LinkedIn Campaign Manager

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is Campaign Manager?

Effective marketing is usually achieved with a combination of organic and paid reach.

Posting engaging content and interacting with your followers will help you to grow your organic reach. However, sometimes you also have to use paid methods to extend your reach even further.

Like many platforms, LinkedIn offers paid options to expand your reach. LinkedIn advertising can be expensive. With thought-provoking and collaborative content, you can get good organic reach on the platform without running ads, but it's always worth testing to see if ads on LinkedIn work for you.

Campaign Manager is LinkedIn’s self-serve paid-ad platform. It allows advertisers to deliver highly relevant, targeted messages to unique audiences.

What cannot be advertised or promoted on LinkedIn

The following items and types of content cannot be advertised or promoted on LinkedIn:

• Illegal products, services, or activities
• Services or content that promotes discrimination
• Content that is offensive to good taste
• Content that is fraudulent or deceptive
• Content that infringes trademarks or copyright
• Fake or counterfeit items
• Tobacco products or illegal drugs
• Weapons, fireworks, or other violent products
• Adult material
• Products or services that promote gambling
• Content that promotes occult pursuits
• Content or products that make false or misleading health claims
• Content or products that advocate for a particular political party or cause
• Content that is insensitive to current events such as tragedies or disasters
• Content that promotes hacking, cracking, or circumvention

LinkedIn also has restrictions on content or products related to alcohol, prescription and over-the-counter drugs, dating services, cryptocurrency, and financial services.

Purpose of Campaign Manager

With Campaign Manager, you can:

• Create, manage, and edit ads and campaigns: Set up your ads based on your goals and objectives.
• Track your ad performance: Remember to monitor your ads to assess their effectiveness, and adjust them as necessary. Record and evaluate impressions, clicks, CTR, social actions, engagement, CPC, CPM and total spend.
• Track your ad budget: You can monitor your daily budget, total budget, bid, and duration. Remember, you’ll want to get a good return on your investment. And also…
• Analyze advertising demographics: You can see which users are engaging with your ads, so you can more specifically target future ads.

LinkedIn ad types

LinkedIn offers a range of ad types to nurture and acquire a specific target audience, across the marketing funnel from awareness to conversion.

Some of the solutions that can help you reach your ideal customers on LinkedIn include:

• Text ads: This is an ad type that only includes a headline, brief text, and an image. They appear on the right side or top of the LinkedIn desktop feed.
• Sponsored content: This is an ad type that increases the reach of company posts from beyond the organic following of the company to the wider LinkedIn community.
• Programmatic Display Ads: These are banner ads that sit on the right-hand side of the homepage. You can place rich media (such as videos, images and slides) in this space. The advantage is that your content is more like to attract attention because it is presented in an uncluttered environment.
• Message Ads (previously called Sponsored InMail): These allow a company to send, on a mass scale, personalized messages directly to the inbox of their target audience.
• Dynamic Ads: These allow you to precisely target decision-makers and influencers with highly relevant and customizable creative.
• Lead gen forms: These enable you to capture data that might result in leads. And lastly…
• Thought Leader Ads: These are ads used to promote content from LinkedIn members. They can be used to promote thought leadership from employees and non-employees.  

Text Ads, Sponsored Content Ads, Message Ads/Sponsored InMail and Display Ads can all be created and managed through Campaign Manager.

Using LinkedIn to nurture an audience

You can use LinkedIn marketing to build an audience over three stages:

1. First, you can reach a specific target audience with attractive content.
2. Then you can nurture that audience by establishing a relationship with it and listening to its needs.
3. Finally, you can acquire the audience as customers to your product or service.

Reach

To reach your audience, you will need to specify who that audience is. As previously mentioned, LinkedIn can target with precision and accuracy. As a business-to-business platform, we can very easily find the decision makers within organizations. LinkedIn is the largest professional network in the world, with more than 1 billion professionals for marketers to target.

The target criteria available to reach a specific target audience includes their location, the company they work in, the industry they work in, their job title, their seniority level, school, skills, gender and finally, their age.

Nurture

Once your target audience has been identified, the next step is to nurture this audience with communication. Typically, this step will be done via onsite display ads to drive consideration. A key metric around awareness would be the CPM or cost per thousand impressions.

Acquire

And lastly, once the relationship is established, the company can nudge the audience towards a conversion. This can be done by utilizing certain content for inbound lead generation. For instance, after a lead downloads an e-book or a white paper, a sales rep may approach the lead to set up a call. Message Ads/Sponsored InMail could also be used as part of the marketing campaign for lead acquisition. Message Ads/Sponsored InMail includes a message with a specific call-to-action, and when the call-to-action is taken, the lead is acquired.

Examples of a call-to-action can be contact us, or get a quote, book an appointment, or download now, in the case of content downloads. 

Acquiring new customers is, of course, the ultimate goal of your LinkedIn marketing and is how you grow your return on investment.