Driving traffic and generating sales via Linkedin Advertising

A real-world example of what works for LinkedIn Advertising

What did we do?

I recently launched a B2B social media campaign on LinkedIn and since I noticed there were relatively few live examples, I thought I would share what we found worked or not to help others who are wondering “is it worth it?” and “how do i do it?”.

The background to the campaign was that we had launched a new service for recruitment professionals and we wanted to build brand awareness to associate ourselves with the service and get signups to the service. You will have noticed I can’t be too specific about the service for confidentiality reasons, but I can be more open about how we optimised the ads which I’ll share at the end of the post.

How did we do it?

We were featuring four different products on our website. These were built as Landing Pages with Google Analytics campaign tagging used to track traffic from LinkedIn to the individual product landing pages

Who did we target?

We used the LinkedIn advertising system to target professional buyers, working for organisations of 500 employees or more, in sectors where we currently operate, in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, India and the Middle East.

We saw that 85,000 people on Linkedin met this criteria. So to control spend we set a budget of $200 maximum spend per day with a maximum cost per click of $20. The average cost per click was $7.

Here's an example of how the targeting selection works:

Image credit: Tim Grimes - Return on Digital

What was the result?

We were please with the results! For an approximate spend of £3000 per month we yielded sales of £30,000 direct from the adverts.

We drove 1500 + screened and qualified individuals to the landing pages via the targeted advertising. Using the Google Urchin platform, we were able to see what users did after clicking on the ads – what did they do next, what did they look at, how long did they spend on specific pages, where did they leave?

We also generated a high number of leads for follow up due to registration requirements for certain offerings.

Next steps?

Using the consulting services offered by Trovus, a monitoring code could be put on the specific landing pages. This registers the IP address and tells us what companies and in which locations are looking at our tools, giving us the opportunity to create a rich customer profile of need, want and requirement for prospective companies.

What we learned/ What to look out for:

Finally, here’s our five takeaways:

• Use the right tone-of-voice. The language that was used to drive traffic was not necessarily the same as that to promote the products through other channels. E.g – The language used on our most successful ad was the one hated most by my boss!
• Always use A/B testing. Think about your audience and what is likely to attract them to click on your links – i.e. what is their problem and why are you the best person to offer a solution?
• Make your copy count. You have 25 characters in your top line and 75 characters in your second line. Pose a problem/ ask a question in line 1 and offer a solution in line 2.
• People love quizzes. Give people an opportunity to benchmark themselves against their colleagues and competitors. And, they’re prepared to submit their contact details which helps with lead generation. Our Emotional Intelligence quiz has had approx 3000 clicks from Linkedin in 6 months.
• Get your bidding strategy right. With Linkedin you set your budget per click. The average amount will be stated when you set the budget, however I advise that, if you’re prepared to take the risk, bid far upwards of the average as like ebay, you only outbid the next guy. The reason for this is that you ad is worth more to Linkedin so you get more impressions. E.g. average bid range of $5.50-$6.50. The max bid was set at $20 however the average cost per click was $7. All it meant was that we increased our visibility.

Thanks to Alan Duncan for sharing his advice and opinions in this post.Alan Duncan is a digital marketing strategist who specialises in the lifecycle management of projects and initiatives designed to increase brand or product awareness in competitive markets.He is experienced in the creation and execution of online marketing strategies and in all aspects of website development, with sound knowledge of cutting edge technologies.

If you’d like to know more about how Alan can help your organisation, please connect with him on Linkedin