LinkedIn is a largest professional network platform where you can find multitude of linkedIn users from across the world. Members at Linkedin are vibrant and potent professionals who are well equipped with business acumen. They employ linkedIn for various purposes like recruitment, network with colleagues/peers and sale product/service. So, LinkedIn can be used as a platform to target affluent consumer and key decision maker at corporations. Here are some facts that you should consider before choosing LinkedIn’s platform for advertisement because selecting your market is first and foremost important for a market campaign to be successful. Considering the importance of LinkedIn, in subsequent part of this essay we will discuss four simple steps to advertise your offerings using linkedIn.
Goal Setting:
Before logging into your LinkedIn account, it will be good that you know the purpose of your advertisement campaign. So, purpose of a business campaign could include:
- Brand awareness.
- Lead creation.
- Lure traffic to your website.
Let look into a hypothetical case of XYZ Software Company who is offering financial software which are not so inexpensive. So, we believe at initially stage of the campaign it would be better for such a company to go for lead generation and then later try to convert those leads into sale. Now as you are clear about your goal or have in your mind the goal for your campaign than its time to login to your LinkedIn account so just visit https://www.linkedin.com/ and log-in or sign up by just clicking on join now. In second step we will actually show this process of goal setting using LinkedIn for XYZ Software Company.
Once you signed in to your LinkedIn account the next step would be to click on “WORK” button as shown in red box to avail the advertisement campaign service offered by LinkedIn.
Afterwards you just need to select the “ADVERTISE” option by just click on it as depicted below in red rectangle and you will enter into campaign manager.
Generating Campaign to Advertise Your Offerings Using LinkedIn:
In second step of advertise usning LinkedIn, you should have to generate a campaign by using campaign manager. Now, to create an account for your campaign just click on “CREATE ACCOUNT” as shown in red rectangle.
After creating your account you should write or even rename your campaign name if required by just clicking on it. So in context of prior hypothesized example we put the name of our campaign as software trial for financial experts in Lahore.
In this step you can also add you campaign’ objectives, audience, ad format, placement and format. In case of our hypothesized example of XYZ Financial Software Company, the goal is to aware audience/target market about our financial software. So in linkedIn you just need to click on “LEAD GENERATION” as shown in the red round rectangle.
Select Target Market for Your Advertisement:
After selecting your specific objective for a campaign next step would be related to your audience. The linkedIn under the rubric of audience will provide you detailed but specific data related to market. So it’s up to you that how you derive answers from linkedIn. Core questions managed by linkedIn data based are as follow.
- Who is your target market?
- Who isn’t your target market?
- Where is your target market?
For XYZ Financial Software Company. The target audience is financial decision maker. As it can be seen in yellow rectangle and it can be selected by clicking on “AUDIENCE” button as highlighted in red round rectangle. Moreover, you can also select the location you want to target. For XYZ Financial Software Company location is Lahore as it can be seen in blue rectangle. Based on selected audience and location, the linkedIn data base has provided forecasting results related to target audience as showed in a rectangle of green color. Besides these, there are several other options related to target market that you can use for best forecasting results like, target by company, target by geography, target by age and target by skills.
Budgeting and Biding to Advertise Your Offerings Using LinkedIn.
Notably, one can control campaigning budget by setting daily limit and overall budget for campaign. Moreover, you will pay only when receive impression or click. So, one should have to plan ahead few important things like:
- How much to spend daily?
- How much for total campaign?
- How many campaigns?
The detail of cost is as follow:
- Least cost per click bid is $2.00 per click
- Least per 1,000 impressions bid is $2.00 per 1000 impressions.
- For the first time LinkedIn would require a $5 deposit for text add.
By just clicking on budget box as shown in red you can set type of budget daily and total budget. Whereas, by clicking on date (shown in green) you can set the time range for campaign when it should start and you can also mentioned the closing date. Lastly, you can also set the type of bid (shown in yellow) you require in the form of either enhance bid option or maximum bid option depends on budget you want to allocate. So, just choose your budgetary options that suits you and make payment to advertise your offerings using LinkedIn.
In this essay we have endeavored to demonstrate four simple steps namely, goal setting, generating campaign, target your advertisement and, budgeting and biding so that even beginners can advertise their offering using LinkedIn to several potential customers.
