LinkedIn Ads: all about LinkedIn advertising

In the era of all digital and social networks as partners of choice in the professional sphere, LinkedIn is a powerful player for development of your business activities. Bringing together hundreds of million daily active users on its network, LinkedIn is the unmissable event for players from all professional sectors to reach as many people as possible. Your target customers are there necessarily!

Existing on most social networks and search engines, web advertising is also present on LinkedIn: under the name of LinkedIn Ads. Accessible via an interface called Campaign Manager, the tool advertising of the most extensive professional social network in the world allows you to create your own advertisements!

Do you know your target customers perfectly? Want to achieve it through Advertising 3.0? Do you want to increase the impact of your brand image? Read on and together let’s find out everything you need to know about LinkedIn Ads advertising today.

Take the time to read the part that describes why I don’t always recommend LinkedIn Ads and discover the solutions I recommend instead!

LinkedIn Ads: what is it?

LinkedIn Ads is the advertising platform of LinkedIn, which you allows you to manage your advertising yourself, internal to the network and therefore with an active audience. From creation to distribution, to the analysis of their scope through the collection of data, you develop, animate and distribute your advertising campaigns according to your objectives, your means and your needs.

LinkedIn Ads is accessible via Campaign Manager, a dedicated interface to the development of your advertisements. From the platform, you have access to a whole range of tools to create advertisements that match your brand image. LinkedIn Ads are also several ad formats, for offer Internet users a wide range of advertising solutions.

The primary objective of an advertising campaign is to generate leads, to build a solid file to convert into customers. Several tools are available on the platform to obtain qualified leads by the through your advertisements.

To put in the spotlight all the information of your business, your news, your important events and even your products or services, LinkedIn Ads is an ally of choice.

Why use LinkedIn Ads today?

You know, we are in the age of social networks and digital. In our personal and professional lives, social networks make our daily lives and allow us to access more opportunities abundant and relevant than ever. LinkedIn is the perfect example of this digital development: by surfing the internet and adopting a adapted marketing, find customers, develop your network and make business is within everyone’s reach.

That’s why using LinkedIn Ads today is your guarantee of align with the trend and position itself on the promising niche of the online marketing. By setting clear objectives, the use of advertising on LinkedIn makes it possible to directly reach an evolving target directly in a professional universe.

LinkedIn members are not necessarily present on the network social with a view to making purchases. This is why advertising on LinkedIn should primarily be seen as a way to get leads qualified to convert into prospects and then into customers thanks to a strategy marketing that you are going to set up downstream.

It is therefore very important for you to clearly define your objectives. advertising to make your campaign a success. LinkedIn is the ideal platform for generating qualified leads, and can be a powerful leverage to develop your customer base.

But LinkedIn Ads can also be a great asset to increase the brand awareness, maintain your image and ensure your visibility during important events for your business.

In summary :

• LinkedIn allows directly reach a target who evolves in a professional universe.
• Advertising on LinkedIn should primarily be seen as a way to get leads qualified and integrated into the marketing and sales strategy.
• He is very important to clearly define your advertising objectives: develop leads, gain a new audience or gain notoriety.

LinkedIn Ads: eight advertising formats

LinkedIn Ads is a very complete platform, which offers several different advertising formats, themselves modular in several configurations, in order to best meet all the advertising issues. According to your project, your objectives, your budget or simply for a test provisional, with the diversity of the LinkedIn Ads offer you are sure to find the ideal solution to your advertising objective.

What advertising formats are available on LinkedIn Ads today ?

LinkedIn Ads – Format 1: Sponsored Content

In French this translates to “sponsored content” but it is also called native LinkedIn advertising because it appears like a classic post. This is content from your LinkedIn Company Page , or created since the latter, which will appear on the LinkedIn news feed of the audiences you have chosen to target upstream. You can distribute links, informative content, videos, etc., on behalf of your company, through its page. If you are on Facebook, you are bound to be familiar with this kind of advertising which is very common on the blue giant. In the middle of your news feed, so-called “sponsored” posts appear. The principle is the same for LinkedIn Ads. The plus: you can direct visitors to a LinkedIn form to collect valuable data on your leads. This form of advertising is only available if you have a business page!

LinkedIn Ads – format 2: Text Ads

It is a smaller format, and therefore less visible, but which appears in several places of the LinkedIn interface (home page, groups, search results, etc.). This type of advertising consists of a image in small format and a short text, which aims to attract the curiosity and prompt to learn more about the content. Format very suitable for targeted distribution, this type of advertising will attract the eye of Internet users your industry.

Personally, I prefer LinkedIn’s Sponsored Content, which is useful for gain followers on your LinkedIn business page or naturally touch your target; and InMail which I present to you now.

LinkedIn Ads – Format 3: Sponsored InMail

LinkedIn’s Sponsored InMail is a popular format for advertisers, because InMail has a high open rate. InMail is the advertising method perfect if you know who to send it to … With Sponsored InMail, you can personalize your advertising as much as possible, adapt it so that the content best fits the issues of your target, and you are sure of a well-delivered advertisement, at the right time and to the right person!

To read also: InMail VS email : the game.

LinkedIn Ads – format 4: Dynamic Ads

The Dynamic Ads format emphasizes personalization. When dissemination of your campaign, LinkedIn will personalize the advertising automatically integrating the data available on the profile of people targeted by you! The news feed is always overloaded information, and the ever-increasing advertising during the navigation, a customization adapted to each target will allow you to stand out from the crowd.

LinkedIn Ads – Format 5: Video Ads

The video format visually engages Internet users, captures their pay attention and play on the emotional side of their mind! With a format advertising in the form of video, be sure to capture your targets customers by offering them innovative, original and intuitive advertising. With this format, you can highlight the values of your company, your brand image or simply your products and / or services while playing on the sensitive chord of Internet users, who will be more impacted by the video format than by a single image.

LinkedIn Ads – format 6: Carousel Ads

With the Carousel Ads format, showcase your creativity and adapt your advertisements according to the offer it offers. With the possibility of stage two to ten images, the Carousel Ads allows you to tell a story with an original format and still too little seen on the networks social. Depending on your campaign objective, stand out with Carousel Ads to promote your offers with originality.

LinkedIn Ads – Format 7: Display Ads

Similar in format to Text Ads, Display Ads allows large-format ads to be displayed on the right of the LinkedIn home page. Larger than Text Ads, these ads engage the visual of Internet users who will discover them very close to their news feed, where the traffic is the strongest. Disseminate an impactful image to promote a product, a special offer or simply the slogan of your company.

LinkedIn Ads – format 8: Conversation Ads

The objective of this advertising format is to make it more natural and above all to be able to put several Call To Action (CTA). In other words, you can put several buttons within one and the same advertisement.

In addition, this format allows you to ask several questions and allows you to retrieve information or better qualify the prospect.

LinkedIn with this format seeks to lower the cost per click while collecting prospect information.

Which LinkedIn Ads advertisement for which objective?

If more than one type of advertisement is available on the platform LinkedIn Ads is because the objectives of advertisers and brands are many. And to achieve different goals, it is essential to match the broadcast method with these.

If you want to establish your brand awareness and make know your image to the players in your sector and to your target customers brand, Sponsored Content will be your best ally. Indeed, in sharing content directly from your business page, your advertisement will appear to your targeted audience on behalf of your brand. Your professional news will then reach a wider audience, public always qualified thanks to your upstream targeting options, and will allow you to increase the visibility of your page, and potentially its number of subscribers and therefore its influence on the network thereafter.

Do you want to attract additional traffic to your website, more qualified traffic, and therefore obtain leads to unfold your marketing strategy with the help of powerful calls-to-action? Use Text Ads or Sponsored Content. Thanks to the Lead Gen system, a tool in the form of forms produced by the LinkedIn Ads platform, when your target clicks on one of your advertisements, a form pre-filled with their LinkedIn account information reaches you. By validating a form, Internet users land on a thank you page that leads straight to your advertising content. A good way to promote your leadmagnet or whitepaper with a capture page (if these terms are unfamiliar to you – and even if they are – I recommend reading my ultimate guide toinbound marketing ), your website or simply a description of your main offers. The plus of this highly qualified lead generator: you can, on the Campaign Manager interface, analyze your advertising statistics, the percentage of validated Lead Gen forms, the cost you paid for each lead, etc.

You aim to reach decision-makers, leaders ? The very ones who never really have time to read their emails, answering the phone, or asking their employees to process the ads for them? You prefer to produce a more personalized advertising? To put all the chances of your side and make your advertising campaign with major decision-makers a real success, use Sponsored InMail. Its advantage? It is not issued only when the person to whom it is intended connects to LinkedIn. So you are sure that the notification will not go unnoticed in the middle of any that happened while your prospect was offline. With Sponsored InMail, the opportunity is too good not to take care of the substance, and form! Indeed, with this advertising format, you can promote very specific content, ask questions, provoke reflections with the person you are talking to. More personal and often perceived as being very professional, Sponsored InMail is a preferred format if you aim to deliver targeted advertising with certainty to a range of profiles in particular.

LinkedIn Ads or Google Ads?

LinkedIn is not the first to enter the niche of internal advertising. Quite the contrary! Google, Facebook, Instagram, and still others have positioned themselves and offer their users the possibility of promoting their content.

When you start your activity, or when you seek to prospect new customers through social networks by developing a new advertising campaign, we would be tempted to say “with Google, I have the certainty of having the most visibility ”. And it’s true … When you think advertising, we think visibility. And the primary objective would be to have as many as possible … But answer frankly the following question: do you want to touch many people, some of whom have little or no qualifications or one more low proportion of Internet users who will be very much in your target customer base ? Let’s talk a bit about the big difference between Linkedin Ads and Google Ads!

On LinkedIn Ads, it’s not keywords you’re targeting, but an audience, and the price of your ads will then be determined according to the number of advertisers who want to reach this same audience. If you are a small structure, and you are looking for an affordable way for you position on the advertising plan, it is to LinkedIn Ads that you must entrust your campaigns. Indeed, with Google Ads, the price can very quickly increase if you focus your advertising on highly sought after keywords.

Second observation: if LinkedIn represents, by its volume, only a small part of the volume that you could touch on Google, the professional social network generates practically no error clicks. With Google, the probability that you pay for clicks that were generated in error (by your competition wanting to take a look, or by ordinary users who only do simple searches) is statistically higher than that of LinkedIn. . Indeed, LinkedIn users know very well why they signed up, and browse the network in search of precise information. The margin for erroneous clicks is immensely smaller than on Google. Paying for visits that will never qualify would be too bad. This margin is all the more reduced as the very precise targeting offered by the LinkedIn Ads advertising platform makes it possible to “eliminate” from your audience users who are of no interest to you. In fact, they will not be aware of the existence of your advertising campaign. Little chance then of clicking on an invisible advertisement!

For a B2B advertising campaign, the LinkedIn Ads platform is clearly more suitable for promoting your offers and your business to people who are part of your target customers. With its precise targeting and the certainty that visitors are present on the network for business purposes, LinkedIn Ads can prove to be a great ally in the development of your digital advertisements.

LinkedIn Ads: laser targeting

On LinkedIn, the tone is set: everything that happens on the social network concerns the professional world and its opportunities. Using LinkedIn advertising space to develop your brand image, generate high quality leads or simply increase your sales volume is highly relevant and part of any marketing strategy.

It’s very simple: for an advertising campaign created, it is an audience previously defined by you who is affected. For this, a filter system to best define your target when your campaign is made available by the LinkedIn Ads platform, and as little as possible to say is that this system is very precise. No less than 17 criteria are available and modular among themselves to distribute content adapted to the right ones people !

Discover all the criteria here: LinkedIn Ads: tutorial to create your advertising campaign .

Among these criteria, we find the basics such as age, sex, geographical location, but also criteria concerning the company in which (or which) your target audience works: its size, its name, sector of activity … To further refine your selection, you can also indicate the number of years of seniority in the company, the job title, the diplomas obtained during the university course, and even the groups to which your target adheres! We are tempted to enter all the criteria and to define a particularly precise audience, but be careful not to reduce the field of possibilities too much by cutting and intersecting all the selection criteria between them. Either way, LinkedIn Ads you will warn if your target volume is too low due to too many numbers important of selected criteria. So be careful not to be too restrictive.

LinkedIn Ads: the price

Now let’s talk about an important aspect in the design of your advertising campaigns: the price of LinkedIn Ads.

With LinkedIn Ads, you choose the amount you can allocate to your campaigns, and you have at any time the possibility of stop your ads from showing if the results you expected do not are not there. You have maximum control over your spending.

With LinkedIn Ads, ads are auctioned. In Indeed, you are not the only one who wants to position yourself on a niche specific, your competitors are also on the spot. It is on this principle that the price of campaigns is determined. With LinkedIn Ads, you pay according to the audience you have defined. Let’s take a closer look at the mechanism auctions …

On LinkedIn, the spaces for displaying advertisements are restricted. This is why an auction system is available, because the competition is sometimes fierce. Depending on the audience you are targeting for your advertising campaign, the price may vary.

On Campaign Manager, LinkedIn shows you a price range in which you can bid while having the maximum chance of be able to reach your audience. Know that you will never pay more than the maximum price you specified. On the other hand, it is possible to pay less, it will all depend on the auction status for your audience predefined.

This being done, depending on the format of your ad, you will be able to choose between different financing options.

• For the Sponsored happy and the Text Ad : you can either opt for a CPC (cost per click), or for a CPM (cost per thousand impressions).
• For the Sponsored InMail , on the other hand, there is only one form of payment: the CPS (cost per shipment). In fact, you will pay for each InMail delivered to its recipient.

Let’s go back to the two previous payment options.

The cost per click, CPC, is to pay each time a user click on your advertisement, and therefore access the corresponding landing page. the cost per thousand impressions, CPM, is the same as paying for the number of ads that will be broadcast. For example, if you want eight thousand people are affected by your campaign, you will be billed for those eight thousand broadcasts. If your goal is to enhance your brand image by showing in strategic places to a specific audience, the CPM is more advantageous than the CPC but beware … this does not mean that your eight thousand broadcasts will drive clicks to your website. The advertising campaigns billed by CPC, although they are less “Visible” than CPM campaigns, are more likely to generate leads, and you only pay when an Internet user made the process of clicking.

Weigh the pros and cons of each of these options, relate your results to your goals and tailor your campaign.

To read also: remarketing: definition, examples and secrets of successful campaigns .

LinkedIn Ads: my opinion and why I do not (always) recommend LinkedIn advertising

As of today, there are very few people who are profitable with LinkedIn Ads campaigns , which remain expensive. Of course, everything is a question of ROI, and as always in advertising it is necessary to test. If you want to test LinkedIn Ads advertising, send us a message here .

To date, there is better, more effective and cheaper than a LinkedIn Ads campaign with long-term results !

It is either:

1. Be trained and supported to generate 1 prospect and 5 BtoB clients per month with LinkedIn thanks to the Proinfluent Method, LA LinkedIn prospecting training already approved by hundreds of professionals;
2. Either, of outsource commercial prospecting with LinkedIn thanks to Outsourced Commercial Prospecting .

In both cases, there is a guaranteed results . If you have any need, book your strategic audit offered here .

LinkedIn Ads: quote and price example for a lead generation campaign

Note that the minimum CPC is € 2 on LinkedIn, so each click will cost you more than € 2.

We recommend starting from a monthly budget, because it will take time to reach the target, and in advertising repetition is essential.

For a test phase, I would propose 600 € / month of advertising budget. Which would make a little less than 300 clicks, that is to say opening of the form.
By imagining a conversion rate (lead generated) of 5 to 10%, we would be between 15 and 30 leads per month (therefore between 20 and 40 € per lead).

LinkedIn Ads is quite expensive, but again, it all comes down to ROI (return on investment) .

LinkedIn Ads: tutorial to build your first campaign

Now that you know the nuts and bolts of how LinkedIn Ads works, it’s time to get started and create your first ad campaign! See you in the tutorial for creating a LinkedIn Ads campaign . Then, don’t forget to install the pixel LinkedIn to collect data on visitors to your website.

LinkedIn Ads: to conclude

LinkedIn Ads: to sum up in 3 questions

LinkedIn Ads : c'est quoi ?

Existing on most social networks and search engines, web advertising is also present on LinkedIn: under the name of LinkedIn Ads. Accessible through an interface called Campaign Manager, the world’s largest professional social network advertising tool allows you to create your own ads!

LinkedIn Ads : quel est le prix des publicités ?

The minimum Cost Per Click (CPC) is € 2 on LinkedIn. Each click will therefore cost more than € 2. The cost per lead depends on the format. To give you an example of price, we invite you to read this article from Proinfluent which details the price of a lead generation campaign.

LinkedIn Ads : quels sont les formats ?

LinkedIn Ads is a very complete platform, which offers 8 different advertising formats, themselves modular in several configurations, in order to best meet all the advertising issues.
These are Sponsored Content, Text Ads, Sponsored InMails, Dynamic Ads, Video Ads, Carousel Ads, Display Ads and Conversational Ads. These formats are all detailed and illustrated in this article by Proinfluent about LinkedIn Ads .