Advertising Strategy with LinkedIn

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Components of a LinkedIn Advertising Strategy

Marketing on LinkedIn, of course involves more than just posting ads and hoping to generate sales. Paid for advertising can be a highly effective way to meet your marketing goals.

An effective LinkedIn advertising strategy includes a number of components and best practices. For example:

• Be clear about what you want to achieve with your campaign. If your campaign lacks focus, you won’t budget wisely. Set SMART objectives. That is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Related.
• Your key performance indicators (KPIs) enable you to measure the effectiveness of your campaign. Make sure you are measuring the right results, so set relevant KPIs. If you want to track website visits, for example, then focusing on the number likes your posts receive might not be the most relevant KPI.
• You need to know who you are advertising to. Research your audience to better understand them before committing money to an expensive advertising campaign.
• You can only launch a successful campaign if you have the necessary resources in place. This includes talent, technology, and budget.
• Remember, LinkedIn advertising can be expensive. Know what budget you’re prepared to commit to it and be clear about what you can achieve with that budget. Obviously, the more you’re willing to spend, the more comprehensive your campaign can be.
• Content is still king. People will follow and engage with you only if your content is relevant to them and addresses their interests and needs.
• Once the excitement of the initial campaign launch has passed, you need to ensure you maintain momentum. By setting a schedule for running ads, you can ensure your campaign continues to develop. Also track the most effective times to launch ads. What time of day do your ads perform best, for example?
• To know how effective your campaign is and whether it’s worth the investment, you need to measure its performance. The KPIs you set at the start of the campaign will enable you to do this. Remember, it’s important to measure the right things and to link your KPIs and other measurements to your objectives.
• And last but not least, as you evaluate performance, be prepared to adjust your campaign as necessary. If you lose momentum, followers will begin to disengage from you.

Setting objectives

Never underestimate the importance of setting the right objectives when setting up a LinkedIn campaign. These objectives will later enable you to measure your campaign performance. Your LinkedIn advertising campaign objectives should be aligned to your other marketing objectives and your overall business goals.

You should align your advertising objective to the ‘Reach, Nurture and Acquire’ funnel. In LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager you will see this referred to as ‘Awareness, Consideration, and ‘Conversion’.

Setting relevant KPIs

If something gets measured, it gets managed. By setting relevant KPIs when setting up a LinkedIn campaign, you can track your progress and benchmark your success. A key word here is relevant. Make sure your KPIs are aligned to your campaign objectives. And ensure that they can be accurately measured. Know what success will look like.

Depending on the objectives, different KPIs will be applied to measure the performance of the campaign. KPIs should be applied to campaigns to track your progress and benchmark your success to ensure that goals are achieved. For example, if you are working towards awareness-based campaigns the KPIs set might be impressions or views gained. If the campaign is Lead Generation focus, the KPIs set might be leads acquired and click-through rates.

Segmenting your audience

Accurate targeting based on data is the foundation of the LinkedIn platform. Your audience is unlikely to be a homogenous group of similar people, so you’ll likely break them down into different segments. LinkedIn advertising and the targeting criteria available can be used to reach these different segments.

You can segment your audience around a number of criteria, such as skills, industry, age, gender, affluence, location, education and so on. Their LinkedIn activity can give your further useful information for segmentation You should be taking the following into account when devising your own LinkedIn advertising strategy: skills, industry, age, gender, company size, job title, seniority, function, discussion groups, company name, education, and then finally, geographical location. Location is a set requirement, and from there you can use the other targeting options to build your audiences for targeted advertising.