Paid social: focus on LinkedIn Ads

  

What we called a few years ago, the social media broadcasting pole has changed a lot… Today, social platforms are real channels for acquiring qualified leads. And paid social , when properly configured, is a tool of formidable efficiency! Focus on the powers of LinkedIn Ads.

Social Paid: a little context

All companies now want to engage the right audiences on LinkedIn and recover qualified marketing leads (MQL). To achieve this, paid campaigns on LinkedIn are a great way to boost visibility and lead generation! With 16 million people registered and 3.7 million monthly active users, LinkedIn is the essential professional network in the B2B field in France.

The proof? According to a LinkedIn study , 79% of B2B marketers see social media as an important source of lead generation.

What are the steps to succeed on LinkedIn Ads?

To configure a campaign on LinkedIn , you will have to immerse yourself in the Campaign Manager , the platform's ad management system. But one thing at a time! Before launching your campaign, several preliminary steps are necessary: ​​define your priority objective and your targeting to ensure consistency and performance, determine the most suitable advertising format as well as the associated mechanics ... Let’s review these steps.

LinkedIn Ads: define your goals

First essential step: identify your priority objective. On LinkedIn, you will be able to seek to achieve three major sets of objectives: thought leadership, lead generation or lead nurturing.

LinkedIn ads to get known - awareness & thought leadership

Do you want to develop your visibility and notoriety to reach new targets? The deployment of campaigns with an “awareness” objective will allow you to support your expertise and generate qualified traffic on your landing pages. To do this, you need to promote information- bearing content that positions you as an expert on a subject. It is therefore necessary to pay great attention to the quality of the content promoted.

The awareness phase is one of the first objectives that a company wishes to achieve, before the lead generation campaigns, which will arrive in the medium term. It is important to develop the visibility of your business before hoping to be able to collect qualified leads!

LinkedIn ads to generate leads - lead generation

Different mechanisms are available to you for generating leads via LinkedIn. You can send the Internet user directly to your blog, to your website to convert it or to make sure that it does not leave the platform: the choice is yours! The lead generation can also afford to feed triggers content campaigns marketing automation.

Take the example of a white paper. You have the choice between distributing it by pointing to your landing page (recommended for campaign triggering content) or creating a “Lead Gen Card” advertisement (with an integrated form on the network which will fill in automatically). If you choose the latter option, we strongly recommend that you limit the number of fields in your form.

LinkedIn ads to nurture leads - lead nurturing

The lead nurturing aims to advance along your conversion funnel prospect. By being visible to this prospect throughout this funnel, by offering quality content, you will optimize the chances that it will appeal to you when it wishes to get started.

When we talk about lead nurturing on LinkedIn, we regularly talk about retargeting, a very interesting targeting technique of the platform. In fact, LinkedIn offers you the possibility of retargeting Internet users who pass on your website (on the entire site or on specific pages only) to the social network. The use of the Insight Tag is then necessary. You can also target a database (companies or email addresses), with the aim of re-recruiting potential prospects who have not yet been converted or retaining current customers.

LinkedIn Ads: define targeting

To reach the right people, targeting is a crucial step. And again, you have a choice!

First option, the best known: specific, personalized targeting.

It consists in establishing, according to your persona, a precise targeting by criteria:
company (company names, company relations, sector of activity, company size, etc.);
demographic data (gender, age);
education (diplomas, fields of study, member schools);
professional experience (years of experience, skills, functions, hierarchical levels, positions);
interests of the group or member.
The second, the formidable: the matched audience.

This technique allows you to build your audiences based on:
the audience of your website, by retargeting the people who pass on your website and your blog (in particular on very specific pages);
lists drawn from your marketing automation software, or your databases in CSV format (accounts or contacts);
similar audiences that allow you to find people with characteristics close to your best audience (website or imported lists).


But how to do it technically?
Go to your Campaign Manager, on your account.

Campaign performance
Accounts: contains your company account
Campaign groups: sorted by major themes
Campaigns: group together sub-themes
Advertisements: actions carried out on each of the sub-themes

Website demographics

The Insight Tag allows you to obtain important data about your Internet users
You can compare multiple audiences on your website

Account resources

Insight Tag: the installation code on your website.
You can also follow the domains that have a tag (check that the signal is active) and the conversions that you have recorded for your campaigns
Matched Audience: allows you to build an audience on your website data, load a list or create a similar audience
Red Lists: to exclude advertising spaces from the LinkedIn Audience Network (delivery to websites and apps outside of LinkedIn)
Lead Gen forms: to create “Lead Gen Card” advertisements (form integrated on LinkedIn as opposed to being referred to on a landing page)
Go to “Account Resources” and click on “Matched Audiences”

You must select your targeting between:

pages that start with a URL (to target a set of pages on an identical topic);
pages that have an exact URL (to target a specific page, for example a landing page );
URLs containing the specified text (to target based on keywords).

You must select the list of prospects or customers you want to target. Please note, LinkedIn recommends importing lists with at least 1,000 accounts (company name and website) or 10,000 contacts (email address).

To create a similar audience, you must select an existing audience on your account (which can be one of the above audiences: website or list).

Tip: to have qualified conversions, you can cross the behavioural data of your audience with retargeting and a similar audience, for example. Your audience will then be larger and more qualified.