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When talking to clients, I’ve noticed that when I ask about what they’re doing on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms, they typically say something to the effect of “Oh yeah, we’re on Facebook” or “We’ve got over four thousand likes!” or “Oh yeah, we’re really making an effort with LinkedIn this year.”

When pressed for more information on how they’re making that effort though, the response typically is that they’ve made a commitment to posting regularly, and not much more. I’ll ask questions like: How are you targeting your ads? Have you built custom audiences? Do you have the retargeting pixels installed on your site and are you retargeting using them? And in return I get a lot of confused looks.

Simply put, many of the clients I talk to are under the impression that content marketing is all there is to social media marketing, and are unfamiliar with social media’s advertising tools.

This series of blogs is meant to help demystify social media advertising in an easy digestible way, and hopefully open the door to a new audience that was once unreachable.

LinkedIn Ads – A Crash Course

LinkedIn has over 500 million users, as of April 2017, all with places of employment and job titles past and present, and they’re all accessible. That information alone sets LinkedIn apart from other social media channels, and provides marketers and businesses with an incredibly powerful tool for B2B. In fact, 277% more B2B social media leads come from LinkedIn, than from Facebook and Twitter combined.

We’ve discussed Facebook pixel targeting previously, but that type of social advertising lends itself best to B2C. My hunch is that you’re here because you assumed LinkedIn would be great for B2B and want to know how to get your name in the game? And I’m going to do my best to deliver to you the recipe in a practical, digestible way, with a little bit of strategy sprinkled in.

So to start, I’m going to be brutally honest: The LinkedIn Campaign Manager is clumsy and sometimes difficult to navigate. There are pitfalls all over the place, and if you aren’t careful you can end up wasting a bunch of time (and money). Hopefully this piece helps you avoid some common mistakes.

The Process

LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager is basically broken down into 3 parts: each “campaign” has one specific audience, budget and schedule, but can include multiple ads. And despite the step-by-step structure within the Campaign Manager tool (select ads, select audience, set bid/budget/schedule), that’s definitely not the order in which we want to develop our ads.

Gather your resources

To be successful, you’re going to need the following items:

• Customer personas from which you can create target audiences
• An ad planner of some kind (I’ve added mine to this for free download)
• Compelling imagery
• A suitable landing page for your objective (gather leads, get registrations, etc.)
• UTM Tracking
• Spending limits, CPC vs. CPM, and timing

Determine your primary audience for your campaign

This is kind of a no brainer, but you need to know who you want to target with your ads. When we work with companies to start LinkedIn ads, the first question I ask is if they have customer personas or an ideal client profile from which to start. With those things in mind you can include age and gender demographics, degrees, fields of study, etc. I also remind clients that we don’t want to aim for C-level executives, unless the company sells jets or helicopters or something and that’s truly their target market.

You’re trying to discover new leads, so think of people who benefit from what you offer, but also have job titles of decision makers. Aim at people with senior management or director titles, the level of employee that might have access to the checkbook.

Plan your sponsored content

OK, so the first thing I should mention is that you can sponsor content that you’ve already posted to your LinkedIn page. Sponsoring this type of content would be ideal if you tailor each piece of content to a specific persona, and then target just that persona in Campaign Manager.

I prefer the second option, which is “Direct Sponsored Content.” The primary benefit of Direct Sponsored Content is that they run “in the dark,” meaning they don’t appear on your LinkedIn page. What this means for you and I is that we can write our source content to a broader audience, and then develop variations on the same ad content specific to our personas, and then deliver it to those different audiences.

Your campaign can have multiple ads, and every ad needs a handful of items. My ad planner includes all of them, plus their limitations or specs:

• Name
• Creative ID – Generated by LinkedIn and can be beneficial if you need to identify an ad for reuse in another campaign
• Intro text – Text that appears next to your logo, above the image (150 characters max with spaces)
• Headline – Text that appears below your image (70 characters max with spaces)
• Description – Text appears below your headline, but only in select circumstances (100 characters max with spaces)
• Ad Creative – Image or graphic (1200px wide x 627px tall)
• UTM tracking for Source, Medium, Campaign, Content
• URL of landing page (Google URL Builder)

Get Started

Once you’ve planned out all your ads, get inside your Campaign Manager and select “Create Campaign” on the upper right, then select the first option, “Sponsored Content.” Give your campaign a name and set the language, leave “Send people to your website or content” selected (you can add the follow button option if you want) and click next.

The next step wants you to select or create content, and from here we want to hit “Create Sponsored Content,” again on the upper right. A window will pop up to create your content, and this is where having your ad planner complete will be really beneficial.

*Here’s pro tip #1: Imagine this pop up is the cockpit of a space shuttle – you are not an astronaut and you don’t know what any of the buttons do, so don’t touch them. If you need to click on any of the links, make sure you right-click and choose open in new tab/window, because every one of the links opens in the same page, and anything you’ve done for the ad will be lost.*

Then follow these steps that you developed in the ad planner:

• Name your ad
• Enter the shortened URL – it will then populate the ad from the landing page
• Select/upload your new image
• Overwrite the URL you put in at step 2 with your introductory text
• Add in your headline and description
• Make sure EVERYTHING is correct, because here comes pro tip #2: Once you save the ad, there is not currently a way to make ANY changes to it
• If everything is verified to be correct, click “Save”

Pro tip #3: If you intend to make multiple ads for this campaign, be warned that you cannot simply use the “copy” icon. A copied ad will not allow you to change the destination URL, which means you won’t be able to identify in Google Analytics which specific ad content is delivering traffic. And here’s my favorite part: you cannot currently delete an ad you created by mistake.

Once all your ads are created, select them by ticking the boxes aside them to the left and click “next” at the bottom of the page.

Finishing Up

Once your ads are built you’ll continue on to your audience selection. Use the primary audience you identified at the start to select the appropriate demographics, job titles, etc. You’ll also need to identify the areas you’d like to target. I typically untick the Audience Network and Audience Expansion options, although you’re welcome to test those out, as they may be beneficial for your own purposes. Click “next.”

Lastly, you’ll set whether you prefer to pay by click, or by impression, set your daily budget and bid. You can determine when to begin your campaign, and when to end it, as well as a total budget. Once all of those are set, click the “Launch Campaign” button on the lower right, and you’re all set.

Conclusion

I realize there’s a lot of regimented information here, but I hope you find it helpful. Having done this for clients, and listening to their frustrations, I knew there was a need for a guide written by someone who actually creates LinkedIn ads on a regular basis. I encourage you to give it a shot for your business, just make sure you have everything in place in advance.

Lastly, if you read this piece and want to try LinkedIn advertising, but don’t want to go through the hassle of trying to navigate these steps (which change somewhat frequently), we offer a wide variety of digital marketing services, including LinkedIn advertising. Give us a shout and we’ll see how we can help you grow your business.

Want a hand setting up LinkedIn ads?

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