One question that’s asked a lot by business owners with regards to LinkedIn is…
“Is there any value in using the advertising platforms that LinkedIn offer?”
The short answer to that is, there is!
It just depends whether your business is the right fit.
We have to remember that with LinkedIn, it’s mostly a business to business exchange. Whilst you are dealing people to people it’s business to business, so you need to find the niche or you need to find the audience that’s right for your campaigns.
LinkedIn Campaigns
We’ve run many campaigns for lots of clients through LinkedIn, including:
- Opportunity building campaigns.
- Straight out advertising campaigns.
One area that we don’t recommend very highly is the ‘in-mail’ campaigns. Not that it’s a negative thing, it’s just become associated with negativity.
LinkedIn Inmail Ads.
If you have a think about your LinkedIn inbox and how many inmail sponsored emails you actually respond to, it’s easier to imagine how effective your inmail ads will be.
The arrive fast and furious and the average person gets several a week. People are kind of looking for other opportunities when they are on LinkedIn.
Is Your Audience on LinkedIn?
Your target audience are likely not on LinkedIn to see what sponsored inmails they have got in their inbox today. Most people are aware that setting up an inmail ad is an easy enough exercise but what’s important to consider is – is your target audience on linkedin? Or are you perhaps better served using some different types of platforms and advertising methods?
If for instance, you’re selling widgets to educational institutions or you might have a specifically branded product that is a great product, but if you’re not going to find that audience on LinkedIn or the type of people you require than LinkedIn simply won’t yield the results you’re looking for.
We need to remember again that LinkedIn is for business professionals. If you’re going to be marketing widgets or products to them, you need to do it in a sense where’s it’s going to catch their eyes, so they’ll engage with your ad. Just putting an ad out there to a basic audience is not going to give you much return on your investment. There needs to be a little bit more thinking time invested into your campaign and process.
We recommend having a think whether your audience exists within a business to business peer platform and if you feel that it does, then by all means go into the marketing section of LinkedIn, here.
You can start to see if your audience is there. It will give you an approximate number of how many people you’re going to reach, and you can go from there. But the first thing you need to do is really consider what it is you’re selling. Whether it has value to your B2B business peers or not because that’s the audience that is going to be seeing your ads.
If LinkedIn is an opportunity that you would like to pursue further but feel that you might need some help in, whether it’s campaign or an outreach program, by all means, drop us a line and we’ll be happy to give you a call, have a discussion with you on how LinkedIn would best used for your business and what sort of things we can put in place for you to help you start seeing results!
