How to Run Successful LinkedIn Ads in 2024

With time, LinkedIn has become the largest online community of business professionals. It’s the go-to place for working professionals to get educational content and the latest industry knowledge.

Given its size and purpose, LinkedIn has become increasingly popular for brands and advertisers – not only to promote their job offers, but also as a powerful advertising tool to reach specific audiences.

However, LinkedIn Ads aren’t suitable for all businesses. We talked with Katrina Aaslaid, Brandwatch’s own Paid Media Manager, to hear what she learnt from years of experience advertising on LinkedIn.

Here’s what you need to know to run successful LinkedIn Ads in 2024.

Why you should advertise on LinkedIn in 2024

Let’s start with the obvious. As a brand, you need to identify which advertising platforms make sense for you. You need to figure out which can help you optimize your marketing efforts the most. This is even more vital when considering expensive advertising platforms like LinkedIn.

To understand if LinkedIn is the right platform for your brand, consider the price per unit of your products, and the type of audience you want to reach. Generally speaking, LinkedIn Ads are used mostly by B2B brands, as these companies usually sell expensive products and are willing to pay a high price for conversions.

“While working for a B2C company, I did try LinkedIn ads. But our product was too cheap and the ads were too expensive, so it made no economic sense.” – Katrina Aaslaid, Paid Media Manager at Brandwatch.

Another thing to consider is targeting options. LinkedIn offers specific segments – very focused on job-related sociodemographics – which makes advertising on the platform even more appealing to B2B brands. LinkedIn also offers several ads formats, from text and display ads to InMails and sponsored content. There are plenty of choices in how you can reach your target audience.

Professionals use LinkedIn to consume informative and quality content. Its reputation is sturdy, reliable, and knowledgeable. With this influence, you can create educational and insightful content as part of your marketing activities. Reports, webinars, and on-demand content all work brilliantly on LinkedIn.

Plus, in the B2B world, it takes a while to convert users. So, feeding them with educational content can be an excellent way to push them further down your sales funnel.

LinkedIn is an excellent tool for awareness and consideration. Did you know that in B2B, it takes around 11 exposures of your brand before prospects to convert? So, while using LinkedIn ads to run awareness campaigns is a great strategy, LinkedIn retargeting campaigns are excellent for keeping prospects interested across your funnel.

The costs of advertising on LinkedIn

LinkedIn ads are expensive. On average, they cost more than ads on other social platforms, like Twitter and Instagram. In fact, LinkedIn’s cost per click is almost 50% higher than on Instagram.

To decide if it makes sense to invest in LinkedIn Ads or not, you need to have a clear understanding of your company’s Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV). This number considers how much revenue a customer brings on average, in a set time period.

CLTV = Spend x frequency / time.

For example, let’s assume we’re selling burgers. Let’s say that we know a customer usually stays loyal for five years, and that they visit our restaurant three times per year. This means, in five years, they will visit us around 15 times total. If, on average, they spend $20 per meal, their CLTV will be $60. CLTV = $20 dollars x 15 times / 5 years.

Equally, you should also try to understand how much it costs your business to turn a prospect into a client. By calculating how many leads we receive for each ad, and how many then convert down the funnel, and by knowing the actual value of a customer, we’re then able to know how much we are willing to spend for an ad.

This type of reasoning is fundamental to understanding how much you can afford with your ads, because you’ll know the exact amount you are willing to spend to get a lead from an ad.

“Before deciding whether or not to run a campaign on LinkedIn, look and compare your other campaigns running on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn itself of course. Do the math, and draw your own conclusions.” – Katrina Aaslaid, Paid Media Manager at Brandwatch.

One of the most useful things you can do for your advertising efforts is to keep your social media campaigns all in one place. This helps to easily spot budgets, results, and performance – and then benchmark them to one another. In our Advertise tool, you can easily set up ads across Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn – tracking your different campaign efforts all in one place. Not only will this give you a full platform overview, but it can help you save valuable time when deciding where to invest your social media budget.

Tips for creating an effective LinkedIn Ad campaign

The holy grail for any paid media manager is knowing which ads are the most effective. Below, we’ve pinpointed our top tips for running effective LinkedIn campaigns.

The funnel is all that matters

Paying attention to where prospects are in your funnel is important. For each stage of your funnel, you need to reach your audience with a different type of content and creatives. For example, start with videos at the top of your funnel, and LinkedIn InMails when your client is about to convert.

“You really don’t want to annoy your audience by showing them the same ad multiple times. Your funnel should guide your strategy.” – Katrina Aaslaid, Paid Media Manager at Brandwatch.

Utilize short videos, GIFs, and carousels

We’ve seen effective performance with 5 to 10 second videos and GIFs. Carousels are also extremely popular on LinkedIn Ads, mostly because this format does not exist as an organic post.

Be descriptive with your copy

Captions are as effective as your graphics, so make sure to add useful, interesting, and eye-catching captions to your campaigns. Plus, stats are always a winner.

You might want to include a time estimate for signing up for your product: “Sign up in less than 5 minutes.” Or, use figures on how many people recommend your product or service: “89% of consumers recommend us.”

Correct your campaign length

There is no perfect length for a campaign. Always make sure you’re monitoring your active campaigns and ads, and compare them to one another. This way, you can optimize your paid activity, re-run successful campaigns, and discontinue those that are not performing well to save money.

Target the right audience

LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities are worth exploring. From audience attributes – such as company, job experience, and education – to interests and traits, you can reach very specific audiences using LinkedIn.

Begin by understanding your target audience segments, and figure out which content they respond to best. An effective strategy to make sure your targeting is sharp, is to put in place a leads scoring system to better understand if your targeting efforts are paying off. Here, you will assign points to prospects depending on their job titles, whether they performed a specific task on your website after seeing your ad, and more. Gather this information into a dashboard, where you look at the persona you’re targeting, the lead scoring, and the performance of the ads – and then optimize.

“We meet our business development representatives on a weekly basis. This is crucial. Sometimes, we might have campaigns performing really poorly, meaning that the leads they convert are of a low quality. It’s the sales team who are the first to be aware of this, and who can tell us if we need to stop running a campaign. They inform us in real time, because if we were to look at our numbers, we would probably only realize leads are not optimal 30 days later.” – Katrina Aaslaid, Paid Media Manager at Brandwatch.

Turn organic posts into ad

When you see organic content performing well on your LinkedIn company page, amplify its reach beyond your followers by boosting it. You don’t need an in-depth understanding of advertising to boost posts, but can be an effective strategy to get more views and engagements.

With tools like Brandwatch Measure and Publish, you can compare your LinkedIn organic posts and boost your top performing content.

Brandwatch also makes it easy to combine your organic LinkedIn activities with paid ones. You’re able to easily create ads or promote LinkedIn posts in just a few clicks, and attach these to relevant campaigns. 

Keep your campaigns well organized

Keeping your LinkedIn campaigns and campaign groups neat and tidy when running successful LinkedIn Ads is super important for advertisers. When things are organized, it’s easier to see how your campaigns are doing, report on your ads, and make smart adjustments when necessary.

When your campaigns are structured appropriately, you can quickly check the performance of each campaign, look at important numbers, and figure out what’s working. 

Plus, when running multiple campaigns across different social media platforms, it becomes crucial to group campaigns in a way that can help you find and manage ads. So, keep it organized, and you’ll be on your way to more successful marketing on LinkedIn.

Watch this video to discover how Brandwatch Advertise can help you manage your campaigns in one easy-to-use place.

LinkedIn campaigns and campaign groups in Advertise

Advance your Brandwatch skills with our Academy courses.

Round-up

The power of LinkedIn Ads in 2024 is unmatched. At Brandwatch, we recommend you use a social media management tool alongside LinkedIn Ads Manager to truly optimize your ads.

The higher the cost of the ads you're running, the more you need to closely follow your results. Additionally, you need to compare campaigns and social networks with one another to monitor effectiveness.

By using a social media management tool, you can easily create, schedule and monitor your LinkedIn ads, compare different campaigns, and benchmark these alongside other channels.