LinkedIn Advertising

LinkedIn is the largest professional network with over 875 million members in 200 countries. Thanks to its business focus, the platform has secured a unique position in our social media landscape. Besides standard functionalities such as a personal profile, company page, or group, LinkedIn offers a number of additional, paid functionalities. These functions are primarily aimed at finding and training talent or new clients. You may already be familiar with LinkedIn Recruiter, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or LinkedIn Advertising? We delve into LinkedIn Advertising, the platform that allows you to advertise on LinkedIn and the LinkedIn Audience Network.

In our view, advertising on LinkedIn is an indispensable part of any solid B2B online marketing plan. The business focus and various advertising tools make it a great platform to get noticed by (potential) clients, but what really makes the advertising platform unique are the business characteristics you can use to assemble a target audience. With characteristics such as job title, company name, education, or industry, you can compile a very specific target audience. Curious about what you need to do to leverage the full potential of LinkedIn? Read on, and we will share our experiences, insights, and examples.

We share our insights and experiences with LinkedIn advertising and provide answers to a number of frequently asked questions. We regularly post new information, examples, and insights. Is your question not answered yet? Ask the question by email and we will gladly add it!

What are the benefits of LinkedIn as a B2B advertising platform?

LinkedIn is globally, but certainly also in the Netherlands, the professional social media platform where your potential B2B relationships and customers go to seek information and inspiration. While most companies, both B2B and B2C, already have a company page and use the platform to find new employees, LinkedIn advertising is much less applied. And yet, it offers so many possibilities! With organic LinkedIn activity, you mainly remain visible within your own first-, second-, and perhaps third-degree network. With LinkedIn advertising, we achieve visibility among a broader audience. These are our five main reasons to allocate budget and start with LinkedIn advertising this year:

• LinkedIn is the largest professional social media platform
• Your competition is not yet using LinkedIn Advertising
• LinkedIn advertising offers a unique opportunity: measurable outbound marketing
• Advertising on LinkedIn is very cost-efficient
• Reach exactly the right target audience and get to know them better

We elaborate on these reasons extensively in B2B advertising: the benefits of LinkedIn Advertising

LinkedIn is an indispensable professional platform, but why?

Why use LinkedIn? Often, we see that LinkedIn is still used as a rolodex or online CV, which is a shame. LinkedIn is the largest professional social media platform and offers unique opportunities to connect with other professionals and companies in your field. We are eager to tell you why LinkedIn, in our eyes, is a valuable social network. The most commonly used reasons for using LinkedIn are:

• The platform for professional networking
• Finding jobs and new colleagues
• Visibility and personal branding
• Exchanging knowledge and advice
• Company promotion
• Research into potential partners or customers
• Career development and advice

To get more out of your LinkedIn profile, we also share a number of tips:

1. Optimize your profile. Consider a professional profile picture, a background image, a clear and professional headline, and an engaging summary about your expertise, professional background, skills, and goals. Don’t forget to add all your relevant work experience, education, and certifications.
2. Expand your network: Start with people you already know such as colleagues, family, friends, and existing business relations. Also dare to connect with interesting individuals you don’t know yet, but add a personal message to your invitation introducing yourself.
3. Regularly share valuable content. Think of articles or updates that fit your field of work, for example, messages from the organization you work for. If you directly share a post from your employer, don’t forget to add a small piece of text, for example, why it’s relevant or what you contributed to it. This makes it much more interesting for your followers.
4. Be active: Try to log in regularly, for example, once a week. Not only post your own content, but also respond to others’ content and be active within your network. It can help to set yourself a goal, for example, posting one (own) update weekly.

In our full article, we also provide tips for managers, team leaders, owners, and marketers who want to increase the use of LinkedIn within their organization. Curious about these tips and how to get your team effectively working with LinkedIn? Read our article Why LinkedIn is an indispensable B2B platform and how to use it.

B2B LinkedIn advertising examples

Thanks to the various campaign goals, advertising options, and audience characteristics, LinkedIn can be used in very diverse ways to support your marketing and sales activities. Although relatively few brands deploy LinkedIn ads, we see opportunities and positive results with our clients who have started advertising on LinkedIn. We make it concrete with B2B LinkedIn advertising examples. We share everything from objectives to anonymous results and compare these with our own LinkedIn Benchmark.

Supporting account-based sales with LinkedIn campaign

LinkedIn is the platform with which you guarantee visibility among the decision-makers of companies you would like to do (more) business with. For a Dutch company active globally in the high-tech and semiconductor industry, we regularly build and optimize campaigns to support their account-based sales teams. The advantage of this approach is the very specific target audience, usually consisting of one or a few companies combined with the correct job titles. This allows us to address our target group very specifically.

Launching a B2B product with a LinkedIn campaign

Last year, one of our clients, a Dutch machine builder, introduced a new product offering both their existing and potential new customers a completely new packaging solution. How do you ensure that as many people as possible become acquainted with this new, innovative product? Through a right mix of different means such as the newsletter, articles, the well-known dealer network, and advertising on LinkedIn, we achieved a lot of visibility and website traffic in a short time. We targeted Retailers in both the Netherlands and Germany in this campaign.
In the full article, we share 3 more examples of LinkedIn ads:

• Apex Dynamics: Building brand awareness via LinkedIn
• Why LinkedIn is indispensable for supporting your trade show visit
• Why LinkedIn is the social media platform for lead generation

Curious about the other examples, the results of all examples, and our comparison with our LinkedIn benchmark? Read LinkedIn ad example: 5 examples of B2B advertising.

Do you want to know more about using LinkedIn for your company? We would love to discuss the organic and paid opportunities of LinkedIn with you!

Engagement on LinkedIn

What do you look at to assess whether the content you post on LinkedIn resonates with your target audience? Engagement rate is a tried-and-tested figure to measure your online performance. We like to look at this figure because it says something about your performance at a glance, making a comparison over different periods simple. That’s why we use the LinkedIn engagement rate in our monthly online marketing reports. However, there is one downside, LinkedIn only offers an engagement rate per post and not for your entire company page. We solved this by investigating which engagements LinkedIn includes in her engagement rate, so we can apply this calculation to the company page as well. LinkedIn counts the following engagements:

• clicks
• likes
• comments
• shares
• new followers

But, what is a good LinkedIn engagement rate? We provide the answer in the full article, LinkedIn engagement rate unraveled + benchmark.

LinkedIn advertising strategy

What LinkedIn advertising strategy yields you the maximum result? Effective advertising on LinkedIn involves more than just creating a nice post and boosting it with a budget. A relatively simple strategy can be set up in three steps, but what we find particularly important is considering your customer journey. Is your main goal new leads? First ask yourself whether your target audience is ready to share personal information in exchange for an interesting download. Or maybe they don’t know you well enough yet? Are you even known to your target audience, or do you want to introduce your brand to a new audience? Before you start, think about the customer journey. What does it look like, and in which phase is the group you want to address?
We are convinced that a good LinkedIn campaign fits into the customer journey. Therefore, especially when lead generation is the main goal, we work with multiple campaign phases and different campaign objectives. How many phases and which campaign goals these are, of course, depends on your audience and objective. In our full article, we share more about our vision on LinkedIn advertising strategy and guide you through the three steps to set up your own strategy:

• LinkedIn advertising campaign: phases and goals
• LinkedIn advertising budget
• Campaign tools

Our extensive explanation can be read in the article “LinkedIn advertising strategy”

LinkedIn benchmark: CTR, CPC, and CPM

What results can you expect from a LinkedIn campaign? For a comprehensive answer to that question, we look at our LinkedIn benchmark. Of course, you can expect impressions, clicks, leads, or applicants. But how many and at what cost is a more complex question, strongly dependent on your campaign goal. With our LinkedIn benchmark, we provide an answer to these questions. Our benchmark is based on campaigns we run for our clients, mainly B2B organizations active in Western Europe. They primarily aim to acquire new customers with LinkedIn advertising. In this part of our benchmark, we discuss the three campaign phases we use for this purpose: brand awareness, website traffic, and lead generation. Here, we mainly look at CTR, CPC, and CPM, but we also provide information about other KPIs, adjusted to the campaign goal.

Average CTR per campaign phase

What percentage of your impressions leads to a click? The Click-Through Rate (CTR) is an important KPI because it says something about the interest of the target group in your ads. Here, it’s important to know that LinkedIn doesn’t always measure the CTR in the same way. In a brand awareness campaign, many more clicks count towards this figure, such as a click to the company page or a like as a click. In campaigns aimed at website traffic, only a click to the landing page counts. But what is the average CTR?

• Average CTR brand awareness campaign: 0.49%
• Average CTR website traffic campaign: 0.74%
• Average CTR lead generation campaign: 0.93%

Average CPC per campaign phase

How much do you need to spend on average to achieve a click on LinkedIn? We assess this based on the Cost per Click (CPC). From our benchmark, we retrieve the average CPC per campaign phase:

• Average CPC brand awareness campaign: €3.47
• Average CPC website traffic campaign: €4.50
• Average CPC lead generation campaign: €4.94

Gemiddelde CPM per campagnefase

Op LinkedIn is je Cost Per Mille (CPM) misschien wel de belangrijkste kostenfactor om in de gaten te houden, het bedrag dat het kost om je advertentie duizend keer te tonen. Dit bedrag wordt, anders dan bijvoorbeeld het aantal kliks, altijd op dezelfde manier vastgesteld. Daarom vinden wij het een goede KPI om campagnes met elkaar te kunnen vergelijken. Ook is het een betrouwbare factor om je budgetten op te baseren en is het een vaak gebruikte (standaard) biedstrategie. Maar, wat is een gemiddelde CPM per campagnefase?

• Gemiddelde CPC merkbekendheidscampagne:  €15,01
• Gemiddelde CPC websiteverkeer campagne: €26,21
• Gemiddelde CPC leadgeneratie campagne: €36,66

Average CPM per campaign phase

On LinkedIn, your Cost Per Mille (CPM) is perhaps the most important cost factor to keep an eye on, the amount it costs to show your ad a thousand times. This amount is, unlike for example the number of clicks, always determined in the same way. Therefore, we find it a good KPI to compare campaigns with each other. It is also a reliable factor to base your budgets on and is a frequently used (standard) bidding strategy. But, what is an average CPM per campaign phase?

• Average CPM brand awareness campaign: €15.01
• Average CPM website traffic campaign: €26.21
• Average CPM lead generation campaign: €36.66

What can you do with these averages? We hope to provide you with insight into what you can expect from a LinkedIn campaign. Of course, this is just an average and can vary per market, target audience, and even, for example, during holiday periods. In our extensive article “LinkedIn benchmark results” we therefore go into much more detail on these KPIs. We don’t just show you the average, but also explain the range. The range offers much more nuance, with which we can even better assess whether a campaign is performing as expected or not. Additionally, we tell you more about other KPIs adjusted to the campaign goals, such as reach, the number of impressions per LinkedIn account, and the average costs for a LinkedIn lead.

LinkedIn advertising, what does it cost?

Let’s cut to the chase: yes, advertising on LinkedIn is more expensive than advertising on Facebook and Instagram and in many cases also more expensive than Google Ads. Yet, LinkedIn remains a promising advertising platform, thanks to its unique opportunities to reach a B2B audience. But, what can you then expect from the costs of advertising on LinkedIn? We break it down by campaign goal.

• On average, we achieve about 6,662 impressions among approximately 2,750 LinkedIn members for a €100 brand awareness campaign budget. An average of 2.4 impressions per LinkedIn account, therefore.
• When the campaign goal is video views, we achieve an average of about 6,125 views for €100 campaign budget.
• Is your goal website traffic? For €100 campaign budget, we achieve an average of 3,846 impressions and 22 clicks.
• Lead generation on LinkedIn is seen by us as a very valuable campaign goal. On average, we achieve 2.6 leads for €100 campaign budget.

Not sure what your campaign goal is but still want an estimate to calculate with? On average, we account for €16 for 1,000 impressions, but realize this varies greatly by goal and audience
Want to know more about LinkedIn advertising costs? In the full article, we lay out the various campaign goals and associated LinkedIn costs in detail.

Understanding and using LinkedIn CPM

The concept of CPM, Cost Per Mille, is probably familiar to you. After all, you encounter it on other advertising platforms as well. For those not yet acquainted with CPM: this is what you pay on average for every 1,000 impressions. CPM can be viewed both at the campaign and ad level and is a handy KPI to assess and steer your campaigns. Therefore, we delve a little deeper into LinkedIn CPM, so you know how to apply it optimally.

LinkedIn CPM is a relatively simple KPI that you can use in various ways to analyze and optimize your campaigns. We mention a number of ways:

• Cost control: a clear figure that quickly shows how much it costs to display your campaign or ad makes it easy to limit costs when the CPM runs too high.
• Budget planning: If you have an idea of what CPM to expect in advance, you can use this to align your budget and target audience size.
• Target audience optimization: the average CPM is not the same for every audience. Based on the CPM, you can make choices to approach your different audiences as cost-effectively as possible.
• Comparison with other platforms: CPM makes comparing different advertising platforms very simple: which platform reaches your target audience as (cost) effectively as possible?
• Measurability and ROI: Are the campaigns delivering the desired result? CPM is one of the factors with which you easily determine how a campaign performs.
• Optimization: like other campaign KPIs, CPM is a valuable factor to optimize on, thus improving your ad spend and campaign effectiveness.

Influencing factors CPM

If you want to optimize LinkedIn campaigns based on your CPM, you must understand how it works and which factors influence LinkedIn CPM. The most important factors are:

• Target audience
• Competition
• Seasons
• Bidding strategy
• Ad type
• Campaign goal
• Relevance of the ad
• Quality of the ad destination
• Network and devices

In our full article about LinkedIn CPM, we explain each of these factors in detail and offer a number of tips to use these factors for a lower CPM.

LinkedIn CPM is higher compared to other platforms

Indeed, LinkedIn is a relatively expensive advertising platform. But the real question is: are the higher costs worth it? This varies greatly per company, goal, service or product, and target audience. In our full article “LinkedIn CPM: a complete explanation” we are eager to explain why, especially B2B-oriented organizations, should not overlook LinkedIn as an advertising platform despite the higher CPM.

Getting started with advertising on LinkedIn

Want to start advertising on LinkedIn but don’t know where to begin? We help you get started with the following steps:

• Create a LinkedIn ad account
• Determine ad format: campaign goal and message
• Assemble target audience
• Determine budget
• LinkedIn Campaign Manager
• LinkedIn Insight Tag
• Launch campaign
• Optimize LinkedIn campaign

We briefly highlight the key steps. In the full article “advertising on LinkedIn” we explain each step in detail.

Determining the ad format

What message do you want to convey to your target audience? Consider the image and text, but also the goal of your campaign. The campaign goal greatly influences your ads, as the ad options vary per campaign goal. The table below provides you with a handy overview of possible ads per campaign goal.

Assembling the target audience on LinkedIn

On LinkedIn, you can set your target audience in several different ways. You start with the language and the geographical area. Only one language is possible per campaign, but you can mix geographical areas. After that, you can assemble your target audience based on different business characteristics such as the industry they work in, how many employees a company has, what functions people in your target audience perform, or for example, what education they have completed.
Additionally, on LinkedIn, you have different possibilities to assemble audiences outside the network, for example, based on your website traffic, an offline event, or your mailing list.

Determining the budget

Four factors influence your budget:

• Target audience size
• Number of advertising phases
• Ad format
• Duration

When setting a budget for your LinkedIn campaign, look not only at your available resources but try to make as good an estimate as possible of what this campaign needs in terms of budget. Your campaign significantly improves when you align the budget with your target audience size. We prefer sufficient visibility under a smaller audience over scattergun targeting a larger audience, just like with any other form of advertising, recognition of your brand and campaign requires repetition.
Also ask yourself how many advertising phases you need to convey your message well, which campaign goals fit here, and how long you want the campaign to run. In addition, it’s important that LinkedIn requires a minimum ad budget of €10 per day.

Optimizing the campaign

Once your campaign is up and running, you’re not done yet! Time to use the data from your campaign to optimize it. LinkedIn provides insights into the number of impressions, your reach, CPM, CTR, and CPC. In addition, the demographic report is very valuable: who are you currently reaching and how well does this align with the target audience you had in mind?
If you’re going to optimize your campaign, at least answer these questions for yourself:

• How many people are you reaching, and does this match the expectation of your target audience?
• How high is the CPM, and does this match your expectations and budget?
• How high is the engagement and CTR?
• How often does one person see an ad on average?
• How is the campaign distributed among your target audience?

Curious about the full plan to launch your LinkedIn campaign or want to read more about the above steps? Read our full article advertising on LinkedIn.