Mastering B2B Advertising on LinkedIn: Expert Campaign Optimization Tips

Mastering B2B Advertising on LinkedIn
Expert Campaign
Optimization Tips

Expert Campaign
Optimization Tips
For many businesses, paid advertising remains
an important channel for promoting products
and services and generating sales—and social
media is their platform of choice. Not only is
social media where your potential customers
most like to spend their time, now more than
ever it’s also consumers’ go-to resource for
discovering information about businesses,
products, and services.
B2Bs can especially take advantage of social
media to find, connect with, and promote their
business to a vast and targeted audience—and
there’s no more effective network for doing so
than through LinkedIn.
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Why Should LinkedIn
Advertising Be Part of Your
B2B Marketing Strategy?

LinkedIn Advertising
We talk a lot about the benefits B2Bs can experience from developing a strong presence on
LinkedIn, including improving public awareness of their brand and establishing themselves as
thought leaders. Advertising on the platform is no different—and using Sponsored Updates,
we’ve led our own B2B clients’ campaigns to success.
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LinkedIn Advertising
There are many reasons why advertising on LinkedIn through Sponsored Updates is a smart
move for B2Bs, including:
• It’s effective. LinkedIn boasts a 2.74 percent view-to-lead conversion rate, compared to
.69 percent and .77 percent for Twitter and Facebook respectively.
• Your audience is there. One-third of the world’s professionals use LinkedIn, meaning
you’re bound to be able to attract the eyes you’re looking to target.
• Sponsored Updates drive conversions. A whopping 4 out of 5 members on LinkedIn are
also decision makers within their respective businesses—and these members also have 2x
the purchasing power of the average adult internet user in the U.S.
So—is your B2B company looking to start taking advantage of LinkedIn’s huge professional
audience and comprehensive targeting features by advertising on the platform?
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Advertising on LinkedIn:
Expert Strategies for B2Bs

Setting Yourself Up for Success
To advertise effectively on LinkedIn, first you have to optimize your campaign from set-up.
Our expert tips for setting your campaign up for success include:
Know Your End Goal
When advertising on LinkedIn, B2Bs typically have one of the following goals: improving
brand awareness and engagement or driving lead generation and conversions. It’s critical
that your team understand the goal of your LinkedIn advertising campaign before you start
building out your Sponsored Updates, as your goal informs how you should measure the
success of your campaign and what specific metrics you should be tracking.
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B2Bs seeking to extend the reach of their business and improve public knowledge of their
brand should ultimately focus their campaign analysis efforts on monitoring the number of
impressions their Sponsored Updates are receiving as well as the engagement rate. On the
other hand, B2Bs looking to convert potential customers into leads and sales should look at
the CTRs of their ads.
Your advertising campaign goals inform everything from how you should create your
Updates to how you should determine success, so know your goal (and maybe write it on a
whiteboard or two in your office…)
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Develop a Compelling Offer & Landing Page
To see success through LinkedIn Sponsored Updates, you need to give before you can get.
B2Bs looking to boost awareness with their campaign might link their ad to a recent blog
post, but for those looking to convert their audience, It’s important to develop a valuable
and compelling offer to entice engagement, such as an in-depth piece of content like an
eBook or whitepaper or a product demo. High quality content is an especially effective offer
for driving conversions—a study showed that 74 percent of B2B buyers ended up choosing a
company that was first to assist them in the buying process by offering useful content and
information.
If your campaign goal is to convert users, you should also gate your offer behind a landing
page so that viewers must submit their contact information before receiving it. Ultimately,
this is still a win-win situation for both parties—you generate a new lead to add to future
marketing efforts and the viewer receives what they wanted from you.
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Optimizing Your Creatives to Drive Results
Your creatives are the lifeblood of your advertising campaign, and need to be developed with
consideration of best practices in mind to get you the results you desire. We have plenty of
experience optimizing our clients’ LinkedIn ads and associated landing pages to ensure their
engagement and conversion potential is maximized. Below, we share our top creative
optimization strategies pulled from years of campaign success and lessons learned.
Get creative with your ad copy.
Consumers are so used to spotting and avoiding online advertising attempts that many all
but ignore most digital ads at this point. This is why B2Bs need to get creative with their
LinkedIn ad copy and use it to drive the desired action from their target audience.
Remember that your potential customers are human and want to be treated as such, so
consider engaging them right off the bat by asking a question within the update itself.
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In the ad below, our client was doing this particular best practice but failing to optimize
other aspects of the ad, including the ad’s headline and description.
Here is the original version of the ad offering a downloadable report from our cybersecurity
client, as well as the results:
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And here is the optimized ad offering the same asset and its results (after receiving the same
amount of impressions as the previous ad):
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Catching Their Eyes. We included a number—and quite an attention-grabbing one—in the
update itself, which is a best practice for attracting the eyes of your target audience.You can
see that our optimized ad saw an incredible improvement in both CTR and engagement rate.
We were successfully able to improve our client’s campaign effectiveness by crafting our
copy to appeal to the audience in the following ways:
• Engaging Them Emotionally. We incorporated language that tugs on the emotions—such
as “cost” and “shocking”—throughout the ad to engage a viewer no matter which part of it
they’re reading. Wouldn’t you want to read on as an at-risk business owner after
discovering that DDoS attacks are more-costly than ever?
• Inviting Action. We included a CTA in the update of our ad—“Download the DDoS Impact
Report”—that let the reader know exactly what action we wanted them to take, helping
guide them down the sales funnel.
• Ensuring Ad Consistency. We ensured that the asset and ad copy were in sync,
eliminating the instance where the client referred the asset as a survey instead of a report
(we’ll discuss more about message match later in this post.)
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Add a high quality image to your ad that aligns with your copy.
Part of the reason Sponsored Updates are so effective for B2B advertising (and why we
choose to use them over text ads) is that they give the user the option to add an image—a
best practice for driving improved engagement from LinkedIn audiences.
We took the extra step with our client’s ad below of ensuring that we added a bold and
compelling image that also aligned with the more creative ad copy we were using:
Original version of the ad:
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Optimized version of the ad:
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Optimized version of the ad:
In the above example, by using a playful picture of army men that aligned with and bolstered
the ad’s message about being “under threat of attack”, we were able to successfully improve
the ad’s engagement rate, CTR, and the number of social actions taken from viewers.
Another important image-related note to incorporate into your B2B LinkedIn strategy is to
refrain from using any that include text. Images with text are not optimal for mobile users
and will typically become unreadable even when viewed from a desktop.
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Ensure landing page messaging is consistent with your ad and offer.
Consider this: a potential customer views your ad offering a piece of content only to be
redirected to your website’s homepage upon clicking your ad. Think they’re going to stick
around to find that piece of content and convert into a lead? Likely not.
One easy way to screw up your campaign conversion rate potential is by allowing
inconsistencies to exist between your landing page and the ad linking to it. B2Bs with the
goal of driving conversions with their LinkedIn advertising campaign need to ensure that
messaging is consistent across their landing pages and ads—from language and branding to
the offer itself.
As an example, recently we created a LinkedIn campaign for our land surveyor client who
had an eBook to offer on drones and wanted to target and convert employees of companies
in the oil & energy industries.
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Here is the Sponsored Update offering a downloadable eBook:
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And here is the associated landing page:
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You can see that we kept important language and keywords—such as “drones”, “unmanned
aerial”, and “oil & energy”—consistent across both the ad and the landing page, and made
sure to reiterate the offer multiple times: a FREE eBook. We also highlighted the value of the
eBook by teasing viewers with what they would learn from reading it via both the ad and the
landing page.
To drive B2B conversions by advertising on LinkedIn, it’s not enough just to have a landing
page—you also have to ensure that ad viewers can seamlessly transition into converted
leads by eliminating any discrepancies between the landing page and the ads they’re
associated with.
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Incorporating LinkedIn into Your B2B Marketing Strategy
Are you looking for expert assistance incorporating LinkedIn content promotion or
advertising into your B2B marketing strategy? SevenAtoms has experience developing and
executing LinkedIn strategies for B2B companies across a variety of industries. Contact us
today for a free consultation.
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Website: www.sevenatoms.com | Phone: 415.513.0435 | Email: info@sevenatoms.com
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Mastering B2B Advertising on LinkedIn: Expert Campaign Optimization Tips

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