LinkedIn Advertising Strategy

Which LinkedIn advertising strategy delivers maximum results? In this article, we show you how to create a LinkedIn advertising strategy that helps you achieve your marketing and sales goals. We start with the guiding factors, objectives, and target audience. Furthermore, we explain the campaign objectives LinkedIn offers, how to match them to your customer journey, how to choose your budget, and which campaign assets you can use.

LinkedIn advertising strategy

What do you want to achieve with LinkedIn advertising? Do your campaigns serve a specific product, do you want to increase brand awareness, generate new leads for your sales team, or share information with your target audience? All this is possible with LinkedIn Advertising. In this article, we guide you through the following steps:

• LinkedIn advertising campaign: phases and objectives
• LinkedIn advertising budget
• Campaign assets

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Clearly define the goal and target audience of your campaign beforehand. Then you can easily determine how many phases your campaign consists of, which campaign objectives you will use to achieve this, how much budget you need, and which campaign assets you will use.

LinkedIn advertising strategy: phases and objectives

Now that you know what you want to achieve, the question is: how will you achieve this? LinkedIn offers various campaign objectives, each focusing on a specific result:

• Brand awareness – ad impressions
• Website visits – website visits
• Engagement – interaction with ads
• Video views – video views, at least 2 seconds
• Lead generation – number of leads
• Talent leads – applications (Recruiter accounts only)
• Website conversions – goals achieved
• Applicants – applications

The difference between lead generation and website conversions is that with lead generation you use a lead form on LinkedIn. If your focus is purely on leads, this adds an extra click in the process, with the idea that you will collect more leads this way. However, it also means you do not send people to your landing page, potentially removing part of the experience. Do you have a well-converting landing page that truly adds value for your potential leads? Then website conversions is also a suitable objective to collect leads.

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LinkedIn advertising strategy: don’t forget your customer journey!

What does the customer journey of your target audience look like? And which phase does your LinkedIn campaign belong to? For example, if you want to distribute a series of recorded videos to generate more brand awareness, you are almost at the beginning of the customer journey. But if you want to collect leads, you are much further along that journey. We believe that good LinkedIn campaigns fit within the customer journey, which is why we almost always work with multiple campaign phases and different campaign objectives. How many campaign phases and which objectives you use obviously depend on your goal and target audience.

A commonly used goal for our clients is downloading a whitepaper in exchange for contact details, a lead generation campaign. At the start of the campaign, the target audience is often still relatively unfamiliar with the brand and its products or services. In practice, we find that we achieve the best results with the following LinkedIn advertising strategy:

• Brand awareness
• Website traffic
• Lead generation

Sometimes this is supplemented with a campaign focused on video views. This way, we first show the target audience an ad a few times at relatively low cost to promote brand awareness and possibly a video views campaign. Then we want to share some knowledge or a great customer case through the campaign focused on website traffic. By first running brand awareness and website traffic campaigns, we increase the number of leads from the lead generation campaign. There is already some recognition of the brand and the offer.

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Budget for LinkedIn

You can determine your budget in two ways:

• How much do you think you need to serve your entire target audience?
• How much can acquiring new (potential) leads cost?

If you base it on your target audience size, you can reasonably estimate how much budget you need to show your campaign to (almost) your entire target audience based on the average CPM. For example, our benchmark showed that the average CPM of a brand awareness campaign is €15.01, while for a campaign focused on website traffic it is €26.21. But beware, a thousand impressions does not equal the reach of a thousand unique members! So it is wise to take your budget a bit higher if you want to reach the entire target audience. We think of +25%, for example.

If you determine the budget from an internal perspective, you assess how much it may cost to acquire new leads. Don’t yet have insight into how much a new lead may cost? At least gather the following information:

• How much does a new customer generate on average in the first year?
• How much does a new customer generate on average during the entire period they remain a customer?
• How many leads do you need on average to acquire one new customer?

Based on this information, you can determine how much a new lead is worth, both short and long term, and how much a new lead may cost.

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Campaign assets

Now that you know your budget and which campaign phases you will apply to achieve your goal, you can also choose and possibly produce your campaign assets. On LinkedIn, you can use the following ad formats:

• Images (single and carousel)
• Video
• Text
• Document
• Event

Additionally, you also have the option to advertise with personal messages and chat messages. Note, not every ad format is available for every campaign objective.

Do you want to know more about using LinkedIn for your company? We would love to talk with you about the organic and paid opportunities of LinkedIn! Want to read more? We gather all information on our page about LinkedIn advertising.