Best Practices On Targeting B2B Audiences On LinkedIn

Are you trying to find the right audience for your B2B paid advertising campaign and believe LinkedIn is best suited to your requirements? You may have made the right decision but unless you follow some of the best practices which have been proven as successful you are unlikely to succeed in your objective. In this post, I am providing you with some of the essentials that will prove beneficial to your advertising campaign.

With more and more businesses looking forward to taking advantage of this social media platform we are providing some tips to highlight the best practices on targeting B2B audiences on LinkedIn.

Initially, you should begin by making a list of the goals you want to achieve from your campaign on LinkedIn. You could be trying to build a contact list, getting fresh leads on building brand awareness but it is extremely important for you to have your objectives in mind before you begin your campaign on this platform.

LinkedIn currently has 500 million users and it is believed that the ad space inventory of the platform is virtually saturated. Advertisers on LinkedIn observed average CPC prices of $6.50 a year earlier. This was higher than the $2.32 charged by Google AdWords. The higher CPC is making it difficult for advertisers to observe similar success and they do on other platforms. However, advertisers can still implement strategies that are successful to increase their conversion rates.

LinkedIn is a platform which can bring the business world together but if the advertiser is focused on consumers this will not be a suitable platform. Advertisers that are targeting business professionals like most B2B businesses will find a wide array of options being offered by LinkedIn for the right audience. The options offered by LinkedIn include company & job, interests , groups, industries, remarketing lists, demographics, and email list. These options allow the advertiser to promote their campaigns to LinkedIn users that match up with their specific requirements.

LinkedIn marketing that allows targeting by interest is a rather new opportunity that enables audience targeting of those who have engaged with related content on the platform in the past 90 days (as opposed to Facebook that determines user’s interests by a much longer historical engagement time period).

Choosing the right ad type is also a factor which must be considered by advertisers. LinkedIn offers different types of ads for advertisers to achieve specific goals. The three most important types of ads offered by LinkedIn include:

Sponsored content — these are ads which resemble pieces of content that are often displayed on LinkedIn. They usually include multiple lines of text with an image. LinkedIn even provides an option to add a form in the ad making this a suitable option for advertisers who want to build a contact list or for lead gen.

Text ads — advertisers can create small messages with your company logo within the text ads. These types of ads are great for companies that are looking forward to spreading brand awareness on LinkedIn.

Sponsored in-mails — Advertisers using InMail ads can send personalized messages to the audience they are targeting by using the internal messaging system of LinkedIn. This is a great choice for advertisers that want to be direct and detailed with their audience.

Simply using the tips mentioned above may not prove helpful unless the advertiser is willing to experiment with a new ad copy to discover whether the text and the images resonate with the target audience. This also proves helpful to make the ad copy remain fresh to ensure users are not seeing a particular ad constantly.

It is important to keep a note of how long an ad is running for. Companies advertising to a small group of people are more likely to have a single user observing the ad multiple times. It would be better for the company to rotate the ads regularly after considering the size of their audience.

Advertisers do not need to change their objectives but should certainly ensure that images and the ad copy are changed consistently to keep the content fresh. This is to ensure ad fatigue is avoided to ultimately improve the click-through rate of the ad.

B2B companies are constantly looking for fresh methods to reach their target audience and are finding LinkedIn as a suitable option for them. However, they must also understand that the platform is different from other social media platforms like Facebook and should, therefore, be treated differently if they intend to drive results.