Advertising on LinkedIn – Your Secret Weapon
If you’re browsing LinkedIn and wondering what the purpose is beyond recruitment and sales prospecting, you have yet to tap into one of the popular networking site’s most promising features: advertising.
While the platform is often used to find the right candidate for a particular job or connect you with your network, LinkedIn is starting to push their advertising services. As it is still just ramping it up, now is the time to take advantage of its introductory offers and snatch up the prime ad spots.
Why Use LinkedIn Advertising
I think the question is why NOT use it?! It is seriously an untapped marketing avenue that is still very economical and helps you really reach your target market when they are in the exact frame of mind you want them in – browsing for business opportunities and figuring out ways to advance their company. This is much different than Facebook ads where real estate for ad space is becoming pricey, harder to attain and an annoyance to the user.
LinkedIn advertising enables you not only to reach specific target audiences but also build brand awareness, get your name out there, and generate leads and sales prospects. The B2B targeting helps businesses drill down to specific industries, job titles, geographic locations, and even company sizes.
Who Uses LinkedIn Advertising
While LinkedIn is a platform almost any business can play on, I find rare cases where B2C businesses would really capitalize on advertise on it. Personally, I think it is more focused on businesses that target other businesses versus consumers. That is not to say if your business targets both, it won’t succeed. For an example a business that is advertising bird houses to home owners would not have as much success as a project management company might have advertising their services.
The Costs of Advertising
LinkedIn also allows users to control the costs of advertising by choosing to pay per click or per 1000 impressions. Paying per click means you will only be charged when someone clicks on your add. LinkedIn sets a minimum bid per click and you set the maximum bid. You may not be charged that maximum every time, as you are competing with other advertisers for clicks and impressions.
By setting a bid range and multiplying that by the number of clicks you are aiming for in a day, setting a daily advertising budget is fairly user-friendly.
The Reach
Setting your maximum bids to a high amount will unfortunately not guarantee you clicks. For the best return, ensure your audience size per campaign is high enough (which will largely depend on the industry) or you may be disappointed with the reach – or lack thereof – of your ad.
Last But Not Least – MONITOR and TRACK!
Regularly monitor and assess the success of your campaigns to find out what’s working in terms of reaching your audience, and just as importantly, what Isn’t. Being aware of the components of your most successful advertising campaigns will allow you to optimize them for the greatest reach and help you spend your dollars wisely.
Need help with LinkedIn or thinking about advertising with it? Contact us to help you maximize your LinkedIn time!
