B2B advertising: The benefits of LinkedIn Advertising

What is the most efficient way for a B2B company to reach the decision-makers in their target audience? LinkedIn might not be the social media platform we wake up to in the morning, but it is undeniably the premier professional social network in the Netherlands. Your target audience turns to LinkedIn for inspiration and information. If you want to succeed in B2B online marketing, LinkedIn is a non-negotiable part of your strategy. In this article, we share the five most important benefits of advertising on LinkedIn. Of course, we aren’t blind to its shortcomings, so we’ll also discuss the platform’s biggest drawback.

Many organizations maintain an organic presence on LinkedIn; they have a company page, share content, and perhaps actively encourage their colleagues to share and like these posts. However, this only reaches a limited circle; people who don’t know the brand yet will never see this content. This is exactly where LinkedIn Advertising makes the difference.

Five benefits of LinkedIn Advertising

The most compelling reasons to allocate budget to LinkedIn Advertising in 2023 are:

• LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional social media platform
• Your competition isn’t using LinkedIn Advertising yet
• LinkedIn Advertising offers a unique opportunity: measurable outbound marketing
• Advertising on LinkedIn is highly cost-efficient
• Reach your exact target audience and gain deeper insights into them

The power of the network: The world’s largest professional hub

Globally, LinkedIn has over 850 million members, and that number continues to grow annually. While the majority of these members are in the United States, LinkedIn is exceptionally popular in Europe and several Asian countries. In the Netherlands alone, 11 million people are active on the platform.

What makes LinkedIn unique in the social media landscape is its professional focus. Virtually every member is linked to an organization or educational institution, lists their job title on their profile, and can even be linked to specific skills.

This is the platform where your decision-makers and potential clients go to find business inspiration and information. It allows you to engage them proactively—long before they start Googling for a specific product, solution, or service.

Your competition hasn’t caught on yet

Although advertising on LinkedIn is certainly not new, relatively few companies are actually doing it. While large, international organizations are active, the specific niches that would benefit most from LinkedIn’s precision haven’t discovered it yet—or simply don’t know how to leverage it. This makes LinkedIn “uncharted territory” where you can easily gain a competitive edge.

Curious if your competitors are running ads? You can check any company page. Go to the page, click on “Posts,” and then select the “Ads” tab.

A unique opportunity: Measurable outbound marketing

Which online marketing channels are you currently utilizing? Almost every organization has a website and is active on a few social media channels. Newsletters, content marketing, and Google Ads are usually the pillars of a solid online strategy—and for good reason. They build brand visibility and drive traffic. However, LinkedIn Advertising offers a unique opportunity.

Newsletters and organic social posts speak to your existing contacts and (potential) clients. A strong SEO strategy and well-structured Google Ads campaigns capture people who are already searching for your solution. But in reality, that is only the tip of the iceberg. What about the companies that don’t even know your brand exists yet?

LinkedIn Advertising allows you to approach your target audience before they start looking for information. Of course, you could try this on Facebook, at a trade show, or via a trade magazine, but no other channel offers the same level of accuracy for an outbound campaign.

This is what makes LinkedIn a game-changer. No other platform allows you to build an audience based on job titles, company names, or years of experience with such precision. Because everyone uses LinkedIn as their digital CV, the targeting accuracy is unmatched for reaching a professional B2B audience.

Why LinkedIn Advertising is highly cost-efficient

How much do you pay for an ad in a trade journal or a booth at a major exhibition? In our experience, those costs are often comparable to—or significantly higher than—a targeted LinkedIn campaign. The key difference? On LinkedIn, you decide exactly who sees your message. You aren’t paying for “waste”; you are only paying for impressions from relevant professionals.

Depending on your goals and audience size, you can expect a Cost Per Mille (CPM) of €7 to €45 for awareness, video view, or traffic campaigns. For lead generation campaigns, this can rise to €80. When planning your budget, remember that goals, audience size, number of campaign phases, and duration are all key factors. LinkedIn also requires a minimum daily spend of €10.

Maximizing your ROI requires specific expertise. While you can build this knowledge in-house, many choose to work with experts like Merkelijkheid. We help you define the perfect audience and build high-performing campaigns. We monitor the results closely and provide regular updates, keeping you in the driver’s seat. Want to see how we do it? Get in touch with us.

Precision targeting: Know your audience

LinkedIn is the ultimate platform for specific targeting. By narrowing your focus, you ensure your message only reaches relevant people, which makes your messaging more effective and your budget go further. An overly broad audience is expensive and hard to optimize.

How specific should you go? It depends entirely on your campaign goal. We run campaigns targeting one specific industry at companies with fewer than 200 employees—which in the Netherlands might mean an audience of 1,000 people. On the other hand, we also run Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns targeting a single global corporation across multiple countries, reaching thousands of key stakeholders.

Broadly speaking, you can build your audience based on:

• Company (name, industry, size)
• Demographics (location, gender, age)
• Education (degrees, fields of study)
• Job Experience (titles, seniority, years of experience)
• Interests and traits

Every campaign is a learning opportunity. The results reveal which industries, companies, and job profiles are engaging most—even if it’s just discovering one extra company you didn’t know existed. This feedback is incredibly valuable and is one of LinkedIn’s greatest benefits.

The biggest drawback of LinkedIn

It’s clear we are fans of the platform, but we have to be honest about its shortcomings. By far the biggest disadvantage is the lack of transparency in the standard reporting results.

While your campaign is running, LinkedIn provides valuable insights into industries, companies, and job titles. However, the Campaign Manager limits these views to 25 rows. This means you only see the top 25 results based on impressions or clicks, even if your ad was shown to hundreds of different companies. Furthermore, LinkedIn’s strict privacy protections—while great for individuals—mean you can’t always track exactly where every click originated from.

This can be a drawback when you need granular data to fine-tune a campaign. While you can try to extract more info by looking at daily breakdowns, the results will still be dominated by the largest segments of your audience.

Unlocking all LinkedIn data

To solve this, we developed our own proprietary tool to extract data directly from campaigns. This allows us to see all companies engaged, enabling us to optimize with far greater precision. Curious about what this data could mean for your brand? We’d be happy to show you during a personal consultation.

Still not sure if LinkedIn is right for you? Let’s have a conversation. We’ll use data and our experience to show you why LinkedIn Advertising is a must for your 2023 budget. Want to learn more? Read all about LinkedIn Advertising here.