It has been more challenging to reach your audience through organic posts because of LinkedIn’s algorithms changes. As a result, many companies use LinkedIn advertising. Are you one of them, and wonder if you make some expensive mistakes? In this article, we present four advertising mistakes and how to avoid them.
Why use LinkedIn advertising?
Unfortunately, the organic posts on LinkedIn do not perform as good as they used to. You may, therefore, need to give your content a push in the right direction.
LinkedIn is the world’s biggest professional platform, with more than 645 million users in over 200 different countries. The platform is suitable for companies with a B2B focus as you can segment your audience by job title, function, industry, and workplace. It is a professional network, where you, as the advertiser, can reach an engaged audience, whether your goal is leads, increase awareness of your brand or increase traffic to your website.
#1: You are applying ineffective ad targeting tactics
LinkedIn offers the opportunity to segment your audience based on unique targeting criteria – including company names, industries, job features, job titles, company size, and interests.
With so many opportunities, it is easy to make mistakes, if you “over-target” your ads when building your audience. It is essential to keep an eye on your target size, so your target audience does not get to narrow. If your target audience is too narrow, your result may be “sub-optimal” and can also cause fewer impressions, clicks, leads, and sales.
To avoid a narrow audience, you need to ensure what limits and expands your target audience. For each targeting criteria you include, the size of your target audience will become smaller.
When you create your target audience, you should add a maximum of two target criteria besides location. Choose as many sub-categories as you want. This will expand your target audience but stick to two overall categories, as it will help improve the scaling and reach of your ad.
#2: Underutilizing LinkedIn Matched Audience
Have you been testing the three different types of ‘Matched Audience’ on LinkedIn? If not, maybe you should go for it. Because it can help your advertising campaigns reach a whole new level.
By using these targeting options, you can match visitors to your website, lists of companies, or emails with members on LinkedIn. In that way, you can make sure that the people who have already visited your website are not passing by.
#3: Underfunding LinkedIn Advertising Campaign Budgets
LinkedIn requires that your daily budget to be at least EUR 9 per day per campaign. At that point, LinkedIn is not the cheapest digital advertising platform – but used efficiently, it can be beneficial.
Use ‘LinkedIn reporting’ to analyze your campaign’s successes and failures. You can monitor your campaign performance under ‘website demographics’ and under the ‘Campaign Performance’, which you can found in the Campaign Manager.
If you keep an eye on your campaign regularly, you can make ongoing adjustments, and get more out of your budget.
#4 Using only one LinkedIn ad placement for each campaign
You can make four different types of ‘ad placements’; sponsored content, sponsored InMail, text ads, and dynamic ads.
Sponsored InMail ads are messages that are sent privately to users. Text ads appear on the right side of the website or at the top of your homepage (only visible on desktop). The dynamic ads appear on the right side of LinkedIn and can be follow-up-, spotlight- and job ads.
LinkedIn’s high budget requirements often force advertisers only to create one campaign, but do not let it hind you from creating more than one ad. Create 2-4 ads per campaign with various images, designs, and intro texts. You can also test video and carousel ads to see what works best for your audience.
Do not limit yourself – try as many ads as possible to make the best decision based on data from your campaign performance. You will quickly be aware of which ads perform best when you look at these numbers – and afterward tailor your future campaigns better.