MKTG 347 LinkedIn Ads Week 10

Using LinkedIn is a great way to expand your professional network, but there can be benefits to using LinkedIn in marketing. For example, I will share this blog post on LinkedIn and that is one way I am marketing my content for my LinkedIn connections. However, LinkedIn also has a way to use paid ads similar to Facebook or Google ads.

To create a LinkedIn Ad go here, and follow the steps.

So once you click create Ad you're given these three options:

Sponsored content is the right choice if you want to have content shown in the LinkedIn feed, you want to target your viewers based on the data in their professional profiles, and you want to gain leads and build customer relationships. 

The Text Ads is the right choice if you want ads that are easy to create, help gain traffic and leads, and pay for only the ads that work, cost per click.

Sponsored InMail is the right choice if you want conversions and a more personal way to send a message, reach people using desktop and mobile, ability to know whether or not the messages go with the target audience.

For the purpose of this post I am going to 'Select' Sponsored Content, after this it takes you through a 5-step set up process. The first step is naming your campaign, picking the language and deciding how you will treat the people who click on your ads.

Since I am just doing this as an example and I do not have my own company I picked McDonald's as the company I want to run ads for. So after that step it automatically found content related to McDonald's to suggest it as what I am sponsoring. Since this is just an example I picked the first one here as what I want to sponsor. 

This is a cool feature because if I really do work for McDonald's marketing and people are posting about it anyway, I can set up campaigns to tailor who sees what based on the content that is being posted by others. 

 The next thing you need to do is determine the audience that will be seeing this ad. What it shows here is that you are choosing to target by the audience below. So you get to pick the specific features of the audience that will be viewing your post.

Above is the basic where, but then a cool feature is you get to pick from these other specifications, and once you pick which ones you are interested in...

You can specify which parts of that category you want to makeup your audience. So I picked Years of expereience, age, and field of study, which led to these different specification options: 

I went with the option to optimize my campaign for Awareness. I want to bring awareness to this specific content to the people I specified. 

You can choose to install conversion tracking to have a better measure of ROI on LinkedIn campaigns. This is optional, it is beneficial but not necessary. After that you need to pick the daily budget. This has some flexibility, but it does require a minimum daily budget. Then you need to pick a start date, or start now both options are fine. It just depends on whether or not you are ready to run the ad, or if you are preparing it for the future.

Overall setting up LinkedIn Ads is very simple, they walk you through ever step and have descriptions of why you are doing that as well as common questions that come with the process. Since there is not a LinkedIn Ad certification, like Google or other common advertising websites have certification processes, they make it easy to use for anyone. LinkedIn Ads tend to be more expensive since they can be tailored to such a specific group of people, you do have to pay for it. Not everyone has the budget for LinkedIn Ads but they are a good thing to be aware of and maybe one day you will use it.