Are you connecting with the right people on LinkedIn? Want to build a stronger LinkedIn network?
In this article, you’ll learn how to make strategic LinkedIn connections to grow your influence and your business.
Why Build a Selective LinkedIn Network?
Whether you’re an entrepreneur or a business professional, LinkedIn is the perfect social media platform to grow your business network. The platform is deliberately designed to encourage you to make connection requests to people you already know.
The key to building a powerful LinkedIn network is to choose your connections strategically. Instead of adding anyone and everyone, limiting the number of people you add to your network will ensure you see posts in your feed from people who are truly relevant or of interest to you.
Sales on LinkedIn come when you’ve developed a valuable network and start to engage with that network. A soft-selling approach works best. Sharing content that helps your network, highlighting examples of how you’ve worked with clients, and answering questions about your field of expertise are all good approaches.
How do you add people to your network? You can send out your own connection requests to your colleagues, clients, and local business network. You’ll also receive connection requests from people you may have never interacted with, either on- or offline.
Rather than accepting every request you receive or sending out hundreds of requests a week from your own account, here’s how you can build a genuine network by being selective.
#1: Control How People Can Connect With You on LinkedIn
By default, anyone can send you a connection request on LinkedIn; however, there are ways to control how people can connect with you.
Its forecasting panel was revamped, and Boolean logic can now be used in queries
LinkedIn added several tools to help marketers on its platform bolster the effectiveness of their targeting.
Director of product management Abhishek Shirvastava said in a blog post detailing the new tools, “You’ve shared that one of your biggest priorities is to reach more of the right audiences at scale. We’ve recently invested a lot in bringing that to life with the introduction of new tools to expand your reach, including lookalike audiences, interest targeting with Bing search insights and audience templates. Today, we’re taking that up a notch by bringing more sophisticated audience targeting and campaign reporting features to Campaign Manager. These tools are designed to help marketers who are looking for more powerful reach and insights for their LinkedIn campaigns.”
The professional network said it improved the campaign forecasting panel in Campaign Manager, enabling marketers to see the makeup of their target audience directly via the dashboard.
The panel can now be customized to bring up specific professional characteristics, such as top industries, years of experience or company sizes.
Shirvastava wrote, “When combined with contacts you’ve uploaded to matched audiences, you can be sure that you’re not only serving ads to the specific prospects you’re trying to reach, but that you’ll have the demographic insights to deliver the content and creative mix that will resonate with them.”
LinkedIn also added targeting using Boolean logic, or using “and/or” in queries, at the top of the list, so that marketers can combine profile facets including job function, seniority and titles in a single campaign.
Shirvastava explained, “For example, let’s say you wanted to target people using director seniority and the finance job function. Previously, within a campaign, you could only do so by targeting directors in finance roles. Now, with Boolean targeting, you can use a single campaign to reach people who are directors at any job function, as well as people in finance roles of any seniority. This gives you greater flexibility to determine the kinds of professionals who see your ads.”
A how-to video on Boolean targeting is available here.
Finally, LinkedIn is adding the ability to track measurement insights at the audience level, including leads, Sponsored InMail openings and video ad views.
Shirvastava wrote, “With this data, you can demonstrate to your leadership or partners in the sales org exactly what kinds of professionals are becoming quality leads for your business, or what kinds of audiences are spending time with your video content or reading your Sponsored InMails.”
The updates to audience forecasting and addition of Boolean targeting are available worldwide starting Tuesday, while the new demographic reporting features will be rolled out over the next two weeks.
So you have a team of salespeople hungry for more leads.
You already have a few channels that help you acquire leads, but such efforts aren’t scalable and the lead quality isn’t high.
What do you do?
If you want to start generating more leads and avoid any of the problems you currently face, then you’ve got to try LinkedIn ads.
In contrast with two of its most popular counterparts, Facebook Ads or Google Adwords, LinkedIn ads represent a unique opportunity for B2B marketers. eMarketer found that B2B marketers named LinkedIn advertising to be as effective as Facebook.
Last year LinkedIn generated over $2 billion in revenue from its advertising platform. While a small fraction of Facebook or Google’s revenues, increasing numbers of marketers are shifting budgets to LinkedIn, with 42% of media buyers planning to increase their spend in 2019.
Driven by this stellar growth LinkedIn updated it’s ad platform in mid-2019 focussing on what it calls objective based advertising. In this guide you’ll learn everything you need to know about the new experience, so you can understand how to advertise on LinkedIn today.
“The devil is in the detail” or so the saying goes, so before we get started with the nitty-gritty of creating a LinkedIn advertising campaign, let’s cover the basics.
In order to start a LinkedIn ads campaign, you need to have a company page.
You likely already have one opened.
If you don’t, then this handy guide that will show you the steps you need to take to open it.
Another important basic is to install LinkedIn’s Insight Tag. This is a small Javascript tag that will help you set up conversion tracking (so you can measure how many people convert from your ads), website audiences, and uncover your visitor’s demographic data. You can find it under the Account Assets menu in your Campaign Manager.
What’s more, the Insight Tag will help you run retargeted advertising campaigns, which as you will see, are incredibly effective and powerful.
While you install the tag, you also want to set up conversion tracking, which will help you see the actual conversions of your campaigns.
With the basics covered, let’s start with the actual LinkedIn ad campaign creation process.
LinkedIn Ad Campaign Objectives
Step 1: How to pick a winning objective
The first step in any successful LinkedIn ads campaign starts with picking the right objective.
The objective will impact on your entire campaign—from the ad type to the budget to the ad format.
Each objective corresponds to a different part of the marketing funnel, as LinkedIn shows:
These three steps correspond to the typical marketing funnel, where each step focuses on a different objective:
Awareness focuses on reaching as many people as possible
Consideration focuses on engaging and persuading visitors to take action and find out more about your business
Conversion focuses on generating leads and converting people in your site
These new objective based advertising campaigns will focus on delivering your ad to the person most likely to take your desired action—let’s take a look at each of these three steps and which objective works best for your campaign goal.
Awareness Objectives
Awareness is all about showing your brand to everyone with whom you can connect. You don’t focus so much on clicks or conversions; what matters most is that people see your ads, that they get to know your brand through mere exposure, and to get them familiarized with it.
In this step, your key metric is the number of impressions you generate—the point at which an ad is displayed in front of a visitor, regardless of whether they actually see your ad or read its content.
Brand Awareness
LinkedIn offers only one objective for this stage of the funnel, one that’s appropriately called “brand awareness.”
One of the beautiful aspects of online advertising is that you can track the effectiveness of a campaign down to the click. Awareness, however, is all about getting people to see your ad, not act on it, so why would anyone choose this ad?
Simply put, because this objective can help you increase your reach (if that’s what you care about), get more followers to your page, and engage with a new audience.
For example, if you’re running an account-based marketing (ABM) campaign, and you have a specific audience you want to connect with, the awareness objective will help you reach them before you start a sales conversation.
Consideration Objectives
Here’s where the advertising gets scientific. At this stage of the funnel, you want people to click on your ads; you want visits, views, and actions (albeit in a non-commercial way).
There are three objectives you can use in this stage:
Website Visits
The name is self-explanatory: with this objective, you get people to visit your site.
Clear, simple, and awesome—who wouldn’t want more visitors to their company’s site?
What you do with people once they do so is a different game.
You can get people to check a new post of yours (which is great if you’re retargeting them from a previous article they read), to sign up for your latest webinar, or to sign up for a trial.
Because the volume of data needed to optimize your bidding is much lower than with the lead generation objective (as you will see later), this objective is a great start for any action you want people to take in your site.
Engagement
When you’re getting started with LinkedIn advertising, you may want to increase the quantity and quality of your following.
That is, you want people to follow you, and you want them to like you; you want to develop a relationship, and as you know, that takes time.
The engagement objective is the perfect fit if you want to get more people to follow your business page and to like or comment on your posts.
The more people that follow you and the more engaged they are, the cheaper it will be to promote your content to them. What’s more, your messaging will be more effective, a goal worthy to any advertiser.
If your business goal is tightly connected with developing thought leadership, brand awareness, and traffic acquisition, then using videos, and the video views objective in LinkedIn, will help you increase the distribution of your content.
Conversion Objectives
This is the stage where the rubber meets the road. This stage is all about getting people with whom you’ve engaged before to take a specific action.
More specifically, that action could be an information exchange for lead generation, a download, a signup, or a job application.
Similarly to Facebook advertising, these objectives tend to have a higher CPC and the focus needs to be on your cost per conversion, but they are highly effective once you get the whole system working.
In the case of LinkedIn, there are three objectives available, which you’ll see in greater depth below.
Lead Generation
The beautiful aspect of LinkedIn is that it’s a perfect match for those marketers are looking for strategies to generate leads. Just think that 80% of their users are decision makers, and because of that, as Hubspot found, their lead conversion rates are 3x higher than other major ad platforms.
You can acquire leads with a network like Facebook, but you’d need to do a lot of pre-qualification before you can attract professionals to your site. There’s a lot of people who simply aren’t interested in registering for a webinar when they’re relaxing in their homes.
With LinkedIn, you know who’s who—you want a director of marketing to sign up for a demo for your enterprise software? You got it; your entire campaign can be built only for that specific audience.
To make things even better, LinkedIn lets you generate leads right from their site without having prospects go to your site.
Enter lead gen forms, which pre-fills their information and gets them to sign up to your offer right away.
Website Conversions
If you want to target specific conversions on your site, then this objective is perfect for you.
Thanks to the Insight Tag, which by this point you should have installed, you can optimize for any type of conversion—from a product purchase to a demo request to software sign up.
Once you have set up the campaign with the conversions objective, LinkedIn will then optimize towards the people most likely to complete a conversion. That is, the more data LinkedIn gathers on the types of people that complete your on-site conversion, the better it will get at optimizing your ads to show to people with similar profiles.
If you’re a marketer who’s conversion-driven, then this objective is perfect for you.
Job Applicants
The last objective is perfect for those companies who are competing for the best talent and need an extra boost to their job application listing.
As with the previous objective, LinkedIn optimizes your ads for the users who they’ve found to be more likely to click on your job post. Not only do you get more applicants to your job listing; you bid for the right ones.
LinkedIn Ads Targeting
Step 2: How to target the right audience
When it comes to B2B sales and marketing, LinkedIn advertising has a unique advantage over competing ad platforms. Due to the detailed employment information that LinkedIn’s 630M members upload to their profiles, you can target people based on extremely accurate employee and company data.
If you want to target the VP of Engineering at tech companies with more than 500 employees, then guess what? You can do that with LinkedIn; it’s the perfect matchmaker for your brand.
The targeting options LinkedIn provides allow you to develop incredibly precise B2B marketing campaigns which you can use to attract the right accounts.
Alongside basic data such as Location and Language there are five targeting options you can choose from:
Company: Which include company connections, followers, industry, name, and size
Demographics: Which include age and gender of the specific people to whom you want to contact
Education: Which include degrees, fields of study, and member schools
Job Experience: Which include job function, seniority, job title, skills, and years of experience
Interests: Which include groups the user is part of and its interests
One of the most interesting ways you can create unique targeting options is to use the “exclude,” “include,” or “narrow by” options. With these options, you can potentially target someone who doesn’t traditionally fit within a certain audience (like chief executives with not more than 10 years of experience) or that’s highly targeted (like vice presidents who are under 40 years old).
What’s more, you can utilize LinkedIn’s own internal data to grow your reach, a feature that LinkedIn calls “audience expansion,” or your own data to retarget users and prospects who often already know you, a feature which LinkedIn calls “matched audience.”
Use Audience Expansion for Lower Costs and Increased Reach
Once you’ve found an audience that works for your advertising campaigns, you can create a new campaign that targets other similar audiences.
That’s where the “audience expansion” feature comes into play. Audience expansion uses LinkedIn’s algorithms to find and reach people that have similar attributes to your tested target audience.
For example, if you’re getting high conversion rates with a campaign that targets VPs of Marketing, then LinkedIn may find that a campaign with the same message that targets Directors of Marketing works equally well.
Use Matched Audiences for Retargeting
If you’re constantly targeting new people who don’t know your brand, you’re wasting a lot of opportunities.
There’s nothing wrong with generating new demand for your offers, but since your company already generates traffic in your website, that traffic is a potential goldmine for new business opportunities.
Matched audiences help you target people who have visited your site, signed up for a gated piece of content (think a webinar or white paper), or who have done any type of business with you (think a demo trial or a proposal).
Two of the most common uses of matched audiences is to retarget website visitors based on your pixel’s data, or target your email list.
You can even mix and match these matched audiences with audience expansion to expand your audience from your email list.
Use Matched Audiences for Account-Based Marketing
What’s more, you can upload account lists to your matched audiences. That means, you can upload a list of company names and site URLs, and then target anyone who works at those companies.
One of the easiest ways to get started with this is to upload a list of high-intent accounts and advertise to your key buyer persona job titles at these companies. If you’re into ABM, then this is a game-changer.
How do you find high-intent accounts? A great way to get started is to use a platform like Leadfeeder. This enables you to identify the companies visiting your website by connecting with your Google Analytics. You can then export lists of companies visiting your website, upload to LinkedIn as an account list in your matched audiences, and use this data to power your LinkedIn ABM ad campaign.
Take a no-obligation 14-day free trial of Leadfeeder today, identify the companies visiting your website and try running some LinkedIn ABM campaigns with this data.
Forecasted Results
Once you’ve selected your audience targeting, LinkedIn will show the forecasted reach and expected volume of traffic for your campaign. These numbers will be affected by your daily budgets and bids—which you’ll select shortly—and they provide a great way to benchmark the actual performance of your campaign versus LinkedIn’s predictions.
LinkedIn Ad Types
Step 3: How to choose the right ad for your business
LinkedIn offers a wide format of ads, which vary in cost and complexity of implementation.
Such a wide range of options will raise an immediate question: which ad type should you use?
As always happens with anything related to marketing, the answer will depend on your needs, budget, and expertise.
Without a deep look at your company, no one can tell you which LinkedIn ad type to choose from. The best way to make the right decision is to take a look at each ad type with more detail.
Fortunately, that’s exactly what we’ll do next.
Sponsored Content
If you’ve ever been browsing through LinkedIn and you saw an ad right in your news feed midway through your scrolling, then that was a sponsored content ad.
Or, guess what? If a post has a small piece of text that says “Sponsored Post,” then that’s sponsored content.
Simply put, a sponsored content ad promotes content. If this sounds too basic and obvious, it’s because it is.
You’ve got content—a blog post, a white paper, a webinar—and you just want more people to see it. What do you do? You get this ad working.
There are many ways you can feature your content in the news feed, and next I will show you how they look.
Single Image Ads
Single image ads are the standard type of sponsored content. They promote any post you publish to a broader audience, with a single landscape image to capture your audience’s attention.
Video Ads
Video ads are the same as single image ads with the exception that the ad creative is a video instead of a static image. Similarly to Facebook, the video will auto-play as a person scrolls over it in their feed. The sound will be set to mute by default—so it’s a good idea to include subtitle captions in your video.
Carousel Ads
There will be cases where you will have multiple images to show within a given post. Carousel ads allow you to showcase those images and maximize the impact of your ad.
Carousel ads are especially useful when you want to tell a story within your carousel images, so you can command your audience’s attention and connect through the power of storytelling.
Lead Generation Ads
As explained before, lead gen forms allow you to pre-fill your ads with your prospect’s information so you can acquire a lead right from the ad.
It goes without saying that the effectiveness of lead gen form ads lays in the ease to convert a LinkedIn user into a lead. If you have a piece of content, like an ebook, a report, or a specs sheet, then lead gen forms will be the best investment you can make.
Dynamic Ads
The dream of sending personalized ads on scale is starting to become a reality. Dynamic ads allow you to create an ad that targets a specific audience.
For example, if you want to show an ad to chief executives, dynamic ads deliver targeted messages that speak to that audience specifically.
Currently, you can only access dynamic ads if you spend at least $25,000 per quarter on LinkedIn advertising.
Text Ads
Text ads promote a message in the right column of the newsfeed. These ads are smaller and less intrusive than sponsored content, and tend to have a lower CTR.
You can show these ads within a user’s inbox or on the side of the LinkedIn homepage. The text snippet is accompanied by a thumbnail to call the attention of your audience.
These ads look more similar to the traditional Google Ads, where you have a headline, a small description, and a CTA (plus the image, which the former doesn’t show).
Sponsored InMail
If you’ve ever received a message from someone you don’t know and who’s trying to promote a piece of content or push some time of offer, that was a sponsored InMail.
LinkedIn allows users to message people who are within their network. If you’re promoting a piece of content and you have hundreds of relevant connections, you may get some good results. But if you want to message thousands of potential leads, you can’t do it unless you use InMail.
InMail is a premium feature that allows you to send a message to anyone you want, regardless of the fact you lack any connection with that person.
Sponsored InMail takes this feature even further, allowing you to promote a message so it shows up at the top of the recipient’s inbox. Such promotion can be useful when matched with a retargeting campaign.
LinkedIn Ads Costs, Bids and Budgets
Step 4: How to pick an ROI-friendly bid
In order to make your LinkedIn ads cost-effective, you must bid to the point where you get the most exposure—whether that’s measured in impressions, clicks, or actions—and the least amount of money spent.
Such balance is hard to get, especially when you’re first getting started and LinkedIn’s algorithms don’t have enough data to optimize your ads correctly.
There are two types of bids you can choose from that vary slightly dependent on your campaign objective:
Maximum cost bid: With this option, you select the maximum amount of money you’re willing to bid for, by providing a CPC, CPM or CPV.
Automated bid: With this option, LinkedIn uses historical campaign data and user information to automatically set and adjust your bid, optimizing towards your chosen campaign objective.
To define which bid strategy you want to take, think on what’s your ultimate goal behind your campaigns.
If you want the most amount of impressions, clicks, or conversions, then the automated bid is the best option for you. Since LinkedIn optimizes your bids with the intention of maximizing your objective, they will make sure you get the results, albeit by overspending.
If you want to control your costs, then the maximum cost bid is your best choice. The problem with this strategy is that you may underbid—that is, you’ll bid for less than the amount you need to get any exposure whatsoever. For that reason, it’s a smart idea to start with an automated bid—letting LinkedIn gather data for you—and pair this with a daily budget cap to ensure your spend is limited.
Once you know how much each bid really costs, you can then optimize your campaigns based on this data.
You can optimize your bids around different metrics, depending on your objective. LinkedIn offers a handy table with all the information available around this topic:
The ad you create will depend on your LinkedIn ad type and format. Since there are three ad types and eight ad formats, we’ve got 24 different variations from where to create an ad. That’s a lot of combinations.
But to simplify everything, here are the basics for creating the best sponsored ads, the best sponsored inmail, and the best text ads.
Creating a high-converting LinkedIn Sponsored Ad
Sponsored ads are native advertising—that is, the content fits naturally within the LinkedIn feed amongst non-sponsored content your target audience is browsing.
The key to creating sponsored ads then is to make them look natural.
You want people to feel as if they’re not seeing an ad, but reading a useful and relevant piece of content.
Your headline should be under 70 characters, and your main copy should be under 150 characters, both of which act as the leverage that stops people in their tracks and makes them read your ad. You can create ads with longer text, but the copy will likely be truncated.
The image is another important element, which often magnifies the idea of the piece. You can use a text-free image, which should illustrate the idea of the ad, or one with text to cement the message of the ad even further.
You can play with video as well, which is a type of media that has shown more engaging than images or text.
The IAB has found that video ads have much higher CTRs than native, banner, and interstitial (i.e., full-screen) ads.
While it’s time-consuming and more expensive to produce than written content, video ads are part of the new wave of media content that you need to try to differentiate your ads from the competition.
Creating a high-converting LinkedIn Sponsored InMail
No one likes to get unsolicited mail. Such is the fact of anyone who tries to get someone to act upon an offer when sent by mail or LinkedIn’s InMail, but it shouldn’t demotivate you.
LinkedIn has reported that the sponsored InMail campaigns have open rates between 35 to 50%, and they go as high as over 70%, comparing very favourably with email campaigns.
Such results make a sponsored InMail campaign pretty enticing.
Think of your sponsored InMail campaign as if you were writing the recipient an email. Therefore, the rules that apply to effective email outreach apply as well to a sponsored InMail campaign.
To start, your InMail should be clear and concise to get your target to pay attention to your message. Your offer should be clear right away so the recipient doesn’t have to guess what you’re trying to do.
Related to the clarity of your InMail comes relevancy. To increase the relevancy of your message, consider using a list of your website visitors or target accounts you’d like to work with as a potential target list for a sponsored InMail campaign.
Finally, given the upfront and cold nature of the contact, you want to align your offer with your recipient. Think on a high-value offer that doesn’t demand much time or effort for your recipient to act upon, especially if this recipient knows you.
As I’ve said before, text ads have more in common with the traditional Google Ads than with the other ads seen in this guide.
You have much less ad real estate to play with, so your job is to maximize the words you use to engage with your audience.
Text ads are made up of four elements:
Headline
Ad Copy
Ad Destination
Image
There’s not a lot of space for creativity with text ads. It’s all about positioning your ads the right way with the right words and expressions.
Given the constraints imposed with text ads, you want to follow the advice from Upworthy and write a number of variations of each headline and ad copy so you can pick the right combination based on performance.
In contrast with sponsored content, text ads look like ads. There’s no way you can convince people that what you have isn’t an offer. Your text ad thus won’t be competing with other feed content, but with other ads.
The text ads that get all the clicks are the ones that best speak to the end user.
If your audience is made up of directors of marketing, then your headline can say something like:
Your images, while small, can also help make your ad stand out. Something that’s a bit surprising or shocking can work wonders as long as it’s not offensive or misleading.
To find the right text ad combination, there’s a lot of testing you can do. As a marketer, you never know what people like or what will connect with them. Test every element until you find the best-converting ad.
LinkedIn Ads Optimization
Step 6: Analyze, improve, rinse and repeat
One of the wonders of online marketing is that you can track and measure everything you do. LinkedIn Ads are no exception.
Earlier in this guide you saw how the Insight tag allows you to track and measure your conversions, including your content downloads, sign-ups, purchases, and more.
This information is easily accessible in the LinkedIn Ads Dashboard, where you can see all the basic data expected from paid media — like impressions, clicks, CTR, conversions, among other metrics — as well as a performance chart which displays a graph of the results of your campaigns.
Beyond this standard analytics dashboard, LinkedIn offers a unique demographics chart which breaks down your campaign engagement by your audience’s job function, job title, industry and much more.
The data provided in the demographics chart is another fantastic feature which B2B sales and marketing professionals won’t get with another ad platform—it goes beyond basic numbers to show you much more detail about who is actually engaging with your campaigns.
Conclusion
If you have read this far, then you must be thinking “where do I get started?”
The answer is easy: pick one objective; the one that’s most pressing.
From there, define a target audience—if you have an email list or target account list, then upload this as a matched audience, and use it to engage and educate these targets.
Finally, choose your ad type—sponsored content is the safest bet to start with—and the ad creative.
Let LinkedIn optimize the bidding for you, and wait until you start to see results. Rinse and repeat.
Like any new marketing channel, LinkedIn ads will take some time for you to master. But if you keep refining your audience targeting, bidding strategies, and your ad creatives, you will start to see an increased return on your investment.
Want to get started with LinkedIn Account Based Marketing ad campaigns? Sign up to Leadfeeder to generate lists of high-intent accounts that have visited your website and use them to power your LinkedIn ad campaigns. Get started with a 14 day free trial today.
LinkedIn announces algorithm changes made over the past 12-18 months to favour conversations in its Feed that cater to niche professional interests, as opposed to elevating viral content, its executives tell Axios.
The big picture: News feeds that were fundamentally built to connect one voice to many are struggling to deliver on value as communication trends move to more personal and ephemeral conversations.
Driving the news: Users may have noticed that their notifications or engagements on LinkedIn have increased lately.
LinkedIn has done this in part, because internal research found that participation wasn’t even across the platform, and that much of the attention in on LinkedIn was skewed towards the top 1% of power users, according to Tim Jurka, Director of Artificial Intelligence at LinkedIn.
Changes include:
Elevating content that users are most likely to join in conversation, which typically means people that users interact with directly in the feed through comments and reactions, or people who have shared interests with you based on your profile.
Elevating a post from someone closer to a users’ interests or network if it needs more engagement, not if it’s already going viral.
Elevating conversations with things that encourage a response (like opinions commentary alongside content), as well as posts that use mentions and hashtags to bring other people and interests into the conversation and elevating posts from users that respond to commenters.
Elevating niche topics of conversation will perform better than broad ones. (When it comes to length, LinkedIn says its algorithm doesn’t favour any particular format, despite rumours that it does.)
Be smart: If this sounds familiar, it’s because LinkedIn is the latest social network to change its feed algorithm to get people to engage more, instead of just passively scroll through the app and website.
Facebook began talking about changes it was making to its News Feed to favour posts from close friends over brands and publishers in 2018.
Snapchat separated social from media on its app in 2017 to keep conversations intimate among friends.
Why it matters: Higher-quality engagement matters because its often more attractive to advertisers, according to Pete Davies, Head of LinkedIn Feed Product.
“Member engagement is at an all-time high, driven by record levels of engagement in the feed and content being shared,” says Davies. “LinkedIn Marketing Solutions revenue is up 46% year-over-year.”
Last year, Axios reported that LinkedIn planned to bring in $2 billion from its marketing solutions business.
Between the lines: LinkedIn has been hinting at this for a while.
Audience development managers tells Axios that LinkedIn editors have been asking publishers to have their reporters share content to boost posts from authoritative individuals, as opposed to having content come from brands directly.
Feature Image Credit: Photo by studioEAST/Getty Images
LinkedIn’s Sponsored InMail isn’t always seen as the most effective type of outreach method, but there are ways that it can be used to great effect.
My organization hosts several events each year, focused on best practice-sharing and helping small businesses, and I recently took the lead on marketing a new event which focused on digital marketing and how companies can use it to drive their bottom line. I was ambitious and set a goal of 200 event registrations. With two months to market the event, I had some time to drive registrations using my organization’s traditional marketing channels.
The Problem
My traditional marketing playbook was simply not working. I managed to bring in approximately 15% of my event registration goal through email and organic social media, but I needed to reach more marketers – in particular, digital marketers or those who worked in the online space.
My database of contacts simply didn’t provide the target market necessary to reach my goal, and after two weeks running social media ads on Facebook and LinkedIn, my budget was nearly depleted, and my registration numbers hadn’t moved significantly.
It was clear, at this point, that I needed to take a different approach.
The Big Idea
I not only needed to reach marketers, but I needed to establish a relationship with them, and drive enough brand trust where they would feel comfortable spending money to register for my event. I wasn’t going to be able to do this alone.
My first thought was to use influencers to help spread the word. Recent studies have shown that 94% of marketers have found influencer marketing to be effective. They would help drive brand awareness, and subsequently bring in new event registrations. The ticket price was not cheap ($55) so I needed to really focus on the brand awareness aspect.
But then I thought about the specific influencers in more depth. Simply reaching out to my core digital marketing influencers wasn’t going to do the trick – I needed over 150 people, and there was nobody within a hundred-mile radius that had that kind of pull with the budget I had remaining.
This led to a new plan – aim for dozens of micro-influencers who would each be able to bring in a small handful of paid registrations.
The Implementation
I like to think of myself as a relatively well-known digital marketer, but I don’t have nearly the network required to achieve my micro-influencer goal. I needed a platform to broadcast my call for these people.
This is where LinkedIn Sponsored InMail was useful. Rather than using it for annoying sales pitches or free e-books, I was going to use it to appeal to marketers’ egos. Most marketers like to consider themselves subject matter experts in at least one area. If people were going to respond to my call for help, there needed to be something in it for them.
Thus, I would ask them to provide their expertise by writing a blog post, publishing it with a plug for my event, and then promoting it on their top social channels. In return, they would receive a free registration to the event, and then I would also promote their blog post, giving them the byline and bowing to their expertise.
I made sure my Sponsored InMail headline would catch their eyes: “Call For Digital Marketing Experts.”
I was careful to target only the most experienced and connected digital marketers. Thanks to LinkedIn’s superior ad targeting capabilities, I was able to narrow down my search to a few hundred individuals that would help me achieve my goal.
The Results
My Sponsored InMail campaign only ran for 48 hours, and resulted in 150 delivered messages. Of the 150, 70 responded and 33 eventually became official micro-influencers.
I provided each micro-influencer with a unique link to my event page so I could track the traffic they would bring in to the event site. In total, my 33 unique links led to 2,000 unique pageviews, and 160 event registrations, giving me the numbers I needed to exceed my initial goal.
The numbers may not seem overwhelming, but they’re exactly what I wanted out of my micro-influencers. I gained thousands of new users at minimal cost, while also gaining valuable content from new connections.
Final Takeaways
If you’re considering an influencer campaign, but lack the budget for big names, consider micro-influencers instead. You may need to do a call out to attract their attention, but by bringing together the right combination of people, content and promotion, you can achieve your goals.
Most businesspeople are influencers at some level – it just requires the right type of action to activate their networks.
LinkedIn has added lookalike audiences to its ad offerings after beta testing the tool over the last year.
Lookalike audiences are nothing new, as Facebook has shown. LinkedIn’s director of product, Abhishek Shrivastava, said it “took us some time” to build the tool.
Marketers could already go to a platform like Facebook to discover new audiences using existing customer data. LinkedIn is now offering that for B2B marketers by making it easier to find company names or job titles.
Audience templates, another new offering, streamline the process of finding audiences. According to Shrivastava, it’s a one-step process that separates audiences job titles and functions into 20-plus templates.
LinkedIn has over 610m users and, according to Shrivastava, it has seen over 30% growth in the number of sessions per user over the last year.
“Because of all this activity happening on the platform by our members on an increasing basis…it allowed us to tap into a lot of the signals that have allowed us to create the lookalike product, which requires a lot of signals to do the modeling of who are users,” said Shrivastava.
LinkedIn also announced it will integrate Bing data for the first time into its ad products. Marketers can now leverage Bing data with LinkedIn’s interest-based targeting tool it launched in January.
“If someone searched for an article on digital marketing trends, that would map them to a category of being interested in marketing,” explained Shrivastava. “That list of categories is what we are exposing within our campaign manager on LinkedIn, to allow our customers to create campaigns to reach people who are interested in that particular topic.”
Shrivastava said connecting Bing and LinkedIn data “gives marketers the best of both worlds”.
LinkedIn now has more than 575 Million users……but has their huge surge in members, businesses and content created an opportunity for you? Discover all the answers…
When businesses begin using social media for marketing purposes, they typically start with Facebook and Instagram. And for good reason: These are two of the most popular social media platforms out there, with billions of monthly active users. If you want to attract customers, you should go to where the customers are.
But digital marketing has become more nuanced, and businesses see that targeted efforts on social media are more effective than simply maxing out their marketing budget on Facebook ads. A prime example of this shift in how businesses use social media is how businesses market themselves on LinkedIn.
Early on, many people thought of LinkedIn as something of a glorified networking event—suitable for posting your resume and job hunting. Now, the site has over 250 million active monthly users and has evolved into a professional social network where companies, industry experts, and content creators can interact.
And while it’s clear that businesses now need to optimize their LinkedIn, it shouldn’t just become another social media site for businesses to spend blindly on. Depending on the model and the short-term goals of your business, a LinkedIn marketing campaign may make more or less sense for you than for other companies.
Here’s a breakdown of whether or not your business should use LinkedIn as a digital marketing tool:
B2B Businesses
If your business primarily sells to other businesses, you need to be marketing on LinkedIn. If you’re not already, you’re behind: According to the network, 92% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn above all others, and 80% of marketing leads from social media are through LinkedIn.
If you’re the owner of a B2B business looking to expand your network and potentially find new customers, LinkedIn is where you go.
There are a few important reasons behind this thinking:
Lead Gen Forms
One of the biggest issues B2B businesses face is having to parse through unqualified leads to find the most promising possibilities. According to LinkedIn, they’ve helped solve this problem with their Lead Gen Forms, which they say reduces the cost per lead for 90% of customers.
Lead Gen Forms are pre-filled with accurate data pulled from a user’s Linkedin profile, so you can easily receive their information in just a couple of clicks. Incomplete or inaccurate forms add useless emails to your newsletter mailing list and lead to a loss of possible business due to a poor user experience.
Lead generation forms Via LinkedIn on YouTube
You can also use LinkedIn’s dashboard to track the ROI of your lead generation campaigns, send automated content or offers to leads as a follow-up, and pull your leads off the site for use on other marketing automation platforms.
Improved Pages
In 2018, LinkedIn revamped their Company Pages—also called just Pages—with an eye on using them to foster conversations and connect businesses with customers. LinkedIn added tools like Content Suggestions and Showcase Pages allow businesses to curate better content and promote new campaigns or projects.
If your preferred audience is other businesses seeking the kind of content that your newly targeted efforts and Showcase pages are providing, it’s now easier than ever for them to find you and your work.
Cisco’s LinkedIn Pages feature important, timely topics with a point of view that showcases their brand voice. Via Cisco on LinkedIn.
Business Content Lives Here
If you have content specifically related to trends in your industry such as leadership, strategy, or productivity, LinkedIn is a great place to target a business-savvy audience. From videos to infographics to eBooks and presentations, other businesses know that LinkedIn is typically home to more sophisticated content that can give them actionable advice on how to succeed and grow.
Businesses Looking to Recruit
Whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, LinkedIn is an excellent place to start building your employee brand, which plays a major role in recruitment. Whether you like it or not, your LinkedIn page is usually a factor in whether potential hires consider your offers.
The war for talent is on, and making a good first impression with your LinkedIn page—with a detailed profile, branded imagery, and high-quality content—is crucial.
Here are some best practices for businesses looking to appeal to new candidates on LinkedIn:
Brand your page and your content: Your logo, colors, and company name should be all over your company page, to give it a slick and professional look.
Highlight the voices of your employees: Re-share content and posts that your employees are sharing on their own pages to give people a sense of who works for your company and how they feel about the brand.
Don’t be afraid to engage: Give your company a voice on LinkedIn by sharing, commenting, tagging, and otherwise engaging with other content creators and brands on the site. This humanizes and personalizes your recruitment initiatives, plus creates more opportunities to expand your network. And if your business doesn’t have a large network of its own, how can you tap into the networks of others?
Nike shares logo-branded content featuring their employees, and engages the larger LinkedIn audience with a trending hashtag. Via Nike on LinkedIn.
Recruiting and filling open positions is often an expensive and time-consuming task. By building an engaging and intriguing brand, you’ll drastically reduce overall costs while landing on the radar of influencers and industry leaders.
B2C Businesses Looking for Customers
If you’re a B2C company looking to expand your audience and find more customers, LinkedIn isn’t quite as urgent a need for you. You’re still more likely to get more bang for your buck on channels like Facebook and Instagram.
That being said, any serious business that doesn’t keep their LinkedIn page up-to-date and optimized is simply throwing away possible business. Incomplete profiles can sow seeds of doubt for new potential customers. A profile without search-friendly keywords reduces your visibility on Google. And failing to use LinkedIn at all means missing out on possible networking events, conferences, and other opportunities to find new partners and customers.
B2C companies may not get as much out of LinkedIn from a marketing perspective as B2B companies, but all channels in this day and age should be used to their maximum potential, and this one is no exception.
Entrepreneurs and Sole Proprietors
Finally, whether you’re a serial entrepreneur or a sole proprietor who isn’t sure that LinkedIn can do much for your bottom line, think again.
There is simply no better social network for business networking. By continuing to engage and optimize your page, you increase your chances of attracting venture capital attention, connecting with future partners, and finding projects that you can meaningfully contribute to.
So, should you market your business more with LinkedIn going forward? For the most part, the answer is a resounding yes. Expect the platform to continue tweaking its algorithm and encouraging conversation and content production from brands and creators the world over, resulting in an even greater treasure trove of engagement opportunities.
Additionally, as a small business, your goals can change at any time. You might pivot and begin offering a different kind of service, or enter growth mode and want to start recruiting more heavily. By always being ready with an optimized and high-quality LinkedIn page, you’ll be a few clicks away from a more marketable business.
By Eric Goldschein
Eric Goldschein is an editor at assignyourwriter and a staff writer at Fundera, a marketplace for small business financial solutions. He covers entrepreneurship, small business trends, finance, and marketing.
15% of people love their jobs. The other 85% are either indifferent or miserable.
Indifference and misery seldom translate into engagement. Although you can serve your LinkedIn ads to users based on their careers, you can’t be sure those people like their jobs enough to care.
Engagement like this is hard to come by. Via LinkedIn.
In fact, your LinkedIn prospects may hate their jobs so much that your career-targeted ads actually upset them. Unless you have a working arrangement with Sarah McLachlan, making people upset isn’t going to drive returns.
My point: most people have professional interests outside of their current jobs. For advertisers, that means there’s a ton of potential for serving LinkedIn ads that people actually want to see.
Enter: LinkedIn interest targeting.
What is LinkedIn interest targeting?
The newest feature made available to LinkedIn advertisers, interest targeting gives you the power to serve your ads to exclusive, highly relevant audiences.
LinkedIn, like Facebook, tracks user behavior. Every time you engage with content—whether it’s through liking, commenting, sharing, or posting—LinkedIn takes note of the subject matter.
If I consistently like and share posts related to social media marketing, LinkedIn determines that it’s an interest of mine. As such, it makes sense for a social media management software like Sprout Social to advertise to me.
Alternatively, Sprout Social could simply advertise to people who list social media marketing as their jobs. Although not a bad tactic, some of those people are far more interested in other professional fields. Some of them would rather see content related to cloud computing.By leveraging interest targeting, you ensure that your impressions come only from LinkedIn users who’ve demonstrated legitimate interest in your product or service.
How does it compare to Facebook interest targeting?
Here’s how Facebook interest targeting breaks down:
Business & Industry: advertising, design, retail, etc.
Entertainment: games, movies, TV, etc.
Family & Relationships: dating, fatherhood, weddings, etc.
Fitness & Wellness: meditation, running, weight training, etc.
Food & Drink: cooking, alcohol, restaurants, etc.
Hobbies & Activities: current events, travel, politics, etc.
Shopping & Fashion: beauty, clothing, toys, etc.
Sports & Outdoors: outdoor recreation, sports
Technology: computers, consumer electronics
And here’s the brand new suite of LinkedIn interest targeting options:
Arts & Entertainment: movies, painting, literature, etc.
Business & Management: company acquisitions, human resources, business law, etc.
Careers & Employment: retirement, job interviews, hiring, etc.
Finance & Economy: banking, corporate finances, financial markets, etc.
Marketing & Advertising: market research, B2B marketing, brand management, etc.
Science & Environment: earth sciences, climate change, computer science, etc.
Society & Culture: religion, legislation, charity, etc.
Technology: telecommunications, robotics, IT infrastructure, etc.
Health: medical research, public health, healthcare providers, etc.
Although each platform offers nine categories, LinkedIn seems more niche-oriented. As of today, you can advertise exclusively to users who’ve demonstrated interest in earth sciences. When it comes to professional interests, it doesn’t get much narrower than that.
And that’s exactly what you want—the ability to exclude everyone except the small groups of people you’ve declared most relevant. The more focused the group, the more impressions you’ll turn into clicks.
As is often the case in digital marketing, the best course of action is to leverage both platforms. Why? Because people use LinkedIn and Facebook differently.
The content users like and share on LinkedIn is very different from the content they like and share on Facebook. If you were to look at someone’s LinkedIn interests and then look at the same person’s Facebook interests, you’d probably think they came from two different people.
Whereas some of your prospects will only show interest in your product or service on LinkedIn, others will only show interest on Facebook. Use interest targeting on both and you’ll seriously boost your lead volume.
Amid the New Year resolutions to shed kilos and quit drinking, there’s always one person at the party who holds up the champagne glass and pledges to change their career.
Frequent job switching is now commonplace and it’s expected Millennials will change jobs four times before they’re 32. If you’re finding yourself trawling Yudu or other internet job boards for a new career, you’re not alone.
But job hunting no longer means having experience in a specific role. Instead, as Facebook vice president of human resources Janelle Gale says, it’s your skill set that matters most.
“We actually value skills over experience in the grand scheme of things,” she said.
“Apply if you have the relevant skills even if you don’t have the right experience, because we’re looking underneath the surface for what’s really going to matter here and that’s what skills you can bring to the table.”
Transferable skills that relate to a range of industries are preferred and some big companies like Apple and Google no longer require applicants to have a higher education degree.
LinkedIn has scrolled through thousands of job listings to find the skills that will be the most sought after in 2019.
Last year, statistical analysis and data presentation skills were the top of employers’ lists, with tech design and development abilities also ranked highly.
This year, recruiters are looking to employ people with digital prowess, creativity and strong communication, favouring applicants with both hard and soft skills.
What are hard skills?
Hard skills are specific and teachable abilities, such as reading, writing and mathematics. Due to their adherence to logic and observance of specific rules and circumstances, these skills are often taught in courses. These skills are more easily measured and are directly applicable to particular industries.
The most in-demand hard skills:
• cloud computing
• artificial intelligence
• analytical reasoning
• people management
• UX design
• mobile application development
• video production
• sales leadership
• translation
• audio production
• natural language processing
• scientific computing
• game development
• social media marketing
• animation
• business analysis
• journalism
• digital marketing
• industrial design
• competitive strategies
• customer service systems
• software testing
• data science
• computer graphics
• corporate communications
It’s no surprise tech skills reign supreme. In a report issued by LinkedIn economists, four out of the top five emerging jobs in 2018 were digitally based, including tech developers and engineers.
A little further down the list, communication skills also emerge. Journalism, social media marketing, digital marketing and corporate communications all appeared in the top 25 desirable skill sets.
Yet, as proficient as you might be in these areas, the more intangible soft skills will help you land the job.
What are soft skills?
Soft skills aren’t as easily quantifiable as hard skills. Often abstract in nature, these abilities are derived from the right side of the brain. Soft skills are closely linked to personality traits, and harder to measure or assess.
For those who can demonstrate soft skills, the job market is wider. Around 57 per cent of leaders attribute more weight in the job hiring process to a candidate’s proficiency in soft skills, which are considered to be more flexible assets to the workplace.
This year, companies will invest in hiring staff who give them an edge in competitive markets. People who can lead technology changes and create market impact will be highly sought after. And if you have the ability to develop creative solutions, you’re more likely to be a hot commodity on the job market.
Editor of LinkedIn Learning Paul Petrone said the list reflects a shift in what employers prioritise in the workplace.
“Interestingly, the newcomers to our list were uniquely human traits. Among soft skills, creativity and adaptability joined the list for the first time, and among hard skills, people management was a new addition,” he said.
“While digital skills like cloud computing and artificial intelligence topped the list of hard skills companies need most, the emergence of these three new skills suggests that employers recognise the importance of embracing modern technologies as well as recognising those things technology can’t do — connect with other people, engage in out-of-the-box thinking and quickly adapt to new priorities or problems.”
Want to create a stronger presence for your company on LinkedIn? Wondering how others are using company pages to support their business goals?
In this article, you’ll discover how 10 prominent businesses are making the most of LinkedIn and 4 key components of an engaged LinkedIn company page.
#1: Recruit Talent
Tesla is on a mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy—partly through making affordable electric vehicles more readily available to consumers.
The recruiting team at Tesla uses their company page to talk directly to potential employees. Through a variety of posts, Tesla’s team works to make sure people know as much as possible about the company, working conditions, and the brand’s accomplishments.
They focus quite a lot on behind-the-scenes content to reveal how their cars are made, show people working on products, highlight places they’re working from, and generally give people a look at Tesla from the inside.
