Designed specifically for professionals, LinkedIn is built from the ground up for delivering business-focused content to its community. Users provide high levels of information about their professional lives and LinkedIn advertising offers a wide range of targeting – providing everything you need to run B2B ads with pinpoint accuracy.

Unique, 360° coverage when it comes to reaching users.

While it’s frowned on to check your Facebook or Twitter accounts at work, LinkedIn is in a different category. This makes it possible to reach users who are checking LinkedIn before work, during, and after, with time-relevant messaging whether they are at the desktop or on a smartphone.

Plus, amazing targeting options and low CPM with LinedIn advertising

LinkedIn advertising offers two million targeting options, whose scope is remarkably diverse in terms of interests and viewpoints. And its CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) is low: At an average price of $0.75, LinkedIn can be a highly cost-effective option.

LinkedIn Ads: Options and considerations

Before we get into your ad options, a few important considerations:

1. Apply the best practices mentioned in our previous post: Define goals and metrics; create daily and lifetime budgets; research your audience and target appropriately; respect privacy concerns; stay on target.
2. LinkedIn ads are much more affected by social sharing and ranking than on Facebook. Your Ad will have a much bigger effect when somebody shares it.
3. LinkedIn advertising is very appropriate for companies with long sales cycles. Many advertisers use it to encourage people to interact with their brands to build awareness and legitimacy.

So what are your options for LinkedIn advertising? Essentially, there are two:

Basic ads and Sponsored Updates. Basic ads appear in the right-hand column of users’ feeds, as in the screen capture below. Sponsored Updates, as you see, appear in the middle of a user’s feed. Let’s begin by describing their advantages first.

Sponsored Update is highlighted on the left. Basic ad is highlighted on the right.

Sponsored Updates. As users engage with content from news sites, professional connections and brands, Sponsored Updates bring you into the conversation front and center – posting right in the middle of their member feeds. You can combine text and visuals, and include videos. The only option for reaching mobile users, they appear in the member feeds on tablets and smartphones. Basic ads, because of their placement in the right column, won’t show up.

Important Note: You first need a Company Page to create Sponsored Updates!

A Company Page increases the visibility of your business and enables you to have followers.

Sponsored Updates support likes, shares, comments and follows – bringing the opportunity for third party validation from friends and colleagues. Here’s where you can engage users with offers for white papers, webinars and podcasts to build awareness, create ongoing engagements and establish relationships.

Bear in mind that users can dislike your ads and make negative comments. So don’t think of them as a way to makes quick sales. Consider them as long-term relationship builders.

Basic ads. These won’t appear on smartphones or tablets, but they do provide a quick way to promote offers. At their simplest they are text only, but for a little extra spend you can include simple videos, images and social options. Don’t dismiss basic ads, though: Target right and message well and you can get good results. They’re also more affordable than Sponsored Updates.

Building effective ads In LinkedIn advertising

Both basic text ads and Sponsored Updates offer complete bid and budget control, and good targeting and content options. Here are the basic steps:

Step One: Create Your Ad

LinkedIn’s interface walks you through building your ad. Click the appropriate fields to name your campaign, choose ad type and format, and then enter the headline, copy and the destination your ad takes users to.

Step Two: Target Your Audience

Now it’s time to apply the homework you’ve done on your target audience. Start pointing and clicking on the options; pop-up windows offer layer after layer of ever-more granular options enabling you to click to exactly the users you want to reach.

Step Three: Your LinkedIn Advertising Budget

Remember to create those minimum and lifetime budgets! The minimum daily budget is $10. And you can bid on either a Cost Per Click or Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM) basis. Prices range from $2.01 to $2.47 and you’ll see a minimum suggested bid.

Important: The look and messaging of your lander needs to connect people immediately with your ad!

The best ad in the world won’t do you any good if the landing page it leads to doesn’t instantly pay it off in respondents’ minds. And we mean instantly. Because if there’s any dissonance, viewers will hesitate before reading on. And he who hesitates is lost to you, the advertiser. So make sure things match up and pay off!

One final thought: Consider the LinkedIn Client Service Team

If you have the budget, LinkedIn advertising has the team for you: The LinkedIn Client Services Team. They’re expensive. But they will come up with creative ideas that will help ensure your campaign’s success. Plus, they’ll work with you to create richer, more customized options than are available with self-service.

Feel free to share this blog, LinkedIn Advertising – Best Practices, How to Use Basic Ads and Sponsored Updates. We only ask that when shared no changes are made, and credits are given to the authors.

About the Authors

John Thyfault

Laurie B. Beasley

The post LinkedIn Advertising – Best Practices, How to Use Basic Ads and Sponsored Updates appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

The big difference between social media and other online advertising is sharing. Users’ love of divulging details about their personal and business lives sets it apart from email marketing and traditional display advertising. And leveraging what people share about themselves on social media can be very profitable.

In short, social media advertising helps you find new customers by using users’ own shared information to identify interest. Its tools let you target the right people before they even begin their online search for products or services – giving you advanced options for targeting and conversion tracking, plus the reach offered by social media’s presence on mobile devices.

Three key reasons for making social media part of your advertising strategy:

1. Targeting

Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter enable you to target your advertising to potential customers using a remarkable level of demographic and psychographic data. From sign-up processes to users’ interactions on social networks, user-provided data gives you precise coordinates for targeting consumers and businesses.

Target what they do, not just who they are.

Social media is also about a users’ interaction with his or her community. This dynamic allows you to better understand who they are and what their trigger points might be – giving you powerful leverage when it comes to arousing interest in your brand or product.

The perfect application of one-to-one marketing science.

Based on the model of one-to-one peer relationships, social media platforms provide you the ultimate in opt-in advertising. You can target users with goods and services matching the needs and preferences they’ve shared. Even better, your ad campaigns can reflect sensitivity to users’ opt-out choices.

2. Reach

Social media is the most popular online activity and offers the potential to vastly extend the reach of your advertising. Three out of five Web requests go through social media, meaning 60% percent of all web traffic is social media based.

Perfect for the big swing to mobile advertising.

Marketing via smartphones is the single biggest wave in digital media advertising. It’s also a perfect native option, since mobile users check Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn multiple times a day.

Mobile ads claim the lion’s share of time spent on social media.

3. Cost Effectiveness

The targeting and tracking tools available can help you achieve very low Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) – the cost of actually obtaining a new customer. This means your pricing in terms of Cost Per Conversion, Cost Per Click and Cost Per Thousand Placement can be much more affordable if a lower CPA is factored into their costs.

Next up, 10 Best Practices. But first there’s one big thing to avoid:

Inappropriate Messaging
If your messaging is off, users will opt out of your ads, lowering your display ranking and hurting future campaigns. Worse, offend one user, and they’ll tell the whole community – killing your campaign and damaging your brand. And be aware that some communities are sensitive to what advertisers know about them. Ads that they feel violate their privacy will a raise red flag with your name on it.

10 Best practices across all platforms.

1. Set Goals and Metrics

First, define your campaign’s goal and then the action you want people to take in support of it. Are you looking for direct sales or leads? Do you want signups for your newsletter, or requests for a free sample? Think it through. Then decide the action most likely to support your goal.

Make use of the guidance provided by social media platforms for optimizing your ads to accomplish specific goals.

Metrics: Decide the level of response required to judge your campaign’s success. For example, if you’re going to tie revenue to workshop attendance, decide the dollar value of each signup and the total number of signups needed to be profitable. Also assign metrics to actions that have no near term monetary value, like website visits. Put a percentage on the boost in website traffic you want.

2. Create Lifetime and Daily Budgets

A Lifetime Budget lets you select an amount to spend over the entire span of a campaign. Once set, you can’t go over budget. If you forget, you can end up in a deep hole very fast as your ads cycle and recycle. A Daily Budget controls your spend per day. You stipulate how much you will spend on a daily basis and your ads will cease showing once you hit your daily budget cap.

3. Do Your Research

Regardless of what seems to be the best platform for your campaign, take the time to explore the relationships between the demographic and psychographic patterns of your audience. Don’t just assume Facebook is better for B2C or LinkedIn for B2B.

Example: If you are advertising shared business plane leases, research shows that people who are interested in private flight also tend to be interested in performance cars. So advertising to Facebook users who are into sports cars may be worth considering – instead of solely focusing on LinkedIn lists.

Always explore the relationships between the demographic and psychographic patterns of your audience. For example, people who are into flying tend also to be high performance car enthusiasts.

4. Be Consistent

Be sure that your social media campaigns align with your other advertising initiatives. Don’t bring up question marks in people’s minds by making your ads inconsistent with what you’re using for paid search, display advertising, billboards, etc.

5. Pop!

Social media advertising is much different from paid search – where people are actively looking for a solution like yours. So do whatever you can to give your ads some bite, some pop.

6. Align Targeting Options to Objectives

A big benefit of social media advertising comes from the wide range of targeting options the platforms can support. But be sure you’re matching your available targeting options with your advertising objectives.

7. Test and Retest

Constantly swap out ad versions showing different treatments of the same content. Use the better-performing versions to keep adding refinements and test them over the course of your campaign. It’s an ongoing cycle where you continually apply the lessons learned.

8. Schedule To Your Advantage

Schedule ads to match users’ schedules. Look at your target audience, what you’re promoting, and determine the times they’re likely to be on social media. Consider week-part targeting, too – that is, running your ads on particular weekdays, over weekends, etc.

9. Automate

Whenever you can, use your platform to automatically make optimization decisions based on ad performance. For instance, in Facebook you can set up a campaign stating a daily budget of $150 and it will automatically bid for you on either an impression or per-click basis to garner as many clicks as possible for your $150.

10. Repeat!

Gather data and set regular meetings to analyze results, go over the metrics, plan changes and decide how to implement them as your campaign moves forward. Repeat over and over to ensure the best bang for your social advertising buck.

John Thyfault

Laurie B. Beasley

The post Social Media Advertising: Driving Response from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.