LinkedIn has 250+ million users. The vast majority of them are on LinkedIn for one of three purposes: 1) Find a Job, 2)Check Out a Job Applicant/Potential Job Applicant, and 3) Build Their Professional Network. Note that these are all business focused tasks. Thus, advertising on LinkedIn offers a unique opportunity amongst social networks. Namely, almost everyone is there in a business mindset.
In this post I'll show you how one company launched their LinkedIn PPC efforts and saw impressive results during their first month.
Getting Started with LinkedIn PPC
Anyone with a LinkedIn profile can access their self-serve ad platform by visiting http://linkedin.com/advertising while they're logged in. Once you've put in a credit card you're good to go. However, before you build your first campaign you need 4 things. I call them the 4 Cornerstones of LinkedIn PPC Success.
- Well-defined customer personas
- Emotion-evoking ad copy
- A compelling offer
- In-house conversion tracking
To illustrate this, let's jump right into our case study
Case Study
Who: SaaS company providing sales support software
Objective: Obtain qualified leads for the sales team to nurture and schedule product demos
Targeting: Industry, Job Title, Groups, Skills
Offer: Free ebook
Landing page (anonymized)
Results
439 Leads
20.47% Conversion rate
This did so well they had to slow it down!
So how did they do it? Let's look at their 4 cornerstones:
- Cornerstone 1: They mined their customer database for the job titles of their current customers & prospects. They looked at their current customers to determine which industries were most successful for them. They had a very active LinkedIn presence through their CEO and company page, so they were already participating in several groups. From launch we had a VERY good idea who we wanted to reach.
- Cornerstone 2: Their message was the equivalent of SEO is Dead for their industry. Think of anyone in SEO and how they react to someone telling them SEO is dead? Whether they agree or disagree, everyone has an opinion and swears their opinion is right. What is the SEO is Dead equivalent to your customers? What really grinds their gears/revs them up? This is the kind of ad copy you need.
- Cornerstone 3: We took their best-performing offers from Google AdWords & Bing, tweaked them so they were specific to LinkedIn, & ran with them.
- Cornerstone 4: They had in-house tracking and data analysts, so we knew very quickly what was working and how well.
If you have your cornerstones in place, your entire program will be built on a solid foundation and you can successfully advertise on LinkedIn.
* Image credit by atomicshark