LinkedIn B2B Marketing: How to Advertise on LinkedIn

3 Key Elements of a Successful LinkedIn Advertising Campaign

Struggling to make LinkedIn work for you? You're not alone. Marketing on LinkedIn isn’t the easiest, and there aren’t a ton of experts out there giving advice. That’s probably because there are no “quick hits” or “tricks” to make it work. It takes hard work, patience and a good-sized budget. 

But as a B2B marketer you can’t ignore it. 850 million business professionals are using it regularly to keep tabs on their industry, competitors and network. LinkedIn states “4 out of 5 LinkedIn members drive business decisions” - you need to be in front of them.

We’ve put together the three cornerstones of a successful campaign to help you understand what works best on the platform, and how you start getting qualified leads for your business.

1 - LinkedIn Content Strategy: Master the Art of Great Content

At its core, LinkedIn is a content marketing platform. Users go there to discover and learn. Keeping this in mind:

• Give the people what they want. “How To Do X...” instead of “We have the best solution for X.” 
• Focus on helping vs. selling. Educate your audience to gain their trust, don’t jump right into pushing your solution.
• Commit to content marketing. Commit to a strategy, to your audience & to quality content that will pay off in the long run. 

2 - LinkedIn Audience Targeting: Take the Time to Define Your Audience

LinkedIn isn’t a place for fishing. The more you know about your target audience, the better results you’ll get. Here are a few tactics to define yours:

• Use multiple options in LinkedIn’s audience builder. Observe the audience insights to make sure it aligns your internal knowledge of company size, job titles, etc.
• Don’t be afraid to test small audiences. Audiences under 5,000 can be very effective (contrary to LinkedIn’s recommendations) because they will see your ad more often, and thus be more likely to interact with it. 
• Ask your sales team for accounts. Get them to provide sample job titles, lists of target accounts and top industries to target. Alternately, use a tool like ZoomInfo to find people who are actively researching your solution.

Case-in-point: For an enterprise software client, we found that campaigns targeting under 100 accounts had 2-3x the number of highly engaged users (as defined by the number of impressions) as compared to larger audiences.

3 - Dig Deep with LinkedIn's Tools and Data

Most of the “good stuff” in LinkedIn is a bit hidden. Don’t just stick to the default settings or you’ll end up paying the most per lead. Use every bit of demographic data to continually refine your audiences until it’s hitting your very best prospects. 

• Go beyond LinkedIn’s automated settings. Tactics such as manual bidding and rotating creative and will help you make the most of your budget. 
• Obsess over demographics. View campaign results by LinkedIn’s profile data to make sure your ads are getting viewed by the right people. Don’t be afraid to continually update your audience to exclude unwanted job titles (think freelancer) and behemoths like Amazon which can dominate your impressions 

Case-in-point: For an enterprise software client, switching to manual bidding not only decreased our cost per lead, it also gave more consistent results without the spikes and drops of automated bidding.