7 Reasons You Should Harness the Power of LinkedIn Ads for B2B Growth

With more than half of B2B buyers using LinkedIn to make purchasing decisions, the challenge is how to make yourself stand out and gather resources for growth.

One way you can achieve that is by using LinkedIn Ads for B2B.

This blog post dives into the powerful features of LinkedIn Ads and why you should leverage this tool to drive significant growth for your business.

1. Unmatched Targeting Capabilities

LinkedIn Ads allows you to pinpoint your ideal customer profile by setting several parameters. This way, you can get granular over whom to show your advertisements. Here are the core targeting modes that you can use:

• Categorise by demographic data, including gender and location
• Company targeting, as in segmenting them according to industry, company size, or specific business
• Targeting by job, including categories such as job title, function, seniority level, and more
• Skills and experience targeting, which can help in reaching specialised professionals with the exact qualifications you’re looking for
• Group targeting, which is useful for engaging with an audience already interested in your niche

Capturing Quality Leads

By using the targeting features offered by LinkedIn Ads, you can:

• Tailor your ads: Targeting allows you to edit and position your message to accurately address their pain points and interests. Let’s say your business offers software-as-a-service. You can create an ad that directly speaks to the challenges that relevant businesses face.
• Focus on decision-makers: By targeting specific titles and companies, you can reach people with the authority and budget to make purchasing decisions. This translates to higher-quality leads who are closer to the conversion stage.

Matched Audiences

LinkedIn Ads also offers the Matched Audiences feature. Here, you can upload a list of contacts that you already know, such as email addresses or website visitors. LinkedIn will match them with actual users on the platform.

Audience Expansion

When you enable the Audience Expansion feature on LinkedIn Ads, the tool uses your existing audience as a base. LinkedIn analyses the profiles and businesses among your audience and finds similar users on the platform. This helps you find new leads that share the same traits as your ideal buyer persona.

2. Building Brand Authority and Trust

Unlike Facebook or Instagram, LinkedIn gathers not just any online user—it’s a professional hub. Having a LinkedIn account for your business alone already gives it a sense of credibility, and further refining it with details establishes authority and trust among other users.

As such, you gain access to a more receptive audience ready to engage with your content and seriously consider your offerings.

LinkedIn Company Pages

Before starting any B2B ad campaign on LinkedIn, you can create a company page on the platform. This serves as a dedicated space to showcase what your company does. Additionally, it helps:

• Show that your business is legitimate and professional
• Attract the right clients with a tailored page that resonates with your target audience
• Drive organic visibility on LinkedIn
• Position yourself as an expert by releasing industry articles, company updates, and thought leadership pieces.

You can go beyond a simple company page by leveraging LinkedIn showcase pages. Here, you can highlight specific products or services that you offer. This way, you can provide interested B2B clients with a focused platform where you can demonstrate what your brand excels at.

Consistent LinkedIn Presence

With a refined company page on LinkedIn, you can start releasing your advertisements regularly. You can set up your campaign schedule to ensure that your target audience isn’t overwhelmed with the ads but gets enough exposure to them. Here’s why that matters:

• Consistent ad exposure keeps your company at the forefront of your targets’ minds. Over time, they become gradually familiar with your business and what you have to offer.
• Leverage LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities for repetition. Precise targeting options let you reach the right people repeatedly with relevant messaging, which can build trust and rapport.

Aside from ads, you should also keep your organic content regularly updated. This way, you create a consistent content stream, reinforcing what your brand says and showcasing your expertise.

Tips for Creating Ads on LinkedIn

When creating your LinkedIn ads, ensuring that they seem authoritative and trustworthy matters. Here are some tips to follow:

• Showcase testimonials from your previous B2B clients: Alternatively, mention any case studies demonstrating how your product or service helped another business. It’s easier to trust a business when people collectively trust it, as it adds a layer of credibility to the brand.
• Incorporate data, statistics, and other expert opinions into your ads: This approach shows that your brand understands industry trends and challenges, which establishes your authority.
• Focus on value: Focus on how your solutions address specific pain points your audience faces. This approach positions you as a trusted advisor rather than someone focusing solely on sales.

In general, use high-quality images and videos that align with your brand image and resonate with your target audience. People won’t trust or pay attention to the ad if it seems sketchy or cluttered.

3. High Engagement Rates with Professional Audiences

LinkedIn welcomes around 1.6 billion visitors per month and over 27 million active users daily. Unlike other social network platforms, users visit LinkedIn to actively consume professional content, look for jobs, and connect with people for opportunities. This makes
LinkedIn an excellent platform for your B2B ads to perform well.

40% of LinkedIn visitors organically engage with a page each week, demonstrating how LinkedIn can connect B2B brands with their target audience without relying solely on paid advertising. LinkedIn users are typically receptive to professional content, which translates to:

• A higher likelihood of users interacting with your B2B ads
• Creating brand interest among users with increased ad visibility
• Keeping your brand fresh in the minds of B2B-inclined users

4. Cost-Effective Lead Generation

Access to advertising tools and cost-per-click rates on LinkedIn is generally more expensive than on other platforms. However, each click that your ad receives might equal one qualified lead for your business.

LinkedIn is different from other platforms.

Here, professionals are actively engaged in their industry, searching for solutions, and receptive to B2B messages. That translates to a higher chance of clicks from qualified leads who are genuinely interested in what you offer.

Here’s more about why LinkedIn Ads can be cost-efficient for lead generation, despite the potentially higher CPC:

• Higher returns on investment: By setting the right audience for your LinkedIn Ads, you can reach the exact decision-makers at the right companies with accuracy. It’s easier to convert these leads into customers since they’re already in the market for your solutions.
• Good customer lifetime value: B2B customers often have a higher CLTV compared to B2C customers. In other words, a single high-value lead from LinkedIn can generate significant revenue over time, justifying a potentially higher upfront cost.

5. Leveraging LinkedIn’s Unique Ad Formats

LinkedIn offers multiple ad formats, allowing you to create the right variety. This way, you keep your message fresh, cater to different audience preferences, and enhance your chances for engagement and conversions. There are four general ad formats on LinkedIn, including:

• Sponsored content to promote brand awareness
• Sponsored messaging for sending personalised offers to potential B2B partners
• Dynamic ads for personalised ads in the LinkedIn feed
• Text ads for simple, effective campaigns to bring traffic to your landing pages

Sponsored Content

If you want to make your ads appear natural, using LinkedIn Sponsored Content might be the right choice. This content seamlessly integrates into the feed as native ads, appearing just like regular posts except for a subtle “promoted” label. This makes them highly viewable and less disruptive than traditional ads.

Sponsored content can include images, videos, events, documents, and carousels on LinkedIn. You can choose to create new sponsored content directly or use past posts as sponsored content.

Sponsored Messaging

Aside from posts that reach multiple people, you can also send targeted, direct messages to the inboxes of your ideal audience using LinkedIn Sponsored Messaging. It’s like sending a personalised email but within the familiar LinkedIn messaging platform.

There are two main formats for Sponsored Messaging:

• Conversation ads: These messages offer more flexibility, allowing for multiple calls to action (CTAs) and branching conversations depending on the recipient’s response. You can use them to guide users toward different landing pages, event registrations, or lead capture forms.
• Message ads: These are more straightforward, containing a single CTA and a concise message. They’re ideal for driving a specific action, like downloading an ebook or scheduling a demo.

These messages appear just like a regular message from someone’s colleague, except for indicators that the message is an ad. They are sent only when the user is active on LinkedIn, ensuring that they can read the ad right away.

Dynamic Ads

LinkedIn Dynamic Ads take Sponsored Content to the next level by automatically personalising them for each viewer. When setting up dynamic ads, you create a template with predefined elements like headlines, body copy, and a CTA.

LinkedIn uses data from your target audience’s profiles to automatically populate specific details within the template. This can include the viewer’s name, job title, company, or even a profile picture (depending on the ad format).

Dynamics ads are either spotlight ads, which lead your target audience to your website or link, or follower ads, which allow users to discover your brand and encourage them to follow your LinkedIn page.

Text Ads

LinkedIn Text Ads are a concise and cost-effective way to reach your target audience on the platform. These text-based ads appear on the desktop version of LinkedIn, typically on the right-hand side or top of the feed.

Despite their simplicity, Text Ads offer robust targeting options. You can define your ideal audience based on factors like location, job title, industry, and even skills. This ensures your message reaches the most relevant professionals. You can use them to bring users to landing pages of your choice.

6. Detailed Analytics and Performance Tracking

You can track campaign performance on LinkedIn using the following features:

• Core metrics: LinkedIn Ads allow you to track essential metrics like ad impressions, clicks, cost-per-click, and conversions. These provide you with a high-level overview of how your campaign performs.
• Engagement insights: You can also get insights on user engagement, such as likes, comments, and shares, especially for your sponsored content.
• Demographic insights: You can see the location, job title, industry, and company size of users and pages interacting with your ads. This allows you to refine your targeting for future campaigns and ensure you reach the most relevant audience.
• Reporting: You can generate reports tailored to your specific data needs. For example, you can filter data by campaign, ad format, or audience segment to gain valuable insights.

7. Staying Competitive in Your Industry

LinkedIn is rich with industry insights and trends, making it very popular in the B2B market. As more and more businesses get involved with LinkedIn, advertising on the platform positions you within the environment, allowing you to get discovered.

As your ads reach targeted businesses, you’re essentially inserting yourself into their online conversations and content consumption.

This exposes you to the latest industry news, discussions, and challenges they’re facing.

To keep your competitive advantage,

• Keep your ad content fresh and relevant: Regularly update your ads and incorporate trends that you discover. This shows that you are aware of what is happening in your field.
• Engage with your audience: Utilise Sponsored Content to share thought leadership pieces. Interact with your audience through comments to showcase your expertise.

Embracing LinkedIn Ads for B2B Success

LinkedIn Ads offers a powerful toolbox for B2B growth. Using it lets you target potential business partners at a granular level. You can also establish your brand authority, drive engagement, and generate leads with LinkedIn campaigns.

Here’s the golden fact: you’re not the only business waiting on LinkedIn for opportunities. It’s essentially a B2B market, and that gives your brand a fertile platform to grow.

Now that you understand how LinkedIn Ads work, along with tips on how to maximise them, it’s time to take action and optimise your campaigns. If you’re still unsure of your next step, check out our blog for relevant resources. Better yet, reach out to Common Ground for personalised help.