LinkedIn Marketing Strategy Explained in simple steps

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LinkedIn Marketing Strategy guidelines to help you with your certification exam. The guidelines for LinkedIn Marketing Fundamental is here.

Brand Awareness

The Principle of all-weather marketing, even going through challenging times, is don’t cut the ad budget. Most of the marketing effects are long-term. Take more Share of Voice when most other companies tend to cut budgets.

LinkedIn Page enables you to react and comment on hashtags associated with your organization.

LinkedIn Pages allow you to access your Follower analytics and Updates analytics.

Any Page Admin is allowed to use LinkedIn proprietary Content Suggestion Tool. The tool allows discovering trends.

The best practice for strong thought leadership content is to offer new perspectives & insights to existing challenges.

Distributing industry trends content on LinkedIn Page increases your organization’s credibility and add value to audiences.

49% of decision-makers think thought leadership is effective in influencing purchasing decisions.

The benefits of using Insight Tag in brand awareness strategy:

  • Compare different pages to learn which content resonates with different audiences
  • Gain valuable audience insights using accurate professional data
  • Use insights about website visitors to create targeted ads

Best Practices

Brand Awareness campaigns are impression-based campaigns to maximize your reach of relevant target audiences at the top of the funnel.

Before building brand awareness campaigns, you must set up & optimize your company page.

The primary metrics for paid brand awareness campaigns are Reach & Frequency, Cost per 1000 impressions.

The purpose of brand awareness is to create and distribute valuable thought leadership content to the right audiences.

The content roadmap for brand awareness is:

  • How do our customers view us?
  • What is our current position in the market?
  • What is our desired audience generally interested in?

The ideal ratio of long-term branding building vs short-term activation campaigns for B2B is 50:50

To understand which buyer persona performed best in a brand awareness campaign, it is recommended to separate the buyer personas into campaign groups based on industry, location and job.

The best practices to target the right accounts & reach decision makers are:

  • Study the content they share
  • Aim for company-wide brand awareness before identifying key people
  • Tailor your content to their interests

A brand’s always-on approach aims to create general awareness of the business to keep filling up the top of the funnel. The approach is not time-sensitive.

Brands that set their Share of Voice (SOV) above their Share of Market (SOM) tend to grow better.

To increase Share of Voice, you must:

  • use first party data in Website Demographics
  • run ads on trusted reputable channels
  • place ads where people pay attention

Ad Campaign

To build brand awareness by engaging employees or colleagues, the best tool in LinkedIn is the My Company tab.

The advantages of using the My Company tab will get more views & follows for the Company Page, and encourage employees to share the content post.

The best approach for an Ad Campaign is trying a variety of ads to see what works best. LinkedIn recommends having four to five different creative campaigns.

Account-based marketing builds brand awareness quickly among a tightly defined group of target companies.

In terms of Account-based marketing, LinkedIn ensures the brand is present & prepared to help during each stage. LinkedIn also helps advertiser gets closer to decision-makers within target companies. You can combine LinkedIn’s first-party data with your account lists too.

An advertiser can answer any questions her audience may have during a LinkedIn Live.

The best to build brand awareness with new audiences through a virtual event is LinkedIn Live.

LinkedIn Live events are Panels, Recruitment Events, Interviews and Q&A+

Ad Types

Dynamic Ad allows to pull member’s company name and profile image to make personalized ad.

Carousel Ad and Conversation Ad allow you to test different CTA in the same ad unit.

Carousel Ad allows you to tease out a research report to showcase five insights in the same ad campaign.

The most recommended number of cards when starting out with Carousel Ads is between three to five.

Conversation Ads allow for quality conversations with professionals through a choose-your-own-path experience.

LinkedIn Macros allow to pull First Name, Last Name, Job Title, Company Name and Industry in a Conversation Ad.

To obtain better results when sending a Conversation Ad, try sending it from a member or company to see what works best for your brand.

Only include one clear CTA when using Dynamic Ads.

The best practices of using Video Ads in a brand awareness campaign:

  • Keep video under 30 seconds
  • Use visual story telling
  • Test different video lengths
  • Consider adding video subtitles
  • Show the most important information in first 10 seconds

Lead Generation

Lead Generation is getting contact details. (Conversion).

Demand Generation is in the earlier stage in the Conversion funnel. The campaign encourages people to do business with you (Consideration).

Website Retargeting audience is built once you reach 300 members.

LinkedIn reporting tool enables you to track & analyze thought leadership campaigns KPI from demand generation campaigns.

The best approach of lead generation is starting broad & narrowing down your audience as you analyze results.

Audience size in lead generation retargeting must be at least 1K+ for open not submitted in the past 90 days.

The metrics used to measure lead generation campaigns are Average CTR, Number of Leads and Cost per Lead.

LinkedIn helps you to retarget your audience by:

  • those have shown interests either by opening or submitting a Lead Gen Form
  • those have viewed your video ad
  • website visitors that have not completed your desired action

Conversion Tracking

Conversions mean generating leads.

No matter how low the Cost Per Lead is, if the campaign generates higher quality leads, the campaign is generating a higher Return on Investment.

Conversion Tracking is an analytical function that gathers insights into post-click & view-through conversions of your Linkedin ads campaigns.

A Conversion Window is a timeframe within which conversions will be attributed to your LinkedIn Ad.

A Conversion Value is the dollar amount that is given to each conversion.

You can add conversion actions to a campaign either by editing campaign details or by adding the campaign name when creating the conversion action.

If you want to track PDF downloads instead of a Thank You page, use Event Specific (“on-click”) image pixel.

A lead scoring model is selected based on activity or demographics.

Questions to ask while evaluating your lead quality:

  1. How long is the sales cycle of a valuable lead?
  2. The minimum criteria a lead must possess
  3. What qualities do your current customers have in common?
  4. The lifetime value or average spend
  5. What does a successful customer journey look like?

The steps to scoring your leads are:

  • Determine your ideal persona
  • Set up marketing automation system
  • Align sales & marketing

You can use the Lead Gen campaign to distribute white paper and gather prospect’s data.

Conversion Tracking and Lead Gen Forms to get leads via LinkedIn Marketing Solutions.

Lead Gen Form

Retarget people who have watched 75% of your video with a Lead Gen Form with the intention to convert them into customers

Privacy Policy URL is mandatory to create Lead Gen Form.

Refresh your Lead Gen Form to optimize the data is a good practice.

The form assets in a Lead Gen Form are form details, ad creative and the confirmation message.

The recommended number of fields on a Lead Gen Form should ideally be fewer than 5.

You can edit all fields except the form language if a Lead Gen Form is not associated with any active ad.

The best type of custom questions in Lead Gen Form allows members to choose from a dropdown menu.

Lead Gen Form is supported by Conversation Ad, Carousel Ad, Single Image Ad and Video Ad.

Data Integrations

You must first integrate your data with LinkedIn data before designing your targeting strategy.

The key advantages of using data integrations with LinkedIn Marketing Partners:

  • Allow you to create Matched Audiences on LinkedIn
  • Automating the delivery of your lead directly into sales
  • Marketing partners help you standardize the information you receive
  • LinkedIn Leads

Integrate your Lead Gen Form data with your Customer Relationship Management enables you to take action on your leads faster.

Optimization

If you find your campaign has a high CTR but a low completion rate, revise your form & make sure it is easy to fill in.

If your campaign generates a high CTR but a low conversion rate, try to improve the conversion process on the website.

When running a brand awareness campaign, CTR is declining. You may consider swapping in a new ad creative.

A Lead Gen campaign offering a free demo isn’t getting enough engagements. You need to review and diversify your content mix. Then, check if your content are meeting your audience’s needs.

Your campaign is driving leads but not turning into Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). You can start nurturing your audience using a mix of ungated content (e.g. thought leadership and promotional video).

When your CTR is underperforming, try to improve your images and text to attract more people.