According to Hubspot research, compared to Facebook (0.77%) and Twitter (0.69%), LinkedIn generates the highest conversion rate (2.74%). Moreover, the reason LinkedIn’s now snatching the lion’s share of many marketing budgets is its ability to target audiences based on specific demographics like interest groups, job titles, seniority, location, etc. LinkedIn ads, when used correctly can deliver new business opportunities at significantly lower costs than cold calling and email campaigns.
That said, every type of marketing has its learning curve. Now, let’s dive into the 5 biggest LinkedIn ad mistakes we see marketing managers often making.
LinkedIn Ad Mistake No. 1 – Audience Mismatch
It doesn’t matter how well your copy, ad creatives, and offers are, if you’re not meeting the target audience’s expectations, your LinkedIn ads will certainly fail. Many marketers get in trouble when using LinkedIn ads as a one-size-fits-all proposition. Your efforts in audience segmentation will go waste if you launch a generic ad rather than leveraging the target audience’s information to create personalized ads.
It’s recommended to experiment with creating multiple ad variations based on the audience segment’s purchasing behavior, location, interests, etc. For instance, if you’ve targeted a single audience segment of football fans, a football analogy in your ad copy may seal the deal. Furthermore, when talking about customer expectations, marketers need to refine customer engagement based on their past behavior. For instance, Amazon effectively personalized its customer engagement with its feature “People who bought this also bought”. It fulfills the customer’s expectations of personalized attention.
LinkedIn Ad Mistake No. 2 – Landing Page Mismatch
Landing pages are the key element of turning leads into customers. When people click on the ad, they expect to land on a relevant page with having similar message and offer. Many marketers make this top LinkedIn ad mistake by sending potential customers to a homepage or poorly designed landing page. Sending customers to a tailored landing page ensures that customers will have a smooth experience finding what they’re looking for and decrease bounce rates.
It’s advised to use similar keywords, messages, and offers within the landing page that you’ve used in the ad. Furthermore, use the same CTA on the landing page as described in the ad. Ensure that your landing page content supports the ultimate goal. For instance, if a business sells leather jackets, the landing page must not suggest that people also view women’s shoes. Ensure that users are kept engaged and don’t get distracted or else you’ll get significant clicks but 0 conversions.
LinkedIn Ad Mistake No. 3 – Insufficient Budget
You might be startled to hear that LinkedIn requires a minimum spend of $10/day per campaign, a substantial increase from the competition if you’re used to using Facebook or Google advertising. To avoid spreading thin campaigns on LinkedIn, try dedicating the majority of marketing budget to a single campaign. Give your ads a better chance of succeeding by increasing their budget and ultimately the number of impressions. Then, utilize LinkedIn’s Website Demographics reporting to assess the campaign’s failures and successes. Make adjustments according to the information provided in Website Demographics and the Campaign Performance tab. Both are available in Campaign Manager. Moreover, our experts recommend allocating approximately a $50-$100 daily budget to generate desirable clicks per day.
LinkedIn Ad Mistake No. 4 – Not Analyzing/Optimizing Performance and Demographics
LinkedIn ads can boost a business’s bottom line. But still, many marketers make this LinkedIn ad mistake of not analyzing and optimizing the ad’s performance and demographics. By regularly analyzing performance and demographics, you can determine how well and to who your offering appeals the most by gender, age, location, and other variables. With this, marketers can understand how much budget to spend on enthusiastic clients and stop spending on uninterested ones or people outside your target area.
Moreover, you can’t optimize LinkedIn ads without performance and demographic data. When you analyze impressions, clicks, CPA, CPC, CTR, landing page visits, and conversions, you can effectively identify improvement opportunities. After analyzing, optimizing performance and demographics allow marketers to improve targeting, bidding, landing pages, and creatives, and eventually increase ROI. Click here to learn about the crucial online marketing performance metrics.
LinkedIn Ad Mistake No. 5 – Targeting Broad and Unspecific Audiences
With LinkedIn’s audience targeting options, it’s easy to get carried away and end up with an audience size that’s either too big or too small. It’s crucial to achieve a balance because if your audience is too big, you could get unqualified leads or suffer from a low click-through rate due to irrelevant content. If it’s too small, you won’t get enough impressions to make a difference. A rule of thumb is to target an audience in a range of 5,000-50,000.
Additionally, it’s crucial for marketers to clearly define buyer personas before launching a LinkedIn ad. To create buyer personas, ask yourself a few questions about the ideal customers’ personal information, working conduct, online conduct, and their relationship with the business. For example, what are the potential customer’s psychological and physical characteristics that will make a purchase? What are the common activities they professionally and personally perform? What are their main challenges, obstacles, and goals?
Suppose, if your ad’s motive is to get clients who’re interested in getting cybersecurity tips for large-scale organizations, the right target audience will be business owners and network security managers instead of software programmers or HR employees. Therefore, clearly defining the buyer personas and serving the right information will help close the deal than taking unspecific audiences into account.
BONUS: Not leveraging LinkedIn Matched Audiences
The three types of LinkedIn matched audiences: email contact targeting, account targeting, and website retargeting can take ad campaigns to new heights! Let’s discuss all of them in detail.
Email contact targeting
Marketers never overlook this powerful advertising feature. It allows marketers to upload contact lists and run ads that target people who match those emails. All you need for contact lists are a collection of at least 300 email addresses that correspond to LinkedIn members. LinkedIn advises you to run campaigns that aim to reach at least 10,000 people, so attempt to provide more than the bare minimum. You need a larger audience than just a few hundred people if you want your campaign to succeed.
Account targeting
With this feature, marketers can input a list of websites and company names and target people who work there. It is advised that you submit at least 1,000 companies for these audiences to ensure that your audience will be enough to target on LinkedIn. Account targeting can also be done directly in the audience selection if it’s a lower amount of companies you are going after.
Website retargeting
Put your initial effort into developing ads targeted at audiences that are already interested in your offering and are on your email list or visiting your website. You’ll most probably get traction there. Furthermore, with a website retargeting campaign,
Marketers can advertise to audiences who already visit your website and ensure they’re not leaving any low-hanging fruit. By visiting your website, these people have already shown interest in the business, therefore creating a personalized ad for them must be a top priority.
Besides that, although LinkedIn’s high budget requirements force marketers into creating a single campaign, this shouldn’t limit the number of ads you run. Don’t make the mistake of limiting your creatives because campaigns with a $10 per day budget can still run many advertisements. Make a minimum of four advertisements per campaign using different layouts and images. You can test both carousel and video ads to evaluate which is more effective for your target audience. Try creating many high-quality ads, then make decisions based on the statistics on the Campaign Performance and Website Demographics tab. After looking at the stats, it’ll be clear which ad performs the best.
Additionally, you should experiment with various ad copy combinations. You can add an introduction to sponsored content when you create a new ad in a campaign. This content might serve as a CTA, a description of a business offering, or just an attention-grabbing message. Test combinations of different messages with ads to determine what stands out.
In Conclusion
When these biggest LinkedIn ad mistakes are avoided, the platform becomes a powerful marketing engine for businesses of all sizes. It allows for geo-targeting, granular budget control, conversion tracking, CPC optimization, etc. The main benefit that distinguishes LinkedIn from other platforms is its demographic targeting capabilities.
Lastly, Run to Win!
We frequently hear from clients who started their LinkedIn ads journey properly but underestimated the time needed for building brand authority to reach the conversion stage. There’s no shortcut to creating a new brand or solutions. Although LinkedIn advertising doesn’t speed up the brand-building process, it does offer strong campaign algorithms that get smarter from the interaction people make with your campaigns. Algorithms seek information, and the more data they have, the more accurate results they provide. All of this takes time. Don’t pull the plug on a well-crafted campaign due to impatience before it has reached the conversion stage. Creating LinkedIn ads is challenging but learning to avoid the biggest LinkedIn ad mistakes will give marketers a leg up on the competition.
