Follow LinkedIn's ad tips and waste money or follow these and get the best results on your spend. Read on for a smarter LinkedIn Sponsored content strategy.
Native advertising on LinkedIn gives organizations the opportunity to serve social media updates directly into the feeds of targeted LinkedIn members. Here are 7 simple rules for successful content and offer promotion using LinkedIn & advertising on LinkedIn.
Rule #1:
This is as good of a place as any to start. You may want to think of these as pure ad campaigns but they are not. A LinkedIn Sponsored Update campaign should be viewed from the perspective of a social media campaign. This sounds simple right?
It might sound simple, but it's a challenge for many organizations. Why? Because 1) they aren't doing social media very well in the first place, and 2) they expect to be successful just because they can now specifically target their posts to a wider audience.
To do LinkedIn Sponsored Updates well, it helps if you're already doing a good job at being social on LinkedIn. Check out our other article on how to share content on LinkedIn Company Pages to learn how to get better at social sharing.
When you treat a LinkedIn ad like an advertising campaign and forget that it's social media, you're breaking the number one rule of native advertising.
If you consider what makes your organic social media great and consider the benefits of "relevance score," then you're on your way to social media advertising success. Let's take a look at how this all works together.
This advertising is optimal when it looks as natural as possible inside of the social media feeds of your target audience.
Your best performing updates in organic social media are your easiest opportunities for success when it comes to advertising promotion.
To get an idea of what's worked for others check out this gallery of LinkedIn Sponsored Updates.
Rule #2:
When you decide to build out an ad campaign on LinkedIn, you should have some goals in mind. Knowing your numbers is going to help you understand how successful your campaign is and make projections prior to launch.
If you don't know your metrics, then you're going to have to work backwards from your campaign results to figure out how well your campaign did. If this is the case, it's best to start out with a pilot project and experiment with it.
Knowing your metrics will help you build native advertising campaigns with clearly defined goals.
If your goal is to achieve conversions, then understanding your current marketing metrics is extremely important
Knowing your metrics will help you determine the click rates and click costs that you need to meet for your advertising effort to be profitable. If you don't know these numbers, then this will be a bit of an experiment.
Not all campaigns are created to attain conversions. Here are some other goals that advertisers try to achieve with LinkedIn Sponsored Updates.
Regardless of your ultimate goal, it's important to establish a value for the actions that you're trying to drive so that you can make the most out of your CPC or CPM costs.
Rule #3:Specific targeting is one of the reasons why LinkedIn Sponsored updates is so valuable. The precision of your targeting is only limited by the fact that you need to find at least 300 LinkedIn members in your target audience to launch a campaign.
A quick note of advice here: Do not listen to LinkedIn's recommendation that you should have at least 70,000 people in your audience for your campaign to be effective.
Your campaign will work best when you have targeted updates going to a targeted audience. If that means you're only targeting 500 users in a certain industry, within a certain title area, with certain skills, in a handful of selected states...then do that.
LinkedIn's goal is to get you to spend money. Yours is to pinpoint your best-fit audience and attract them with content and offers that resonate with them. Don't expand your audience arbitrarily.
Who are you trying to attract to your content or offers? This is one of the most important questions to consider when you're developing out your strategy. To drive optimal performance for your native ad campaign, you should follow the concept of multi-factor targeting when building your content and selecting your audience.
For the best results, you should combine any or all of the targeting segments below (there are more segmentation possibilities, but these are some of my favorites). A simple combination to start with is Persona+Industry.
This is an easy place to start. If you can build your content and offers around a specific set of interests for people in a specific industry, you'll see targeted gains, not generic cross-industry content.
If you haven't sat down and tried to create a buyer persona, try it out with this buyer persona guide. The knowledge you gain from building your own will help you develop a sound native advertising strategy that is targeted to the audience or audiences you have in mind.
Persona targeting is so important for success that the next 4 rules will be devoted to understanding behavioral advertising targeting.
Skill and group targeting come in handy when you're trying to do precision targeting. Consider which endorsed skills your target audience might have. Think about which LinkedIn groups they might be members of and what that membership says about their interests and motivations.
Geographic targeting can be helpful if you have highly location-specific content or offers. By segmenting your content and offers by city or state, for instance, you should see a slight uptick in your success metrics compared to offers with non-specific or general geographic targeting.
Aim to build campaigns that target a persona plus one additional non-company demographic targeting factor. Many advertisers try to go as broad as possible. Generic content and offers will yield generic results. Try to get as specific to your target audience as your content/offer creation budget will allow.
Audience targeting on LinkedIn can help increase engagement rates, especially when your content or offers target multiple factors at a time.
Rule #4:One-size-fits all content doesn't consider an important factor of behavioral targeting: What is the intent of your audience on a given channel?
People will react to your content and offers in different ways depending on where they find them. Someone who finds a specific page on your website may convert more than someone who traveled from that same offer from one of your blog articles.
A Facebook follower is going to engage with different kinds of content and in different ways than a LinkedIn follower. Since we're taking about LinkedIn here, let's consider these questions:
Think about why you log into LinkedIn. Users are there for a variety of reasons. Some of the top ones are to look for jobs, to look for new hires, to network and catch up with colleagues, and to try to sell things.
Very few of your LinkedIn targets logged into the social network specifically thinking about solving a business problem for the company they work for. Even fewer of them are going there for specific product research.
While your solution and/or product based content and offers may get some uptake from a very small subset of a very specific audience on LinkedIn, don't expect a lot of engagement. LinkedIn can be a great way to target your precise B2B buyer personas with product and service based marketing. But to do so effectively, you must know your conversion metrics.
If you're going to use LinkedIn Sponsored Updates for middle and bottom of the funnel content and/or offers, consider taking the following routes:
It's very important to know your numbers and to make sure you're getting the pulse of your campaign results. This will help you make quick pivots if you see that you aren't achieving your targeted metrics.
A few years ago, LinkedIn's self-service ad inventory was limited. Today they have many ad formats to choose from depending on your objective. These include:
For a rundown on each advertising type read my latest blog: LinkedIn Advertising Formats - Which One is Right for You
Rule #5:Rule #5 is similar to rule #4. Where rule #4 focuses on the channel, #5 gets to the heart of why the person is using the channel. What are the personal and professional drivers, not just the ones that brought them to the channel, but that motivate them in their day-to-day lives?
For the best engagement rates, you're going to need to put your strategy hat on. You've thought about the persona, you've honed your targeting, and even considered user behavior on the channel. How do you put this all together to create great content and offers that create brand engagement on LinkedIn?
By finding the intersection of the personal and the professional, you'll be able to craft focused offers that will entice a higher percentage of desired actions.
Remember that you're not marketing to a business with pain. You're trying to market to a person on a professional social media network. What are their drivers? Why did they log into LinkedIn?
Once you brainstorm with your sales people and your strategy team, you should be able to come up with a handful of consistent themes that will appeal to your buyer personas. Let's dive into a few in the next section.
What are some themes that work well on LinkedIn? Here are some themes that we've found success with:
Finding the best recipe for you may take some testing. Aligning your message themes with your marketing workflows may take some imagination. Be ready to try out multiple messages and different content and offer directions. The marketplace of clicks will tell you what's working and what's not.
Rule #6:The direct sponsored content feature allows you to test multiple variations of your message. This feature allows you to post updates that are ONLY seen by your targeted ad audience. They're invisible to the followers of your page.
This allows you to test different copy and/or image versions of your posts without filling up the feeds of your followers with the same message. Don't just post one version of your update, cross your fingers, and hope for the best! Be creative!
Try different headlines, test different social media copy, swap out meta-descriptions, and adjust your images to see what post variations get the best results. This can help you increase your click-through-rates and decrease your cost-per-click. Experimenting with different copy and images over time can also help inform your overall social media strategy.
Your audience will "vote" for what post variations they like with their clicks, likes, shares, and follows. Think of direct sponsored content as a your social media laboratory.
Part of your message testing will be trying out different visuals for your posts. Whether it's the post image that renders from your landing page, an update image that you upload, or an image or file attached post, try to make sure that it's unique. This will help your message stand out inside of users' feeds.
How do you know which images are the most appealing? Try out multiple versions, and let your audience decide. Direct sponsored content will allow you to test out messages where everything is the same EXCEPT for the image. This will give you some insight into what drives engagement.
Rule #7:If you're attempting to drive clicks to a landing page or other content, then make sure that your pages are in alignment with your post copy and images. Here is an interesting experiment on the impact of symmetry in online marketing.
Make sure that the page visitor isn't having an incongruous experience. This can happen when you send them to a page that isn't aligned with the messaging that they clicked on.
The basics of this rule go something like this:
I'll call this part of the rule: lesson learned (the hard way).
That is because I've broken this one in the past. Clients have asked to target multiple personas across a variety of industries, and I've tried to improve our CTR by building targeted ad sets with targeted copy variations.
While this can help lead to better click-through-rates, your conversion rates will probably hover at around the same rates. When your targeted audience gets to a generic landing page that fails to speak to them, this poor user experience will hurt your conversion numbers. It's much better to build offers that align with your audience segmentation than to try and bait-and-switch them with social media updates that don't align with your landing pages.
I've developed these tips from using and LinkedIn Sponsored updates since August of 2014. Since then, I've managed hundreds of thousands of dollars in client and internal spend. Based on my experience, here are some achievement benchmarks that you can strive for if you take these rules to heart:
Are you looking to achieve these kinds of numbers now without months of trial and error?
Reach out to our sales team, and let's set up a time for a consultation to talk about your native advertising content strategy. Mention in the notes section of the form that you're interested in a content assessment and/or content strategy session, and one of my team members will reach out to you to discuss your options.