Many marketers are often drawn to using Facebook or Google Ads when it comes to pay-per-click campaigns. While these two obviously have mass appeal, LinkedIn Ads, on the other hand, is recognized for offering exceptional advantages through its unique and advanced features.
LinkedIn ads are perfect if your business goals are to reach and engage with professional audiences and generate top-quality leads. Other remarkable benefits to expect are the opportunities to find and hire talented individuals and, of course, increase your sales.
But despite its great paid features and tools, spending ad money on LinkedIn is often put into question by many marketers because of its higher cost. In this blog, we will help you analyze and answer a vital question—are LinkedIn ads worth paying for?
What makes LinkedIn Ads different from others?
Despite being on the higher end of the spectrum in terms of cost-per-click, more and more businesses are including LinkedIn advertising as an important element of their digital marketing campaigns.
If you want to focus your marketing strategies on business professionals, LinkedIn provides a significant advantage compared to other channels. It has unique features and functions that extend beyond the common qualities of different social network channels.
For example, while both Facebook and LinkedIn are people-based platforms, they offer distinct opportunities for audience reach. Facebook is great for advertising products, but its news feed feature is less predictable. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is more effective for securing audience engagement and delivering content.
To help you better understand how LinkedIn advertising distinguishes itself from others, check out the following sections:
1. The professional platform
LinkedIn is the best platform to reach a particular business-minded audience. People using this social platform are there to advance their careers, promote their knowledge and skills, follow industry news, and connect with peers. You can easily deliver content that aligns with your targets’ professional profiles and career interests and expect they will engage with it.
LinkedIn makes it convenient to interact with relevant, professional targets. You can target them by industry, degree, skill set, job function, title, company size, and more. You can then exclude specific groups of people to avoid irrelevant click traffic.
2. More advanced targeting options
As LinkedIn allows you to run ads on the side panel, news feed, and InMail, you have the opportunity to test different creative formats. And in your campaigns, you can integrate lead generation forms and use a range of video, text, carousel, display, and dynamic ad formats.
While there are other social media platforms that also offer such things, targeting options of LinkedIn are tailored to a professional audience and are more advanced. Profiles here are rarely fixed, as users continually update and edit their professional experiences, certificates, academic backgrounds, and other notable achievements. This means you can reach targets based on member-generated data like education, experience, company, and other relevant demographics and interests.
3. Better conversion rates
LinkedIn Ads might be considered more expensive than others, but that doesn’t mean it’s overpriced or you’re wasting money. In fact, the platform offers a straightforward advantage of increasing conversion rates. It allows advertisers to generate conversions without guiding the audience to the official website through Lead Gen Forms.
According to HubSpot’s year-long study, LinkedIn ads, on average, were able to convert users to leads at a conversion rate of 6.1. This is a better figure than Google search ads’ 2.58% conversion rate.
Who should use LinkedIn advertising?
The answer will depend on your budget and target market. But ideally, B2B companies are the ones who are most suited for the platform. Here are some notable statistics from different sources:
- 46% of B2B companies’ social media traffic comes from LinkedIn.
- 80% of B2B leads were generated from LinkedIn.
- 68% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for their social advertising strategy.
According to a post from Marketing Land, there are three types of businesses that are most likely to find the platform most effective: high-value B2Bs (products and services), recruiting efforts (less expensive compared to the traditional hiring process), and higher education (targeting a specific group of people, like those with graduate degrees).
While such resources only point out certain types of businesses, it doesn’t mean that you should not consider using LinkedIn just because you’re not part of those “who should use” it. Regardless of your business, the platform is no doubt a powerful tool to reach professional audiences. A good marketer will test everything!
And if your goals include lead generation, brand awareness, and engagement, running campaigns on LinkedIn should be part of your strategy. After all, you can always acquire LinkedIn Ad services from experienced marketing agencies to ensure your campaign’s success.
How much do LinkedIn ads cost?
It’s no secret that LinkedIn ads are indeed more expensive than others. This usually places it as a better option for large companies or businesses with bigger budgets. However, that doesn’t mean a small business or company with a smaller budget can’t advertise here. But if that’s your case, you need to manage your expectations around success or performance.
According to LinkedIn, these factors can influence the ad cost:
- Target audience—You face a high-demand audience when you opt for narrow targeting options. The higher the demand, the higher the cost will be.
- Bid—The cost you will pay depends on the bidding strategy you use. The auction process will require you to pay one percent of your competitor’s bid. Higher competition leads to higher cost-per-clicks.
- Ad relevance score—High ad relevance equates to a lower cost-per-click. So if your content is not getting engagement or generating clicks, the platform will stop serving it.
While the monthly ads spend for LinkedIn may vary, the recommended budget ranges from $2,000 to $5,000. The daily spend for this range is between $66 to $165, which is quite enough to give the data you need for quicker scaling and determining performance success.
The verdict: is LinkedIn advertising worth the money?
As already mentioned above, LinkedIn Ads is considered expensive compared to other options. Think of it as a premium option. If your company can sustain the required budget and get a deal big enough to generate a good ROI, it is no doubt a great investment. It provides bigger niche targeting options and can potentially yield high-quality leads.
Are you thinking of giving LinkedIn Ads a go?
Feedback Systems is here to help you generate highly targeted leads and drive sales with our LinkedIn Ads service. Talk to us today and find out how our team can help you harness LinkedIn’s full potential.
