Making the most of LinkedIn advertising

Whilst the cost per click for LinkedIn may be higher than other social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, the ability to reach people that work within certain industries, or even at certain companies, within a business minded atmosphere, is what makes LinkedIn unique.

Here's how to do it.

Use the weekend

Ultimately, we should test different ads at different times and on different days, but don’t forget to include the weekend. While you might think - “who checks their LinkedIn on a Saturday?!” - those that do often have much more time to engage with content and there’s usually less competition for your audience, meaning lower cost-per-clicks. This also goes for commuting times, and evenings, as professionals are 62% more likely to engage in work related content when they are home, rather than the office.

Target skills

Remember those endorsements on your profile from random people that know almost nothing about you? As an advertiser, you can target people who have these skills listed on their profile. Great for recruitment, but also for prospects who you may expect to use a particular tool or application.

Free Ad Credits

If you have a business LinkedIn account, you can often find reminders for credits from LinkedIn – usually these come as £50 (or $50) ‘vouchers’ for you to use through their paid platform. Testing your content with these credits could give you a good idea of where to start and which strategy path to follow – and remember to use your LinkedIn analytics and data to improve the next round of ads, when you start spending your own money!

Choose Your Medium - Sponsored InMail

We’re all used to seeing ads, whether that be display or text, on other platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and arguably we’ve become numb to these attempts to engage. But LinkedIn has ‘Sponsored InMail’ as a unique medium for advertising. This is like sending a DM – but it sends a private message directly to the inbox of everyone in your target audience. It physically can’t bounce, so this eliminates one metric. It also has a much better open rate (who likes to see an unread message waiting in their inbox, the red (1) bothering you until you open it!), averaging at two times more than normal email rates, at 41.2%, and with an average CTR of 4.8%.

Personalise this, like you would with any other marketing email, and create copy that is short, sharp, friendly (casual can work well here, as it will feel like a genuine DM) and this genuine voice can reap some great rewards via this method. And even if you don’t get a click/sale/download from this, your company name will still be in their inbox, on view next time they visit their messages – and if you use your profile and name, you could make a new connection that your consumer can revisit later.

Remember that you don’t have to ‘sell’ if the product genuinely fits the needs of the consumer. Make sure you are targeting the right audience, finding that Goldilocks pot to reach out to (not too big, not too small, just right!). All paid advertising comes down to matching a valuable audience with the right content – bear this in mind at all times and you can’t go far wrong. Spend, learn, iterate, save.