LinkedIn is a widespread and old social media platform where the professional business world comes together. It is a digital marketing channel preferred by brands doing business according to the B2B model since it is a platform where business professionals spend time.
The advantages of using the LinkedIn advertising channel are:
For LinkedIn ads, you will first access the ad account dashboard from the https://www.linkedin.com/campaignmanager/accounts link after logging in from your personal LinkedIn account.
You can easily create a LinkedIn ad account with the Create Account button from this panel.
The LinkedIn advertising account is opened after you enter the currency in which you will pay the advertising bills and the LinkedIn company page to be linked to the account, which is accomplished by typing the URL or name. If you do not have a company account, you cannot publish your campaign. But if you do not have a company page yet at this stage, you can continue without making a choice and make your selection during the campaign creation phase.
Then you will see a screen like the one below. You can see the groups of your campaigns on this screen. If you want, you can group all your campaigns together or create different campaign groups for different purposes.
To create a campaign, you can use the Create Campaign button on the upper right corner.
It offers you three campaign goal options while creating your campaign.
Brand awareness: You should choose if you want to achieve brand awareness and reach more professionals.
Website visits: If you want to attract visitors to your website and turn them into potential customers, you can choose this target.
Engagement: You can choose this campaign model if you aim to interact with users on your posts more and aim your company page to have more followers.
Video views: You can choose this model if you want people to watch your videos
Lead generation: It is an advertising model where you can collect your contact information with the help of a form without going out of your target audience.
Website conversions: Although it looks the same as website visits, your campaign will be optimized according to the conversion action you will create with your website in this campaign model.
Job applicants: You can use this campaign model to inform LinkedIn users about relevant job opportunities in your company and to promote your job postings.
After choosing the most appropriate of these targets (we selected the most preferred website visits target in this example), you will see a targeting area like the one below.
As in all other advertising channels, one of the most important areas is the targeting phase. LinkedIn creates ready-made audiences for marketers who don't know the panel very well or have no time. If you wish, you can choose a ready audience from this area. But our advice is to make your own detailed targeting as we will explain below.
After the Audience section, you search the Locations section and determine the location where you will make your campaign. You can target specific countries, cities and districts here.
After location targeting, you should make language targeting from the Language section. The language option here is the language that LinkedIn users choose when using their LinkedIn account. You will have the option to choose only 1 single language for the campaign from this area.
After the language selection, you come to the area where you will make your detailed audience targeting.
Here, after clicking the "Narrow audience further (AND)" button, you will see 2 main audience targeting options called Audience Attributes and Matched Attributes.
Company: It is an option that you can target companies that your target persona is working at. You can target companies according to company name, sector, and size.
For example, in this campaign example, we chose the "Computer Software" and "Internet" sectors from the Company Size option, 501-1000 Employees and the Company Industries option.
Demographics: Although not preferred in B2B campaigns, you can also target age and gender.
Education: You can target the graduation degree of your target audience, the school they graduated from or the department they graduated from.
Job Experience: One of the most important areas in audience targeting is this field.
This section allows you to make detailed targeting of your target audiences such as job title, expertise, and department. In this example, we selected the project manager and product owner job titles.
Interests and Traits: With this option, you can target the interests of your target audience and the LinkedIn groups that they belong to.
This main targeting allows you to perform bulk targeting by uploading e-mail addresses or company information in a list. Or you can make a remarketing campaign to the audience who has visited your website before.
After targeting, you need to choose which format you want to run your ad in.
LinkedIn has 2 models that differ from other advertising channels. In the Spotlight model, as seen in the example below, you can create personalized ads, profile photos, and custom banners and give messages on these banners.
Spotlight ads are particularly efficient in campaigns selected as Job Applicants targets.
It can also be used to attract your target audience to your website, download a document or submit a demo request.
Also, you can make InMail campaigns specific to your target audience with the Message Ad model. You can present your brand, service or offer by sending special messages to the message boxes of LinkedIn users with InMail campaigns.
Photo credit: Smart Insights
Please note that you need to get Sender permission from the ad account manager for the ad account you will send messages from while creating a LinkedIn inMail ad.
In this example, we will continue with the Single Image Ad model, which is the most preferred advertisement model in LinkedIn advertising media.
After selecting the ad model, if we did not select the LinkedIn company page to which the ad will be linked during the ad account setup phase, we will have to make this choice now.
After the company page selection, the details of the budget and publishing dates should be determined from the “Budget Schedule” section. In the budget phase, there is an option where daily budget or total and daily budget are used together.
After the budget selection, you have to specify the dates between which the campaign will be live. Whether you choose an end date is up to you, but the start date must be specified.
Then you can choose the bid type from the bid type section. It would be good to choose an automated bid and leave the bid to the LinkedIn algorithm.
Finally, you can complete the conversion process from the area where you will define the conversion.
Once you have determined the campaign goal, audience targeting, ad model, and budget details, you can see how many people you will reach from the Forecast Results area next to it. You can also see how many impressions and clicks you can get according to your budget.
After the targeting, there are options to create a new ad in the ad creation phase and to choose from the linked link shares from the LinkedIn page linked to the ad account. You can publish your ads without any further action by selecting the desired ones from the existing shares.
But if you want to show special ads to your audience, you need to continue with the Create New Ad button.
Then you can enter your campaign text and upload images. And on the right, you can see the preview of the ad.
You can also select the URL of the web page to which the advertisement will go and the Call to Action, and finally preview it.
After completing all options, your campaign and ad are ready to be published. You will see a summary of all the details on the screen you will see from now on, and with the publish option, the ads enter the review process and are then published.
LinkedIn advertising is just a small fraction of Paid Media and PPC Marketing. So we recommend you to get familiar with the whole concept of Paid and PPC marketing to be able to utilize each channel effectively.
Since paid media marketing is an essential component of business growth, it needs to be planned carefully. You need to strategize wisely, calculating all the angles and components (such as main goal, budget, target audience’s needs, and the characteristics of each paid media channel) to be able to measure, report, and optimize.
In order for you to plan and track your PPC activities easily, take a look at our Paid Media and PPC Planning Guide and learn how to create a paid media marketing plan with some growth tactics to use in your paid media marketing activities. Moreover, here’s our tool for Paid Media and PPC Planning for you to practice and exercise on how to create new plans and track them.
Last but not least, here’s also a wide range of PPC tactics we have prepared for you to implement to your growth marketing activities. You can choose the tactics according to your main goals (Brand awareness + traffic generation, conversion, and retention) as well as the difficulty level (beginner, intermediate, advanced).
