- Reading time: 3 mins
- Topics:
- Advertising
- Social Media
Before you begin a social media advertising campaign, it is important to identify the best channels to reach your intended audience—and statistics often help determine the preferred social media platform for your target audience.
For LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, statistics show that out of its 240 million active users, 79% are 35 years or older. LinkedIn usage is also higher among those with a college degree and an income of $75,000+. Since the LinkedIn crowd is older and more professional, it is the perfect platform for business-to-business (B2B) advertising campaigns. Here are a few important options to be aware of with LinkedIn advertising.
LinkedIn paid ads are simple to set up and require a minimum $10 per day budget. You can choose to pay per click (PPC) or pay per 1,000 impressions (CPM), which should be determined on whether you aim to create awareness or get traffic to your website. Paid ads can be placed in a few different areas on LinkedIn—profile pages, home pages, inbox, search results pages, and group pages—and can include text and an image, or text only. LinkedIn ads have a fairly standard appearance, which consists of a headline, description, and URL of the landing page.
Similar to Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn also gives you the option to promote your post among organic posts—this is called sponsored updates. This advertising option is great for giving your posts more traffic through putting them directly in the feeds of professionals’ homepages. Sponsored Updates are also priced through PPC or CPM, and appear on desktop, tablet, and smartphone devices. Although the posts are marked as sponsored, users still have the option to comment, like, and share the post.
An important feature to remember for both paid ads and sponsored updates is the ability to target specific LinkedIn users down to their age, gender, company, job title, skills, and more. Targeting is very important in order to reach the decision makers of a company and put information relevant to them right in their LinkedIn feed or in the ad section of their page.
While LinkedIn has the largest network of professionals, LinkedIn advertising is not limited to B2B ads. LinkedIn ads can also be used to get more donors for a fundraising campaign, or applications for a job opportunity. Through paid ads and sponsored updates on LinkedIn, you can successfully reach a highly targeted audience and gain awareness of your brand.
