How can your business use LinkedIn Advertising to engage customers?

On 13th July, as part of the series of marketing training courses Business West is offering to Chamber Members, Emarketeers delivered a course on LinkedIn Advertising.

Jonathan Saipe, the training course leader said:

"With LinkedIn approaching a billion users, marketing opportunities on the platform have never been better. It is unrivalled as a B2B social network, and thanks to its purchase by Microsoft for $26 billion, its feature-rich advertising tools offer marketers a full range of products to engage with audiences at every stage of the funnel.”

The course allowed attendees to learn about advanced audience targeting opportunities and getting the most of your campaigns with re-targeting. So, what were the key take-aways?

Planning LinkedIn campaigns requires a strategy

During the session, Jonathan Saipe, founder of Emarketeers urged the importance of careful planning.

He said: “Planning is about building a strategy. The strategy has to include the answers to three questions: What are your goals? Who is your audience and what is the competition up to?”

Businesses should think about what they use the platform for, is it brand awareness, business networking, sales prospecting, or lead generation?

He told businesses “The important thing is to use as many of the LinkedIn campaign options as possible to target the whole of the sales funnel.”

He also outlined the importance of micro and macro goals to help achieve this. The macro goals are the main measurable goals we want to see happen such as gaining leads, increasing sales, or receiving phone calls. Micro goals are the smaller goals that people set to indicate that they are engaging people and pushing them towards the macro goal. Examples could include comments, likes, or shares.

Measuring the campaign goals is important

Businesses learnt that it is important to be able to measure all of the goals, not just the macro goals.

Jonathan said: “You should be in a position, where you can run a LinkedIn ad campaign and you can say, based on the £500 I spent, 25% of my audience watched 50% of the content. You can then re-market that audience who watched the video, with another campaign that pushes them down the sales funnel.”

Targeting is about building audience personas 

Personas are archetypal users of your product such as typical website visitors for example. If you don’t know who those personas are, there needs to be a process of building them.

The realistic way of doing this is to carry out a focus group perhaps over Zoom, and build a picture of what their motivations are, their aspirations, and in turn what kind of content would delight them make them want to share it. 

Jonathan said: “there are three ways to think about the audience. First define their persona and what their attitudes and goals are, secondly, identify the scenario they’re in or the narrative that describes how they behave. Thirdly, you have to identify the goal which is the motivation of why the persona is taking action and what they need to fulfil or how can you help them. 

He then pointed businesses towards the company page analytics on LinkedIn to understand who the audience is and to encourage businesses to think about what type of content might be relevant for them. He advised firms to do this once a month to help develop their business strategy. 

How different LinkedIn ads can be used for different goals

Jonathan then spoke about the different format of LinkedIn ads and how these change based on your campaign objectives. 

Examples of these include single image ads, carousel ads and video ads as well as spotlight and dynamic ads which can be used to send users to landing pages, content or job postings.

Dynamic ads enable you to personalise the experience through using dynamic attributes such as using the profile picture and name. These can be used with Follower ads, which are used to increase the number of followers on your company page or engage with existing followers. 

He also drew attention to LinkedIn’s Insight Tag which allows you to better understand your website visitors and their actions. This works by adding a piece of Javascript code to your website. Steps on how to do this can be found in the LinkedIn Help section. 

The purpose is to collect information about people who visit your website, enabling you to start building audiences to remarket to via LinkedIn. 

How to get involved in future events

Emarketeers is hosting a training course on Google Analytics on 14th September, where you will learn how to maximise your Google Analytics setup and configuration.

Journolink is running two events on the 7th and 21st July to help you develop your PR strategy.

To stay up to date on all of Business West’s Chamber events, visit this page.