If you’ve identified that your customers or partners, whether existing or prospective, are using LinkedIn in relation to your products or service then there is a good chance that you are already using the platform to post content to. But have you considered how LinkedIn Ads can help you grow your business even more?
In this article, we explore three ways you can use LinkedIn to capitalise on what you are doing organically with your company page.
LinkedIn offers businesses a range of tools and resources to help via it’s Ads platform. The three key ways it can be used are:
- Build your brand
- Generate leads
- Gain audience insight.
Let’s take a look at each of these in more detail.
Build your brand
Part of growing your business is to increase your brand awareness and with LinkedIn Ads you can do this with a specific brand awareness campaign. Firstly, you need to decide on what your brand awareness objective would be:
- Growing followers – strengthening your base, which in turn will have a positive impact on your organic reach
- Increased reach – getting your content in front of more of the right people
- Higher engagement – increasing the level of interaction or engagement that your messages receive.
LinkedIn Ads can help you achieve these objectives, complimenting any organic activity you are doing. This is done largely through the targeting options available in the platform.
Overall, all of the above are supported by the in-depth analytics tools that LinkedIn Ads has. These allow you to really understand what the impact and results of your campaigns has been.
A related are around increasing brand awareness is ‘thought leadership’ – this is how you can position your company, its leaders and other employees as experts in their field, authoritative and trustworthy. According to the 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, 73% of decision-makers say an organization’s thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis for assessing its capabilities than its marketing materials.
Generate leads
For many businesses, driving an increased level of leads is an important thing to be doing with your marketing activity. And LinkedIn Ads can help do that. The typical buying cycle for B2B can be longer and more complex and if you map out these journeys, it is likely that LinkedIn will feature prominently as a touchpoint.
There’s three reasons why the platform seems to be a good fit for lead-generation:
- People are using it with a mindset that is geared up for business. This sets it apart from other social networks, which they may be using purely for leisure
- Data and targeting – LinkedIn categorises members by their job position, location, seniority, industry and other labels, which means you can then choose the most relevant audiences to gain leads from
- Placement visibility – LinkedIn Ads are inserted into the user’s news feed and are unobtrusive, so can feel like part of the natural feed of posts they are seeing.
Further, LinkedIn has a neat Matched Audiences feature, which allows you to target people with:
- Website retargeting- based on people who have visited your website
- Account targeting – upload a list of target companies to focus on
- Contact targeting – upload or integrate your own contact lists.
Gain audience insight
Within LinkedIn Ads campaign manager, there is an Audience Insights feature that allows you to learn more about your matched or saved audiences.
Using this can help you to:
- Understand your audience better
- Create relevant content
- Reach people who are more likely to engage or become a lead.
The useful thing about this is that you can create audiences for research purposes, without having to put a campaign live.
And then if you do decide you want to target them further, you simply create a campaign.
Looking for more support on how to use LinkedIn as part of your marketing strategy? Contact us today to find out how we can help.
