Why You’re Missing Out on Business by Ignoring LinkedIn Ads

As we approach 2016, we have to remember to continue to market like the year we are in. Where are people’s eyes at most of the day? On their social media accounts, primarily Facebook. I have discussed in the past why Facebook Dark Posts are the most cost effective strategy when targeting a customer. However, LinkedIn is not so bad itself.

In fact, LinkedIn offers a great opportunity for B2B lead generation and their ad targeting is great as well. Let’s get into how you can effectively use LinkedIn ads to grow your business.

Sponsored vs Text Ads

LinkedIn offers two different options of advertising, sponsored updates which show up in a user’s timeline and text ads which typically show up in the sidebars. Both options can be beneficial, in fact, running both at the same time can be your best option. Text ads in the sidebar are typically a bit cheaper, but may not show the same results.

Sponsored updates show in the timeline which means that they will also show up on mobile devices or tablets, as well as the desktop version of LinkedIn.com.

If you choose to use a sponsored update, you can use something that you have posted in the past, or you can create a brand new status update. What you want to include in the status update is totally up to you, but I recommend either a link to an article or a white paper download in order to collect their email address.

Ad Targeting

Now we can get to the targeting of who the ads will be shown to. I can provide a lot of different examples, but let’s just start with one. Let’s say that you want to connect with dentists. Maybe you sell dental supplies and want to connect with the dentist themselves, or even more importantly, the office manager who may actually purchase the supplies.

You can target these people in a few different ways. You can select to target people whose occupation is “dentist, orthodontist, etc.” You can also select a certain radius within a specific zip code. With this, your status update with a link to download a white paper that a dentist would be interested in will show up in their LinkedIn feed.

Here’s a more aggressive approach to targeting that can be even more effective. If you have a specific location that you sell these dental supplies to and know the dentist office name, you can then find out the name of the office manager or purchasing manager of the office. With that name, you can target that specific person if they are on LinkedIn. Create a list of the names that you want your sponsored update to be shown to and add them into the targeting list on LinkedIn.

This is a great opportunity to make first contact with someone and have them sign up for a white paper and provide you their email address.

As I mentioned, there are several more examples that I can provide about how you can use LinkedIn targeted ads to reach your target customer.

If you would like more information about how you can best execute on these ads, then contact me today.