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7 Marketing Tips for Successful LinkedIn Advertising

7 Marketing Tips for Successful LinkedIn Advertising

July 27, 2022
4 min read

When growing your professional network as a company or an individual, LinkedIn is one of the most well-known and powerful tools for making connections by finding employment or employees, discovering services and products, collecting leads, and developing your brand, company, and thought leadership portfolio. In fact, LinkedIn is the most used social media channel in the B2B industry.

While organic and unpaid growth is easy and versatile on LinkedIn, paid promotion through this platform’s multiple advertising options is also a simple and effective method for furthering your marketing efforts. With paid LinkedIn ads or “sponsored content,” you can target the precise demographics your marketing is intended to reach. While it may cost money to advertise on this platform, the opportunity to target specific decision-makers and audiences directly proves its worth.

LinkedIn gives advertisers many ad options when deciding on a paid piece of promotional content or direct message. To achieve goals from lead generation to website conversions, employee recruitment, and product or service sales, ad and message options include:

  • Sponsored Content
  • Sponsored Messaging
  • Text Ads
  • Dynamic Ads
  • Carousel Ads
  • Follower Ads

Spending on B2B advertising in the United States is projected to grow to 14.57 billion dollars by 2023, so it’s essential to leverage the following tips to effectively stand out in this growing and competitive space and reach the 810+ million professionals on LinkedIn.

Quick Tips:

  1. Format Your Ads for Maximum Impact
  2. Keep Your Buyer Personas Updated
  3. Identify & Target Decision Makers
  4. Run A/B Testing
  5. Monitor & Understand Your Analytics
  6. Gate Your Content
  7. Use a Variety of Ad Types

1. Format Your Ads for Maximum Impact

Familiarize yourself with the most effective practices for writing and formatting the different kinds of LinkedIn ads so that they’re displayed to your audience as intended. Keep headlines and descriptive copy short, concise, and punchy. Be aware of specific length limits such as headlines under 150 characters and descriptive copy under 70 characters—deviating from these guidelines can truncate text and cut off your intended message, leading to less engagement. Use images that are approximately 1200 x 627 pixels, as content with larger visuals has up to a 38% higher CTR (click-through rate) than smaller thumbnails and images that are too big.

Different ad types call for different image sizes and copy lengths, so be sure to reference LinkedIn’s Sponsored Content Advertisement Specifications.

2. Keep Your Buyer Personas Updated

By knowing exactly who you’re marketing to, you can target ads to be shown to your specific buyer personas. This helps better collect spot-on leads and ensures you’re increasing your ROI. Outdated buyer personas can be as detrimental as having none at all, so it’s important to revisit these profiles and make adjustments as the industry, your company, and other environmental forces change.

3. Identify & Target Decision Makers

Speaking of buyer personas, you’ll want to specifically target the person or persons who will be purchasing your product or service. Luckily with LinkedIn’s Company Targeting, you can execute account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns and target your ads to reach the inboxes or feeds of decision makers from the companies and industries you’re aiming for, raising the likelihood that they’ll become profitable leads and customers for your business.

4. Run A/B Testing

LinkedIn is the ideal platform for A/B testing your ads. Start by creating two versions of the same ad and then change one component: perhaps target different demographics, change an image or video, utilize a different CTA (call to action), or whatever differentiator you’d like to implement.

Test their effectiveness by running both variations simultaneously. After observing your results, you can determine which ad or ad type performs better and utilize that information for future campaigns. On the flip side, this can help you determine if neither option works well and if you need to create a different ad entirely.

A/B tests help you better understand how to effectively communicate with your potential leads, customers, employees, and others who are representative of your buyer personas. Your marketing and advertising efforts can only improve alongside your understanding of your audience.

5. Monitor & Understand Your Analytics

Whether from organic marketing efforts or paid LinkedIn advertising, you’ll gather data about your efforts’ performance that you can leverage in future campaigns. LinkedIn has built-in analytic tools. With this data, you can better target the most appropriate demographics, understand what formats work or don’t work, measure leads and conversions, and gain other insights to improve your ROI.

6. Gate Your Content

Don’t give out every piece of valuable content without collecting a lead. You’ve done the work to create content to grow your business, so be sure to strategically gate your content with a form or other contact collection method. With LinkedIn advertising, you can place these gated content pieces directly in front of their intended target audience and efficiently collect that lead. An excellent tool for this is LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms which can be used in your ads to quickly generate high-quality, data-rich leads that come straight from the user’s LinkedIn profile. This not only generates leads but strengthens analytics to benefit future campaigns.

7. Use a Variety of Ad Types

With LinkedIn advertising, you can experiment with the different types of ads. You can create sponsored ads with images or videos, or even message ads that go directly into targeted inboxes. You can experiment and be creative with the type of rich content ads you’re promoting about the service, product, or event you’re advertising. Not only that, you can continue repurposing older, relevant content by reincorporating it into different ad formats and placements and refocusing toward different target audiences.

Effectively Execute Your LinkedIn Ads

The potential for effective, targeted, and specific advertising is broad and evergreen. By leveraging these tips for effective LinkedIn advertising, you can garner quality leads, grow your business and brand far and wide, and stake your place in your industry as an exemplary thought leader. Do you want expert assistance to boost your LinkedIn advertising efforts? Let’s get started today.

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Mark Schmukler

Mark Schmukler, CEO and Co-founder of Sagefrog Marketing Group, brings more than 30 years of global marketing and consulting experience to the agency, leveraging his B2B background to lead brand strategy and business development. Headquartered in Doylestown, PA with offices in Philadelphia, Princeton, Boston and Washington, DC, Sagefrog is a top-ranked B2B marketing agency with specialties in healthcare, technology, industrial, and business services. Founded in 2002, Sagefrog’s mission is to accelerate client success through branding and strategy, websites and digital, content and inbound, and traditional marketing services. Visit Sagefrog.com or call 215.230.9024.

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