Chapter 1
The Cost of Advertising on LinkedIn
We know how important it is to have the right content available. And we know how challenging it can be to stay on top of these things, remaining responsive to your audience while finding the resources to create quality content to engage them.
As Campaign Managers, a key part of our role was finding ways to make our advertisers’ lives easier: tips and tricks that could take the pressure off, make it easy to stay on top of what matters, and maintain a healthy flow of high-quality content and advertising. Over the years, we’ve come up with tiny adjustments that can make it far easier and more time-efficient to manage campaigns on LinkedIn. These are small changes that will make a big difference: in how you set up your campaign, how you get the extra mile of value from your creative and make the most of limited resources and bandwidth, and how you can get into the groove of testing and optimising to increase your effectiveness and ROI over time.
If you can carve out just a few minutes each day to start putting the recommendations in this chapter into practice, then I guarantee they will quickly start to make your life as a marketer on LinkedIn a lot, lot easier.
Why is LinkedIn so effective for marketing? Because of the insights and targeting capabilities that enable you to put the most relevant message in front of the most relevant people for your objectives. Keep this in mind as you plan and set up your campaign.
"Objectives and Product, Targeting and Audience, Bidding and Budget and finally, Content, Content, Content"
I tell advertisers that there are four pillars to success on LinkedIn: Objectives and Product, Targeting and Audience, Bidding and Budget and finally, Content, Content, Content. You need to think about and address all of these things. If you only focus on one or two, you won’t be as successful as you should be.”
Felim McMahon
Online Advertising expert
When you need to get started running Sponsored Content campaigns on LinkedIn
It doesn’t take much to get started running campaigns on LinkedIn – but focusing on the right few details will help set you up for success.
Grace MacDonald
Campaign Manager turned Marketer
"Successful emails are a great foundation for Sponsored InMails. The best tweets often have the key elements that Sponsored Content needs for success"
The more value you get from your best content ideas, the less pressure on your budget and resources to keep filling your content pipeline from the top. Remixing content from other platforms is a great way of getting started with advertising on LinkedIn without having to invest in creating new content from scratch. Successful emails are a great foundation for Sponsored InMails. The best tweets often have the key elements that Sponsored Content needs for success – like concise copy, compelling images and a clear call to action.”
The little things can make a big difference to your experience of marketing on LinkedIn. Structure your campaign in the right way from the outset, and you’ll make life a lot easier for yourself going forward.
"In my current role, I’m supporting LinkedIn Marketing Solutions globally, and I can really see the value in setting up separate regional accounts for EMEA, North America and Asia Pacific. All of these areas are using different currencies for their marketing and they’ve also got different objectives and needs. It makes absolute sense to manage these individually for that reason. The one downside is that your different teams don’t have the same instant visibility into what their colleagues in different regions are doing – but I think that trade-off is worth it.
Another piece of advice that I often give to people when setting up their campaigns is to use a standard Campaign Manager naming convention. It’s makes it as easy as possible to run different types of campaigns simultaneously – and it works.
We submit campaigns all the time for different regions, different audiences and different purposes, and using a standardised syntax is a huge help. As you start running more LinkedIn campaigns, it will help to use the search function and filters to find exactly what you’re looking for.
The final thing I’d mention with the setup is applying the Insight Tag across your website, because you’ll get great value from using that for Conversion Tracking and your Website Demographics. It’s great for tracking how engagement on LinkedIn is converting into leads. You’ll get really good insight on who’s clicking, who’s engaging, who’s looking at your content, and you can see this broken down by country, company, functions, seniority. It’s a pretty cool tool to use.”
Gaurav Nihalani
LinkedIn Insider
How to increase campaign effectiveness over time
Setting a framework for testing and learning will help you to boost your relevancy score, increase your reach and engagement, and focus your targeting on the audiences driving real results for your business.
Jamie Pham
Content Marketing Evangelist
"Optimise after the first few days and then keep an eye on them on a weekly basis"
My advice is to set up a handful of campaigns for the audience that you’re trying to target, fill them with two to three pieces of content, optimise after the first few days and then keep an eye on them on a weekly basis. Try to make sure that you’re getting some scale of impressions so that you can have a meaningful amount of data to work with for optimising.”