WORLD’S LEADINGLINKEDIN TRAINING COMPANY

THE STATE OF ADVERTISING ON LINKEDIN

INTRODUCTIONLinkedIn has an advertising platform that has been heavily under utilised by advertisers online.

Many people have avoided it due to its high cost per click (more on this later) and limited options of ad types. The ad platform is also very basic in comparison to Facebook and Google.

But when everyone is zigging you need to be zagging, so while everyone is fighting for clicks on a saturated Facebook / Google ad platform here we are leveraging LinkedIn ads for some pretty astonishing results.

BEFORE WE BEGINDue to the high CPC if you have an online course for example and the price point is under $500 you may not be able to get a ROI from LinkedIn.

That said, we’ll share with you the best way to leverage the LinkedIn advertising platform so you can start to generates leads for your business based on our experience.

1. CREATE A COMPANY PROFILETo get started with LinkedIn advertising you need a company profile setup to run the ads from. We don’t recommend setting one up if you have under 11 staff members as this can make you look small.

Only use your LinkedIn company profile for advertising - sharing content from this really isn’t worth the effort unless you have a big following.

You are much better off using your personal profile, connecting and building relationships with your target market personally using our 3 step methodology.

2. AD TYPE SELECTIONOnly run sponsored content ads, these are the pieces of content that you post from your company profile and these go in the LinkedIn newsfeed.

The right-hand ads don’t seem to get traction at all - not to say they can’t be effective – we just haven’t cracked that code.

All you need to do is share a link from your profile and run ads to this.

3. GET YOUR TARGETING RIGHTOnce you have selected your post, created a headline and image for the post it’s time to get your targeting right.

There’s actually some really good targeting options for you to run ads too like targeting country, industry, plus company size and adding seniority level.

We’ve also had some pretty good results targeting groups. For example if you are targeting business coaches you can target groups that business coaches are a part of.

4. SET YOUR BUDGET AND BIDDue to the cost of the clicks you’d want to have a budget of $50 – $100 a day to test at the least.Setting the CPC (cost per click) to their recommended bid seems to be get good clicks at cheaper prices.

Although it may say you pay $9 a click if your ad is good you often end up paying $4 a click or so.You can set your clicks budget to less than that but your ad might not get shown to many people and you have to keep monitoring regularly in case it suddenly stops being shown.

One thing to note is although the CPC can be higher on LinkedIn the quality of the traffic I have found is a lot better than other platforms.

The traffic tends to convert better which can mean conversion numbers almost double that of Facebook ad traffic and the quality of the applications are much higher.

So although you might pay $4 per click on LinkedIn, the quality is better and it converts better means that even though Facebook has cheaper clicks of $1 – $2 the ROI is better from LinkedIn.

4. SET YOUR BUDGET AND BID

5. REVIEWING THE DATAOnce you have launched you need to review your data, a solid test is around 60 – 100 clicks.

Once you have that you can see how many converted to a lead and a sale – you may need to test for a couple of weeks to get a solid picture of your results so don’t pull the pin too early. It’s also important to keep an eye on your Click Through Rate (CTR) and Cost Per Click to see if that’s getting higher at all.

If you notice your CTR dropping and your CPC increasing it’s most likely that your ad has ‘ad fatigue’ meaning that it’s been shown to the audience too much and they are no longer clicking it.

GET YOUR FUNNEL RIGHTMake sure you have a high converting online sales funnel first and foremost. If you have created it yourself or someone built it for you has no idea about web conversions, just forget about it and wait until you have the foundations right.

Good business owners use experts, you should to in this space, make the investment and get someone who knows what they are doing with been there done that experience to build it for you.

The investment will pay itself off a thousand times over.

RESULTSFrom our tests we have had an ROI from our LinkedIn ads of around 1200%, our click through rates have been around 1.5 – 2% and cost per click is around $4 – $5.

So if you are hovering around these numbers from your tests you are looking pretty good.You don’t have as great reporting abilities with LinkedIn so you do have to make some assumptions from the data. However if you get it right it can be a highly attractive ad platform.

Hope this article has given you some good guidance on how to start with LinkedIn ads and from what has worked for us.

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