Hi everyone!
There are different ways you can promote your business on LinkedIn to generate leads, drive traffic to your website or build brand awareness. In my past blog posts, I already talked about a few of them, which were all free of charge. Today, I want to talk about another method, this time costing money to the businesses employing it: LinkedIn Paid Ads.
You may think that advertising on the platform is only available for big companies. It’s not that simple. Small companies and start-ups could also use these ads, but not all of these businesses would benefit from them the same way. Indeed, there are many advantages, but also disadvantages of using them. To decide whether you should try LinkedIn ads, I recommend to ask yourself these questions:
Is my company’s industry and my products & services the right ones to advertise on LinkedIn?
What is the marketing goal that I would want to achieve through LinkedIn ads? Meaning am I trying to gain brand awareness, visibility or am I trying to directly grow my sales? Not all these goals fit with these ads.
To help you answer these questions and to learn more about the pros and cons for LinkedIn paid ads, I suggest to look at the video below in this article. But before looking at it, let me quickly mention the different types of ads available on LinkedIn.
Different Types of LinkedIn Ads
- Sponsored content: the audience you decide to target see your sponsored content in their feed. It has the look of a regular post, with the mention that it’s promoted. Like a normal post, people can like, comment and share it, which is great to create engagement. That’s the kind of ads I suggest to use.
- Text ads: they will appear on the right side of the screen and is composed of a headline, a small text and a small image. The one problem I see with text ads is that people tend to ignore them a little more than sponsored content. They use a space that is usually reserved for ads on many websites, which means that users will probably not even look into this area of their screen.
- Sponsored InMail: if you want to send a personalized message to some LinkedIn users, Sponsored InMail could be the solution. It might be the type of advertising that will catch a lot of attention at first, as people will see or get a notification saying they received a message. However, as it’s mentioned that it’s sponsored InMail, they will probably just see this as spam and won’t even read the content of the message. That’s why I don’t recommend to use this kind of ad.
- Dynamic ads: a little similar to text ads, they also appear on the right side of the screen. The difference comes from the data of your target audience that LinkedIn use to create personalized ads that include this specific data (name of the user, job title, profile picture, etc.). And as it’s dynamic, you don’t have to create yourself the ads for each person you target. LinkedIn does it automatically. It might sound nice, but I wouldn’t recommend this option for small companies and startups as it’s more for businesses that have big marketing and communication budgets.
And now, here is the video I mentioned a little earlier, enjoy it!
https://youtu.be/2XG-ICEJxsg
To sum up, LinkedIn paid ads is a lot more expensive than ads on other social media platforms or on Google Ads (source here). However the people you’ll reach will often be more interested in your products (especially B2B products and services), due to the good targeting LinkedIn is using, and which allows to directly advertise to key decisions makers, such as CEOs, directors, managers and so on. So in one sentence: by choosing LinkedIn ads over other options, you’ll privilege the quality over the quantity.
What is your opinion regarding LinkedIn advertising? Have you already experienced it? Do you see any other pros and cons? Let me know in the comments below. I’m sure there are many other advantages and disadvantages, depending on the characteristics of a company, its industry and so on.
In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning more about LinkedIn for small companies and start-ups, check my previous blog posts and don’t hesitate to comment and share them:
- 6 Reasons Why You Should Use LinkedIn for Your Small Business
- Everything You Need to Know About LinkedIn Posts
- 10 Free Ways to Gain Visibility on LinkedIn
- Best Practices of Small Companies and Startups on LinkedIn
Take care & have a lovely end of your weekend!
