Mastering B2B Advertising on LinkedIn

Expert Campaign

Optimization Tips

Expert Campaign Optimization TipsFor many businesses, paid advertising remains

an important channel for promoting products

and services and generating sales—and social

media is their platform of choice. Not only is

social media where your potential customers

most like to spend their time, now more than

ever it’s also consumers’ go-to resource for

discovering information about businesses,

products, and services.

B2Bs can especially take advantage of social

media to find, connect with, and promote their

business to a vast and targeted audience—and

there’s no more effective network for doing so

than through LinkedIn.

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Why Should LinkedIn Advertising Be Part of Your

B2B Marketing Strategy?

LinkedIn Advertising

We talk a lot about the benefits B2Bs can experience from developing a strong presence on

LinkedIn, including improving public awareness of their brand and establishing themselves as

thought leaders. Advertising on the platform is no different—and using Sponsored Updates,

we’ve led our own B2B clients’ campaigns to success.

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LinkedIn Advertising

There are many reasons why advertising on LinkedIn through Sponsored Updates is a smart

move for B2Bs, including:

• It’s effective. LinkedIn boasts a 2.74 percent view-to-lead conversion rate, compared to

.69 percent and .77 percent for Twitter and Facebook respectively.

• Your audience is there. One-third of the world’s professionals use LinkedIn, meaning

you’re bound to be able to attract the eyes you’re looking to target.

• Sponsored Updates drive conversions. A whopping 4 out of 5 members on LinkedIn are

also decision makers within their respective businesses—and these members also have 2x

the purchasing power of the average adult internet user in the U.S.

So—is your B2B company looking to start taking advantage of LinkedIn’s huge professional

audience and comprehensive targeting features by advertising on the platform?

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Advertising on LinkedIn: Expert Strategies for B2Bs

Advertising on LinkedIn: Expert Strategies for B2BsSetting Yourself Up for Success

To advertise effectively on LinkedIn, first you have to optimize your campaign from set-up.

Our expert tips for setting your campaign up for success include:

Know Your End Goal

When advertising on LinkedIn, B2Bs typically have one of the following goals: improving

brand awareness and engagement or driving lead generation and conversions. It’s critical

that your team understand the goal of your LinkedIn advertising campaign before you start

building out your Sponsored Updates, as your goal informs how you should measure the

success of your campaign and what specific metrics you should be tracking.

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Advertising on LinkedIn: Expert Strategies for B2BsB2Bs seeking to extend the reach of their business and improve public knowledge of their

brand should ultimately focus their campaign analysis efforts on monitoring the number of

impressions their Sponsored Updates are receiving as well as the engagement rate. On the

other hand, B2Bs looking to convert potential customers into leads and sales should look at

the CTRs of their ads.

Your advertising campaign goals inform everything from how you should create your

Updates to how you should determine success, so know your goal (and maybe write it on a

whiteboard or two in your office…)

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Advertising on LinkedIn: Expert Strategies for B2BsDevelop a Compelling Offer & Landing Page

To see success through LinkedIn Sponsored Updates, you need to give before you can get.

B2Bs looking to boost awareness with their campaign might link their ad to a recent blog

post, but for those looking to convert their audience, It’s important to develop a valuable

and compelling offer to entice engagement, such as an in-depth piece of content like an

eBook or whitepaper or a product demo. High quality content is an especially effective offer

for driving conversions—a study showed that 74 percent of B2B buyers ended up choosing a

company that was first to assist them in the buying process by offering useful content and

information.

If your campaign goal is to convert users, you should also gate your offer behind a landing

page so that viewers must submit their contact information before receiving it. Ultimately,

this is still a win-win situation for both parties—you generate a new lead to add to future

marketing efforts and the viewer receives what they wanted from you.

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Advertising on LinkedIn: Expert Strategies for B2BsOptimizing Your Creatives to Drive Results

Your creatives are the lifeblood of your advertising campaign, and need to be developed with

consideration of best practices in mind to get you the results you desire. We have plenty of

experience optimizing our clients’ LinkedIn ads and associated landing pages to ensure their

engagement and conversion potential is maximized. Below, we share our top creative

optimization strategies pulled from years of campaign success and lessons learned.

Get creative with your ad copy.

Consumers are so used to spotting and avoiding online advertising attempts that many all

but ignore most digital ads at this point. This is why B2Bs need to get creative with their

LinkedIn ad copy and use it to drive the desired action from their target audience.

Remember that your potential customers are human and want to be treated as such, so

consider engaging them right off the bat by asking a question within the update itself.

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Advertising on LinkedIn: Expert Strategies for B2BsIn the ad below, our client was doing this particular best practice but failing to optimize

other aspects of the ad, including the ad’s headline and description.

Here is the original version of the ad offering a downloadable report from our cybersecurity

client, as well as the results:

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Advertising on LinkedIn: Expert Strategies for B2BsAnd here is the optimized ad offering the same asset and its results (after receiving the same

amount of impressions as the previous ad):

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Advertising on LinkedIn: Expert Strategies for B2BsCatching Their Eyes. We included a number—and quite an attention-grabbing one—in the

update itself, which is a best practice for attracting the eyes of your target audience.You can

see that our optimized ad saw an incredible improvement in both CTR and engagement rate.

We were successfully able to improve our client’s campaign effectiveness by crafting our

copy to appeal to the audience in the following ways:

• Engaging Them Emotionally. We incorporated language that tugs on the emotions—such

as “cost” and “shocking”—throughout the ad to engage a viewer no matter which part of it

they’re reading. Wouldn’t you want to read on as an at-risk business owner after

discovering that DDoS attacks are more-costly than ever?

• Inviting Action. We included a CTA in the update of our ad—“Download the DDoS Impact

Report”—that let the reader know exactly what action we wanted them to take, helping

guide them down the sales funnel.

• Ensuring Ad Consistency. We ensured that the asset and ad copy were in sync,

eliminating the instance where the client referred the asset as a survey instead of a report

(we’ll discuss more about message match later in this post.)

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Advertising on LinkedIn: Expert Strategies for B2BsAdd a high quality image to your ad that aligns with your copy.

Part of the reason Sponsored Updates are so effective for B2B advertising (and why we

choose to use them over text ads) is that they give the user the option to add an image—a

best practice for driving improved engagement from LinkedIn audiences.

We took the extra step with our client’s ad below of ensuring that we added a bold and

compelling image that also aligned with the more creative ad copy we were using:

Original version of the ad:

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Advertising on LinkedIn: Expert Strategies for B2BsOptimized version of the ad:

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Advertising on LinkedIn: Expert Strategies for B2BsOptimized version of the ad:

In the above example, by using a playful picture of army men that aligned with and bolstered

the ad’s message about being “under threat of attack”, we were able to successfully improve

the ad’s engagement rate, CTR, and the number of social actions taken from viewers.

Another important image-related note to incorporate into your B2B LinkedIn strategy is to

refrain from using any that include text. Images with text are not optimal for mobile users

and will typically become unreadable even when viewed from a desktop.

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Advertising on LinkedIn: Expert Strategies for B2BsEnsure landing page messaging is consistent with your ad and offer.

Consider this: a potential customer views your ad offering a piece of content only to be

redirected to your website’s homepage upon clicking your ad. Think they’re going to stick

around to find that piece of content and convert into a lead? Likely not.

One easy way to screw up your campaign conversion rate potential is by allowing

inconsistencies to exist between your landing page and the ad linking to it. B2Bs with the

goal of driving conversions with their LinkedIn advertising campaign need to ensure that

messaging is consistent across their landing pages and ads—from language and branding to

the offer itself.

As an example, recently we created a LinkedIn campaign for our land surveyor client who

had an eBook to offer on drones and wanted to target and convert employees of companies

in the oil & energy industries.

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Advertising on LinkedIn: Expert Strategies for B2BsHere is the Sponsored Update offering a downloadable eBook:

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Advertising on LinkedIn: Expert Strategies for B2BsAnd here is the associated landing page:

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Advertising on LinkedIn: Expert Strategies for B2BsYou can see that we kept important language and keywords—such as “drones”, “unmanned

aerial”, and “oil & energy”—consistent across both the ad and the landing page, and made

sure to reiterate the offer multiple times: a FREE eBook. We also highlighted the value of the

eBook by teasing viewers with what they would learn from reading it via both the ad and the

landing page.

To drive B2B conversions by advertising on LinkedIn, it’s not enough just to have a landing

page—you also have to ensure that ad viewers can seamlessly transition into converted

leads by eliminating any discrepancies between the landing page and the ads they’re

associated with.

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Advertising on LinkedIn: Expert Strategies for B2BsIncorporating LinkedIn into Your B2B Marketing Strategy

Are you looking for expert assistance incorporating LinkedIn content promotion or

advertising into your B2B marketing strategy? SevenAtoms has experience developing and

executing LinkedIn strategies for B2B companies across a variety of industries. Contact us

today for a free consultation.

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Website: www.sevenatoms.com | Phone: 415.513.0435 | Email: info@sevenatoms.com

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