INTRODUCTION
With more than 30 million companies on LinkedIn and 303 million monthly active users, according to DataReportal, the social media platform is an effective way to advertise, especially in the B2B sector. From an expansive audience, multiple advertising formats and accurate audience data, LinkedIn provides a degree of targeting and accuracy that other social media platforms can’t match.
Here are three new features in LinkedIn advertising.
OBJECTIVE-BASED ADVERTISING
Objective-based advertising is LinkedIn’s complete reconfiguration of Campaign Manager. In the past, when users launched a new campaign, choosing your ad type–Sponsored Content, Text Ads, etc.–was the first step. Now, LinkedIn asks which objective best fits your marketing goals. But how do you know which is the right type?
Choose awareness campaigns if you want to build name recognition. Meanwhile, choose consideration campaigns if your brand is encouraging your target audience to engage with and gain a better understanding of your company. Lastly, conversion campaigns have a high focus on generating leads (e.g. through a lead gen form) and using tracking to measure the true impact of the ads to make them better in the future.
TARGETING REDESIGN
LinkedIn created a new and redesigned targeting experience. First is the “global search” field. This gives users the ability to type in any type of targeting you want and a number of results will appear, regardless of the main targeting subject.
For example, you can search for “engineering” and results will appear for job titles that include “engineering” in them, degrees that include “engineering,” etc. Second, advertisers can use the “drill down” feature, which groups criteria into five major categories: company, demographics, education, job experience and interests.
Interest targeting, which has been available on other platforms like Facebook, is now available on LinkedIn. This feature allows users to target based on a combination of your audience’s professional interests on LinkedIn, as well as the professional topics and content your audience engages with through Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
Users are given two options: member groups, which let you target your ads by groups users are likely to be a part of on the platform (e.g. career forums), or member interests, the type of content they engage with on the platform.
FORECASTED RESULTS
This feature allows advertisers to see the make-up of your target audience on the dashboard. Users can estimate how your campaign will perform against your target audience. Furthermore, it gives you an idea of what you can expect for impressions, spend, clicks, CTR and sends. This data helps refine your campaign to best fit your marketing goals.
Advertisers can also customize the panel to filter for specific professional characteristics, such as years of experience or company size.