LinkedIn Advertising
LinkedIn is the ultimate social network for professionals. It allows professionals to create an entirely interactive digital resume for themselves that can be constantly updated without having to be sent out over and over again to potential employers. LinkedIn allows people to network with other companies, other professionals, and subsequently build out their rolodex with valuable professional connections. Sounds like a good place to advertise to professionals, right?
Why Use LinkedIn Ads?
LinkedIn is one of the fastest growing social media tools in the world, with 300 million active monthly users. Despite its audience expanding rapidly world wide, LinkedIn has a very specific set of user targeting options for advertisements that makes buying and targeting ads to the professional world easy and efficient.
Ad Types
LinkedIn offer 3 different ad types: Premium Display Ads, Direct Sponsored Updates, & Sponsored InMail.
Premium Display Ads are ads that share content with targeted audiences via display ads. There are a variety of options for this ad including being displayed in the ad bar on the right-hand side of pages, a text-link option of a line of text that appears at the top of LinkedIn pages, and a leaderboard ad style which appears at the bottom of certain feeds and acts as the last thing a user sees on a page.
Sponsored InMail delivers sponsored content directly to a LinkedIn user’s inbox. This is a great option for advertisers that want to send more detailed messages to a specific groups of users. However, this kind of sounds like spam emailing, doesn’t it? Well don’t fear, LinkedIn thought this ad option might result in an overcrowding of peoples inboxes by ad mail, which is why they placed a limit on the number of sponsored InMail’s that you can receive in your inbox within a period of time. So if you go on vacation and don’t check your LinkedIn for a few weeks (must be a nice vacation), you won’t have a million sponsored messages in your inbox. Thank you LinkedIn.
Direct Sponsored Updates is just a fancy name for a type of ad that appears in the LinkedIn timelines of targeted audiences. These ads can be “Follow Company Ads” to follow specific companies, “Recommendation Ads” that recommend certain products, and “Join Group Ads” that are a great way to get engaged with LinkedIn communities.
Side note: Communities are a great way to talk to the groundswell. LinkedIn communities differ from other social media community tools for one main reason: the user base. LinkedIn is a professional social network. People in the professional working world join with the expectation that they’ll be networking with other professionals. That being said, forming communities on LinkedIn on topics like Project Management, Senior Executives or Sales Best Practices allow a space where professionals with similar professional interests, titles, or whatnot can come together and talk. It’s like holding a convention for all the CEO’s, CFO’s, and COO’s in a certain region except online and longterm. Engaging these communities with ads could be a great way to lead in customers, who will then go tell all their professional friends in their community how great your company is!
The image above is an example of an actual LinkedIn community page for IBM Alumni. It is a private group where alumni can keep up with each other and talk about various other elements going on in their industry, even recommending businesses to each other. At the top of the page below the menu you can also see an example of a text-link ad.
Pricing
LinkedIn pricing is based on a cost-per-click (CPC) model with a minimum bid of $2 per click. They also feature a CPM option of $2 for every 1,000 impressions. This is a lot higher than Facebook’s $0.25 for 1,000 impressions, but then again, your targeting folks in the professional world as opposed to your sister’s 8th grade boyfriend… LinkedIn also has a pretty hefty minimum daily ad campaign budget of $10 per day. Because the cost of LinkedIn ads are so much higher than other social media platforms, it’s important to take advantage of their highly focused targeting system.
Audience & Targeting
LinkedIn offers its customers a highly focused targeting system for ad audiences. Because it is a professional networking site, demographics to target with include industry, job title, company name, company size, job function, past jobs, and then more obvious demographics like age, gender, etc. This system of targeting audiences is especially useful for B2B (business to business) marketing as well as job-related advertising.
Closing Thoughts
LinkedIn is a great platform in the B2B space because it helps small and large businesses alike find companies and professionals seeking their services. In 2014, 65% of B2B companies found customers via LinkedIn ads. Though the cost of ads is high, the professional network that you are able to advertise and target to is like nothing else out there. If your business caters to the professional clientele, LinkedIn is a great place to start advertising, regardless of the cost. It’s really just the cost of doing unparalleled business.
Do you have a LinkedIn? How many InMail ads do you receive in a week? What about communities? Are you a member of any helpful LinkedIn communities? Sound off in the comments below!
For more social media advertising details, check out my next post in the series: Instagram Advertising. To get started creating your own LinkedIn ads, click here.
Facts provided by wordstream.com, sproutsocial.com, hootsuite.com, & the book Groundswell.
----