Getting started with LinkedIn Advertising is expensive, right? 

If your company is looking to win new business, it might be time to take another look at Linkedin Advertising and the LinkedIn Campaign Manager. LinkedIn is one of the best ways to get in front of the right decision-makers in the right industries.

The ability to laser focus audience targeting to reach the right B2B buyers with the right message effectively allows you to ‘cut to the chase’. Linkedin audience targeting regularly produces more high-quality B2B leads than other platforms. 

While we’re currently in times of huge uncertainty, for most businesses the need to ‘keep on going’ means adapting to the times. The pandemic hit and trade shows, exhibitions and events have stopped. The world has moved even further online. In response, B2B digital marketing budgets have increased as a percentage of revenue to compete for a share of wallet in the online environment.

Opportunities exist

Now, more than ever, companies are looking to rationalise or optimise their relationships with suppliers. Yes, volatility is unsettling. But is there an opportunity to win new business by outperforming a poor performing incumbent?

For B2B businesses wanting to make sure they’re ‘in the game’ and can be found online, digital advertising is an obvious choice. But, few businesses these days can afford to waste ad spend, so we need to be smart about where we put our ad budget. 

Should you be getting started with Linkedin advertising or Google Ads?

Businesses that have used Google Ads have sometimes written off Linkedin Advertising as relatively expensive. This is based on cost per lead (typically about 5-10 times more expensive than Google Ads per lead and per click). However, LinkedIn shouldn’t be discounted on this metric alone. It offers real benefits to B2B marketers not afforded by Google Ads and Facebook. 

LinkedIn Ads have a reputation of having a significantly higher cost per click (or lead) than Google Ads. Yet LinkedIn’s audience targeting capabilities are excellent, especially for B2B advertisers. Linkedin Campaign Manager allows you to focus your B2B sponsored content and ad-spend to increase your chances of generating quality engagement from B2B key decision-makers. 

Use LinkedIn to laser-focus the targeting of your sponsored content (ad-supported content) to your target audience. While the cost per lead may be higher on this B2B platform, the quality and calibre of leads are often higher. 

4 ways to hyper-target your ads when getting started with Linkedin Advertising

1 Target your existing contact database 

One of the best ways for a company to increase its chances of generating new business is to focus on your existing database of contacts, past leads and existing clients.  

With LinkedIn, you can choose to only show your ads to your existing database. You can also segment further and target just your existing and past clients or prospects. This segmentation allows you to narrow down and tailor your ad content to resonate with specific contacts to increase the likelihood of engagement. 

If you’re using a website tracking system that ties into your CRM (like Hubspot), you’ll be able to see who clicked on your ad and visited your webpage. So, regardless of whether your contacts submit an enquiry, you’ll be able to see who has shown interest and clicked through to your website, and you may wish to have your sales team outreach to them.

You can track ROI on both leads generated and attributable revenue for each Linkedin Campaign across all audience segmentation options. 

2 Target by industry, seniority level & geography

OK, so you’re a mining services supplier and you only want to direct your sponsored content to target senior executives in the mining industry in Western Australian and Queensland? Or maybe you’re looking to sell enterprise software into the higher education marketing in Australia and New Zealand? No worries. With focused targeting, you can make sure your ads are only shown to your chosen target audience for the most efficient use of your advertising budget. 

Finding the right audience for your campaign is relatively simple. Ask yourself who you wish to target and the criteria you could use to appropriately refine the audience for your Linkedin ad. For example, is your target audience defined by geographic region, industry type, job position or other criteria? You can use a combination of filters in your campaign to define the various audiences you’d like to engage using personalised content. Then your ad creative and copy can be specifically designed to talk to just your chosen audience. 

No matter the industry, narrowing down industry, job seniority and geo-targeting and developing highly customised ad creative helps generate high-quality leads. 

3 Account-based marketing ABM (URL targeting) 

Are you running account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns? Using Linkedin Ads you can target your ads so that they only show to a single company domain or group of companies. Selling into BHP,  Rio, or Bunnings? By combining the ‘level of seniority’ segmentation with URL targeting you can focus your ad spend on the accounts that mean the most to you. 

4  Retargeting website visitors 

LinkedIn retargeting simply means showing (or serving ads) to your company contacts, prospects or clients who have already visited your website or engaged with your brand. 

There are three sources from which to serve retargeting advertising to prospects via LinkedIn:

  1. Website retargeting 
  2. Video retargeting 
  3. LinkedIn Lead Ads – form fills 

Knowing how your prospects have previously engaged with you and what they’ve shown interest in allows you to serve future ads that are relevant to them.  

Website Retargeting 

When getting started with Linkedin Advertising you can’t overlook Website retargeting. Serving ads to prospective clients who have already visited your website is a great way to generate new leads and build the brand profile. Linkedin says “Website retargeting allows you to create a targeting audience based on Linkedin users who have visited a specific page or pages on your site.” You’ll need to install the LinkedIn Insight Tag on your site to allow for this. 

Video Retargeting 

Video retargeting allows you to create an audience based on members who viewed almost all or part of your videos on LinkedIn. 

Lead Gen Form Retargeting

Lead Gen Form retargeting allows you to create an audience based on members who clicked on or submitted a lead gen form on one of your Linkedin Lead Generation Ads (where you fill out the form directly after you click the ad rather than on a separate landing page). You can also choose the audience based on how recently individuals engaged with your lead gen form (from 30 to 365 days in the past).

Final Thoughts

Getting started with LinkedIn advertising is one of the best ways to generate quality b2b leads. With thoughtful targeting, great copy and design you can maximise the value of your advertising spend to give you the best return on investment. 

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