LinkedIn is a great tool for acquiring new customers: 760 million active users speak for themselves.

Source: Kinsta: Mind-Blowing LinkedIn Statistics and Facts (2021)

It’s incredibly valuable in terms of generating leads primarily because it’s a professional network. Let’s have a quick look at the main steps needed to create an effective Ad Campaign on the #1 B2B platform.

Step 1. Study the tool

LinkedIn Marketing Solutions Platform is what you need to explore when starting with Ad Campaigns. Updated in summer 2019, Campaign Manager Tool provides a customized approach supplemented with objective-based campaigns that help to fulfill complex unique goals. The service is intuitive and easy to follow.
After creating a Campaign Manager Account you can launch campaigns, define the pricing, manage the budget, and monitor the performance.

Step 2. Determine your campaign goal

Being fully aware of the goal is half of the success. The desired result should be defined as specifically as possible. Depending on your needs, there are three available objectives:
◆ Brand awareness. This objective is aimed at high-level brand building and promotion. You as an advertiser pay for the number of impressions.
◆ Consideration option provides engagement – views, clicks, visits, shares, followers increase, etc. You pay for the number of desired actions.
◆ Conversion is about interaction with the website – leads generation and downloads. In this case, you pay for clicks.

Step 3. Select your target audience

Analyze your potential customer and create a precise description of your buyer persona – location, age, gender, education, occupation and work experience, group membership, and more. Here is an insight: combined targeting proved much more effective than aiming at a large group of more or less eligible professionals. It’s important to strike a balance and avoid hyper-targeting: there is no point in attracting everyone. The optimal target audience for sponsored ads – 50k, messages – 15k. One more tip: it’s more effective to stay specific about the professional skills and more general about demography, e. g. you can include location facets + 1-2 more demographics.
◆ Audience expansion option enlarges the reach of the campaign by showing the ads to the audiences with attributes similar to the target audience.
◆ Matched audience and Lookalike audience match user’s first-party data (e-mail lists or website visitors) with LinkedIn users. It’s a good way to target the existing audience in new locations.

Step 4. Create relevant content

After studying your target audience it’s necessary to specify what content is engaging for them and tailor messaging to every audience segment. That’s the homework you have to prepare by conducting your own research and reveal what type of content engages your audience the most.

Step 5. Launch the campaign

Once the previous steps have been mindfully completed, it’s the right time to start launching the campaign. However, before that make sure to decide on the types of ads Linkedin is offering and pick the most appropriate for you.

Read Now: LinkedIn hook: create ads that hit your target audience

Step 6. Track the performance and test the audience

After the setup of the campaign, it’s all about analysis and flexibility. The very moment the campaign is launched, it’s crucial to start tracking the performance and make changes once needed. Here are the tips from Linkedin about tracking your campaign progress.
Even though the campaign may perform well, testing on targeting is rather non-negotiable – it’s the key to find the most effective formats that work for your business the best. Just duplicate the campaign and slightly alter targeting parameters. By doing it over time, it’s possible to learn how to reach the right target.

Step 7. Analyze and learn

After finishing the campaign it’s time to perform a post-mortem – overall analysis of the results to understand the gaps and avoid them in the future.
If you need more guidance and support while creating efficient LinkedIn Ad Campaigns, you are always welcome to contact us.