LinkedIn offers far more than its commonly known features. While personal profiles play a significant role, and job searching is one of the primary functions, the platform provides much more. It boasts an advanced advertising platform, similar to other systems, with the added benefit of enabling direct interaction with businesses.

What Can You Achieve with LinkedIn Ads? An Overview of Advertising Objectives

LinkedIn’s ad platform is very similar to other systems in terms of its breakdown of advertising goals. There are three main objectives: awareness, consideration, and conversions, which closely mirror those in other advertising tools. These objectives are further divided into eight smaller categories worth exploring:

• Brand Awareness – helps reach the largest possible audience and showcase your brand, its strengths, and offerings.
• Website Visits – like in other ad platforms, the primary goal here is to increase traffic to your website or dedicated landing page.
• Engagement – this objective helps increase activity on selected posts shared on your company page and gain new followers.
• Video Views – as the name suggests, it allows you to widely distribute video content used in your campaign.
• Messages – helps reach your audience through automated messages. It can be used for recruitment purposes or to present offers to clients.
• Lead Generation – an ideal choice when your goal is to collect contact details from potential new clients.
• Website Conversions – similar to other ad platforms, you need to define conversions and set up events in analytics to track and achieve this goal.
• Job Applicants – helps increase the number of applications for posted job offers.

These objectives illustrate that LinkedIn is a versatile tool that can be utilized for various brand-related activities. From very simple goals, such as increasing brand awareness, to more advanced ones, the platform offers options that can significantly impact your business growth.

Example: A campaign aimed at acquiring new clients using the Lead Generation objective and targeting users similar to your current customers could result in a significant increase in new business opportunities. The fact that you can use these objectives and target such precisely defined groups highlights the enormous potential of the platform.

Who Can You Reach with Your Message? Analyzing Available Target Audiences

What sets LinkedIn Ads apart, especially in B2B marketing, is its unique audience targeting options, which differ significantly from other advertising platforms. However, the B2C sector can also find valuable opportunities on LinkedIn.

The system allows targeting based on audience attributes, such as interests, job titles, industries, or skills. These attributes are slightly different from those available in platforms like Meta, as they are strictly focused on professional topics (industries, positions, or competencies).

Example: By choosing an interest related to marketing and advertising, you can narrow it down to even more specific topics, such as Marketing Communication or B2B Marketing, reaching a highly targeted audience.

You can also create an audience based on parameters such as job titles, specific years of experience, or roles.

Example: If you want to reach directors in logistics companies, LinkedIn allows you to do so. Simply enter „director” under job titles, specify the industry, and you’re set (of course, you can further refine the group using additional parameters).

Furthermore, LinkedIn enables you to target specific companies. Just enter their names—if they have a profile on LinkedIn, you can define additional audience attributes, and your ad can be shown to people working in roles such as marketing or accounting at those companies.

As shown in the system example above, there are many targeting possibilities. You just need to combine them skillfully and test them. It’s important to remember that these are typically professional attributes. You won’t find interests related to skincare or pet adoption here.

Another group of options offered by LinkedIn’s system is audience segmentation based on external and system data, commonly known as remarketing. Similar to other advertising platforms, this can target individuals who have taken specific actions related to your website, fan page, or ad. The system also allows you to upload your contact lists. However, keep in mind that to create such a group, you need at least 1,000 emails or phone numbers (compared to Meta, where only 100 are required). As with other platforms, you can also create lookalike audiences based on these remarketing groups. In this respect, LinkedIn doesn’t differ from other tools.

Lastly, it’s worth mentioning the ability to define the location and language of your target audience. Remember, business profiles often use English as a universal language, which could prevent you from reaching people running businesses in Poland who have set their language to something other than Polish. Unfortunately, you cannot select multiple languages in a single campaign, so it’s worth testing several approaches to customer outreach and focusing on the one that converts best.

What and How Can You Show? Creating Ads

In addition to standard formats, such as images, carousel ads, or videos, LinkedIn offers several unique options not available on other platforms. One of these is the Message format, which delivers a direct message to your target audience’s inbox. A similar format is Conversation, where the recipient receives a message presenting an offer and can respond. LinkedIn also offers the Document format, which is, as the name suggests, a document 😉. It could be a presentation, a single slide, or a longer guide that provides value to the recipient.

 

 

 

 

The ad creation process depends on the objective and format you choose. LinkedIn’s ad platform allows you to create entirely new ads or use content already published on your company page. You can even use content shared by your employees (with their prior consent, not only verbal but through LinkedIn’s system).

As mentioned earlier, the ad configuration process depends on the selected format. It’s worth planning ahead to determine how the ad should look and what message it should convey. This allows you to prepare the necessary materials and optimize the system’s capabilities. I recommend considering available formats when designing your customer journey, as they can complement various stages of the sales funnel.

How Does Campaign Creation Work? Let’s Look at an Example Using the Website Visits Objective

Step 1: Create a new campaign group and define the primary objective. In this case, it’s Website Visits. You’ll also specify the campaign start date, but importantly, the system doesn’t require an end date.
Step 2: Create a campaign within the campaign group. At this stage, you select your audience, budget, schedule, and ad format. For the Website Visits objective, all formats are available.
Step 3: After defining these parameters, go to the Ads section to decide whether to create a new ad or select one from previously published posts.

Finally, an important note about launching campaigns: simply clicking „Save and exit” does not activate the campaign. After configuring everything, go back to the campaign section, hover over the newly created campaign, click „Edit and launch,” scroll to the bottom of the panel, and press „Launch.” This is one key difference between LinkedIn Ads and other advertising systems.

Key Takeaways:

• LinkedIn offers not only personal profiles and recruitment tools but also a robust advertising platform that effectively reaches a business audience.
• LinkedIn’s ad platform provides a variety of objectives, such as increasing brand awareness, generating leads, boosting website traffic, engagement, and conversions.
• LinkedIn stands out with its precise targeting capabilities, based on professional audience attributes such as job titles, industries, or skills, which is especially valuable for B2B activities.
• In addition to standard formats like images and videos, LinkedIn offers unique options, such as Message, Conversation, and Document formats, which can be powerful tools for communicating with potential clients.
• The ad platform allows the creation of new ads or the use of existing content from company pages or employee profiles, potentially increasing campaign effectiveness.
• Tip: Experiment with targeting—try different targeting options and see which is the most precise and effective.
• Tip 2: Leverage employee content—promote what your employees have to say. Remember, a qualified employee is a key asset to your company.