LinkedIn advertising is a fantastic marketing tool that allows you to really hone in on key audiences, whether you are promoting new content, success stories, services and events or you just want to get more people to visit your website.

For relatively little cost, businesses can gain access directly to an audience of thousands of businesses and individuals, each neatly categorised by their sector, size, experience and a range of other factors.

To help you understand how LinkedIn advertising works, so that you can consider whether it may be the key to unlocking your firm’s potential, we have outlined a few helpful tips for setting up and running an advertising campaign.

Keep your eye on the target

One of the main strengths of LinkedIn is that it is built around its members’ professions. This means it contains a lot of information about a person’s career background and interests, which can help you to hit your target audience right away.

When thinking about launching an advert on this platform you should think about what you are advertising and who would be most likely to engage with the advert.

If you are selling property tax services then you want to focus on investors, brokers and perhaps professional referrers, such as estate agents.

Maybe you just want to focus on geographical areas where there is considerable property wealth or reach people of a specific age bracket that are more likely to invest in property.

This is all possible with LinkedIn advertising. When creating your campaign, it is possible to not only include the audience parameters you want to target, but also exclude those with no relevance to your campaign.

This ultra-specific targeting means that your ad spend should, in most cases, go directly to those that are interested and most likely to engage with your advert.

Choose carefully

LinkedIn offers you multiple ways of interacting with its members via advertising. These different ad types allow you to create a campaign that is tailored to your needs.

We have outlined these ad types below:

Sponsored content

These are native ads that will appear in your target audiences’ feeds as they scroll. These ads are designed to appear seamlessly alongside other content in their feed and are particularly effective at building brand awareness.

Sponsored InMail

One of the most direct forms of digital advertising, this ad format gives you the option of delivering a personalised message and relevant advertisements to interested leads directly via LinkedIn’s InMail inbox. The success of these ads is that they look just like any other professional message you would receive from a business or individual.

Text ads

These adverts operate in a similar way to most pay per click adverts and appear along the sidebar of the website. They can be set as pay per click or cost per impression. This means that you will pay either for each time a person clicks on the advert or per 1,000 people that view your ad. These are great for engaging with new audiences and promoting events, products or service to interested parties.

Make it personal 

The subject, style and content of your advert should be tailored carefully to your audience. Personalised ads will help you reach your audience by engaging with their interests so that they, in turn, engage with your content.

In some cases, this may mean creating separate ads within the same campaign targeting specific audiences and their particular needs.

By taking the time to think about your audience and create specific ads you can significantly improve engagement.

First impressions count

Most LinkedIn members will only see your advert once and so it is important that it is not only attractive but that it also makes the right impressions about your company.

You should, therefore, ensure that your ads look professionally produced and, importantly, are error-free.

Even if a person does not engage with your advert, it may leave a lasting impression on them, even subconsciously.

It is worth engaging the services of a professional marketing or graphic design agency to ensure your ads create a lasting impression on those who see them.

Test and adapt

Before ramping up your advertising activity it is worth spending time testing your approach and the content you have prepared.

It may be worth running two preliminary adverts, on a limited budget, to the same target audience to see which is most effective.

This small initial outlay should help you to identify which approach works best so you can invest your main ad spend on a campaign that actually achieves results.

Once a campaign is live you must analyse its performance. If you don’t get the bang for your buck that you hoped for then it is time to review your advert and make changes.

Initially, it may seem like a lot of trial and error, but over time you should learn what does and doesn’t work so that you can tailor your campaign to get the best results.

Start with success

The easiest way to get LinkedIn advertising right is to leave the work to professionals. It can take months or even years to learn all the ins and outs of digital advertising, so having expert help at hand can help you save money spent on ineffective advertising costs.

We work with a wide range of sectors to help deliver effective LinkedIn advertising campaigns that have helped our clients to establish their brand and make critical connections that result in new leads and instructions. To find out how we can help you and your business with a killer LinkedIn advertising campaign, please contact JE Consulting – Social Media for Accountants.