Set your LinkedIn campaigns up for success in 2022

Life moves differently during the festive season. You do less, but it counts for a whole lot more. That’s true of time spent with friends and family, brisk walks in the great outdoors, long meals where you can savour every course and conversation, and the games you’d never play at any other time of the year. It’s also true of the way people engage with marketing on LinkedIn.

The weeks around Christmas and New Year deliver some of the best results for LinkedIn ad campaigns – but a lot of marketers miss out on the opportunity, because they’re thinking about their audience’s time and attention in the wrong way. They rightly assume that people will engage with less content overall as they set aside time for other things. They wrongly assume that this means they won’t engage at all – or the engagement that does take place is somehow less valuable. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. LinkedIn audiences engage more deeply and purposefully during the festive period – and this gives campaigns a unique opportunity to increase reach and influence at a significantly reduced cost.

What really happens to engagement during the festive period

LinkedIn data shows that the engagement rate for campaigns on the platform does indeed dip from mid-December onwards, as audiences spend relatively less time with their phones and laptops – and more time hanging decorations, going to parties and wrapping presents. However, engagement doesn’t disappear altogether – and the engagement that does take place has greater value.

At the same time as the average engagement rate for LinkedIn campaigns in Europe goes down by 19.6%, the average click-through rate for those campaigns actually increases – by 19.2%. How is this possible? There may be fewer people engaging overall, but those that do engage more deeply. They read in depth. They take action. These are the people using some of their quieter moments over the festive season to think deeply and productively about the year ahead. And that adds up to a powerful opportunity to build brands and influence choices.

The key to gaining reach and influence at lower cost

Not only is there real value in the engagement available over Christmas – there’s also a lot less competition for it. All those marketers who assume that campaigns should shut down when the stockings and tinsel go up means fewer people bidding for impressions and clicks from your target audience. In LinkedIn’s second-price auction model for buying impressions, that quickly brings down the cost of a campaign. In fact, the average cost per click for a LinkedIn campaign drops by 16% during this period. Cost per lead comes down by 13.9%. Plot the net impact of all this on a graph and it becomes clear that a period with reduced engagement overall is actually one of the best opportunities to drive engagement for less.

The festive period isn’t just a wonderful time of the year. It’s also one of the most wonderful illustrations out there of the value of always-on marketing; the principle that campaigns do their best work over the long-term. Leaving a campaign to run and run means build up reach and frequency over a longer period, bidding less for impressions and making your budget go further. Always-on campaigns find opportunities to add value – opportunities that you’d miss out on by second-guessing when your audience is ready to engage, and when they’re not.

Marketers know the value of increasing their share of voice (SOV) in order to grow their share of market during the recovery. They know the importance of reaching and influencing the kind of senior decision-makers that use downtime to research their buying choices. The challenge we all face is finding a way to do these things on potentially limited budgets. One of the best opportunities to do so is coming up. It’s a festive gift you don’t want to miss out on.