Compared to other email campaigns, Linkedin’s Sponsored InMail Ads have higher click-through rates and offer the additional benefit of conversion tracking

B2B businesses on LinkedIn would usually drive sales through social selling, but there are plenty of compelling reasons to use Linkedin Ads instead. By advertising on the world’s largest professional network, you can effectively reach out to other businesses or professionals who will be interested in your services. With Linkedin Marketing, you can get the most qualified leads if you optimise your ads for the best results.

If you have not been getting conversions or are thinking of trying Linkedin Ads, here are 5 tips you should try to optimise your campaign:

1. Capture Attention with Sponsored InMail

When you create a campaign on the LinkedIn Campaign Manager, you will be provided with three options to choose from: Sponsored Content, Text Ads and Sponsored InMail.

Sponsored InMails allow you to serve more personalised ads to your customers through the LinkedIn messenger, thus capturing your audience’s attention immediately. Moreover, Sponsored InMail messages are only delivered when the members are active on LinkedIn, which increases the chances of your ad getting noticed.

Compared to other email campaigns, Linkedin’s Sponsored InMail Ads have higher click-through rates and offer the additional benefit of conversion tracking. Combine your ad with a strong call-to-action (include words such as ‘try’, ‘free’, ‘register’) and Linkedin’s sharp targeting functions, and wait for those conversions to start rolling in.

2. Drive Action with Lead Generation Forms

This option is available for Sponsored Content and Sponsored InMail. Lead gen forms are a great way to quickly obtain leads, as they make it extremely convenient for your customer to fill up your form. Instead of being redirected to a landing page after clicking on your ad, your customer can fill up your form directly from your ad, and form fields can be auto-filled using information from the customer’s LinkedIn profile.

Here are some best practices for running lead gen forms:

• Do not include too many form fields that require manual input as this makes it more tedious for your customers. Incorporate more fields asking for information that will be on their profile as these will be auto-filled.

• Be direct and upfront about the value the customer gets from signing up. Your customer needs to know what they are getting into with the limited number of words in your ad.

3. Maximise LinkedIn’s Targeting Capabilities

One of the best reasons to use LinkedIn Ads is its unique, super sharp targeting methods that no other digital marketing channels offer (at least at the moment). You can filter your audience based on job seniority, company size and industry, job title and function, and more.

Create your buyer’s persona, and target accordingly. For instance, if you are targeting business owners of small and medium-sized enterprises, you can target people with more senior job positions, or with job titles such as ‘Owner’, ’Managing Director’, ‘President’, ‘Chief Executive Officer’, etc. You can also exclude audiences to further refine your targeting. In this case, you can exclude people working in large companies (with over 5,000 employees).

For maximum conversions, call out to your audience in the ad. In this example, your ad copy can mention “Calling all business owners …” Your copy can also mention something that has direct relevance to your audience, such as “Did you know that 90% of digital marketers…”

Also read: Want to generate more leads and sales? Reverse engineer your LinkedIn profile views

4. Choose the Correct Bid Type

Your bid type can make a huge difference in your ads’ performance. Selecting the correct bid type can help your campaign spend your budget wisely to meet your goals. Linkedin provides 2 bid types to choose from:

Cost per click (CPC)

You will only pay for the clicks on your ads, and you can set the maximum amount you are willing to pay for each click. This option is recommended if your intention is to generate conversions.

Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM)

You will only pay for every 1,000 impressions of your ad, and you can set the maximum amount you are willing to pay for 1000 impressions. This option is recommended if your intention is to boost brand awareness, or if you have been running your campaigns with CPC bidding and getting good CTRs, you can consider switching to CPM for more cost-effective results.

5. Test Your Ad Creative

This is quite a standard practice across all digital marketing campaigns. Testing your ad creative may seem tedious and just downright unnecessary, but it does bring in results! You can test your ad’s copy, call-to-action, landing page and image, but some advertisers found that they were able to triple their results just by changing their ads’ image!

Images are important in capturing your audiences’ attention, so take care to choose the right image that represents your brands’ values while being eye-catching.

You can test your ad’s image by creating two ads with identical copies but with different images. For a particular client, we tested an ad by using an image with human faces and another without. We found that the ad without human faces performed better, which was a peculiar case because typically, ads with images featuring peoples’ faces should perform better. So for every rule, there is an exception, and you will never know if your ad happens to be ‘exceptional’ until you test them.

Also read: Want to stand out from other job seekers? Use this LinkedIn cheat sheet

Conclusion

LinkedIn marketing is one of the must-have digital marketing platforms for B2B businesses, but at the end of the day, there isn’t a ‘one-size fits all’ strategy. Remember to make full use of LinkedIn’s smart targeting functions whenever appropriate, and try different types of ads to see which fits your business most.

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