Is your company a B2B business? Then you should know that a LinkedIn ad has a greater Return on Investment (ROI) than other social media site ads. Why do we say that? LinkedIn ads generate a click-through-rate (CTR) of 0.025 percent on average, according to Kissmetrics. However, when you create precisely targeted ads that have compelling and well-crafted copy, you can expect to achieve a CTR between 0.7 to 0.10 percent.

Setting Up Your Supercharged Ad Campaign

Evaluate your Business

To decide whether LinkedIn is a viable platform for promoting your business ask yourself these questions:

  • Does my business market to other businesses (B2B)?
  • What is my niche, service or product?
  • Who am I targeting?

LinkedIn is the appropriate platform for B2B marketing, because it’s targeted and meant for working professionals, executives, entrepreneurs, and business owners. If you can clearly visualize your target audience and you know that certain professionals would be interested in your product, then LinkedIn is for you.

Use Targeting to Your Advantage

LinkedIn allows you to target your ads based on a variety of variables including business size, professional interests, location and industry. The fact that LinkedIn allows you to get very specific with your targeting options, makes this an effective platform for creating valuable leads and conversions. In other words, for a B2B company, leads generated from this platform will be much more likely to convert than leads generated from a Facebook ad campaign.

Tips for a Supercharged LinkedIn Ad Campaign

  1. Use a destination URL relevant to your LinkedIn audience. Don’t just send people to the homepage of your website. Create a specific landing page that has been carefully crafted with conversion rate optimization (CRO) in mind and that is geared towards your LinkedIn audience.
  2. Optimize for click-ability. A LinkedIn ad includes:
    • 25 characters for headline
    • 75 characters for copy
    • Company name
    • Image & URL

Make each of these elements count. Ensure all these parts have been optimized to specifically capture the attention of the audience you are targeting with tempting CTAs (Call To Actions) that make people want to click.

  1. Be straightforward. Don’t leave anything up to the imagination in your ad. Be direct and tell your audience exactly what you offer, the action you want them to perform, and the direct benefit of that action. For example, ”Click here for 50% off your first purchase.”
  2. Choose a picture that gets you noticed. According to LinkedIn, images that have a woman on them are actually clicked on the most. In fact, when applicable, use people in your images. Bear in mind this is a small space so you don’t want to crowd in a detailed image that could be difficult to discern at a small size.
  3. Craft a headline that specifically targets the audience you are marketing to. This technique is especially effective on this platform due to the specific nature of profiles and content on LinkedIn.
  4. Offer freebies or incentives. One very effective method to grabbing more likes and shares is offering discounted products or services. Entice users with free or discounted products or services for signing up for weekly email deals or signing up for your email marketing campaign. When supply is limited, you can use this to your advantage by creating a CTA to act quickly. For example, the first 100 customers that sign up today win a free or discounted item – or sign up and share to win 50% web design & development.
  5. Create multiple ads. LinkedIn allows you to create up to 15 different ads on each ad campaign. You would be selling yourself short to not run at least three different types of ads. By doing this, you are able to experiment with different images, headlines, CTAs and ad copy in order to evaluate what has been most effective. Use this information when creating your next campaign and you will only improve your LinkedIn advertising prowess.

Tracking and Optimization

  • Use two methods to capture leads. One way to collect leads is by capturing those conversions on your landing page. A good conversion rate optimized page will generate the most leads. The second way is by turning on the LinkedIn feature called ”lead collection.”
  • Set up Google Analytics for easy and effective tracking. Tag your URLs. This is easily done with Google Analytics URL builder. Do this by first inserting your landing page then completing the remaining details. The name will be your LinkedIn campaign name, source ”LinkedIn” and medium ”CPC.” Learn more here. Then use the tagged URL Google Analytics provides and insert it into the LinkedIn ad for the destination URL. Also be sure you have your goals created in order to track progress.
  • Track ad conversions in order to determine the ROI profitability of your ad campaign. Here’s how:

Step 1: Set your goals. Click on settings/profiles/goals and enter a goal. Most commonly used for tracking in this step is a destination URL which is the page your visitors are redirected to once they convert, typically a ”thank you” page. It is not necessary to include the domain URL for this step, instead use the short URL for example instead of http://www.yourwebsite.com/thank-you, only enter /thank-you.

Step 2:  Analyze tracking sources. You have the ability to create unique URLs for each ad you have created in order to more accurately measure the effectiveness of the ad. Let’s say you want to determine if including pricing information in your ad copy creates more conversions than an ad without this pricing information. In order to determine this, tracking needs to be established at the ad level.

  • Within Google Analytics, set up the appropriate ”UTM” parameters to be sure your ad tracking is being picked up. Analyze the metrics you discover within Analytics such as average time on site, bounce rate, etc., to discover if you need to spend more time creating a compelling landing page or identify other areas that need attention.

LinkedIn Ad Potential

Ultimately, LinkedIn can rack up a decent amount of spending, but depending on your niche and your ad approach, you can extract a good ROI when precisely executed. Ready for some encouragement? LinkedIn is 277% more effective at generating leads than any other social network, according to HubSpot. That’s huge! Plus, it confirms the potential for LinkedIn ad campaigns and their value to your business. Contact us if you need help getting started or if you want us to set up a killer LinkedIn ad campaign without you even having to lift a finger.