Can I tell you a secret? Lean in close… closer… okay, that’s a little too close. Ready?
You are the reason people want to invest time on LinkedIn.
It’s true. If you’re a marketer creating great content and sharing it on our platform, you are the reason people find value on our site.
Our research shows that people are here to engage with content. And as a marketer, you’re creating that content. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions was created to help you get your best content to the most relevant audience. When you provide value to your audience, you’re also helping us fulfill our mission statement.
Since we’re playing on the same team, I think it’s high time to let you peek at our playbook. We just released our Spotlight on Best Practices: An Insider’s Guide to Effective LinkedIn Campaigns. It summarizes everything we have learned about marketing on LinkedIn, with concrete tactical examples from our team’s experience.
Here are just a few tips from our team of in-house experts to whet your appetite. We’ll start with the three commandments of marketing on LinkedIn:
1. Test Everything. Regardless of which products you’re using, your campaign size, or your budget. Run multiple variations of headlines, creative, calls to action, visuals. Then monitor and continually optimize performance. This is the biggest lesson we have learned. We made it easy to test and improve because it’s the most important thing you can do on our platform.
2. Visual Is the New Headline. Make sure every ad you run has compelling visuals. In our testing, we found that the right image could nearly double our CTR.
3. Organic is Good, but Paid Is Better. It’s always great news when people find your content on their own. But we found with LinkedIn Sponsored Content we could choose our audience, picking the people who would appreciate the content most.
The previous three rules are the framework for building success on LinkedIn. Here are a few tips to help you fill in the blanks:
4. Test Drive Your Sponsored Content. Use your LinkedIn Company Page as a testing ground for potential Sponsored Content. Promote the highest-performing updates, as they’ve already proven to be a hit with your existing audience.
5. For Higher CTR and Conversions, Bid above the Suggested Range. We saw a 15% lift in CTR and 27% lift in conversions by bidding 10% above the range.
6. Bid within the Suggested Range for Improved ROI. We saw a 33% higher ROI on campaigns when bidding within the suggested range.
7. Use Sponsored Content and Sponsored InMails Together. The boost in awareness from using multiple channels is undeniable. We saw a 25% increase in open rates and a 95% increase in CTRs when we tried it.
8. Keep Your Copy Short and Sweet. We found that 150 characters or fewer work best for Sponsored Content links.
9. Find Your Targeting Sweet Spot. You want a large enough audience to be significant, but small enough to still be relevant. Most successful campaigns have an audience range between 60k and 400k.
10. Use Sponsored InMail for High-Value Audiences. Our tests of InMails aimed at executives saw an impressive 58% open rate.
We’re continually evolving the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions platform to make it easier for marketers (including our team) to get the best results. Testing, analyzing, and optimizing applies both to marketing on LinkedIn, and to our development of LinkedIn as a marketing platform.
For the rest of our team’s time-tested tactics, download Spotlight on Best Practices: An Insider’s Guide to Effective LinkedIn Campaigns.
