As an advertising platform, LinkedIn often gets overlooked. If you’ve got a manufacturing or service-based business that depends on other businesses to survive I think you should take a look at LinkedIn ads.
As LinkedIn has grown it’s added some new and quite powerful features into its advertising platform including (finally!) a business console: so, if you’re an agency, you can split out your customers into discrete accounts and give your customers shared access to their account if you want to. Learn more here:
There’s no denying it though; compared to other online advertising platforms, LinkedIn isn’t cheap. With minimum click prices starting at $2 a pop, it pays to get everything set up just right — probably not an option to set and forget either!
I think there are great benefits to advertising on LinkedIn; the ad targeting options are simply unmatchable.
Do you want your ads to appear in front of female HR managers employed in companies with 51–200 employees based in Sydney? No problem, LinkedIn ads can do it.
Want to show LinkedIn ads to IT managers at BHP Billiton? Piece of Cake.
Want to show an ad to all event managers around the world alerting them to your new event management software? Easy as.
Seriously, the targeting options within the platform are mouth watering.
Like Facebook, you also get great brand awareness from all the impressions your ads rack up over time so there’s a benefit for you there as well. LinkedIn ads do amass a lot of impressions.
One newish feature that has surprised the heck out of me when we started using it for some of our clients is the lead collection feature.
It’s a tiny little setting (like virtually hidden!) in your account that can have big results. It creates a pop-over, toolbar-type thing on your landing pages allowing LinkedIn to handle or facilitate the lead for you.
We’ve been running a set of LinkedIn ads in the UK for an Australian client who’s trying to attract people with certain job titles to come and work for them.
Using the Lead Collection setting in LinkedIn ads we’ve had a lot of people perform a ‘Request Contact’ follow-up directly from the ad itself.
This is an interesting new development I quite like. Rather than relying on your landing page doing all the heavy lead generation work, leads are gathered from LinkedIn ads directly. It’s subtle, but effective.
And, as I say almost every week, if you’re going to try LinkedIn ads then campaign tag your links so you can see what the traffic is doing in your analytics account!
Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
