LinkedIn: Reach new target groups with LinkedIn Ads

For many, LinkedIn and LinkedIn Ads are purely a B2B topic. In principle, however, LinkedIn Ads are interesting for anyone whose target customers are on LinkedIn and active there. This could be a service provider who wants to make their services better known to companies. The same applies to an office chair manufacturer who simply wants to sell more chairs, a start-up that wants to become better known, or a company that wants to attract the attention of new potential employees. However, your offering should still fit into a work context. For example, if you want to market a music festival or a video game, you will achieve much better results on other platforms than on LinkedIn.

But if you want to market a specific business service or promote a product for use in everyday working life, this is the right place for you. If you are looking for new employees, want to present your event to a new target group, or want to attract more users to your website, LinkedIn Ads gives you the potential to reach exactly the target group that is difficult to reach on other platforms such as Google or Meta.

Before you jump right in and start placing ads, be clear about the specific goal you want to achieve with them. Are you looking to raise awareness of your brand? Do you want to familiarize users with your offering and potentially drive them to your website? Or are you focused on conversions and want to generate sales or applications directly on LinkedIn or indirectly via your website? Anything is possible and will work better or worse depending on how you design your targeting and ads.

Don't be alarmed as a newcomer: LinkedIn ads are significantly more expensive than other ads on platforms such as Meta or Google. LinkedIn charges a premium for precise business targeting, and competition is fierce, especially among decision-makers and in certain industries. The average CPM/CPM is around $30, but depending on the target group and objectives, it can be as low as $8 or as high as $50. However, when implemented well, the high costs are rewarded with a significantly better ROI than on other platforms.

Companies such as Expensya have been able to generate four times as many leads with LinkedIn Ads while halving their cost per lead. Similarly, classic B2C brands such as Jaguar (link in German) have been able to significantly reduce their lead costs despite high CPMs with ads on LinkedIn. We have also achieved very good results with LinkedIn Ads for our clients, which have been well worth the high CPM.

The big advantage over other platforms such as Google Ads or Meta is LinkedIn's knowledge of its users' professional activities and interests. People who use LinkedIn reveal significantly more about themselves than on many other platforms, even if the data is significantly different. This enables very precise targeting in a business context. You will find it difficult to reach a target group on LinkedIn that is very interested in films and series, for example. But if you want to specifically reach a group such as IT managers/CTOs with X years of professional experience who work for companies in the following industry, no other platform can offer you such precise targeting as LinkedIn.

Specifically, the following categories can be targeted:

Person-related

• Job title – Good if you are targeting specific titles such as CTO
• Years of professional experience
• Career level
• Skills – Good if the job title can vary and it is more about related activities (e.g., project management)
• Field of activity – If the job itself is irrelevant, but the field of activity is important (IT)
• Education
• Interests and characteristics – Both are a good addition to professions in a professional context and are also useful for reaching specific user groups on LinkedIn.
• Demographics
• Language
• Location

Company-related

• Industry
• Company – Yes, specific individual companies can also be defined as targets
• Revenue – only if specified (which many do not do)
• Company size – Would you prefer a small business or a large corporation?
• Company categories – Curated lists such as Forbes or Fortune 100
• Growth rate – Measured based on the number of employees
• Company contacts – Does your target group work closely with a specific company? Then reach them through that connection!

There are also many other options, such as using contact lists, lookalike targeting based on your previous target group, and retargeting for website remarketing and lead nurturing. It is important to combine the targeting options in a meaningful way. This allows you to define exactly who you want to reach. However, your target group should not be much smaller than 30,000.

Decide on a suitable format. Depending on your goal, certain formats are more or less suitable. Single image ads and carousel ads are classics that usually perform well. Messenger ads are good for job applications, but somewhat more difficult for other offers. If you want registrations for events, newsletters, or consultations, you should ideally use lead gen forms or event ads. In addition, there are a variety of ad formats that may be interesting for different goals and target groups and should at least be considered when creating your ads.

Text and images also play an important role! Make sure you stand out from the crowd: graphics should definitely stand out from your users' feed so that they don't simply get lost. If your corporate design allows it, use colors such as red, yellow, orange, or similar to catch the eye. Note: Standing out does not mean conjuring up the ghosts of advertising catalogs of yesteryear and drawing attention to yourself with garish colors and contrasts or even flashing elements. On LinkedIn, your ads should stand out, but be serious and professional. The same applies to the text! Stay serious in line with your brand image, but if it fits, you can also use emojis for headlines, for example. Everything in the right measure.

Use A/B testing for your ads here too. It is advisable to have at least five different graphics per campaign in order to reach users more effectively and have more variety. So why not play around with the elements a little and learn important lessons for future campaigns? Experiment with different combinations and styles and then see what works well for your target group and what doesn't.

In principle, campaigns on LinkedIn should run for at least two weeks so that the algorithm can adjust to your target group and perform better. However, especially at the beginning, you should check the campaign frequently and make adjustments if necessary. It is best to check the ads daily or every other day at the beginning for any irregularities. Later on, this can be done less frequently. It is best to decide in advance which indicators you want to use to determine whether a campaign is good or bad.

LinkedIn provides a wealth of information about the audience your ads have reached so far. If you find that only career starters are clicking on your ads, for example, but they are not part of your target group, then it is better to optimize your targeting right away. If one of your visuals is significantly less cost-effective than the others (too high cost per click/lead/mille), then consider taking it offline. Or allocate more budget to particularly successful campaigns so that they perform even better. LinkedIn also offers the option of allocating the budget to a group of campaigns based on their success. This feature is very user-friendly, but it also takes away some of your control. So use it with caution.

It is very difficult to make general statements about how long your campaigns should run. It depends on the goal, success, and size of the campaign's target audience, as well as your budget. Branding campaigns can run for longer periods of time, as you are more concerned with awareness than clicks, and your target audience is better served by having many points of contact with you than just a few. Therefore, set up the ad so that your total budget cannot be used up within a day, but rather spread out over time. For ads with the specific goal of bringing users to your website, the target should be the clicks and leads you want to generate rather than a time period. If this is your first campaign, we recommend that you plan a budget for at least 2-3 months and play around with lots of variations and graphics. This will allow you to learn a lot from this initial period for future campaigns.

Thought Leader Ads are a relatively new ad format on LinkedIn, where it is not the company itself that acts as the advertiser, but rather an employee of the company or a “corporate influencer” who takes on this role externally. This is a powerful new lever for promoting your own products and services without being perceived as advertising.

True to the motto “people follow people,” we are more willing to follow other users on LinkedIn and click on their posts than we are with companies. No wonder, then, that LinkedIn saw an average click-through rate of 1.7 times and 1.5 times more engagement during a test phase. This is an exciting new format for anyone who relies on social selling, supports employees in their own company as corporate influencers, and wants to promote their services and products at the same time. We will definitely stay on top of this and keep you up to date.

In recent years, LinkedIn has become the most important B2B platform in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Europe, the US, and many other countries. In Germany in particular, it has overtaken previous market leaders such as XING and Co. More and more companies have internal LinkedIn strategies for their employees, and more and more users, especially in management, are now significantly more active and easier to reach on this platform than on other platforms such as Instagram and Co.

If you want to target people in a professional context or companies and get them excited about your services and products, you should definitely be active on the platform and consider the targeted use of LinkedIn Ads. Classic KPIs such as CPM/TKP may be significantly higher here than on other platforms, but you are also likely to achieve significantly more qualified leads and higher-quality conversions than on other platforms. In short: it's worth it!

If you want to get started right away, we're here to help! Whether it's campaign management for ads, designing a customized LinkedIn strategy, or setting up and maintaining your company profile and organic content, Drive can help you exactly where you need support. Together, we'll get your brand, product, or service ahead on LinkedIn!

Feel free to send us an email or give us a call to get started.