LinkedIn’s self-service advertising has become more robust than ever, particularly with its narrow targeting abilities. Let’s take a look at the current choices available and their features:
Sponsored Content – Similar to Facebook’s boosted posts, Sponsored Content appear in your targets’ LinkedIn feeds. They can meet two objectives:
- Increase website traffic – This option sends people to your website or landing page on their click. Plus, you can add a follow button to encourage additional followers. You can also use the conversion tracking feature to see how many people convert after clicking or viewing your ads.
- Generate qualified leads – This option converts prospects into qualified leads directly on LinkedIn, through a form. When users fill out the form, LinkedIn pre-populates it using information from their profiles, so they can submit with just a click. This option also can connect to your marketing automation provider to capture and manage lead data
Furthermore, advertisers choose to increase the reach of their content by enabling the LinkedIn Audience Network. This places the content on “high-quality, third-party publishers across mobile and desktop,” enabling you to reach your target audience outside of LinkedIn. Of course, you can block URLs where you don’t want your ads to appear.
LinkedIn’s self-service advertising has become more robust than ever, particularly with its narrow targeting abilities.Click To TweetSponsored InMail – This is a fascinating ad unit, because there is nothing like it on any other social platform. With Sponsored InMail, you can send a sponsored message from your personal profile to drive conversions. And, Sponsored InMail only will serve a message to users once every two months. This means you don’t need to worry about spamming users and the ads losing their effectiveness.
Increasing the effectiveness even further, Sponsored InMail messages are only delivered when the recipient is on the platform, guaranteeing placement at the top of recipients’ inboxes.
Text Ads – Generally viewed as the least effective type of LinkedIn advertising, these are the ads that appear on the right rail. They are only available on desktop, so if for some reason, your website isn’t very mobile-friendly (better update that ASAP), these ads could be a good choice for you.
LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities make all of these ads particularly useful:
- First off, you can choose very narrow targets – You can target all the way down to specific titles at specific companies. Plus, LinkedIn offers Audience Expansion, a feature that chooses additional audiences with attributes similar to your target audience.
- You can retarget to individuals – You can install an Insight Tag to landing pages to retarget people who have visited your landing page.
- You also can target specific individuals or companies – Simply upload a list of emails or web addresses.
Have you seen success with LinkedIn self-service ads?