We’ve covered recently why LinkedIn is great for Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns, a strategy we are recommending for B2B marketers in 2023. LinkedIn is a great resource for getting in direct contact with decision-makers at firms you want to be doing business with, but it is for the competition as well. You want to do your utmost to leverage LinkedIn’s connection-making potential – and to do that, we recommend integrating LinkedIn ads into all your B2B campaigns.
Whether you’re interested in upgrading your B2B digital advertising campaigns, or getting ready to go all in with ABM, LinkedIn ads have been proven to be extremely effective and should be part of your strategy. LinkedIn is a space where executives at top firms offer the very information we need to market to them, willingly and for free, and they expect to see offers relevant to their industries and positions made to them on a regular basis. Both of these are major factors in what makes LinkedIn ads so effective in maximizing your B2B campaigns.
Internal data from LinkedIn shows that LinkedIn ads consistently outperform ads on other digital advertising platforms. (LinkedIn, 2023)
At LSC Marketing Group, we look at LinkedIn marketing as a cornerstone of any successful B2B marketing campaign in 2023. In all our years of experience in the marketing field, we’ve never seen such a powerful single tool for getting your message in front of decision-makers at top firms in all kinds of industries. LinkedIn has evolved its services extremely wisely, recognizing its potential and taking smart steps to evolve from a social network to the world’s best B2B marketing network – with a robust digital marketing platform – LinkedIn Marketing Solutions – to handle all aspects of your in-network campaigns.
That being said, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions is such a robust platform that using it properly takes quite a bit of research. And like any other digital marketing platform, we at LSC see it as a tool in your digital marketing toolbelt – not the whole set all by itself. LinkedIn marketing is at its most powerful when integrated with the rest of your digital and traditional marketing techniques and strategies – which we’ll go into in some of our tips below.
5 tips to maximize the effectiveness of your LinkedIn ads campaigns
1. Know your audience and target
LinkedIn is a great source of information on the kind of people your business wants to get its marketing message in front of – decision-makers at the firms that you want to do business with – all of whom voluntarily provide LinkedIn and you with highly-relevant data to use in your targeting.
LinkedIn has some robust targeting options, allowing you to get down to some pretty fine detail in who you want your ads to reach. This can be a double-edged sword, though – in many cases, you may find that if you’re overly-specific in your targeting, you can lose out on a lot of valuable leads.
It’s important to keep a few considerations in mind when targeting on LinkedIn. We suggest not getting overly-specific in terms of industry names and job titles – LinkedIn will help you find similar industries to the ones you’re targeting if you allow it, but it’s usually better to target by seniority levels and departments rather than specific job titles. And it’s very important to target more than just the final decision-maker at your target firms – try running campaigns that target managers of departments that your offering most closely aligns with as well.
2. Combine the power of LinkedIn with your first-party data
LinkedIn’s “Matched Audiences” feature allows you to import your first-party data to maximize your advertising potential through Website Retargeting and Account (Company) and Contact (Individual) targeting. This incredibly powerful feature allows you seamless contact with any LinkedIn user who’s ever interacted with your brand anywhere, as long as you collected their information, as well as the ability to build target audiences similar to ones already interacting with you online.
And you do have tracking on your online content, right? If so, you probably already know how useful the analytics and retargeting potential are to your marketing campaigns. If not, we highly suggest you contact us and have a conversation about how to modernize your marketing with digital solutions that will drive cross-platform results in 2023.
3. Recognize the value of ad objectives
LinkedIn’s Marketing Solutions platform doesn’t just target the best audiences for you, it also uses the power of its own tracking to determine where your targets are in your sales funnel. When used properly, this can really maximize the effect of your LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn describes this kind of objective-based advertising as “the single most important way to succeed at advertising on LinkedIn.”
LinkedIn ad objectives include Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion-based campaigns. It can often be tempting to focus on conversions too heavily and too early, especially for smaller firms on a budget. Conversions are where you make the money, right? But this kind of attitude can end up losing you time, effort, money, and potential closes when your LinkedIn ad audience isn’t ready to do business with you just yet.
You might be perfect for the audiences LinkedIn Marketing Solutions serves your ads to. They might be crazy not to do business with you – if they only knew who you were. Unless you’re starting with a ton of name recognition in your industry, it’s likely best to start off with Awareness campaigns to build up some credibility. That way, when you start sending Message ads to build a closer relationship, your targets are already used to seeing your name on LinkedIn and more likely to open and engage with your marketing content.
4. Constantly nurture a closer relationship with your target audience
One of the great strengths of digital marketing is the ability to target and retarget your audience along their path to making a decision, constantly reminding them why they should choose your business for the products or services they need. LinkedIn is especially useful for nurturing closer relationships with key accounts and stakeholders due to the nature of the platform – it is a place to link up with other professionals, after all – and also due to the wide range of options they’ve chosen to offer advertisers on their platform.
Take advantage of and experiment with the different ads types available on LinkedIn to maximize your impact on your audience, and keep in mind that different ad types, and the ways you use them, are more relevant at different points in your sales funnel. Text ads are going to be a lot more useful as ways to build awareness than to generate closes. Direct messages are going to convert better when your target has at the least seen your business’ name, if not interacted with some of your content already.
5. Always be testing and improving
A/B testing is always just a click away with digital advertising, and with a robust platform like LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, you have a lot of different variables to work with. It’s important to constantly tweak the content of your ads and the targeting parameters to see what’s working and what can be improved.
And don’t stop at just A/B testing within LinkedIn – leverage your insights from other online advertising platforms to inform your LinkedIn campaigns, and vice versa.
As we wrote in our guide to the marketing challenges of 2023, a holistic approach to a fully-integrated, self-complementing set of marketing techniques is what will set your business apart from the competition this year and in years to come. LinkedIn is great, but don’t stop there – your target audience is on more than just LinkedIn, and their activity on other platforms like Google, Facebook and others can be just as useful to you as LinkedIn if you have a plan to target and retarget your audience across all platforms. When you put them all together, it just gives you a clearer picture of who your targets are and new and better ways to market to them.
We hope these five tips to maximizing the effectiveness of your LinkedIn ad campaigns have been helpful to you. We’d love to have an even more in-depth conversation on how you can best implement these tips into your own marketing – contact us today.