Intro to LinkedIn ads | How to target your ideal prospect

Targeting your prospects through social media can be a very cost-effective way to allocate a marketing budget and drive more interest, leads, and sales. LinkedIn ads provide a unique ability to reach people when “work” is on their mind due to its inherent nature of being a social networking platform for professionals. As a result, some businesses may find that social media ads on LinkedIn can achieve more unique and targeted results than other social media platforms.

In this article, we’ll cover the basics of targeting your ideal prospect with LinkedIn ads. First, you’ll want to know what types of ad formats Linkedin Offers. Choosing the correct ad format is important because your ideal prospect may be more likely to convert on certain types of ads. 

Types of LinkedIn ads

• Image ads
• Video ads
• Carousel ads
• Event ads
• Conversation ads
• Message ads
• Lead form ads
• Text ads
• Spotlight ads
• Follower ads

One of the best ways to find out what ad format is best for you is to split test different ads types based on your goal. If you’re trying to get leads, It’s a good idea to split test LinkedIn’s dedicated lead form ad type with an image or video ad that brings the lead to a landing page on your website with more information and a form. For some advertisers, having the lead fill out their information directly in LinkedIn’s form yields more results than having the form on your own site, but the quality of those filled in on LinkedIn can differ greatly from the ones filled in on your site. This is just one example, but illustrates why it’s important to test multiple ad types and scrap the ones that you find don’t work.

Ad Objectives, based on the three stages of the buyer’s journey:

LinkedIn lets you decide on the business objective of your ads. This objective directly affects which ad types you have to choose from. For example, if your objective is brand awareness, you won’t be able to choose Lead generation as your ad type. To make it easy to decide on an objective, the different objective types are broken up into the three stages of the buyer’s journey. These stages are awareness, consideration, and decision.

Here are the objective that LinkedIn lets you choose from for you ads:

Awareness

• Brand Awareness

Consideration

• Website Visits
• Engagement
• Video Views

Decision (Conversion)

• Lead Generation
• Website Conversions
• Job Applications

Audience Creation

Finally, and most importantly is the targeting and Audience selection for your ads. This determines exactly who sees your ads, so you want to make sure that you are only showing your ads to the right people.

First, you can choose your audience based on location. Select which country, state, region, or zip code you want your ads to be shown in. You can also exclude certain areas if you want to run ads in a large area with the exception of a certain region.

Next, you can add an audience from existing sources. This is helpful if you want to target a large list of leads that you already have, or if you want to retarget people who have engaged with your brand in the past. You can also target lookalike audiences, which is when you let linkedIn target not only people who are on your list, but share similar attributes to people on your list.

Audience:

• Uploaded list
• Lookalike audience
• Retargeting

If you don’t already have a list, or if you want to build one from scratch, you can target based on attributes. This option lets you use the data that LinkedIn has collected from its users to target your ads. This includes targeting based on their employer or industry, which can be immensely valuable for B2B businesses that want to get in front of a certain company or area of business.

Attributes that can be targeted:

• Company
• Demographics
• Education
• Job Experience
• Interest and Traits

Overall, Linkedin provides powerful tools that can be overlooked by the marketing departments of many companies due to the plethora of social media advertising options available. This, however, can be a benefit to many companies due to the possibility of lower competition and increased quality of leads who are already in the “work” mindset while using the platform. See how Magnetic North can help you and your business with advertising on LinkedIn.