Is LinkedIn Advertising Worth It?

December 15, 2016

Have you received a LinkedIn Advertising Credit recently? Want to use it, but aren't sure how?

There are a few different types of advertising options on LinkedIn. Here's the scoop: there are text ad options (think Google Adwords in LinkedIn), Sponsored Content (kind of like Facebook Ads), and Display Ads (which start around $10,000 so we'll leave those to the national advertisers). Here is a breakdown of these options for advertising on LinkedIn and what might work for your business.

You can target your specific buyer personas by the information used in creating their profiles. This includes things like their job title or function, the industry, geographic location or proximity to your business, their education level and so much more. Even as specific as the company they work for.

LinkedIn Sponsored Content

This is our favorite of all LinkedIn Advertising Options. Think of this as a promoted post or update in the LinkedIn home screen or news feed. You see updates from people and businesses here, and are able to like, comment and share these posts.

When you create a great content piece on your website and promote it via a LinkedIn update on your profile or your business page, you can also promote (sponsor) that update. The best part about this is that you can promote this update to appear in the feed of specific LinkedIn members.

This is a huge opportunity to get your content in front of other target audiences for your business. You can do this on a CPM or CPC basis – which means a cost per thousand impressions or a cost per click basis.

You can control & limit your budget by the amount of $ per day, for a set number of days, too. So it won't get out of control.
A few other tips and best practices on this type of advertising option are available directly from LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Text Ads

We don’t recommend the text ad option very often, since they can be hard to find in LinkedIn.

Have you ever noticed these in the sidebar when you're in LinkedIn? If not, it’s likely they go unnoticed by many (if not most) LinkedIn users.

LinkedIn Display Ads

These are the big, beautiful banner ads you see on the right hand corner of LinkedIn. These ads have historically been a lot of recruiting ads or big software companies. Mostly a place for bigger budget advertisers who apply to a big user based, and need to connect with B2B professionals. LinkedIn is definitely a great place to reach decision makers.

These display ads usually begin with an ad budget of about $10,000. If you have a larger advertising budget and LinkedIn is your space, then this is a great investment of your budget. Ads can be targeted based on user profile information, companies, geography, and so much more.

Best LinkedIn Advertising Recommendation for Small Businesses

If you’re comfortable with advertising dashboards and things, then we’d recommend using LinkedIn Sponsored Content Ads. There are still several options here to promote an existing organic update (i.e. boosted post), such as:

To create a specific post or content for the news feeds of your specific audience,
Direct sponsored content, which is a specific ad “update” that isn’t viewed publicly but only promoted in the feeds of your target audience.

Online Advertising Best Practices

Clarify Your Goals
- Want to increase awareness of the company, product, etc? Impressions may be your metric
- Want to get visitors to your landing page for more information? Clicks may be your metric
- Want to get them to your site and capture their information? Form completions may be your metric
- Is it to simply click a link to download a free whitepaper or article? Download actions may be your metric
Your updates/posts should include content and an image/graphic, since those get more attention.
Create a solid target audience based on your buyer personas and existing customer information.
Test, Measure & Repeat. Try different audience tweaks, budgets and ad copy or imagery to see what gets you the best results.