LinkedIn is a great platform for advertisers to reach millions of businesses and business professionals to help create awareness around your business’s solutions, drive sales of your products to professionals in their respective industries, generate high quality leads, or drive specific conversions you have set up on your website. No matter your what your B2B (Business to Business) marketing objective may be, LinkedIn can assist you in reaching your marketing objectives.
Lets look at some of the campaign objective options available to advertisers when creating a campaign in LinkedIn Campaign Manager.
Campaign Objectives.
The campaign objective you select should directly assist your main marketing objective. Whether you want users to interact with you on LinkedIn, perform specific actions on your website, or you trying to generate leads; the correct campaign objective will assist you in achieving your desired goal.
Campaign objectives are group into three main categroies:
Awareness
This campaign is best for top-of-funnel advertising where you are trying to build an audience for your business or a new solution you are offering. This campaign objective will focus on showing your ads to as many professionals as possible within the audience you have set.
Consideration
This campaign objective is focused on encouraging your targeted professionals to take action to find out more about your business and your business solutions. These actions can be either clicks on your ad that will lead to your website landing page, or to engage with you directly through your ad on LinkedIn by completing social inertactions on your ad.
Conversion
this type of campaign objective will focus on generating leads with LinkedIn’s lead forms, or users taking specific actions on your website that you have marked as a conversion in LinkedIn.
We will look at the individual campaign objectives from each of the above categories in another article. For now, we will go through some of the creative formats available to advertisers in LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager.
Creative Formats
We will be looking at the creative formats available across all campaign objectives. LinkedIn offers seven different ad fromats:
Single Image Ad
Sponsor your LinkedIn page’s existing single image content to help it reach new professionals or create a new single image ad that will capture your audiences attention in LinkedIn’s native single image ad placements. Single image ads work well with all campaign objective types.
The image you use may be horizontal/landscape, vertical/portrait or square. We recommend using square imagery as it has shown the best performance across most campaign objectives.
Image ads also have a headline (usually shown directly below the image), introductory text (shown above the image) and a call to action button (below or next to the headline). It is recommended that you keep the text as short and engaging as possible and using a call to action option that is relevant to what you would like the viewer of your ad to do once they have seen your ad; for example, “learn more” if you would like them to click on the ad that will lead them to a landing page that you have provided with more information about your business.
Video Ad
Captivate a professional audience with appealing visuals, sounds and motion with video ads in the LinkedIn feed. Video ads work well with brand awareness and considertation campaign objectives. Your video should also be relevant to the campaign objective you have selected.
Your video may be between 3 seconds to 30 minutes long, however we recommend your video being no longer than 30 seconds for awareness and consideration type campaigns. Similar to single image ads, video ads may be either horizontal/landscape, vertical/portait, or square.
Video ads are accompanied by introductory text, headline and a call to action. Your introductory text and headline should provide context to the video you are advertising while the video provides further information about your business; either your business’s story or information on your products or services.
Carousel Image Ad
Tell a story, show off your business wide range of service solutions, or products with LinkedIn’s carousel image ads. You can use up to 10 images in LinkedIn’s carousel image ad format. Carousels are great for consideration and conversion type campaign objectives as they can provide the viewer with a lot of relevant information about your business and the solutions your business offers.
The carousel image format has similar specifications to the single image ad format however, we recommend using square images consistently throughout the carousel. You may have a unique headline and landing page URL for each image in the carousel. However, your call to action and introductory text will be the same across all images of the carousel.
Message Ad
Create ads that are delivered via LinkedIn Messages directly to your target audience’s LinkedIn Messaging inbox. Engage directly with your prospects to increase consideration for your brand or add lead forms to your message ads to collect leads directly.
Message ads allow you to reach your audience in an unclutterd environment so your business stands out. This ad format works well with all campaign objective types.
You can set up your message ads to be personalised for the individual receiving your ad with a custom greeting; automatically inserting the recievers name and last name to the message ad.
It is recommended that you keep your message ads short and concise, usually under 500 characters.
Other Ad formats
Text ads are simple ads shown on the right-hand side or top of the LinkedIn desktop feed. Text ads are available in a wide variety of sizes and ratios. Text ads are greate for brand awareness as they are cost effective and offer greate visibility for your business. Text ads are usually a picture of your LinkedIn business profile image accompanied by a short headline and description.
Spotlight ads (also known as Dynamic Ads) are personalized ads using the viewers profile data, like their profile photo, company name, job title and more. Spotlight ads work well when assisting your current campaign whether the campaign objective is brand awareness, consideration, or conversion focused. Spotlight ads are usually the viewers profile information (profile photo and name) accompanied by your businesses profile photo and a short call to action and call to action button (view website, follow, and many more).
For all ad fromats you will be required to provide a landing page URL for when a user clicks on your ad. It is best practice for your landing page to directly relate to the ad that was clicked on, for example if your ad is focused on driving sales of a particular product or service, the landing page should provide more information about that product or service. It is also important to note that certain ad formats will not be available for certain campaign objectives types.
Why Choose LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is one of the world’s largest professional networks. LinkedIn offers businesses high level targeting options that allow you to reach the professionals in the industries that are most relevant to you at a time when they are most likely to engage with your ads and content. Not only can you reach other business, you can also reach key decision makers within those businesses.
No matter what your B2B marketing goal may be LinkedIn offers you effective marketing solutions and campaign objectives that will help you reach your marketing goal.
