The ultimate guide to LinkedIn ads: Mastering your B2B marketing

As the number one professional network, LinkedIn is the best place to reach a B2B audience. The platform has millions of industry practitioners and key decision-makers in its network, and running impactful and targeted LinkedIn ads can get your products and services in front of the right audience.

Organic content may be at the heart of your LinkedIn marketing strategy. But ads help you take it to the next level, amplifying your reach and impact.

In this guide, we dive into LinkedIn advertising, sharing everything you need to know. From the different ad formats to measuring campaign performance, let’s find out how to make the most of ads on LinkedIn.

Why choose LinkedIn ads?

LinkedIn ads are a paid marketing tool that lets you display your products and services in front of a targeted audience within the platform. A LinkedIn ad campaign involves choosing an ad format that works for you, such as sponsored content or messaging and showcasing the ad to users from specific demographics, job titles or industries.

This allows you to target with precision—reaching the users most likely to see value in your offering and ready to make purchasing decisions.

Source: LinkedIn

The latest LinkedIn stats show that ads on the platform boost purchase intent by 33%. Marketers also see a 2x higher conversion rate on the platform. On top of this, 40% of B2B marketers say LinkedIn is the most effective platform for driving high-quality leads. No wonder LinkedIn ads perform so well.

The LinkedIn Campaign Manager makes it easy to create, manage and measure all your LinkedIn ads in one place. It even offers powerful, data-backed recommendations to maximize ROI from your LinkedIn campaigns.

Types of LinkedIn ads and formats

LinkedIn offers several ad types and formats to help you promote your business in the best way possible. Strategically choosing the best ad type is vital for success when using LinkedIn for your business. Let’s take a look at these ad types below:

Sponsored content

LinkedIn sponsored content looks just like a regular post that you’d see on your feed except with a CTA button and a “promoted” label.

You can choose from nine different formats of sponsored content. It’s better to switch between the options every once in a while to compare their performances and see which one works best with your audience.

• Single image ads: These ads consist of a single image. They help to promote a product or service, increase brand awareness or drive website traffic.
  
• Video ads: These ads include video and typically demonstrate how a product or service works, tell a brand story or increase engagement.
  
• Carousel ads: These ads include a series of images or videos that users can swipe through. Carousels are great for showcasing multiple products, services or ideas, or tell a story in slideshow format.
  
• Event ads: These ads allow businesses to promote upcoming events like webinars, conferences and meetups. They include date, time and location details, and a call-to-action to register or attend the event.
  
• Document ads: These ads allow businesses to promote whitepapers, ebooks or case studies. They display a preview of the document with a link to the full version. They’re effective for generating leads and increasing brand awareness.
  
• Thought leader ads: These ads let you promote your thought leadership posts to a larger audience. They’re great for building brand equity and showcasing expertise.
• Click-to-message ads: These are single image ads that redirect to a direct message. They’re effective for starting a conversation and generating leads.
• Connected TV ads: These are ads that appear within streaming content in a large-screen environment. They’re perfect for reaching professional, hard-to-reach audiences.
• Article and newsletter ads: These ads let you promote native, long-form content to garner more readers and subscribers.
  

Lead gen forms

LinkedIn’s lead gen forms let you easily capture leads without requiring users to leave the platform. You can add these forms to any sponsored content or message to collect names, emails and job titles.

The forms are pre-populated with users’ profile data, which encourages more people to sign up. These ads significantly boost your LinkedIn lead generation efforts. You can also include custom questions in your forms to gather additional information about your prospects.

Once a user submits a form, their contact information is sent to your business, and they’re also added as a new lead in LinkedIn’s CRM.

Sponsored messaging

LinkedIn also lets you send paid direct messages to targeted users. In fact, using this ad tactic alongside sponsored content can boost your clickthrough rates by over 70%. Note that these ads are different from InMail messages, which is a premium feature for messaging members even if you’re not connected to them.

There are two sponsored message ad formats you can choose from:

• Message ads: This ad format lets you send personalized and targeted messages to users with a single call-to-action (CTA). You can also add lead gen forms to your message ads to easily capture leads.
• Conversation ads: This ad format lets you add multiple CTAs to your messages. So prospects have various ways to engage with your business and access targeted offers and links.

Quick tip: Personalize your sponsored messages with your audience’s names and job titles using LinkedIn macros.

Text and dynamic ads

LinkedIn also offers special ad options that are a bit different from regular sponsored content. These include text, spotlight and follower ads. Let’s take a look at each one below.

• Text ads: Pay-per-click (PPC) text ads appear on the right-hand side of a desktop screen. They include a small image along with a short headline and blurb. They may be less prominent than sponsored content but can still be very effective depending on your campaign goal.
  
• Spotlight ads: These are dynamic ads that are personalized for each individual profile. Spotlight ads link back to your website or landing page, and are a great way to share insightful, thought leadership content.
  
• Follower ads: These dynamic ads are also personalized, but the goal is to get you more followers on your LinkedIn Business Page.
  

6 steps to plan your LinkedIn advertising campaign

To start planning your LinkedIn ad campaign, you need access to the Campaign Manager. Within the Campaign Manager, you have the option to create a new ad account. If you have an existing ad account, make sure to associate your LinkedIn Page with the account.

Once you create your ad account, click on the “Create” button at the top of the page. Then select “Campaign” from the drop-down menu to start planning your campaign.

Step 1: Define your campaign objectives

Every successful ad campaign starts with a well-defined objective. This will influence which ad formats you choose, what messaging you use and which metrics will measure success.

LinkedIn simplifies the campaign planning process with the option to choose from a pre-defined set of objectives. This includes:

Awareness

This objective focuses on raising brand awareness, helping you reach more people with your posts. It’s a top-of-funnel campaign objective that could attract more views, engagement and followers.

Consideration

Under this category, you have three types of mid-funnel objectives:

• Website visits: To drive more traffic to your landing page
• Engagement: To boost interactions on your posts and attract more followers
• Video views: To engage more viewers through compelling videos

Conversion

This objective category focuses on four bottom-of-the-funnel goals:

• Lead generation: To collect info from potential customers
• Talent leads: To identify potential candidates for open job positions (only available for LinkedIn Recruiter users)
• Website conversions: To drive the desired action on your website
• Job applicants: To encourage more applications to your job opportunities

Choose the objective that you want to achieve for this specific campaign. For this example, let’s choose the “Brand awareness” objective.

Step 2: Identify your target audience on LinkedIn

The next step involves deciding which users will see your ad. LinkedIn lets you get really precise with your targeting, with the option to choose:

• Where: You can target people in specific countries and cities.
• Who: You can target buyer groups interested in specific product categories.

You get to further fine-tune your target audience based on shared attributes. This allows you to reach people in certain companies or holding certain job titles. Or even exclude those having certain attributes. Make sure to get as specific as possible for highly precise ad targeting.

Step 3: Select your LinkedIn ad format

This step is one of the most crucial: deciding what type of ad to use in your campaign. LinkedIn gives you a pre-selected list of ad format options depending on your objective.

Not sure which format to choose? The “Forecasted results” section on the right-hand panel simplifies it for you. It shows you the projected results and campaign cost for each ad format, giving you an idea of which format would be most impactful.

Optionally, you can set up UTM tracking to track your campaign performance. This lets you attach dynamic UTM parameters to your campaign creatives, so you can attribute traffic and conversions from specific LinkedIn campaigns and ads.

Step 4: Set your budget and schedule

How much are you willing to spend on your LinkedIn ad campaign? And for how long do you want to run it?

LinkedIn gives you several options to customize your ad budget and scheduling. You can set a daily budget, a lifetime budget or both. This helps you control your ad spend based on how much budget you’ve set aside for LinkedIn advertising.

As for scheduling ads, you can choose to run your ad continuously or set a start date and end date. If you choose to run your LinkedIn ad continuously, you’ll want to closely monitor your campaign. This is especially important for time-bound offers and event-specific ads.

Step 5: Set up conversion tracking

This step is optional, but crucial if you’re running a conversion ad. That way, you can better attribute results to your campaign and understand its impact.

You have three ways to track conversions:

• Using the Insight Tag
• Integrating with a conversions API
• Uploading a CSV file

LinkedIn lets you select from a long list of conversion categories, such as ad clicks, content views, purchases and more. Select the category that best fits your desired action and set the value of the conversion.

Step 6: Create your ad campaign materials

If you’re the creative type, here’s the fun part. Create the materials for your ad campaign. Depending on your ad format, this typically includes:

• Introductory text: Use up to 600 characters, which serves as the caption for your ad
• Destination URL: This is the desired landing page to direct users
• Media: Whether it’s images, videos or documents
• Headline: This appears below your ad media
• Description: This provides additional context about the ad but isn’t visible in most cases

Best practices for LinkedIn advertising

Setting up a LinkedIn ad is one thing; getting results from your ad is another. Here are some LinkedIn best practices for running more impactful ads on the platform.

Maintain the correct LinkedIn ad specs

Your LinkedIn ads need to instantly attract and draw in your target audience, and you can’t do that without outstanding visuals. When creating visuals for your ads, make sure you follow the proper LinkedIn ad specs and sizes.

The specs vary for each LinkedIn ad type and ad format. Here are the basics:

Sponsored content

Single image ads

• Should be in JPG, PNG or GIF format.
• File size should be 5MB or smaller.
• Keep headlines under 70 characters to avoid truncation.
• Keep introductory text under 150 characters to avoid truncation.
• Images display best at 1200 x 628 pixels with an aspect ratio of 1.91:1

Carousel ads

• Use 2-10 cards per ad.
• Individual cards should not be larger than 10 MB.
• LinkedIn recommends using 1080 x 1080 pixels with an aspect ratio of 1:1 for individual images.
• Keep introductory text under 255 characters to avoid truncation.
• Card headlines should be under 45 characters.

Video ads

• Keep it under 15 seconds for better engagement (though LinkedIn allows up to 30 minutes of video ads).
• File size should be between 75KB and 500MB
• Your video should be in MP4 format, running at less than 30 frames per second.
• Audio size should be less than 64 kHz.
• Multiple aspect ratios and quality options are available with varying requirements. Check out the full LinkedIn ad specs for video ads to learn more.

Document ads

• Should be in PDF, DOC, DOCX, PPT or PPTX format.
• File size should be 100MB or smaller.
• Keep it under 10 pages (although LinkedIn allows up to 300 pages for document ads).
• Use any of the standard PDF layouts for optimal display.
• Headlines should be under 70 characters to avoid truncation.
• Introductory text should be under 150 characters to avoid truncation.

Event ads

• Images display at an aspect ratio of 4:1. LinkedIn will pull the image from your event page so keep this in mind while designing your event visuals.
• Keep your event name under 255 characters to avoid truncation.
• Introductory text should be under 600 characters to avoid truncation.
• LinkedIn allows up to 2,000 characters for destination field URL.

Message ads

• Banner creative should be 300×250 pixels.
• It should be no larger than 2 MB.
• It should be in JPG or PNG format.
• Subject should be no longer than 60 characters.
• Message text should be no more than 1,500 characters (or up to 8,000 characters for Conversation ads).
• Call-to-action should be under 20 characters (or 25 characters for Conversation ads).

Text ads

• Ad images should be 100×100 pixels.
• It should be in JPG or PNG format.
• File size cannot be larger than 2 MB.
• Keep headlines under 25 characters.
• Keep descriptions under 75 characters.

Note that there are five different sizes and ad specs for text ads. There are many more LinkedIn ad size and specs for dynamic ads like follower and spotlight ads. LinkedIn will tailor them to individual users depending on which format you choose.

Consider using colors that contrast with the platform’s blue and white colors in your visuals. This will give your ad an instant pop, allowing you to effectively draw in your target audience.

Support your ads with a strong organic brand

Running ads alone does not guarantee leads and conversions.

You also need a powerful organic strategy in place to pique your audience’s interest, build trust and boost the impact of your paid campaigns.

Along with investing in ads, regularly share valuable and engaging content to establish your business as a thought leader. Create a well-designed company page and use consistent branding to look authentic and high-quality.

Don’t forget to engage with your audience—respond to comments and messages, and welcome both positive and negative feedback.

Finally, track analytics to understand the performance of your organic content. This will help guide your LinkedIn ad campaigns and set your future content up for success.

A/B test and optimize

Finally, use your LinkedIn analytics to keep a close eye on the performance of your campaign and specific ad creatives. This will uncover some excellent opportunities and ideas to improve your ads.

Run A/B tests on different LinkedIn ad types, ad creatives, ad copy and CTAs. Find out what resonates with your audience and use that to further improve your ad performance.

Additionally, you might even want to use A/B testing to optimize your ad targeting. Make slight alterations to your targeting criteria to identify which audiences are most responsive to your ads. This will eventually help you perfect your LinkedIn ad targeting and get more out of your advertising efforts.

Master LinkedIn advertising for business growth

LinkedIn’s powerful ad solutions give you the tools you need to tap into its expansive professional network. You can get highly precise with your ad targeting to achieve your B2B marketing goals. Whether it’s generating leads or attracting high-value applicants, make the most of this guide to run successful LinkedIn ads.

Want to get more out of your LinkedIn marketing efforts? Use analytics insights to inform and optimize your campaigns. Download our free Social Media Analytics Spreadsheet Template for Paid and Organic Reporting to get started.

The post The ultimate guide to LinkedIn ads: Mastering your B2B marketing appeared first on Sprout Social.