Adsmurai 
LinkedIn Ads represents a strategic way to achieve your business goals in a purely professional environment. In an increasingly competitive business world, LinkedIn advertising stands as a critical tool to stand out from the crowd, connecting companies with highly targeted and engaged audiences.
In this article, we will explore how to make the most of this platform, from the basic definition of LinkedIn Ads to advanced strategies to maximize ROI, thus consolidating your presence and relevance in the online professional arena.
What are LinkedIn Ads and why advertise on the platform?
LinkedIn Ads represent a powerful advertising tool within the ecosystem of the world's largest professional social network. With more than 850 million users and approximately 59 million companies with a presence on the platform, LinkedIn offers a global reach to connect with highly qualified and engaged audiences. This platform not only provides networking and professional development opportunities, but also serves as a space to build strong business communities and establish trusting relationships.
Source: Linkedin
Promoting products and services through LinkedIn Ads offers a number of unique advantages. By being immersed in a professional and trusted network, brands can leverage the platform's inherent legitimacy and security, which in turn helps build a community committed to their values and goals. The ability to accurately target based on professional criteria, such as location, area of study, work experience and more, allows advertisers to specifically address their target audience, thus maximizing the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns. Let's take a closer look at audience targeting on the platform.
Audience segmentation in LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn Ads offers a variety of targeting filters ranging from geographic locations to specific professional profile details, giving advertisers the ability to define and reach their target audience. These filters include detailed options such as company name, company size, industry, job title, role, skills and interests, providing precise targeting that ensures ads are delivered to the right people at the right time.
For example, an advertiser seeking to promote financial consulting services might specifically target financial industry professionals with more than 10 years of experience, located in a particular geographic region and who have shown an interest in investment and risk management issues. This detailed targeting capability allows advertisers to create highly relevant and personalized messages, thereby increasing the likelihood that users will interact with the ads and take desired actions, such as clicking on a link or completing a form.
In addition, LinkedIn Ads enables the creation of predictive audiences, which extend the reach of the campaign by identifying people with similar characteristics to an existing data source. This is achieved by applying artificial intelligence to available data, which automatically generates a new custom audience that can be used in campaigns. This functionality is especially useful for reaching broader but relevant audiences, thus increasing the chances of conversion.
Also, through the Matched Audiences functionality, advertisers can perform retargeting of website visitors, interactors with specific ads and more. This means they can target people who have already shown interest in their brand or products, increasing the likelihood of conversion.
Together, this wide range of targeting options allows advertisers to maximize the relevance and effectiveness of their LinkedIn Ads campaigns, ensuring that their messages reach those most likely to be interested in their products or services. But what is the optimal format for each campaign?
Ad formats in LinkedIn campaigns
In LinkedIn campaigns, advertisers have at their disposal a wide variety of advertising formats designed to achieve different marketing objectives and reach the audience effectively.
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Sponsored Content: These ads appear natively in users' news feeds from the advertiser's LinkedIn page. Ideal for generating leads, increasing outreach and building relationships, the ads can be in single image or carousel format. The video format offers a powerful way to capture the audience's attention, achieving up to 3 times more interaction.
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Sponsored Message: This option allows you to reach your audience in a personalized way, sending direct messages to their inboxes. It is especially useful to generate leads through specific segmentations.
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Dynamic Ads: With this format, advertisers can define their marketing objectives and highlight their brand with highly personalized messages. This type of ad is automated and fast, being useful to promote the company, gain followers, generate traffic and convert leads.
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Document Ads: These ads allow the promotion of documents directly in the LinkedIn feed, where members can easily read and download content without leaving the platform.
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Text Ads: Targeted to the right column or top of the LinkedIn page on the desktop version, text ads allow you to segment your audience with precise filters to reach the right prospects and generate qualified leads.
To maximize results, it is advisable to combine different ad formats. By optimizing campaigns with more than one format, advertisers can increase their brand visibility, reach different audience segments and increase the effectiveness of advertising messages. Strategically combining ad formats on LinkedIn allows for a more comprehensive and successful campaign, tailored to each company's specific marketing objectives.
Best practices for creating effective LinkedIn Ads
Within the competitive LinkedIn environment, creating effective ads becomes a crucial aspect of standing out and achieving marketing goals. Discover 4 best practices to maximize the impact and effectiveness of your ad campaigns on this platform:
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Engaging visual design and planning varied creatives: Use high-quality images and videos that are relevant to your target audience. Be sure to change your creative regularly to avoid user fatigue and maintain the freshness of your ads over time.
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Clear and concise messaging and adaptation to micro-audiences: Communicate your message clearly and concisely, highlighting the benefits of your product or service. Customize your messages to adapt them to different segments of your target audience, which will increase the relevance and engagement of your audience.
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Message personalization and competitor ad analysis: Use LinkedIn's advanced targeting to target specific groups of professionals and customize ad content based on their interests and needs. In addition, analyze the ads of your competitors and other advertisers in your industry to identify trends and gain insights for your own advertising strategy.
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Optimize for mobile devices and use video as a primary tool: Make sure your ads are optimized for viewing on mobile devices and use relevant and engaging video to communicate your message. Include subtitles in your videos to ensure that your message reaches even those users who cannot turn on sound.
By integrating these practices into your LinkedIn advertising strategy, you can create more effective ads that generate interaction, improve brand awareness and increase the chances of closing new customers.
Strategies to maximize ad performance on LinkedIn
Maximizing ad performance on LinkedIn is becoming a priority for companies looking to stand out and deliver strong results. In this section, we will explore key strategies that allow you to maximize the potential of this professional platform.
Website visitor retargeting with Insight Tag
Retargeting is a powerful strategy that allows you to target users who have previously interacted with your website. With LinkedIn's Insight Tag, you can identify who is accessing your sites and gain valuable demographic data to optimize your campaigns. By targeting these users with direct marketing, you increase the likelihood of conversion by keeping your brand on their radar and transforming interest into concrete actions.
Personalizing ads based on the customer's buying cycle
Every customer goes through a unique buying cycle, from discovering a need to making a purchase decision. Personalizing your LinkedIn ads based on the stage each potential customer is in can significantly increase the relevance and effectiveness of your messages. Use behavioral data and preferences to tailor your ad content and deliver targeted solutions that resonate with the customer's needs at each stage of the buying process.
Using Lookalike Audience to find new prospects
LinkedIn's Lookalike Audience feature allows you to expand your reach by finding new prospects that share similar characteristics with your existing audience. By identifying profiles that resemble your current customers or users who have interacted with your ads, you can reach a broader, more qualified audience. This strategy is especially effective for finding new prospects that have high conversion potential, as they share similar attributes and behaviors to your most valuable customers.
By implementing these strategies effectively, you can maximize the performance of your LinkedIn ads, increase the effectiveness of your campaigns and get solid results that drive business growth.
Case Study: OBS Business School on LinkedIn
OBS Business School, founded in 2006 as the first business school to offer 100% online classes in Spanish, has been a pioneer in offering MBA and Master's programs to future business leaders. With more than 33,000 students from 80 countries and an outstanding reputation in the academic world, OBS has established itself as an institution of reference in the world of online education.
In collaboration with the University of Barcelona and backed by Grupo Planeta Formación y Universidades, OBS was looking to improve its lead acquisition strategy to increase enrollment conversions in its courses. To address this challenge, they partnered with Adsmurai and chose to integrate LinkedIn into their advertising campaigns.
The strategy implemented focused on using LinkedIn's sponsored content and InMail (Sponsored message) campaigns, especially targeting the Latin American market. These options allowed OBS to maximize the quality of the leads by identifying the target students of each program and defining an audience related to the school. Through creative and strategically designed communications, OBS was able to connect its educational offerings with a quality audience, ready to convert.
The results obtained were highly satisfactory. The LinkedIn campaign generated a 289% increase in lead volume, with an average conversion-to-enrollment rate of 4% during 2022. In addition, there was a significant increase in CTR (Click-Through Rate), which reached an average of 1.96% in 2022, thanks to the increased presence of OBS on the platform.
OBS Business School's success story on LinkedIn demonstrates the potential of this platform to drive tangible results in terms of quality lead generation and conversions. By leveraging segmentation tools and the ability to reach a highly interested audience, OBS was able to improve its recruitment strategy and strengthen its position as a leader in online education.