LinkedIn: the platform for advertising as a business

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LinkedIn: the platform for advertising as a business

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Advertising on social media? Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest are excellent platforms for reaching a broad audience. But what if you want to communicate in a B2B context? LinkedIn is a well-known professional social media platform primarily used for staying informed about specific professional topics and fields, finding a job, or recruiting staff.

Is advertising on LinkedIn a good idea for your business? And if so, how do you go about it? In this blog post, we’ll explore it for you.

LinkedIn: the largest professional social media platform

LinkedIn users are, by definition, focused on professional topics. In Belgium alone, there are 3 million profiles, and the number of users continues to grow. Not all of these profiles will be equally active, but even so, LinkedIn is a giant among social media platforms.

As a business, you can advertise on LinkedIn in a highly targeted way based on factors like gender, age, location, industry, company, company size, experience, education, degrees, skills, and more. For instance, a company offering language courses could target an audience living in Brussels who have marked their knowledge of French as “basic.”

Campaign Manager: the heart of your advertisement

Your LinkedIn ad campaign starts in the Campaign Manager. To access this tool, you first need to create a (free) profile.

The process of setting up a campaign involves the following steps:

1. Objective selection

LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager is similar to Facebook’s ad tool and begins with selecting your campaign objective. What do you want to achieve? Are you aiming to create awareness? Drive conversions to your website or through LinkedIn itself? Or a mix of multiple goals?

2. Audience

Once the objective is defined, you specify who you want to target. You can target based on audience characteristics like job title, industry, or skills. Additionally, you can use your own data to reach your audience, such as remarketing website visitors, email lists, or lookalike audiences. Campaign Manager will provide a forecast of the potential reach based on the defined goal and available budget.

3. Ad formats

On LinkedIn, you can choose from the following ad formats:

  • Text ads: optionally with a photo.
  • Sponsored content: your company updates appear as sponsored content in the news feed of your target audience.
  • Sponsored InMail: personalized messages delivered directly to the inbox of your target audience.
  • Dynamic ads: personalized ads based on a user’s profile information within your selected audience.
  • Video ads: a video appears in the news feed of your target audience.

4. Placement

Placement determines where your ad will be displayed. The location of your ads cannot always be freely chosen, as each ad format has specific placement options. For example, Sponsored InMail always appears in the inbox of LinkedIn users, while text ads offer more possibilities: the homepage, group pages, network pages, the ‘Profile views’ page, etc.

5. Budget & schedule

Here, you define the budget, bid type (e.g., cost per click), and the duration of the ad campaign.

6. Conversion tracking

Naturally, you want to know what your LinkedIn ads are delivering for your business. With Conversion Tracking, you can activate the measurement of conversions to your website.

Are you active in the B2B sector? Then advertising on LinkedIn is definitely a smart choice. The professional social media platform offers an extremely refined, diverse, and professional approach to advertising. Moreover, no other platform provides such a vast professional reach as LinkedIn. While LinkedIn advertising isn’t cheap, with a well-structured ad and carefully chosen target audience, your B2B company can achieve strong conversions.

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