If B2B is your game, LinkedIn ads are a tactic you can’t afford to ignore. While the cost per click can be substantially higher than on Facebook & Instagram (part of why we rarely recommend a strategy of solely running ads on LinkedIn) often the quality of your leads is higher than leads that come from other platforms. 
How do you capture them? You follow our LinkedIn ads best practices.

LinkedIn Ad Best Practices:

1. Layer Your Targeting

The key with targeting your LinkedIn ads is to find an ideal audience that’s dialed in enough to be seen by the right people and broad enough to avoid missed opportunities. The way to do this is to layer multiple LinkedIn targeting options. For example, if you were using LinkedIn ads to promote a cloud-based point of sale system for coffee shops, you could do a layer of targeting for people who work in the coffee industry. Alone, this parameter would be far too broad of an audience. If you layered it with other parameters to specifically target general managers and owners of coffee shops, you’d drive far better results!

2. Get Inspired From Your Other Platforms

Use the performance of your ads across other platforms to inform your LinkedIn ads. The targeting, creative, and copy that play well on Facebook can be tweaked and turned into LinkedIn ads that convert. Any themes, phrases, or imagery that your audience finds compelling are worth testing in this arena as well.

3. Keep Content Short

LinkedIn reports that shorter copy – read: 150 characters or less – had an 18% higher engagement rate on average for Sponsored Content Ads. Videos that were less than 30 seconds long had a 200% higher completion rate than videos that went longer. For Sponsored InMail messages, body copy that has less than 500 characters have a 46% higher click through rate on average. For LinkedIn, less really is more.

4. Facts Not Fluff

LinkedIn tested an update with a statistic and without a statistic to measure performance differences. The update with a statistic had a 37% higher click through rate and 162% more impressions. This is a platform full of professionals and using cold hard facts pulls greater results than a purely emotional appeal. 

5. Skip The Jargon 

You know the ins and outs of your business and the jargon of your industry is a natural part of your vocabulary…but nobody else knows what you’re talking about. When it comes to LinkedIn ads, be clear, say it simply, and say it directly. Don’t give your reader a weighty cognitive load to understand your ad, you’ll lose them in translation.

6. Personalize Your Ads

LinkedIn is unique in its ability to put you straight into someone’s inbox. You can personalize these messages by adding the recipients %FIRSTNAME%, %LASTNAME%, or mentioning their job title. Using direct language for Sponsored Content Ads to call out a specific audience (i.e. “Attention All Nurses”) leads to a 19% higher click through rate and a 53% higher conversion rate than ads with generic language.

7. Use People In Your Visuals

LinkedIn ad visuals that highlighted people instead of a product or location outperformed other ads by as high as 160% according to LinkedIn’s reports. One thing to keep in mind is that the vast majority of LinkedIn users are on mobile (upwards of 85%) so using visuals with people who aren’t too small in the frame or drowned out by a busy image will play best. 

8. Test Test Test

As with all platforms – test, test, test your LinkedIn ads! Find out exactly what phrasing, tone, and visual elements best connect with your target audience. Play with targeting till you’re getting leads that are the right fit for your products and services. Turn off ads that are underperforming. Run variations of ads that do well to see if you can highlight *exactly* ingredients should be in your LinkedIn ad secret sauce.   

LinkedIn is a powerful platform for your B2B marketing efforts!
If you need help to get your ads up to speed and your cost per click down – shoot us a message. We’ve been in the B2B game for a long time and we’re always down to lend a hand.