When done successfully, LinkedIn Advertising campaigns can place your business in front of millions of potential clients and partners. It is important to remember that these audience members are far different to those on other social media platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram. Whereas those users might be more willing to browse and are open to being surprised, LinkedIn audiences only want to be exposed to content that will benefit them in their professional field. Fortunately, audience targeting is refined to work for the platform, allowing users to target the ideal ad formats based on more demographics like professional job titles, industry, business models and more. This means that LinkedIn Advertising often comes with a higher cost per click (CPC) than other platforms but can come paired with conversions holding a far greater transactional value.

Organic posting on LinkedIn refers to any pieces of content you have made available or shared on your account without paid promotion behind it. LinkedIn Advertising, on the other hand, is creating posts and actions with a budget behind it in order to push the content in front of targeted audiences beyond your existing follower count.

LinkedIn as a platform is designed to benefit professionals looking to network for mutually beneficial opportunities, and so it makes sense that LinkedIn Advertising campaigns benefit businesses fitting this description. Whether that makes you a small business trying to increase your lead generation results, or a larger organisation pushing brand awareness to overcome your competitors, there are effective strategies waiting to be utilised by you.

LinkedIn Advertising is only an effective marketing avenue when campaigns are created and maintained by someone in-tune with the platform. Without a keen understanding of audience targeting and the nuances around developing creatives that spur engagement can lead to businesses losing a dangerous amount of marketing budget on ailing campaigns.

Here at Clearwater, our LinkedIn specialists spend all day, every day, studying the social media platform to better understand what campaigns are rewarded most by audiences and generating hyper-focused testing and optimisation processes for unparalleled return on investment.

LinkedIn Advertising works similarly to other paid Social Media Advertising tools. Once an ad has been designed and created, users will operate on a bidding system where a budget is submitted alongside audience and campaign selections with Campaign Manager. This will then place the ads within a rapid auctioning system to allocate whether it will be considered relevant and shown to specified audiences. Therefore, in order to create a winning LinkedIn Advertising campaign, you must find the perfect combination of bidding amounts, sharp audience targeting, and relevant messaging to see it posted and generate a healthy return on investment.

LinkedIn Advertising allows users to invest flexible budgets based on the goals they are looking to achieve, and the timeframes upon which they want to achieve them. The cost behind each ad will varying depending on a range of factors, such as the audience you are targeting, the objectives behind your campaign, and of course the bidding necessary to win the auction process for it to be shown. There is also a minimum daily budget amount required when starting on LinkedIn of $10 to be aware of, and cost per clicks can range around the $5 mark. It is important to remember, however, that despite the amount spend on the ads, this has to be placed into context with return on investment from the quality of the ads and their ability to convert.

The amount of time it takes to build a LinkedIn Advertising campaign will vary depending on a variety of factors. If you are tackling it yourself, it will naturally take some time to become familiar with the platform and completing the due diligence to develop powerful creatives and proper audience targeting. At completion LinkedIn will also require approximately 24 hours to review new ads to ensure they align with policy guidelines before sending it live.

If you decide to work with an agency to develop your LinkedIn Advertising campaigns, the process will differ slightly as the specialists walk you through the process to ensure everything is aligned with your business and goals. At Clearwater, we carve out the time needed to understand what you are trying to achieve in your campaign and who you are trying to target, so we can develop a bespoke strategy that delivers this quickly. We are capable of doing this at speed given our extensive knowledge of the platform and the best practices for a range of industries, as well as our processes for constant testing, review and refinement.

LinkedIn Advertising offers a variety of formats designed to help you achieve a range of objectives. These include:

• Single Image Ads: These are the most common ads found appearing on users’ feeds,
  working excellently for brand awareness and lead generation.
• Carousel Image Ads: This format allows businesses to display a range of products or
  resources within their portfolio in one single sitting, ideal for giving potential
  customers or clients insight to what they could receive when doing business with you.
• Video Ads: Depending on the production quality of the videos used in your ads, this format
  holds a lot of potential to draw in and hold the attention of audiences. This makes it
  ideal for building awareness of your overall brand or new announcements made from the
  business.