In the age of social media, leveraging a social professional network like LinkedIn to drive your own sales leads is becoming increasingly important.
₁DemandWave 2017 state of B2B Digital Marketing Report; ₂LinkedIn Audience 360 study
First off – Establish your brand on LinkedIn
Attract followers & build brand awareness by posting content on company LinkedIn page. Brand your page, attract more followers & engage your employees with content & campaigns relative to them. Through the use of publishing & sharing of content, you can begin to create engaging relationships based on news & trending topics within your industry.
So how do I get leads?
Quick answer: Generate leads directly from your news feed with Sponsored Content – using the following 8 tips to reap the rewards.
1. Identify Your Target Audience
Before you give content a paid boost with Sponsored Content, it’s important to understand your buyer persona. Who is your ideal customer? How might they make a purchasing decision? Look at the following;
- Industry
- Job Function
- Experience
- Pain points that your content/product/service is curing.
2. Relevant Target Audience
Needless to say, there is a mass amount of targeting options available on LinkedIn. It’s very easy to focus on a particular niche target, however, if your audience is too small your campaign will not be effective – worse still you may not even generate enough data to improve upon future campaigns. Hone it, but remember this is an exercise to learn & improve from and this requires results and data.
3. Choose the Right Content to Sponsor
So you’ve already posted a piece of content and it’s performing well organically with your audience. – start with these popular posts that align with your marketing goals.
Content for lead generation?
Gated content works best in this scenario, such as gated eBooks, webinars & guides. Also strong blog posts & reports which are ungated but with a clear & strong call to action.
4. Select Compelling Creative Assets
Like a magpie seeking out that glittering piece of treasure – your sponsored content has a limited window of time to capture the attention of your potential customer.
“First, content should always have a compelling visual that accompanies it. We recommend using rich media images versus a standard thumbnail image – you can get up to 38% higher CTR with a bigger visual.” Linkedin.
Text: Short with the value of the content clear for all to see. Quotes / Stats followed swiftly with a beautiful call to action will perform best. Video content if you can produce it is a great way to get noticed in a busy newsfeed. Top tip, the introduction has to be clear & illustrate value, use subtitles (no-one plays audio out loud anymore).
5. Create an A/B Testing Strategy
The campaign manager tool allows you to run multiple campaigns at once for testing. These are vital to help optimise your results.
Remember that TRUE A/B testing means changing only ONE variable at a time. For example 2 different audiences; for this test keep all creative, headline, offer and CTA identical for both audiences – otherwise you won’t have a clear indicator allow for improvement.
6. A/B Test Your Creative Content
You can run multiple creative assets for the one campaign, so testing visuals is a good way of optimising your campaign. 4-6 visuals simultaneously work best. Key tip: when starting off, select ‘rotate variations evenly’ which gives all your creatives equal spend to gain valuable insights in order to effectively focus on the best performing creatives!
7. Bidding and Budgeting Strategy
How do you best spend your budget?
Bigger ambitiously, we suggest going above the suggested range if within your spend. LinkedIn ad auctions are second-price auctions, which means the highest bigger only pay enough to beat the second-highest bid (not the full bid). Pays to be aggressive with your bidding.
8. Monitor, Report, and Optimize
Evaluation & Improvement = Journey of success with sponsored adverts.
In fact, LinkedIn’s ad auctions take that improvement into account.
“Past performance is combined with your bid to determine the winner. In other words, a lower bid with a higher performance score can win an auction over a high bid/low score combo. So it pays to keep monitoring and optimizing.” LinkedIn.
So stop reading this article, and go plan your next LinkedIn campaign!
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