You’re all probably thinking “Not another social media website!” However, this one is different! LinkedIn is a professional social network and is the world’s largest with over 120 million members. According to LinkedIn these 120 million professionals follow more than two million companies, recommend over 350,000 products, and are joining over one million groups. Yes, it is massive! The benefit of LinkedIn for small businesses is LinkedIn Advertising, or known as LinkedIn Ads.
How can LinkedIn Ads benefit your small business, you’re asking? Well, the great things about LinkedIn Ads are how targeted and specific you can be with the audience. LinkedIn Ads provide an efficient way to spend your advertising dollar ensuring you are targeting the right people and not receiving any unwanted clicks.
If you have searched through LinkedIn before you would know that people have profiles that state their occupation, the company they work for, previous jobs, experience, education, location, group’s people are joined in on, and so on. All this information is gathered by LinkedIn, which allows them to create segments within their community of professionals.
See below the segments LinkedIn allows you to utilise when selecting your target audience. Under these headers are further categories that allow you to drill down to the finest point, such as the title of a professional, the name of a company, qualifications, groups joined, city or country, the list goes on and on… and on.
LinkedIn is best to utilise if you are a B2B business or B2C business with corporate clients – this is because you are targeting professionals. For example; if you own a Personal Training business and wish to offer your service to inner-city Male Melburnians that work in the Professional Services Sector, as you feel that there is a gap in that industry you can target. You can use LinkedIn Ads to target specifically to people that live in Melbourne, and work in professional service areas such as Accounting, Consulting, Finance, and Sales, that is between the ages of 25-40 years old and are males.
However, the above example is quite broad… so, let’s imagine this: setting up numerous LinkedIn Ad campaigns that are even more targeted than the above! E.g. one campaign to only target male Accountants, living in Melbourne aged 25 to 40 years old. A Second Campaign to target male Consultants, again living in Melbourne and that are 25 to 40 years old. Then apply the same idea to another two campaigns for Sales and Finance professionals. What’s the point in this? Well, it means you can target the copy of the Ad to each specific industry professional, which in turn will be more meaningful to them instead of a generic copy ad.
The benefit of utilising segmentation of the LinkedIn community is that you can make as many ads as you like for each segment of your target audience and measure the effectiveness of each campaign and control the budget of each ad you place. So, in my opinion if you implement LinkedIn Ads into your small business marketing plan you should consider all you target audience segments and efficiently utilise the options LinkedIn Ads are providing you, as this will provide you with overall better results.
So, how do you setup your LinkedIn Ads campaigns? Just signup to LinkedIn and under the ‘Home’ tab there will be an option for ‘Advertise on LinkedIn’, click this and follow the steps to create your own campaigns for your LinkedIn Ads.
Here are some tips when putting together your LinkedIn Ads:
- Clearly explain your product or service offering
- Be creative and choose words that grab the attention of your audience
- Include an appropriate image
- Use a strong Call to Action such as; Try now, Download, Sign up or Free Trial
- Create Multiple ads to test which segment or copy content works best for your audience
- Set a realistic daily budget
- Check your campaign’s progress daily
As you can see there is a significant benefit for using LinkedIn Ads for your small business. You have access to a huge audience, over 120 million actually… but you have the ability to target to your specific audience and only use a small amount of your budget in doing so.
Social Media advertising for your Small Business can be confusing, especially when you are learning about it for the first time. Web123 can help you with your Social Media andLinkedIn Ads for your Small Business! Give us a call today or find out more here >>