Many B2B companies’ association with advertising via LinkedIn is often “it’s too expensive”. Therefore, in 2019, there are still companies that don’t use LinkedIn Ads. In this blog, we explain how to use LinkedIn Ads to generate as many high-quality leads as possible for your IT company in a cost-efficient way.
Why LinkedIn Ads for IT companies?
LinkedIn is the largest business social media platform in the world. The platform has 590 million active professionals, of which 60 million are senior influencers, 40 million decision makers and 10.7 million opinion leaders. It is possible to target specific industries such as healthcare, logistics and transport or business services. Especially when you focus on a niche target audience, it is important that you utilize the power of LinkedIn Ads. The Lead Gen Forms feature offers the opportunity to generate leads directly within the platform, automatically retrieving contact information and making quality content instantly downloadable.
5 tips to use LinkedIn Ads cost-efficiently
To help you get started with the cost-efficient use of LinkedIn Ads, we give you 5 practical tips:
1. Target the decision makes of a company
You can build the target audience by setting all kinds of criteria. By setting the target audience at seniority level, you only address the people within a company who are relevant to your campaign. For example, you can filter to only CEOs and managers, the decision makers of a company. Keep in mind that LinkedIn’s bid estimation is higher for a selection of CEOs than for a selection of interns or trainees. You can also compile the target audience by job title. The risk is that you will exclude people who don’t have the job title you entered, but who are among your prospects. Please note: you pay less if the advertisement is shown to a smaller target audience, but you also don’t want to exclude potential leads.
2. Make use of Account Based Marketing (ABM)
With Account Based Marketing you create your own account list with companies or email addresses of the people you want to target. You can then upload this list as a target audience in your LinkedIn Ads campaign. Such a targeted ABM campaign can yield many Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), because you choose the companies or people you want to target. Because you target yourself to a very specific target audience, you can also make the message with which you approach this target audience very personal. Even if you have uploaded an account list with all kinds of companies, you can still filter by seniority level, for example.
3. Run different ads per campaign
Use different advertisements with different texts and images, but with the same message. In the end, you can see which ad has the highest relevance score and generates the most leads. Then you can optimize the campaign based on this knowledge. In fact, the LinkedIn auction rewards relevant, attractive ads. Your ads receive relevance scores based on click-through rate, comments, likes and shares. The more relevant your ad, the less you pay.
4. Don't forget to set a daily budget and a total budget
This way you will always have an overview of your expenses and there will be no surprises. For each campaign you determine how much budget to set. The minimum daily budget for LinkedIn Ads is €10.
The daily budget and the total budget aren’t the only things you have to fill in with regard to costs. You also need to set a bid. It is possible to pay per 1000 views (CPM) or per click (CPC). As it were, you are bidding against other advertisers targeting the same LinkedIn members. Based on the audience you have set up, LinkedIn gives you a bid estimate. You can decide whether to bid higher or lower. In general, though the higher you bid, the more views your ad will have.
5. Continue to optimize your campaign
From the moment you launch your campaign, you should actually constantly track the results and compare them with other campaigns. This way you can see what works well and what doesn’t. By adjusting your ads, target audience or budget accordingly, you make sure you get the most out of your campaign and budget.
How does Leadgate help?
Do you have any questions after reading this blog? Please feel free to contact us. You can call us on 010 – 268 1148 or send an email to info@leadgate.eu.
