Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn for Business

Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn for Business Page 21

by Ted Prodromou

  Elevate monitors your brand’s social media presence through an easy-to-use dashboard. When your social media team sees trending, relevant content on the social media networks, they can share it with your employees so they can amplify the content through their personal networks using the Elevate mobile app or through the LinkedIn desktop application.

  According to LinkedIn and their experience with Elevate’s customers, content shared by a company’s employees has twice as much engagement as content shared by the brand’s social media accounts. LinkedIn’s research also says sales people who share social content are 45 percent more likely to exceed sales quotas.

  To learn more about LinkedIn Elevate and see case studies, visit https://business.linkedin.com/elevate.

  DATA TOOLS

  LinkedIn provides a variety of tools to help you generate more leads and to monitor your LinkedIn ad campaigns. As I’ve mentioned numerous times, the LinkedIn advertising platform is evolving faster than any other section of LinkedIn, so you can keep up with the latest updates at https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/ads.

  LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms

  LinkedIn created Lead Gen Forms to make it easier for people to register for offers because more than 60 percent of members now access the site on mobile devices. Lead Gen Forms lets users fill out the form automatically using data from their LinkedIn profiles with just one click. This way, forms are always filled with accurate data and opt-in rates soar. For example, Bynder, a software company, used Lead Gen Forms to increase leads from its Sponsored Content by 400 percent and achieved a 20 percent conversion rate.

  Figure 20–6 on page 229 shows you how to set up your Lead Gen Form in a Sponsored Content ad campaign.

  LinkedIn Conversion Tracking and Matched Audiences

  LinkedIn finally created ad tracking and retargeting capabilities in 2017 and continues to enhance these tools today. Before then, there was no way to track your ad campaigns on the site unless you used third-party tools. With the release of Insight Tags and Conversion Tracking, we can track the performance of our campaigns and create Matched Audiences, which allow us to retarget page visitors with follow-up ads.

  The first step is to create an Insight Tag and install it on your website. The Insight Tag is a small piece of code that is installed on your website, just like you install code to track Google Analytics. Your marketing department and web developers can set this up for you. Log into your Campaign Manager by going to your LinkedIn homepage, select Work and Advertising. Next, select Insight Tag under Account Assets. Once your tag is created, as shown in Figure 20–7, copy the script and install it on your website into the body section of your site’s HTML, above the tag. If you use Google Tag Manager, which I highly recommend, you can add the Insight Tag script into your current Google Tag. You can learn more about Google Tag Manager at https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/tag-manager/.

  FIGURE 20–6. Lead Gen Forms

  FIGURE 20–7. LinkedIn Insight Tag

  If you have a WordPress website, you can download a free plugin like RO Marketing from Red Olive, which lets you install and manage your Insight Tag, among others. I recommend searching for WordPress plugins for LinkedIn Insights and see how many downloads and positive reviews the plugin has. Here’s a URL to view WordPress plugins designed for the Insight Tag: https://wordpress.org/plugins/search/linkedin+insight+tag/.

  Once your Insight Tag is installed on your website, add your site’s URL in the right column of LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager under Domains. LinkedIn will go to your URL and verify the tag is installed properly.

  Conversion Tracking

  Now that your Insight Tag is installed, you can set up your Conversion Tracking. The tag will track your conversions and manage your Matched Audiences, which I will explain later in this chapter.

  To create a new conversion to track, go to Account Assets and Create New Conversion. Figure 20–8 on page 231 shows a sample conversion setup form. Fill out the conversion name and select the type. Your choices are:

  ■ Add to cart

  ■ Download

  ■ Install

  ■ Key page view

  ■ Lead

  ■ Purchase

  ■ Signup

  ■ Other

  For more details about the conversion type, visit https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/67515.

  Next you can assign a value to the conversion. If you are selling a product, it’s easy to know the value of the conversion. If you are offering a whitepaper as a lead generator, you could assign the value of the product or service you hope to eventually sell them. This may not be the best measurement since you will not convert 100 percent of the people who download the whitepaper. For example, if you offer a $5,000 coaching package, you could assign the value of $5,000, but it may be better to assign a value of $50, which would be a 1 percent conversion rate.

  FIGURE 20–8. Conversion Tracking Setup

  I leave the Conversion Window at the default settings: Clicks at 30 days, and Views at seven days. This lets you set the amount of time that a conversion can be counted after someone clicks or views your ad.

  Select the campaign you want under Applied Campaigns. I usually select Site-Wide Insight Tag unless I’m tracking an event-specific conversion. In that case, I would need to create a separate pixel for that event. To complete the setup, enter the URL where you are sending the traffic from the click. You have three choices: Contains, Starts With, or Exact. If I’m driving traffic to a specific landing page on my website, I select Exact so I know how well that landing page is converting. For example, I would select Exact and enter “https://tedprodromou.com/li-chapter” if I were promoting a free chapter of this book. After you click Save, LinkedIn will verify your conversion to make sure it’s set up properly.

  Matched Audiences

  Now comes the fun part. If you are familiar with Facebook Custom Audiences and Google Audience Targeting, you’ll love LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences. There are two types of Matched Audiences, pixel-based and list-based.

  Pixel-Based Audience

  This is one of the most powerful online advertising tools in existence. Once you place the pixel or Insight Tag on your website, you can create a list, or audience, of everyone who visits that page. You can then run follow-up ads to those people if they didn’t complete the conversion you want to achieve. Research by HubSpot says people are more likely to convert after they see an ad at least seven to ten times. If they only see your ad once or twice, the likelihood of converting is low.

  Let’s say I set up a Sponsored Content ad to promote a free chapter of this book, which leads to an offer to buy the book after they download the chapter. Here’s the basic marketing funnel:

  1. A viewer clicks on my LinkedIn ad and is taken to a landing page, like https://tedprodromou.com/li-chapter.

  2. Once he views that page, a cookie is placed in their browser by the Insight Tag, and he is added to the Matched Audience I created for this campaign, called LinkedIn Free Chapter Visitor.

  3. If they fill out the web form and downloads the free chapter, a conversion is triggered, and they are placed into a different Matched Audience, called LinkedIn Free Chapter Downloaded and removed from LinkedIn Free Chapter Visitor.

  4. If they do not fill out the web form, I can run follow up ads to the LinkedIn Free Chapter Visitor Matched Audience to urge them to download the free chapter.

  5. If they do download the chapter, I can run follow-up ads to the LinkedIn Free Chapter Downloaded Audience and offer a video tutorial for $97 about optimizing your LinkedIn profile. (This is how you earn back your advertising costs and move them further down your marketing funnel toward your high-end products.)

  6. Once they are on my email list, they are a follow-up email sequence, where I can share free tips and entice them to invest in my Linked Accelerator course or one-on-one coaching.

  This basic funnel gets my campaign started. I’ll show you how to create high-converting Linke
dIn campaigns in the next chapter.

  List-Based Audience

  Another type of Matched Audience is created by uploading a list of contacts. The most common list upload is your email list. Once you upload your email list into a new Matched Audience, LinkedIn will try to match your email addresses to email addresses in LinkedIn profiles. Once this process is complete, you can run ads to this targeted Matched Audience. These ads can be very effective since they subscribed to your email list at some point and may already be customers. When they see ads from your company, your conversion rates should be very high because they are already familiar with your business.

  You can also upload a list of contacts who have purchased a specific product or service from you into a Matched Audience. When you run an ad campaign to promote that product or service, you can prevent those people from seeing your ads. This way you don’t waste money showing ads to people who don’t need the product.

  WEBSITE DEMOGRAPHICS

  Another great feature of the Insight Tag is the powerful analytics you receive about your website. In Figure 20–9 below, you can see one of LinkedIn’s Website Demographics reports. I placed the Insight Tag on my website, https://tedprodromou.com/, and all visitors there are matched to their LinkedIn profile demographics. This screenshot shows me the LinkedIn job functions of my website visitors from January 2018 until mid-August 2018.

  FIGURE 20–9. Website Demographics

  Business development professionals made up 43.7 percent of my website visitors during this period and were trending up. This tells me I need to be creating products and services geared toward those professionals. During the same time period, entrepreneurship was declining at only 11.1 percent of my visitors. I should stop writing sales copy targeting entrepreneurs and consultants, the two smallest categories, and focus on business development, marketing, and media and communication people.

  I can also break out this data by:

  ■ Company industry

  ■ Job title

  ■ Job seniority

  ■ Company size

  ■ Location

  ■ Country

  ■ Company

  Using this data, I know exactly which demographic is visiting my website, which helps me fine-tune my marketing messages. I can create products and services these people need and shorten my sales cycle dramatically.

  CONCLUSION

  As you can see, LinkedIn provides a variety of advertising solutions to help you generate leads, promote your company, and recruit new employees. LinkedIn ads are very targeted and very effective because you have access to so much demographic data. You can precisely target your advertising, so your conversion rates are often well above industry average.

  In the next chapter, I’ll show you how to write LinkedIn ads that convert like crazy.

  For additional updates and how-to videos, visit https://tedprodromou.com/UltimateGuideUpdates/.

  Chapter 21

  Creating LinkedIn Ads That Convert Like Crazy

  What makes one ad bring in sales better than another? We’ve all seen ads that grab our attention and make us want to learn more. We’ve also seen ads that leave us speechless, wondering what the heck the advertiser was trying to say.

  What is the difference between an ad that works and an ad that leaves us confused? It’s simple. Ads that get our attention aren’t visibly trying to sell us anything. Nothing turns us off more than being given the hard sell like a used-car salesman. We like ads that teach us something or entertain us. They turn off our noise filter so the advertiser can start to build a trusting relationship with us.

  Apple is one of the very best at this. Just watching an Apple commercial makes you feel like your part of the “in” crowd. Notice that Apple never tries to sell you a phone or a computer in its ads. Instead, it creates an experience where average people just like you and me are enjoying a perfect life, without a care in the world. They just happen to be using an iPad to surf the internet or talking to Siri on their iPhone while they’re living that carefree life. This makes us associate Apple products with an ideal lifestyle. As a result, we want to run out and buy an iPad or iPhone so we can be just like the people in the commercial. Who doesn’t want to feel like that? Owning Apple products has become a status symbol, like driving a Mercedes or BMW. Make sure you focus on creating an experience, and people will remember you.

  On the other hand, have you ever watched a commercial or seen a banner ad that left you feeling angry or annoyed? Or maybe the ad was so offbeat that you had no idea what company produced it and what product it was promoting?

  For example, ads with annoying jingles or irritating characters can turn us off. The ads with Flo from Progressive Insurance—the woman in the white apron, selling insurance like it’s a product in a box—are always considered among the most annoying commercials by my friends.

  Flashing banner ads with too much rapid movement are also considered ineffective. While the fast, flashy movements catch our eye, they can also turn us off, even if the ad has a great message.

  Ads that confuse us often try to sell us something before we even know what the product is. Sometimes the ad does a terrible job explaining how the product can help us, so we get confused and tune out. It may be a product we really need, but it tried to close the sale before we were ready.

  So how do we create text and banner ads on LinkedIn that seduce like the Apple ads do?

  SELLING THROUGH ADS ON LINKEDIN

  When creating ads for LinkedIn or any other online platform, don’t sell your product or service through the ad. Perry Marshall, online marketing expert and bestselling author of Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising and Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords, teaches that you are “selling the click,” which means your only goal is to get the viewer to click on the ad. Once they do, they are redirected to a landing page where you can continue the conversation you started in the ad. You want to make a connection with the reader and build a long-term relationship.

  If you are selling business-to-consumer (B2C) products, like you see on sites such as Amazon or Target, it’s OK to sell in your advertising because you can entice people to make impulse purchases. The price point for B2C products is much lower and the buying cycle can be seconds or minutes. LinkedIn isn’t a great place to advertise B2C products since it’s aimed at a business audience.

  B2B products and services have a much higher price point and a longer buying cycle—sometimes up to a year, so you have to build a long-term relationship with the buyer.

  On LinkedIn, you may be running ads for many reasons, including:

  ■ Lead generation so your sales reps can follow up with the prospects

  ■ Inviting people to follow your company or join your Group

  ■ Recruiting new employees for your company

  ■ B2B products or services promotions

  ■ Client case studies or success stories promotions

  ■ LinkedIn polls or promotions to gather business intelligence

  ■ Brand promotions so people will become familiar with your company

  LinkedIn advertising can be a very powerful tool if used correctly. As with any ad campaign, you need to create a plan and an objective. A well-executed advertising campaign will return huge dividends for your company.

  CREATING LASER-FOCUSED CAMPAIGNS

  If you are creating an ad campaign to generate leads, focus on generating leads. If you are running a branding campaign to publicize your company name, focus on the branding campaign. Do not try to kill two birds with one stone by combining a lead-gen campaign with a branding campaign. The mixed message will yield terrible results.

  When you see an online ad, you should be able to tell if it is meant to promote a brand, advertise a product, generate leads, gather information, recruit new employees, or build relationships. If the ad’s intent isn’t obvious, it’s probably a failure. Remember, people decide in a split second if an ad is relevant and move on if it’s not.

  Everyone sees thousands
of ads every day, so it’s hard to break through the clutter and grab someone’s attention. You need to interrupt a viewer’s thought pattern without being annoying. If you pique their interest, they’ll click on your ad to learn more. If you don’t grab their attention in a second or two, they move on and can subconsciously block you out in the future. This is why you need to carefully plan your ad campaigns to get the most for your dollar.

  LinkedIn has some of the most advanced targeting capabilities of any online advertising platform. You can display specific ads to specific job titles, companies, or Groups. A well-planned LinkedIn ad campaign includes tracking your results so you know which ads and targeting demographics work best for you.

  If you are creating ad campaigns for a web content management software company, you can target web developers, IT managers, marketing executives, project managers, and CEOs. You can display technical ads to the developers and IT managers, marketing-focused ads to the marketing executives, project-management-related ads to the project managers, and financial-related ads to the CFO and CEO.

  Many advertisers don’t take advantage of the site’s targeting capabilities, displaying all their ads to all job titles. The web developers thus see ads designed for the CEO, and the CEO may see the technical ads, which results in a lower conversion rate. Creating specific, relevant ads and displaying them to the appropriate target audience will improve your conversion rate significantly while reducing your advertising costs.

  WRITING EFFECTIVE ADS

  Remember when you were learning to ride a bike? You were probably nervous—maybe even scared—because you didn’t know what to expect. You were afraid you would fall and get hurt. Maybe you thought people would laugh at you. At first, you were unsteady and fell a few times. You might have even fallen a lot before you got the hang of it.

 

‹ Prev Next ›