and allows you to target them with your ads. Another option to consider to broaden your
Now that you’ve seen some of our audience tips, the top one we have is to constantly experiment. Unless you are lacking in funds, you should always be testing multiple audience set ups whether it be a different region, persona or industry vertical. Having multiple audiences running at once allows you to see where your money is best spent, and get specific in your messaging.
Off audiences and onto bids – our golden rule is to start as close to the bid floor as possible. This allows you to see if you can get as many clicks as possible for your budget. The key to this is to check in with your spend and clicks for the first few days and weeks.
If you see that you’re continuously hitting budget and your CPC is low, keep things as they are. If you see that you aren’t hitting budget for more than 3 days, consider increasing your bids a bit to ensure you are competitive in the bidding auction. As long as you continue to monitor, you can’t go wrong with this one!
Another easy, important LinkedIn advertising tip to go by is – don’t push your daily budget below $100 a day. If you’re working with anything under $100, you may think you’re being thrifty but you won’t be able to get the kind of data you need to draw conclusions, take insights or make data-driven decisions. These are 3 key elements that need to be present in any successful LinkedIn advertising campaign. Just don’t do it!
Moving onto creative, our advice is to speak directly to your target audience in your LinkedIn ads. If you go for a generic approach, the likelihood of your audience engaging with your brand is 10x lower than if you take the time to really consider what will appeal to your specific audience.
Everything from the imagery choose (or video if you are running video ads), to the text on your banner, to the ad formats you choose, to the intro text in your ad and the copy on the form if you have one – needs to be catered to your audience. You want them to stop scrolling through their feed and engage.
For example, if your target audience is key decision makers at major universities, you’d want to be using language that is 100% grammatically correct, and appeals to the problems these professionals are dealing with day-to-day e.g. wading through long, overly engineered processes. Calling them out directly in your ad copy and visuals is also a key move.
Finding success with your creatives is all about testing and experimenting. But this needs to be in a measured, methodical and thoughtful way. We’d recommend testing creative variants for at least 2-4 weeks before coming to any conclusions about performance. And only one variable at a time. Having a document e.g. a simple excel spreadsheet, to collect your observations in is also a handy way to ensure your testing is set up for maximum impact.
When it comes to what to test – some of the different ad format types you can experiment with are carousel ads, single image ads, text ads, job ads, lead gen forms, spotlight ads and message ads. But you can also test different types of ad copy (different messaging angles), different banners, and different visuals. We’d recommend you test as much as you can, but not all at once!
If you’re running a LinkedIn campaign, you’d be a fool not to analyse your LinkedIn ads data at regular intervals. After all, you’ll never know what’s working and what isn’t in your campaign manager, if you’re not constantly checking in with your data.
While LinkedIn ads has there own data display, we’d recommend setting up some kind of dashboard externally in a platform like funnel.io so you can focus on your key metrics, and compare against other channels e.g. Google Ads and Facebook.
We’d also strongly suggest creating a monthly report where you take out key insights, and then use this to inform your optimisation actions as well as your strategy and tactics moving forward. This is the best way to ensure your LinkedIn ad campaigns are running at max performance.
There you are! 9 shortcuts to becoming LinkedIn ads royalty. We’d recommend any time you’re going to build a fresh campaign, come back to this tab and re-read our tips. You’ll never put a foot wrong if you let yourself be guided by best practices as sharp as these. Still in need of guidance? If you need a further helping hand or want to clarify anything we’ve talked about, please get in touch with the Campainless team today. We’d love to hear from you!
