Your top LinkedIn advertising questions, answered

Didn’t catch our member exclusive webinar: ‘Six ways to win with LinkedIn advertising?’ Don’t worry, presenter and CIM course director Sarah Kerrigan is here to answer more of your top questions on effective social media campaigns. If you’re still looking for ways to win with LinkedIn, read on for more of Sarah’s insights and advice.  

Is there typically a significant difference in engagement between video and single-image adverts on LinkedIn? Are there any trends in effective ad types? 

Video works well for ad recall (how many people remember your advert), so it’s always the top choice when it comes to brand awareness. Video naturally leads to higher engagement rates as it’s easier for people to engage with the ad. However, for activation campaigns such as lead generation campaigns, single-image ads often work best at generating the most leads for the cheapest costs, so video certainly doesn’t always rule. 

To have the best chance of success for an SME, do you think it is worth paying an agency to run LinkedIn ads, or trying to manage this in-house? 

There are pros and cons to both options. Hiring an agency adds extra on-going costs, which can be worth it if you don’t have the expertise or resource in-house. If there is someone who can dedicate themselves to running LinkedIn ads and has the resource to be checking in to campaigns daily, then great. It’s important that if they have no experience with LinkedIn ads then they get some training, so they know best practice. Otherwise, it can be very easy to set yourself up for failure with these platforms. 

Ideally whoever is running the campaigns at least has a marketing background and then they can invest in LinkedIn-specific training. Even if you work with an agency, whoever manages that agency in-house should get trained up on the platform so they can ask the right questions and push the agency. 

What is your view on LinkedIn webinars and events? Can these be effective in generating leads? 

It’s a really useful feature that you can stream live into a LinkedIn event. This enables us as a brand to easily engage live with an audience/community on a platform they are probably already familiar with. Although there is the option of linking to your website or an event website such as Eventbrite for people to sign up or to buy tickets, people don’t need to submit their email address to register for a LinkedIn event. So although it’s a great feature to drive engagement and strengthen your community, the focus of these is not to drive immediate lead generation, it’s more to drive brand engagement. 

However, it’s worth noting the average webinar viewer watch time is a lot higher than other webinar platforms, so if it’s your objective to sell during the webinar then there is likely to be extra opportunity there. For generating immediate leads, LinkedIn’s lead generation lead form campaigns work best, as people need to sign up and share their email and other info to access the webinar/content/whatever you choose to give away in the form. 

Do you have any recommendations of what works best on LinkedIn ads when working with small audiences? 

It depends on your objective. I wouldn’t recommend any particular campaign type just because your audience is small. If you are looking to generate leads, then single image lead generation campaigns work well. If you want to make sure you are being seen by your audience, then brand awareness or video views campaigns work best. 

You will want to keep an eye on the frequency metric if your audience is small to make sure you are not showing them the same ad too often. Otherwise, this can lead to audience saturation which results in low engagement rates and higher costs. You can plan ahead if you know your audience is small by having a larger variety of creative (I’d suggest 6-8 options) available so they are seeing different ads, as you can predict that if you have a small audience, your frequency will get high quickly. I’d be cautious of an ad frequency higher than 8 in a month.

Tell us a little bit more about budget. For those just starting out on LinkedIn, for example, what would you anticipate being a typical entry level monthly budget for effective advertising? 

I would plan for spending no less than £40 per day and for running your campaign for at least 2 weeks. If you have a bit more budget to work with, £70 per day will mean you will get more data in more quickly which helps with optimising the campaign quicker. Short campaigns don’t work as well as on LinkedIn, so you need to give enough time for the campaign to get going and for your audience to login to the platform. The longer the campaign runs for, the more opportunity you have for your relevancy score to increase which will make you more likely to win the ad auction at a lower price.  

Can you explain an organisation’s LinkedIn relevancy score and how it’s calculated? 

Relevancy score Is based on predicted response rates. It uses historical data such as Click Through Rates (CTRs) and engagement metrics to come up with a predicted response rate. The score is not connected to your LinkedIn page followers; it’s linked to the engagement on your ad campaigns.  

How long should a campaign run to deliver effective results or measurement? 

This also depends on your daily spend, but around 2 - 4 weeks. The longer the campaign can run for the better (as long as it’s performing well of course). This is because your relevancy score will build while your campaign is running. Don’t feel like you need to have an end date for your campaign unless you have a time-sensitive campaign message. LinkedIn campaigns do not fatigue as easily as Facebook and Instagram campaigns. Waiting for your ads to have at least 10,000 impressions each before making optimisations on creative is best practice. Depending on your budget you may have 10,000 impressions for each ad very quickly or it may take a lot longer for you to get that data in.  

Are there any companies that jump out as having delivered really powerful B2B campaigns through LinkedIn and why? 

HP have a great always-on LinkedIn ads strategy. They run multiple types of campaigns to drive different objectives along the buyer’s journey from brand awareness to lead generation. They also invest in having multiple ad types: video, image and carousel ads. They have a great brand campaign around cybersecurity in offices - HP Wolf Security with Christian Slater in. This ticks lots of boxes when it comes to brand, it’s memorable and consistent.

If you want to learn more about how to become an expert at LinkedIn advertising, we have plenty of resources and content to help you. Make sure to catch our full member-exclusive webinar on demand and you can even book your place on our LinkedIn advertising training course with Sarah Kerrigan. 

Watch the webinar