Advertising on LinkedIn is a great choice for many businesses with its over 250m global active users.
LinkedIn is a highly-targeted communications channel that offers marketers great marketing and advertising opportunity.
This social media platform offers great targeting options for marketers and advertisers.
Your business can benefit from LinkedIn’s ability to let you target users by job title, employer, role, skills, and interests.
Also, its user profiles offer up-to-date professional information than what you will see on personal profiles on other social networking sites such as Facebook, Google+ etc.
Each of LinkedIn’s advertising options offers you the flexibility and affordability to reach your target audience, whether you are generating leads, growing your network, recruiting new employees, or growing your company page membership.
Is LinkedIn advertising right for your business?
It’s not just about joining the bandwagon of people using LinkedIn advertising, it’s more about the impacts it will have on your business.
So, before making a decision on whether you should advertise on LinkedIn or not, it’s important to know if LinkedIn advertising is right for your business.
Yes, LinkedIn offers an affordable way to get your message out to a targeted audience. In fact, it’s one of the best social media advertising platforms for business marketing.
But is that enough to convince you to join the community of LinkedIn advertisers? Is the platform right for your business marketing? Below are some of the best LinkedIn advertising strategies that work like magic:
#1). Offer something for free
Offering something for free is a traditional advertising tactic or strategy that works like magic. Just like any form of advertising, a typically good way to get a high and better response rate is to give something away for free.
Give-something-away tactic works really well and offers a two-way results – you are giving something away in one hand while you are getting your users’ attention and contact details in other hands. For instance, you can offer give-away stuff like a free whitepaper in return for an email address or phone number.
However, if you really want to make this work, it’s advisable that you provide a landing page that’s specifically optimised for the action you are trying to get the user to make.
For instance, if you have an advert for a free content marketing whitepaper, the ads should be linked to a page that allows users to download the whitepaper straight. In return, you get their contact details, which will allow you to follow this up with a call or email – moving them further along the sales process.
#2). Local advertising
Local advertising simply means targeting users within the geographic area or location of your business. A great way to increase your Click-through Rate (CTR) when advertising to local businesses is to create ads that relate specifically to the location you’re targeting.
LinkedIn advertising offers tools that can easily help you target certain locations. However, the location targeting for LinkedIn Ads is not that perfect though, as you can’t choose to target small towns and villages, and not all of the cities you want to target will be available as an option.
This means that you may have to settle with choosing a wider, less-targeted audience across several towns, which can still be very effective.
#3). Specific and highly targeted advertising
Highly targeted advertising means building extremely targeted campaigns and create ads that are really specific and relevant to your audience.
For example, you could target a selected industry in a specific town and show them an ad saying something like “Want to appear on 1st page of Google search engine for XXX in XXX?”.
However, highly targeted LinkedIn advertising can cost you more. This is why you will need to ensure that you have plenty of budget to work with when building these highly targeted campaigns.
Your budget is set at campaign level, which means that for each location and industry you target, you will need a separate budget. There is also a minimum budget of $10 a day per campaign and the minimum cost-per-click (CPC) bid is $2.00/click.
Despite the costly minimum budgetary requirements, these campaigns can be extremely successful due to the relevance that the ads hold to the target audience.
#4). Reactive advertising
Reactive advertising means responding to certain industry changes through your ads campaigns. If you work within a very competitive industry, it often pays to be reactive as well as proactive; if you’re able to respond to industry changes quickly then it will pay off.
Reactive advertising is capable of helping you to stand out from your competitors. They are perfect for building up a good reputation online as it shows that you are well-established and you have your finger on the pulse.
For instance, you can roll out ads about latest changes in search engine marketing especially when Google makes major changes to its search engine indexing. You can use reactive ads to reach out to anyone who has been hit by one of Google’s recent algorithm updates.
#5). Sponsored posts
LinkedIn advertising also offers sponsored posts, which is very similar to Facebook’s promoted posts, whereby you can pay for an update to be shown to LinkedIn users based on company, industry, company size, job title, job function etc.
These sponsored posts appear about third or fourth in the newsfeed on the LinkedIn Home page and it’s not hugely obvious that they’re ads, as most people don’t spot the “sponsored” label. You can choose between a CPC or CPM model and schedule end dates for each post.
