A Complete Guide to Making the Most of LinkedIn Advertising

At LinkedIn, we strive to make advertising a science. We even created a step-by-step walkthrough all about the fastest, easiest and most effective ways to start advertising on LinkedIn. It’s all the science, all laid out.

As marketers and advertisers know, however, what we do isn’t just a science. Advertising is a unique combination of art and science. Today, we want to talk about the art of LinkedIn advertising. 

Here we’ll break down a five-step process for LinkedIn advertising success while touching on some of the ways you can maximize your impact at each step. First, an overview of targeting option and demographic insights that help you understand and reach your audience.

Targeting and Demographics in LinkedIn

With the long, slow sunset of third party cookies finally taking place and data privacy regulations rising, brands need reliable and robust audience demographics tools. That’s why LinkedIn has invested in growing our suite of demographics and targeting functions within Campaign Manager.

Drawing on the LinkedIn membership of more than 1 billion users, as well as your own customer data sources, you can fine-tune your LinkedIn campaigns to reach the right audience at the right time with the optimal messaging. Here’s a quick look at these tools.

Predictive Audiences

This feature enhances targeting efficiency by leveraging AI to identify high-intent audience segments, tailored for your business, and optimize campaign performance. Predictive Audiences combines LinkedIn's vast user data with your first-party data, identifying individuals most likely to convert.

Discover how to best use Predictive Audiences.

Audience Insights

Audience Insights in Campaign Manager provides an in-depth analysis of the characteristics and behaviors of your target audience. This tool utilizes LinkedIn's extensive professional data to offer detailed insights, such as job titles, industries, company sizes and locations of the people engaging with your ads.

Check out these tips and best practices for using Audience Insights.

Matched Audiences

Matched Audiences gives you the unique ability to combine LinkedIn’s data with your own first-party data. 

This feature gives you access to three capabilities: 

• Retargeting
• Company Targeting
• Contact Targeting 
  

Using Matched Audiences effectively is the key to focusing your advertising on the audiences that matter most. When you’re ready to take on Matched Audiences, we’ve developed a step-by-step guide for you to follow.

Demographics Reporting

Don’t sleep on valuable campaign data. Once you’ve run your campaign, you can see the demographics of users who have viewed your ad and discover opportunities to optimize your ad content or targeting strategy.

Follow these best practices for using Demographics Reporting data from your campaigns.

How to Advertise on LinkedIn: A Quick Overview

Step 1: Choosing your objective

“Objective-Based Advertising” is the cornerstone of modern digital marketing, and it’s how all ads work on LinkedIn. Effectively understanding your own objective is the single most important way to succeed at advertising on LinkedIn. 

First, understand your goal! What do you want your campaign to do? Your Campaign Manager will give you several options:

Awareness

Select Brand Awareness when you want to create a campaign primarily targeting audience members who have never seen or interacted with your brand. Think of it as the “introductory” category.

When making an Awareness campaign, focus on your “elevator pitch”: How would you describe your business to someone who has never heard of it? 

Want to learn more about how to use LinkedIn for Brand Awareness? Take the course! 

Consideration

Consideration represents the middle of your digital sales funnel. This is where your goals start to become more specific and directed. You’re not just trying to raise awareness of your brand; you’re trying to get your audience to take action.

A successful Consideration campaign results in your audience understanding what you do, how it could help them, and, hopefully, even following your brand actively!

Conversions

Conversion campaigns are the most focused in terms of audience and content. You want Conversion campaigns to end your sales funnel: the audience should buy, call, or apply.

Your conversion ads should be considerably more pointed than other types. Always include a clear Call To Action, and use the ad to make the most compelling argument for that CTA and audience possible. 

Want to learn how to write compelling conversion-based copy? Take the course!

Step 2: Select your targeting criteria

In Step 1, we answered the question, “What do you want your campaign to do?” Step 2 asks an equally important question, “Whom do you want to see your ad?” 

It is no exaggeration to say that the quality of your targeting is the #1 determinant of the success of your campaign. It’s also absolutely an art form that takes time to learn. Here are some of our best practices:

Discover Audience Demographics

Make the most of first-party data to discover the optimal audience for your campaign. Between LinkedIn’s 1 billion users and data from your CRM, you can fine-tune your campaign targeting with to get your ad in front of the right audience at the right time. 

• Use AI-powered Predictive Audiences to discover what your LinkedIn audience may look like by predicting the most receptive and relevant audience segments for your campaigns.
• Use Audience Insights to gain a deeper understanding of your audience's demographics, interests, and behaviors on LinkedIn.
• Use Matched Audiences to retarget website visitors, engage contacts from your customer databases or marketing automation platforms and reach decision-makers at target companies.
  

Avoid Hyper-Targeting

It’s natural to want to focus your targeting as much as possible, but it’s also an easy way to exclude valuable audience segments.

Probably the most common hyper-targeting mistake is over-targeting directors and executives. Try not to include too many overly specific targeting parameters in your ads. Instead…

Focus on the Right Parameters

What’s the most important factor that differentiates this group of people from other LinkedIn members? Is it age? Industry? Job title? Skills? Interest? 

Zero in on where your audience really is with the goal of using fewer and fewer parameters to find them. You’ll reach more people without sacrificing effective targeting.

Always Be A/B Testing

A/B testing is the best way to experiment with your advertising and derive insights into what works and what doesn’t. 

Create two campaigns that are exactly the same, and then change ONE variable. If one performs better than the other, then you’ll know why.

Step 3: Choose your LinkedIn ad format

LinkedIn allows you to create four different types of ad campaigns, which you can utilize in any combination. Here are our best tips for how to use each:

Sponsored Content

Sponsored Content appears in your audience’s feeds directly. You can make image ads, video ads, or carousel ads using sponsored content. 

We’ve created best practice guides for Sponsored Content, as well as a content advertising specification FAQ.

Message Ads

Message Ads allow you to send direct messages to your prospects that spark immediate action. It doesn’t get more direct than this, which makes targeting absolutely paramount. 

Check out our best practice guide, starter guide, and specification guide for Message Ads to arm yourself with the knowledge and context to make your first deliveries effective.

Dynamic Ads

Dynamic Ads leverage the most powerful personalization technology at LinkedIn’s disposal to allow you to automatically personalize your creative for each member of your target audience based on their profile data.

Dynamic Ads won’t give you much space to construct an elaborate argument, so it’s best to keep them simple. Try to develop single-sentence callouts to specific audience members that will get them interested enough that they click to learn more. And, of course, follow our best practices and specification guides.

Text Ads

Text Ads are basic but highly reliable ads that appear on your target audience’s LinkedIn sidebar.

Text Ads are generally only as good as… well, their text. To help you create compelling text ads, check out our Text Ads tips.

Step 4: Set your budget and schedule

After you know what you want to accomplish, whom you want to target, and how you want to reach them, all that’s left to do is figure out campaign spend and scheduling. LinkedIn gives you three options for bid types:

• Cost per send: This is used for Message ads, and charges you for each message that is successfully delivered.
• Cost per click: This is used for action-oriented campaigns such as consideration and conversion campaigns.
• Cost per impression: This is generally used for brand awareness.
  

Finally, you’ll have to set your budgets and bid on the marketing space. Bidding is an art in and of itself, and you can learn both the basics and more advanced techniques now. 

As we note in our guide, LinkedIn also uses an auction system that rewards engagement with visibility even beyond spend. If your campaign isn’t working it may not necessarily be because you’re not spending enough. We always recommend A/B testing and experimenting before you decide to double down on a particular campaign’s budget.

Step 5: Measure and optimize

Congratulations! After you’ve completed Step 4, your campaign is live. Now, the real work begins. Continually measuring and tweaking your campaign to optimize is the secret that separates good marketing from great marketing. LinkedIn makes it easy.

Here are some of our best tips for making sure your campaign performs better over time:

Don’t Stop with A/B

We call it “A/B testing” but that doesn’t mean you should stop with two versions. Instead, follow your more successful campaign further down the rabbit hole. If “B” is more successful than “A,” then create a “C” that builds off of what you think made “B” a winner. 

Follow What Works, Cut What Doesn’t

Digital advertising is a fast-paced game. If something’s not working for you, cut it. There’s always another campaign, and you can always try tweaking messaging as you go. The more you evaluate, cut, and enhance, the clearer your best path to repeatable success will become. 

Frontload

When you create a new ad campaign, give it an extra push budget-wise. This will allow you to collect data faster, which you can then use to update and tweak the campaign to make it more effective. 

Dig into the Data

LinkedIn gives you a lot of analytical information to work with, including valuable Demographics Reporting. Use this checklist to make the most of this information, optimize more effectively, and, ultimately, ensure a continuously improving ROI.

You knew the science, and now you’ve got a strong understanding of the corresponding art of LinkedIn advertising. If you can incorporate all of these tips and best practices into your LinkedIn ad campaigns, you’ll see a tremendous improvement in coverage, target response, and, ultimately, conversions.

Want even more guidance on how to make the most of your LinkedIn ads? We have all the resources you could ever need.