LinkedIn Ads Aimed at Job Titles and Industries

Search ads full of the wrong searchers

A firm that sells to other businesses runs search ads, and many of the clicks come from people with household questions: homeowners, students, job seekers, people comparing their own accounts.

Search ads answer whoever types the words. When a business service and a household need share the same words, the ads cannot tell the two apart.

LinkedIn offers what search cannot: ads aimed at people by what they do for a living, rather than by what they typed.

What LinkedIn lets you aim at

LinkedIn ads are bought through its self-service advertising tool and shown to members who match the audience you describe, using details members give in their own profiles:

• Location, down to a region or a metropolitan area.
• Job title or job function, such as plant manager or human resources.
• Seniority, from entry level to owner.
• Industry of the member's employer.
• Company size, by number of employees.
• Groups and skills listed on members' profiles.

Each choice narrows the audience, and LinkedIn's estimate of how many members match changes as you add them. Within one province, a precise audience can be small.

Two kinds of ad

Text ads are small: a short headline, a line or two of text and a tiny image, shown beside the main content on LinkedIn's pages.

Sponsored updates are posts from your company page, placed in the news feeds of the members you chose. They need a company page with something worth reading on it.

Both can be paid by the click or by the thousand views. LinkedIn sets a minimum price per click and a minimum daily budget.

Why each click costs more

Clicks on LinkedIn are priced higher than many search clicks, because audiences are narrow and many advertisers want the same professionals.

A click from the right plant manager can be worth far more than ten from people with no use for the service. That only holds if the right person clicks and something useful happens next.

So LinkedIn suits businesses where one customer is worth a great deal and the buyer can be named by role.

An offer meant for that reader

An ad saying your firm is experienced and trusted gives a busy manager no reason to click. It could be any firm.

Offer something specific to the role you chose: a checklist for planning work around a shutdown, a short guide to a rule that affects their industry, or a case study from a company like theirs.

The headline should name the reader's situation in their own words, so the right person recognises it and others scroll past without costing you a click.

A page that continues the offer

Each click should open a page built around that offer, under the same headline. The home page makes the reader hunt for what the ad promised.

Put the promised thing near the top: the guide, the checklist, the form to request a call. Ask only for the details you need to follow up.

LinkedIn's own reports stop at the click. Add campaign tags to each ad's link, so Analytics files these visits under the right campaign and shows what visitors did next.

A worked example

An industrial painting contractor coats steel structures, tanks and factory floors for manufacturers and food processors from Kamloops to the Okanagan.

Its search ads for painting and coating terms drew homeowners wanting a house painted or a garage floor done, and each of those clicks cost the same as a plant manager's.

It set up a LinkedIn campaign aimed at maintenance, plant and facility managers in manufacturing and food production, at companies with more than fifty employees, within the province.

The text ad offered a checklist for planning coating work around a scheduled shutdown. The click opened a page under the same headline, with the checklist behind a short form and a direct phone number.

The search campaign stayed, narrowed to industrial terms, with residential words such as house and deck added as negative keywords. Each channel now screens out homeowners its own way: LinkedIn by job title, search by the words typed.

When it suits a small company

LinkedIn advertising suits a company whose buyers can be named by job title, whose customers are each worth a great deal, and whose sales take weeks or months to close.

It suits an offer a professional would want at work: something that saves time, explains a rule, or helps make the case to a manager.

It suits poorly anything bought on impulse, sold to households, or needed urgently, when people search rather than browse.

Running it

Start with a company page that is complete and current, because members who see an ad often look there first.

Build one campaign per audience, with two or three versions of the ad, and a daily budget you are prepared to leave running for a month.

Check the reports weekly. Pause versions that draw few clicks, and read in Analytics what visitors did on the page before judging the campaign.

Change one thing at a time, the headline, the image or the audience, so that any difference in the figures can be traced to what caused it.

The counter-case

Many small businesses sell to people who are not thinking about work when they buy: homeowners, families, travellers. For them, LinkedIn's targeting has nothing to aim at.

A business whose customers search when the need arises, such as an emergency repair service, is better served by tighter search campaigns than by a new channel.

But where the buyer has a job title and search keeps delivering the wrong people, a small LinkedIn campaign is worth testing, built by someone who sets it up properly and reads the figures honestly.

Before the first campaign goes live

1. Name the job titles that make buying decisions.
2. Check the audience size LinkedIn estimates.
3. Write an offer useful to that reader.
4. Build a landing page that continues it.
5. Tag the ad's link for Analytics.
6. Set a budget you can leave running for a month.
7. Narrow your search campaign with negative keywords.

Step three decides whether the rest matters. A manager clicks for something useful to the job, not for a firm's name, and every click costs the same either way.

Splitting a search campaign into tight themes, each with its own ad and its own landing page, is covered in one ad group holding every keyword.

Frequently asked questions

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