If your company sells products and services to other businesses, then you’re likely focused on marketing to your potential customers on LinkedIn. This social media platform is geared specifically toward professionals, after all, and therefore is one of the best places for a B2B company to be, according to marketing expert Robert Arloro.
In addition to producing content so you can organically be found on the platform, creating a successful LinkedIn ad campaign can prove extremely successful at marketing your business.
But, how can you ensure that they budget you’re dedicating to LinkedIn ad marketing is money well spent? A good place to start is to follow LinkedIn’s best practices for ad targeting.
Who’s Your Target Audience?
With nearly 67 million U.S. professionals on LinkedIn, it’s easy to see why the platform is so popular for B2B companies. However, not all of these professionals are likely customers.
Before diving into LinkedIn ads, it’s important to define your target audience. If you don’t already have buying personas, this is a great place to start. These should include the background of your customers, their goals, the challenges they face and how your solutions can help them.
You can help to create these buying personas on LinkedIn by analyzing your current customers and by identifying the key traits that could signify someone is a prospective customer. This could include the disposable income a person could be presumed to have based on their job.
Separate the Audience
After you conduct this exercise, you might find that you have multiple “buckets” your audience could fit into. Now, it’s time to separate this audience into different segments.
You could separate them based on demographics, interests, income, sector or past purchases. What this allows you to do is create separate LinkedIn ad campaigns that specifically target each of these buckets.
Instead of running one large, generic LinkedIn ad campaign, you could divide your budget into multiple smaller campaigns, with each message tailored specifically to that bucket. This could help make your ad campaigns more effective.
What is Your Competition Doing?
If you’re new to LinkedIn ads, it may seem overwhelming to try to start. Instead of trying to come up with something completely from scratch, Robert Arloro suggests checking out what your competition is doing.
If your main competitors are on LinkedIn, head over to their page to see what type of content they’re producing and how they’re disseminating and presenting it. Don’t forget to also check out the individual pages for the company’s top executives and marketers.
Conduct this research on a handful of your top competitors to see if there’s a common theme or two behind their marketing efforts. Then, see where you might be able to differentiate yourself from your competitors.
This research will help you not only come up with good ideas about the type of content that might work for LinkedIn ads but also how you can make your campaigns more effective than what your competitors are doing.
About Robert Arloro
Robert Arloro is a digital marketer and marketing consultant with more than a decade of experience in the field. He currently works with businesses of all sizes to help them reach their digital marketing goals. Robert’s expertise includes SEO, social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, and website optimization. When he’s not working, Mr. Arloro enjoys spending time with his family, playing soccer, and traveling.