It is very common to see companies activate their advertising strategies on platforms such as Google Ads or Facebook (Meta) Ads. Means and costs are more attractive on these two platforms. The reality is that there is a lack of knowledge about LinkedIn Ads and how to advertise on this network .
Every marketing strategist, area leader, digital planner or digital traffic must be prepared for the moment in which Management says: "let's advertise on LinkedIn Ads", "why don't we get leads on LinkedIn?"
Awkward moment if we don't have the knowledge, right?
Well, I welcome you to a new Blog to learn. Today you will learn about advertising on LinkedIn 
. In this reading you will be able to consult:
- What does LinkedIn Ads mean?
- How does advertising work on this professional network?
- Types of linkedin campaigns available
- LinkedIn Ads goals you can use
- How to create your first campaign
- Advantages of advertising and how to invest strategically
Whom! I know you will get the most out of this step by step tutorial, let's get started!
What is LinkedIn Ads?
The professional network par excellence: LinkedIn, has diversified as it has evolved since 2003, when it was created.
Through its Marketing Solutions program, the most globalized company of professionals presented LinkedIn Ads: the advertising solution that reaches more than 850 million users worldwide on its platform.
This is precisely LinkedIn Ads. The advertising solution for companies looking for decision-makers in talent or commercial actions.
This solution has an interesting behavior throughout the world. But, for the specific case of Latin America, the platform has:
- More than 18 million users in Mexico.
- More than 10 million users in Colombia.
- More than 9 million users in Argentina.
- More than 6 million users in Chile.
- And an expansion of 56 million users in Brazil.
The really valuable thing about this advertising solution is that its segmentation capacity makes it very different from platforms like Google Ads or Facebook Ads .
While in one the advertising action is determined by "bid or auction of keywords" and in the other you create target audiences based on "their demographics and interests" , in LinkedIn Ads you can create very specific audiences:
- Company: sectors, sizes, names.
- Education: universities, careers, degrees.
- Work experience: years of experience, positions, functions.
- Interests: groups, product interests or general interests.
Wooo! Strategic and assertive advertising
To concretize this first part, this is the impact that LinkedIn has in our region today:
How powerful, don't you think?
How does LinkedIn advertising work?
To develop this point and make it extremely didactic for you to know how advertising works on linkedin , consider bringing Milton Suarez Salazar , Full Stack Marketer, Growth Product and Teacher of the Platzi educational platform as a source of information .
During his development as Teacher Platzi, Milton developed the course "How to generate leads with LinkedIn Ads" where he indicates the pattern structure that the most powerful professional network has . Let's review the concepts mentioned by the Prof:
1. Evaluate the right time to start. As we saw a moment ago, LinkedIn is one of the networks that today maintains its traction excellence in organic reach. 99.45% indicates your high level of organic search traffic.
Consider evaluating very well when LinkedIn Ads will bring a greater impact to your brand.
2. Eliminate fear for a new advertising platform. If you already come from the world of Google Ads or Business Facebook for ad management, the campaign platform on LinkedIn will be very easy to use.
If, on the contrary, it is your first time in advertising actions through networks, there is no problem. The interface of this solution is very friendly and it will be very useful for you to understand the path you must follow to activate campaigns:
3. Get your Campaign Manager ready. It is the official tool to configure the entire campaign system in this network. You'll need to have it associated with a LinkedIn company page to get started, not a professional profile:
When you create your first ad account, this window will appear.
4. Choose the objective that best suits your business. Depending on what you want to achieve in your marketing and sales strategy , select from the objectives provided by the platform. Maybe you want to position your brand, capture data or interact with great content.
It all depends on the action you want to perform. Later we will delve into the objectives that LinkedIn Ads offers you.
5. Identify the "anatomy" of the Platform. I was telling you a moment ago that LinkedIn Ads is easier to manage because of its simplicity. In this advertising solution you will be able to find fewer objectives (better targeted), effective filters on types of businesses and intuitive forms.
For this point we consider bringing you an infographic that exemplifies the hierarchy of the platform where the view will be between:
- Accounts: here you can see the account summary and associate the campaign manager account with the official pages of the companies.
- Campaigns: in this area you will have approximately 7 objectives to define the ones that make the most sense to you: positioning your brand, capturing data or interacting.
- Ads: through this section you can create your advertising pieces in graphic or video, add an attractive copy and a call to action or call to action for the next step.
Types of campaigns offered by LinkedIn Ads
Since we knew the initial part of the platform, let's go into detail. To identify the types of campaigns that LinkedIn Ads offers you, I considered it very pertinent to consult "Profe Jorge Santos".
Jorge Santos is not currently a Marketing teacher (he is GrowthHacker SaaS and Marketing Manager for RD Station Latam
), but he likes to teach a lot about this subject and he shared his Blog: Linkedin Ads, everything you need to know , to identify the different groups of ads and segmentations that you can create.
- Advertising campaign objectives
As in any network and field of Marketing, the first thing will be to define our horizon, what we want, how we will achieve it.
This part is vital to select the type of objective, since the spending of the advertising budget will be consistent with the correct choice.
The objective categories in LinkedIn Ads are:
1. Awareness: make your brand known. That they follow your company page, that they react to content. That help you position yourself in the market.
2. Perception: allows you to generate traffic. Capture data. Fill out a form on your website. Send clicks to a landing page or web page.
3. Conversions: it differs from the previous category because here the priority is the acquisition of leads .
In that sense you can play with the following objectives:
- Types of segmentations
Something fundamental when configuring this part is to be very clear to whom and why you are talking. So, the initial and definitive path at this point will be to keep in mind what your ideal buyer persona or audience archetype is and the business objectives: why do you choose X type of audience and what will you achieve with the type of segmentation selected.
What we want to avoid at this point is choosing the wrong campaign configuration to waste money or marketing budget.
With that said, learn about the types of targeting in LinkedIn Ads campaigns:
- Geographical segmentation. It is the most common where you can reach people by their location: specific regions, countries or cities.
- Segmentation by language. Like the previous one, you can reach people according to their language of use in the Linkedin account.
- Segmentation by demographics. It is the most exemplified when we talk about the target audience, you can filter by gender and/or age.
- Segmentation by company. It allows you to find people who work in companies with certain characteristics. Companies by size, industry, growth rate, among others.
- Segmentation by education. Here you have the option of reaching audiences according to their knowledge and titles (Marketing, Accounting, etc.). Or to people who study or studied in certain institutions. You can also segment according to their educational level (Degree, Bachelor's, Master's, etc.).
- Segmentation by work experience. Being one of the most complete options, here you can direct your campaigns to audiences with specific skills, experience time, specific positions, by linkedin profile , etc.
- Segmentation by interest. With this feature you will be able to reach people related to the topics and products that have aroused their interest in browsing Linkedin.
- Trait segmentation. It is very powerful because it reaches people by their exact behaviors. People who received a promotion, changed jobs, are looking for a job, among others.
- Segmentation by retargeting. I like this one because it matches your website. You can segment your website visitors based on the tracking code installed on your website.
- List segmentation. Depending on your customer base, you can charge them to your account and talk to them from another channel through your campaigns.
- Segmentation by similar public. Just like in Facebook Ads, here you can also take advantage of the data with AI that the linkedin algorithm has and find new prospects.
- What is an ad group?
A group of ads in linkedin ads gathers the strategic inputs of your company through: interest in a product, pain of the user or creation of funnel or sales funnel (the necessary stages to attract the user until taking him to the commercial process).
You can create ad groups in different formats (image, video or carousel) that will test which one is correct according to the strategic inputs mentioned above.
The ad formats you may come across are:
1. Ad with an image:
This is an example from the same company LinkedIn
In this type of ad you can include an image that is clickable to take the audience to the landing page or website. The image can be horizontal (1.91:1 aspect ratio), square (1:1 aspect ratio), or vertical (1:1.91 aspect).
2. Advertisement with Carousel:
This is an example of the Colombian construction company Amarilo
In this option you can add a sequence of images to the ad. Include a minimum of 2 images and a maximum of 10 (but 3 or four would be fine). In this case the images will only be in square size, 1080×1080 pixels would be fine.
3. Video Ads:
The simplicity of the audiovisual pieces makes the video advertisement look very natural.
Through this format you can upload a video of maximum 200MB. Linkedin allows you to upload videos up to 30 minutes long.
This format is appealing because the most engaged videos are typically between 15 and 30 seconds. This allows campaigns with a very high click-through rate performance and reduces the cost of the campaigns.
We're done here! Now that it's clearer, let's move on to creating our first campaign 
.
How to create a campaign: step by step
Let's go "hands on"!
As we at RD Station like to say , follow the steps below to create your first LinkedIn Ads campaign. At this point I want to thank our "Teacher Tatis", who we consulted the steps and went to the board to recreate how to start very well:
"Professor Tatis" is really Daniel Jiménez Tatis, International Growth Marketer at RD Station , who daily contributes his knowledge in our area to create effective campaigns in this professional network.
According to the dashboard, you will need to prepare 5 steps to activate your first campaign. However, prior to these steps, it will be necessary to attend and be clear about 4 preliminary steps:
Now that we have a "pencil, blank canvas and eraser" to start, let's put into practice the steps indicated by "Professor Tatis":
1. Select the objective type: of knowledge, perception or conversion.
2. Segment the type of audience: this is the great differentiating value of LinkedIn Ads. Take into account the segmentations that we saw previously and select.
3. Create the ad type: choose between message or feed ads in the formats we saw: image, carousel, video or text.
4. Budget: with this point we will close this Blog, for now what you should know is that you can set a daily budget or a total one, in a certain range of time.
5. Review: adjust the details of your campaign, check that the ads are attractive, that there are no spelling errors, that the settings are ok , that the preliminary steps are resolved:
Synchronized Company Page.
Active ad account.
Aligned target audience.
Credit card ready.
Approved graphic or audiovisual pieces.
Ready! Click on “Lanzar campaña”
Advantages of advertising with LinkedIn Ads
We are finishing this step by step and I would like you to stay with the main reasons why it is worth activating your ad account.
For B2C markets (Company sells to customers), it could be interesting to experiment (as long as we have the budget).
For B2B markets we can find the following advantages when advertising on LinkedIn Ads:
- Access professionals who make important decisions in companies.
- Segment audiences in an advanced way with filters designed for the company's business.
- High-value tools to optimize connections in the professional network.
- An ROI (return on investment) according to the moment of the process in the strategy.
Maybe you want to know more advantages of LinkedIn as the most important professional platform in the Blog, LinkedIn: what is it for and how does it work?
Are you still thinking about whether to start? 
I hope not!
How much to invest in LinkedIn Ads?
Finally, the questions that all of us begin to move the spreadsheets in Excel or Google Sheets: how much to invest in my LinkedIn Ads campaigns? How to define the budget to invest?
Before answering, a clarification is important. All budgets are personalized according to the status and needs of the companies' marketing and sales process. It is said that companies generally invest at least 10% of their sales made in new marketing actions.
However, the above will depend on all the marketing fronts or channels that the marketing area needs to cover.
For now and for you to take a first test and experimentation exercise. The teacher Milton Suarez Salazar taught us that:
- The algorithm learns and identifies the best-performing hours of your ads, when there will likely be optimal ad spend.
- The budget can be divided between the “20/20/60” theory: 20% to start, 20% to optimize and 60% to push the optimized “full steam ahead”.
- We have 4 indicators that help us verify this theory, for example:
- spending per day
- Impressions
- % of clicks
- Clicks in the time period
- To look at the cost per click, look at the spend per day and divide it by the number of clicks, or leads. Then determine if that cost per click is good.
I hope your campaigns are a success! Remember that it is an exercise of learning and relearning.
As a useful resource I invite you to use our free material “ROI in Social Networks”. Download it and check your early earnings in organic to move on to advertising processes, good practice!
