For companies working in B2B sectors that are heavily influenced by personal recommendation, a narrow digital marketing mix that focuses on search marketing alone has limited scope for success. Display / social media advertising has its place but is wasteful if you are judging any said traffic source purely on ROI.

LinkedIn users are logged into this platform to increase professional connections. The LinkedIn user is heavily encouraged to provide as much information as possible and the committed professional commonly obliges. By using LinkedIn’s B2B pay-per-click advertising model you will generate highly targeted visibility and as a result both website enquiries and LinkedIn leads. The benefits of pay-per-click are simple and well documented with the huge popularity of Google Adwords. We can then provide cost per lead information to conclude whether this advertising method is a cost effective channel for you moving forward.

LinkedIn advertising allows member targeting with the following data:

As with any other traffic source, you will be looking for an increase in tracked enquiries – normally in the form of emailed responses or telephone calls. LinkedIn advertising also generates LinkedIn leads where the user may choose to respond to you outside of these parameters and engage via your company’s LinkedIn profile. This is a nice feature because this makes the user still feel like they are within the original ‘social environment’ of LinkedIn as opposed to a cold online advert that is taking them away from what they were looking at initially. This is something that Facebook advertising suffers with in particular – despite all of these new channels the questions of appropriateness and relevancy still must be answered. Here is a screengrab of what the LinkedIn lead generation looks like:

Bear in mind also that there is an option to only generate traffic to your company LinkedIn page which is definitely worth a test.

Minimum daily spend for LinkedIn advertising is $10 per day at an average cost per click (CPC) of $2. There is a small need for manual intervention sometimes if you are (a) not reaching a wide enough audience or (b) not bidding enough per click. This is normally very obvious within the first 1-2 weeks of putting the advertising live.

Answering the demographic targeting questions with care really pays dividends – where possible we tend to use concrete data as opposed to assumptions. Meeting the recommended minimum audience of 100,000 members ensures that impression levels are optimal for you to get the traffic you need.

Ad creatives are brief we spend time on testing variations. Persona images work well as the LinkedIn ‘wall’ has a trail of professional head and shoulder type images. We follow guidelines for the text micro copy that LinkedIn have issued:

Headline: Catch the attention of your target audience with a clear and concise headline. The best headlines relate to your target audience.

Profile Link: Link your ad to either your profile or your company’s profile on LinkedIn. This link increases your credibility with your audience.

For the B2B world where you feel that a majority of your business will always be referral driven, you could well be right. You could well find that there are hundreds of thousands of highly targeted individuals that really need you – your product, your service and your industry experience. For this reason, I would say if you’ve tested Facebook advertising then testing LinkedIn advertising is imperative.