Paid ads have been around for a long time in the online search industry. Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines allow business enterprises to launch their ad campaigns. The big reason for companies to launch such ad campaigns is to create brand awareness and attract interested customers to their website, which eventually serves the bottom line.

To bag in the profits of paid advertisements, the social networking sites have hopped on to the paid-ad bandwagon. Facebook and Twitter have nailed it with helping humble start-ups and giant corporate to connect with target customers and drive in business.

Catching up in this race is >drum roll please< LinkedIn – the professional networking site that apparently shares nothing in common with Facebook, Twitter and Google. And that’s why it would be unfair to peg the same expectations to LinkedIn ads.

LinkedIn ads are not all the same as other paid advertisements

Facebook and Twitter ads let you present your company to people who would be interested in services like yours. LinkedIn ads do pretty much the same too.

Ok, it’s obvious that no one would take up LinkedIn ads unless there’s an advantage for using it. So how does a LinkedIn ad get a leg up over other paid ad platforms?

Google AdWords: Get noticed when people actively search products or services like yours and from the locations you cater to

Facebook ads: Exposure to people with your target demographics

LinkedIn ads: Reach out exclusively to the decision makers

This is not a clear-cut categorization set in stone. This is what I gathered while I was promoting my company’s newly launched service targeted to enterprises. We were very hopeful about the Google AdWords and Facebook ads to cut through to people who’d be interested in services like ours. This was the usual way to promote and reach out to potential clients until we tried out LinkedIn ads.

It’s been over a year since LinkedIn entered the paid ad arena, but still online marketers are struggling to understand and set their expectations for their LinkedIn ad campaigns, and we were no exception.

Cutting long story short, after our research about LinkedIn ads we decided to try it and sure, we made a ton of mistakes along the way. In this post, which doubles up as your guide to LinkedIn ads, I’ll walk you through each step of launching a LinkedIn ad and measuring its effectiveness. But before that, there is something I want you to know about starting a paid ad campaign on LinkedIn. I learned this quite late in the process. Here it is:

Ads on LinkedIn don’t typically work the same way as Google AdWords and Facebook ads or even Twitter ads for that matter.

LinkedIn ads work best for B2B promotions - when you want to connect with a business audience for partnership or for products of business utility. So, advertising about pet supplies or summer holiday essentials is best left to Facebook ads for communities there to discover them.

When you run a LinkedIn ad campaign, you can directly reach out to the decision makers by choosing the audience by job title and job category (more on that later in this post). There are nearly eight million business decision makers in the LinkedIn community.

If you are an ERP solution provider, you can reach out to Managers, Directors and even the C-level league by choosing to display your ad to CxOs. Or, if you provide financial assistance to small business enterprises, LinkedIn ad is your best bet to advertise your services. By the way, 1.3 million small business owners are on LinkedIn (at the time of writing this post).

When your marketing message reaches out to the right people in the organization, the chances of taking action increases exponentially and so does your ROI.

Time for some action….

Way to Your First LinkedIn Ad

I will walk you through a step-by-step guide along with the learning I have had while launching, managing and gauging the effectiveness of my experiment with LinkedIn ads.

1. Create Ad Campaign

LinkedIn Campaign Manager is quite intuitive to use. When you visit LinkedIn Ads, you’ll be asked to name the ad campaign. The name of your ad campaign will be visible to you and not the LinkedIn members.

While naming your ad campaign, ensure that it is unique and relevant to your marketing strategy or objective that you are trying to achieve.

If you plan to run multiple ad campaigns targeted to customers with varied demographics, you might want to name the ad campaign accordingly. Say, you are considering an ad campaign to target companies seeking web design services in Los Angeles; create the campaign name as:

“Web Design Service Los Angeles”

Though the campaign name isn’t visible to LinkedIn members, try to avoid naming it as:

“Web Design Service Test - 1”

We did this mistake. We named our first LinkedIn ad campaign with ‘Test – 1’ and later when we had about five ad campaigns running simultaneously, it was a mess to gauge the campaigns correctly.

Take away tip: Name the campaign such that at least you can identify which strategy it has been created for.

2. Selection of Language

LinkedIn provides you the facility to choose from over a dozen of languages in which you can display your ads. It doesn’t provide the facility to translate your ad, but you can write the ad content in multiple languages using the drop down menu.

3. Media Type

You get to choose between Basic and Video ad formats. If you want to promote a video in the ad, choose Video or else for a text and image layout for your ad, opt for Basic type.

Take away tip: If you choose to go for video ads, then the video must not exceed 120 seconds duration. For Basic, optimize the image to fit a 50x50 pixel square.

4. Create Your Ad Copy

You should know how to push the desire button and make people give your ad a read and hopefully a click-through.

LinkedIn has world’s largest audience of active professionals, and the ads thereon help you to connect with them. You don’t want to miss out the chance of getting their considerations for your services. So, take time to think through how you can craft the ad copy that it draws interest among your target audience. You can create up to 15 variations of your ad copy under one campaign to test which gets the most responses.

Before that, you have to decide where you want to direct viewers when they click on your ad – to some specific landing page on your website or to your company page or a discussion group on LinkedIn.

Once you have entered all the details, you can choose the display of the ad among square, tall and long format.

Take away tips: Keep it simple and relevant.

Headline: Create attention-grabbing headline for your ad of no more than 25 characters. Avoid headlines like “Rent Shop Call: 480-3292” as having telephone numbers in the advertisement can cause a rejection.

Description: You get 75 characters and about a couple of seconds to encourage the viewer to click through your ad. Talk about the benefits of your services followed by a call to action.

Image/Video: You can choose to place your company’s logo or a short product demo here. If you choose image layout, use an image with which viewers can quickly relate to, thereby eventually increasing the click through rate. From my experience, images of real people, especially women help increase CTR. So, if you are advertising about “Golf Lessons for Beginners”, having the image of the coach might fetch more interest and CTRs.

5. Specify the Audience for Your Campaign

The choices you make here are crucial to the effectiveness of your ad campaign. Your ad will be displayed exclusively to those who match the specifications and qualify as your target audience.

You can choose to narrow down the demographics of your potential customers to company-level or even target specific interest groups. Alternatively, you can also choose to keep it broad and have your ad displayed to people with varied job titles and multiple industrial sectors. You can scale up or down your ad exposure to LinkedIn members depending on the professionals you seek to target. As you go on specifying the attributes, next to it you will see the number of LinkedIn members who qualify for it.

You can funnel down the demographics of your target audience to whom your ad will be displayed. This avoids dilution of your marketing message, and you get the most from every dollar you invest in LinkedIn ad campaign.

Location: LinkedIn ads allow keeping the geographical location of your target audience as broad as multiple continents to as specific as states, and even particular state areas. Make the most of it.

Companies: You can choose to have your ad displayed to a few selected companies and people who work there. Say, you have shortlisted a handful of companies that you want to collaborate with for your new venture. You can have your ad displayed directly to people working in those companies. There is more to this section, take time and explore.

Job Title: Say, you are a payroll software provider seeking to reach out to companies with 500+ employees. Unlike ads on Facebook, Twitter and Google, with LinkedIn you can have your ad displayed to people working in Human Resources at varied levels of seniority. Your ad is visible to those who would be interested in services or products like yours and have the authority to make purchase decisions.

School: This will allow you to target people who have indicated to attend your specified alma mater in their LinkedIn profile. For instance, a law firm wants to run an ad campaign targeting those who have studied law. You can enter specific school names such as Yale Law School, Stanford University Law School and target specifically to LinkedIn members that qualify to your specifications.

Skills: Your ad will be displayed to those who have indicated they are skilled in any skills that you have specified here.

Group: Here you can specify the groups that you seek to target. You can include niche or large groups on LinkedIn.

Gender and Age: If your target audience is skewed towards a certain gender, you can have your ad displayed specifically to them. Specify the age-range of your customers.

Take away tips: Relevancy is the key to generating quality leads. Keep your message from being diluted with too open selection of the target audience demographics.

6. Campaign Options

LinkedIn provides you with two options to pay for your ad campaign:

Take away tip: I was under the impression that it hardly matters which pay option you choose, but I was off the mark on that. If traffic is all you want from your LinkedIn ad campaign, go for cost per click. It essentially means that you pay for the traffic you receive from LinkedIn. For your ad campaign that’s aimed at creating brand awareness, you would want maximum exposure for your ad and that’s why it makes sense to pay for every 1,000 times your ad is flashed (impressions) to LinkedIn members.

Your daily ad budget and for how long you want to run the campaign depends on your marketing strategy.

7. Lead Collection: Until this stage, you could craft and chisel your ad campaign to reach out to interested customers, gain their attention and earn qualified leads.

When you turn on Lead Collection, people who click on your ad will be prompted to request contact from you. You will be notified of it by an email to which you can respond with a personalized message. This increases the chances of converting potential leads into actual sales.

8. Analytics of LinkedIn Ads

After you are through with making the payment, you will be provided with a feature on your LinkedIn ad page to track your ad’s performance. You will find crucial statistics related to the performance of your ad, such as clicks and click through rate for each ad variation (if you have chosen to run your ad with multiple variations).

Iron out the creases in your LinkedIn ad campaign by closing down the variations that aren’t creating many conversions. For the ones that are performing well, you might consider inching up your ad budget. A CTR of 0.3 or higher could indicate that your ad is doing good.

Marketers from almost every niche can find and connect with their target audience through LinkedIn ads. The unique ability of LinkedIn ads to connect with active professionals makes it a perfect platform for B2B marketers. Get the most from it.

Considerations While Choosing Your Social Media Advertising Platform

If you are trying to weigh your options for social media advertising platforms, this infographic gives you a clear comparison between LinkedIn ads and Facebook ads along with recommendations for marketers. Courtesy of Search Mojo.

Over to You

So there you have it - your guide to LinkedIn ads with tidbits from my experience. The choices you opt for creating your ad campaign will depend on your marketing strategy and objectives. There is still a scope to research and explore ways to make LinkedIn ads more effective. Don’t believe in everything you read, go out and do it for yourself. Experiment it.

Have you launched a LinkedIn ad lately, or are considering one in near future? Share your experiences as comments and let’s discuss.