There are numerous articles circling the web around best practices and hacks for LinkedIn advertising, but before digging into advanced tactics it is crucial to understand the basics. Your clever puppy ads will definitely get clicks, but how will you know how effective they truly are if you’re aren’t tracking conversions? There are many types of ads and tactics for LinkedIn, but today we’re going to focus on what it takes to launch Sponsored Content with a demand generation focus.
What do you need to get started?
Launching a successful LinkedIn campaign is just like baking a cake – you’ve got to gather your ingredients and prepare before you can start baking. That’s what our Customer Success Manager Sarah Pierce did with her double-decker baklava cake, and look how amazing that turned out!
Prior to launching your campaign, you’re going to need:
Offer: Something of value, such as an eBook or industry report, to offer in exchange for contact information.
Landing Page: This is a separate landing page where details of the offer and your form live.
Thank You Page: After completing the form on your landing page, this page should provide the offer. It is also used for conversion tracking.
Creative (1200px X 628 px): The image that appears in the actual ad.
Ad Copy: The copy that accompanies the image & link.
Now that you’ve gathered your ingredients, let’s get started!
1. Set Up Proper Tracking
If you’re going to be launching LinkedIn ads, it’s vital to track your return on investment in terms of conversions and leads. Every company has different tools available and different levels of tracking, but at a minimum, you’ll want to get the LinkedIn Insight Tag and Custom Conversions set up. This will enable you to see how many people are completing form fills on your landing page from within the LinkedIn platform.
If your company is using a marketing automation platform, such as Marketo or Hubspot, you’ll want to make sure that you’re using hidden form fields to capture URL tracking parameters. New to using URL tracking parameters? Learn more here.
When building out your ads, you’ll want to append the parameters to the end of the link. These will be captured when the prospect completes the form on your landing page and notify you which campaign and/or offer drove the lead.
2. Build a Specific, but Healthy Audience
You might make an award-winning chocolate cake, but that’s not going to matter if you’re serving a party that only eats Funfetti cake. One thing I love about LinkedIn is the ability to reach the right audience with the right offer and messaging. You have the ability to target prospects based on company name, job title, seniority, and a whole range of other work-related demographics. Choose a primary targeting criterion such as job function or industry, and then layer in additional filters such as skills or company size.
LinkedIn also gives you the ability to build an audience based off of company or contacts lists, allowing you to execute ABM strategies on the platform. For all campaigns, the minimum audience size is 300 members, but LinkedIn recommends audiences have 60,000 to 600,000 members. Running ads to an audience size that is too small will limit your reach and stunt your lead generation potential.
3. Button Up Your Landing Page, Copy, & Creative
At Obility, we recommend creating a dedicated, gated landing page for the offer that you’ll be running in your LinkedIn campaigns. We see eBooks and whitepapers consistently perform well as top-of-funnel content on social, but the most important factor is determining what type of asset provides the most value to your audience. Test various offers that you think will be attractive to your audience and let the conversion data tell you what type of content is being consumed by your prospects.
Your ad copy should be concise, engaging, and action-oriented. Creative should be bright, have limited text, and resonate with the group that you’re trying to reach. Before building out your ads, ensure that there is a cohesive and on-brand experience from the creative, to the landing page, and on to the offer.
4. Bids and Budget
Keeping with our cake analogy, the bid and budget for your campaign are kind of like the size of each piece of cake (the bid), and the number of pieces (clicks), you’ll get out of the whole cake (the budget). Sort of. Okay, maybe it’s not a great analogy, but cake is delicious and I’m committed to this. Just stick with me here.
I recommend setting your bid based on cost-per-click. In doing so, the bid amount is the maximum amount that you’re willing to spend per click. The platform offers a recommended bid based on audience and I suggest setting your bid slightly higher than this recommendation to ensure that your ads get picked up and served in the auction.
Depending on your campaign, it may make more sense to set a daily budget, total budget, or both. A general rule of thumb for setting daily budgets is to multiply the number of clicks desired times the bid amount. In the real world, we often start with our overall monthly budget for the account or campaigns and then work backwards.
Learn all about bids and budgets directly from the source, here.
5. Launch!
Everyone loves hitting that “launch” button, so after you’ve completed these steps, it’s go-time! Or, as some would say, “let them eat cake!”
