LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking service.
To create a campaign, you’ll first need the following:
- A LinkedIn account
- Basic understanding of your audience
- Ad copy
- Video (optional)
Sponsored updates are a great way to get your message directly onto a user’s home feed. The offering is comparable to sponsored content on Facebook, and it is a good tool to use to amplify your content. For example, if you have a great story, interview or other piece of content, you can post it through your company’s LinkedIn account and then make it a sponsored update.
To create an ad we need to fill in a few fields:
- Campaign Name: Create a name for your campaign. I recommend following any naming conventions you use on other platforms.
- Ad Language: Select the language for your ad.
- Media Type: Select either a basic advertisement that follows the traditional format, or a video ad that includes a play button on the image.
- Ad Destination: This will allow you to link your ad to either a LinkedIn profile page or an external URL. If you are driving traffic to your website, I highly recommend that you tag your URLs so that you can measure the engagement and quality of traffic in your analytics platform.
- Ad Design: Create your headline and description. Note that LinkedIn is a bit limited in this regard. The headline has a 25-character limit, and the description cannot exceed 75 characters (2 lines). You can also add your imagery here. Note that as you edit your ads, a thumbnail preview appears on the right side.
- Ad Variations: LinkedIn allows you to create multiple variations of ads. For each ad, you can choose either an external URL or a page on LinkedIn. Note that the choice of location does not affect the price — it costs just as much to send traffic to external pages as it does to send it to internal pages. Also, keep in mind that LinkedIn advertising is push advertising, not pull. That means that your audience is not actively looking for your product or service, so you have to work harder to make sure your ad stands out and captures the user’s attention.
