LinkedIn Advertising in 5 Simple Steps

LinkedIn is a fantastic platform to help bolster your marketing campaign. But knowing the most effective ways to run your ads is essential. If your ads are working well, it's much easier to run them alongside other ads that you may be running on other platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter.

These five simple steps should help get your marketing campaign on LinkedIn off to a good start:

Create a company page

The first thing you need to do is create a company page, which you can easily do from the LinkedIn homepage. Simply click on Interests, then select Companies from the drop-down menu, and then Create. You'll need to put in the name of your company and a few other details and then you can get started creating your ads.

Set up your campaign

Go to the LinkedIn Ads page to create your ad. Click Start Now and decide what type of ad you want to make. If you click on Sponsor Content this will allow you to add sponsored ads to your campaign. Once you're on the Campaign Manager dashboard, you'll be able to click on Create Campaign and have more control over your LinkedIn marketing.

Choose your ad format

You'll then be able to decide whether you want to create a Sponsored or Text ad. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but the latter is much more budget-friendly so that may make the decision for you. If you're just getting started, it's probably a good idea to get your head around Text ads first and then move on to Sponsored content later.

Start building your ad

You will then need to set the parameters for your campaign, such as what language you want your ad in and the name of your campaign. This information will only be internal so make it as descriptive as you can. You'll then need to start building the ad, by choosing its headline, body text, CTA, value and whether you want to perform any testing.

Most of these are self-explanatory; CTAs are important to improve the click-through-rate (CTR) of your ad, while entering a value such as '20% off' can give users an incentive to click on your ad. Testing allows you to create multiple versions of your ad and play around with the text and images to see which is most effective with your target audience.

Narrow down your targeting

LinkedIn allows you to target your ads to help improve your conversion rates. You can do this based on a number of different categories such as location, skills, gender, age and even what skills they have on their profile.