Advertising on social media sites can be incredibly effective when growing your business, marketing a new promotion or simply improving brand awareness. LinkedIn Ads offers many customizable options that make it a great choice for your next advertising campaign. Being a professional social media site with over 750 million users*, advertisers can reach professionals of all ages and industries.
Setting Up Your Ad Campaign
Using LinkedIn advertising can be difficult at first; I'd advise giving yourself at least a full week prior to your targeted launch date to learn the ropes and properly prepare. This will give you time to create your target audience, set up your ad and get use to LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager.
Once you create a Campaign Manager account, which is connected to your profile, you will be able to create a campaign. The first thing you'll do is select the objective of your ad campaign—are you looking to spread brand awareness, drive visitors to your website, increase engagement on content, bring additional followers to your LinkedIn page, attract potential job applicants, or generate leads? Once you’ve selected your objective, you will begin to create your audience. On LinkedIn, you can target audiences in very specific ways. If your company has a list of email subscribers or a membership list, you can upload that list(s). From there, LinkedIn will find those accounts and identify characteristics of those pages, ultimately targeting those users/profiles for your ad. Once that list has been uploaded to LinkedIn, you’ll be able to create a “lookalike list”—a list of profiles with characteristics like those on your uploaded list. This gives you an entirely new group of people for potential sales. In addition to lists, LinkedIn allows you to target ads based on industry, location, position, work experience, skills and more!
After you’ve created a target audience, LinkedIn will prompt you to choose an ad format. There are several different options tailored to the type of ad campaign you hope to build. From there, you can set your budget. LinkedIn’s advertising can be a bit more expensive than other social media sites. However, there is value in these ads since you can target so specifically. Once you’ve completed all steps, set the dates you’d like your campaign to run and push it out!
While Your Ad Is Running
In the time that your ad is running on LinkedIn, it is a good idea to check in on how it is doing. Make it a part of your daily routine to log into your Campaign Manager account, even just to see how the numbers are looking at that point.
Be sure to keep your LinkedIn business page active while your ad is running. If a potential client wanders to your business page after seeing the ad, you’ll want to make sure they are seeing fresh and engaging content that is updated regularly.
After Your Campaign Has Ended
Measuring the success of your campaign is the most exciting part, but these numbers can be difficult to understand. You’ll want to pay attention to the number of impressions, clicks and conversions. Conversions are going to be the best measurement for ROI if the objective of your ad is to sell something.
For your next ad, LinkedIn will allow you to re-target the audience of people who clicked your ad the first time but never finalized a purchase. Those leads are hot, and LinkedIn can help you reach them.
Don't get frustrated as you are learning LinkedIn. Give yourself time because once you get the hang of things, you will see the value in the opportunities offered on this advertising platform!
Source: https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/audience