How to run LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn is a great place to expand your business connections and establish your position as a thought leader in your industry. But, it’s also a great place to run B2B ads.

By running LinkedIn ads, you can guarantee your brand’s voice reaches the right audience. It can help your brand achieve certain goals, such as brand awareness, audience engagement, increasing website traffic, lead conversions and potentially increases in sales. Using the platform that all thought leaders and business professionals use, can help you reach the right type of audience. Meaning you can influence decision-makers.

Before getting started with the process of running LinkedIn ads, let’s discuss what type of ads you can set up.

Sponsored Content

Sponsored content is what shows up on the audience’s feed whether they are scrolling on desktop or mobile. LinkedIn labels these ads as sponsored or promoted to distinguish them from normal content. Videos, singles images and carousels can be promoted and set up to run as an ad.

Sponsored Messaging

Sponsored messaging or previously known as InMail lets you directly advertise in your audience inbox. And is a great way to engage your audience for professional conversations. This type of advertising lets you send offers, promotions and updates directly to key people in your audience.

Text Ads

Text Ads are another type of LinkedIn ads and they generally show up on a desktop feed. And they help you in building a list of leads with professional backgrounds.

Dynamic LinkedIn Ads

Dynamic ads speak directly to your audience through personalisation. When this ad pops up on your LinkedIn feed your details are reflected on it. Meaning your photo, name, job position and even employer’s name.

Now, you generally know what type of LinkedIn ads you can run on the platform. Let’s discuss how you can set them up.

Work with Campaign Manager

LinkedIn is an all-in-one platform and has an advertising tool incorporated into it. Using its Campaign Manager can help you to set up ads, configure them, run the campaign and track all the progress you’ve made. It will show you results from the ad’s performance such as who clicked on the ad, what engagement your sponsored content had and much more.

Choose your LinkedIn Ads format

You can choose from sponsored content or text ads. Sponsored content appears natively in your audience’s feed, and you can promote your best performing content. Since that content was already a hit with your current audience, using it as an ad can help you reach a broader spectrum.

Text ads are displayed on the side, top or bottom of the audience’s feed. Adding a compelling copy with a dynamic graphic gives you the best results.

Create your LinkedIn Ads and target

Through the Campaign Manager you can enable the Audience Expansion which supports the platform's algorithm in finding and targeting similar audiences. At first it’s better to focus on size of the audience and how broad it is to generate statistically driven results to help you optimise. See what works organically and then decide to run the top-performing content as LinkedIn ads.

Set your budget, measure and optimise

You can choose from cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM). CPC is better when you want the click to be correlated to conversions, such as a booking a call on the website, or registration to a webinar. CPM is best to use for increasing brand awareness.

To have the best results, you need to optimise. Review the results, stop low-performing ads, and promote high-performing ones. And don’t forget to add how long you want the LinkedIn ads to run.

Using LinkedIn ads helps you connect with the right audience and it helps you grow your business or brand. Having the right LinkedIn ads strategy generates valuable and important leads inside a community of thought leaders and business professionals. Are you ready to take your business and LinkedIn presence to the next level with LinkedIn ads? Leave us a comment if you have LinkedIn ads set-up and let us know how they perform.