Leverage these best practices and professional tips to better harness the potential of B2B LinkedIn marketing campaigns.
When it comes to B2B marketing, LinkedIn is the place to be.
Between the more “professional” nature of the platform and its deep business targeting capabilities (at least compared to Facebook), LinkedIn is a useful tool for marketing to a specific B2B audience.
Launching your first campaign on a platform like LinkedIn doesn’t require an advanced degree or 10+ years of experience.
In fact, if you’re looking for an excellent how-to guide for how to get started with LinkedIn advertising.
Yes, it is true that you can get a LinkedIn campaign off the ground with a little preparation and a few Google searches here and there.
Make Use Of LinkedIn Campaign Groups
If you’re new to LinkedIn, or more familiar with Facebook, one of the first things you’ll notice is that LinkedIn has a more simplified campaign structure.
In LinkedIn, your objective, targeting, optimization, budget – and just about everything except for ad creative – are controlled at the campaign level.
In order to change any of those elements, you’ll need a separate campaign.
You’ll also need a new campaign if you want to try different types of ads, like single images or carousels.
This can become hard to manage if you have various campaigns doing essentially the same thing, but with different audiences, budgets, or creative types.
LinkedIn added Campaign Groups a few years ago in order to improve organization on the platform, but utilization is still relatively low.
If you want a well-oiled campaign structure, or don’t want to hunt around for specific variants, you should learn how to use Campaign Groups.
Campaign Groups are exactly what the name implies: groups of LinkedIn campaigns.
They sit on top of the organizational structure and can be set to run at specific times with specific budgets, or always on with no set spending limits.
LinkedIn marketers should consider using Campaign Groups to improve the organization of their specific marketing initiatives.
For example: If you’re a B2B marketer running campaigns with different end goals like brand awareness video views, white paper downloads, and demo requests, try using a separate Campaign Group for each initiative.
Not only will this keep your structure cleaner and more organized, but you can also apply specific overall budgets and run times to those campaigns as a group.
Laser Target With Company Matched Audiences
A powerful tool for LinkedIn marketers is the ability to create specific target audiences, including segments like job title, seniority, industry, etc.
LinkedIn can also be ideal for targeting employees of specific target accounts you’d like to do business with.
This means you could get your content in front of all of the decision-makers of a particular company you want to work with – it’s every salesperson’s dream!
And it’s surprisingly easy to do on LinkedIn.
Simply, navigate to the Plan (compass icon) and click on the Audience section.
Under Create audience, select the Upload a list Company/Contact button.
This will allow you to create two types of “Matched Audiences” based on contact information or company profiles.
A contact list creates a target audience based on individuals using their name, email, job title, etc. Not all of this information is required. Generally, you only need a name and email to ensure a decent match rate.
A company list is a different list that allows you to find employees of a specific set of companies without having specific contact information available. Instead of matching email addresses, it simply creates an audience of people who are all employees of the company you’re interested in targeting.
For both contact and company lists, LinkedIn has a template that you can download from the interface and use to populate your data.
Use Company Engagement Reports To See Who Is Engaging
Another bonus for using company-matched audiences is the additional reporting available through LinkedIn’s “Company Engagement Reports.”
Company Engagement Reports can give your marketing and sales team great insights into how people at specific companies are engaging with your brand on LinkedIn, including:
Engagement level – A calculated metric that compares the volume of engagements with the number of people targeted.
Members targeted – How many people within the matched audience were targeted.
Impressions – How many times an ad was served.
Ad engagement – Likes, comments, shares, and video views on ads.
Organic engagement – Likes, comments, shares, and video views on organic posts.
Website visits – How many users visited your website.
Company Engagement Reports are a great way to understand who is engaging with your paid and organic content.