LinkedIn marketing

Why LinkedIn marketing?

LinkedIn marketing is relevant for both B2B and B2C companies. Close to ¾ of Denmark's entire business community is represented on LinkedIn, and worldwide we are talking about over 600 million users. So there is a very high probability that your prospects or future business partners can be found on LinkedIn.

Compared to Facebook or Instagram, for example, LinkedIn as a social platform has the advantage that its users are all connected to the labor market in one way or another. Being visible on LinkedIn also sends a more professional signal in the eyes of many. On LinkedIn, there are no vacation photos or silly memes. Your messages and searches are automatically more targeted.

As LinkedIn has become increasingly social in recent years, it now makes sense to use it for organic posts. For example, you can spread messages and brand awareness related to your company by telling interesting facts or sharing bits of the story behind it.

It can also be a good idea to like, comment and share different content on your timeline. This way you not only show what you have to offer, but also show support and interest in other people's content. There's plenty of opportunity for cross-pollination and connecting with new acquaintances for free.

Then there is the inorganic - or paid - visibility. In other words, ads.

Guide to LinkedIn campaigns

So how do you advertise on LinkedIn? LinkedIn has an ad interface very similar to what you might know from Facebook advertising. However, slightly less complex and detailed. LinkedIn doesn't have quite the same granular information about their users, but they're very good at it. They call their ad interface Campaign Manager, or LinkedIn Campaign Manager, and it largely follows the same recipe as Facebook's ditto:

1. You must first have a personal profile on LinkedIn if you don't already have one.
2. Then you can create a LinkedIn page for your company.
3. Once your company page is created, your business is visible on LinkedIn. Now you can start running ads. You do this by first creating your Campaign Manager.
4. Then you create a campaign group.
5. Now you're ready to create your first campaign. This is where you really start to get into the targeting of your ads. You can create your ads following a lot of guidelines.
6. Goal: Should the goal be brand awareness, engagement, leads, or something else entirely? LinkedIn lets you choose your specific goal.
7. Target audience: Who should see your ad? LinkedIn allows you to segment your audience by geographic location, job title, school, skills and age, among other things. They also offer audience templates if you're unsure exactly what your ideal audience looks like.
8. Format: Like Facebook, LinkedIn offers image ads, video ads, carousel ads and more.
9. Placement: You can just run your ads on LinkedIn or you can reach the LinkedIn Audience Network, which are LinkedIn's partners.
10. Budget and schedule: LinkedIn lets you choose between a fixed daily budget, a total campaign budget or bidding in either CPC or CPM.

Once your ads are up and running, it is of course important to monitor them and track how they perform and convert. Especially if you have chosen bidding in your budget, you need to be aware of where the limit is for when you start getting impressions of your ads and thus spending your budget. This limit fluctuates depending on location and target audience, so you need to test it.

Is marketing on LinkedIn necessary?

The short answer is no. There is nothing in marketing that is a necessity. As a business, you always have a lot of different tools and levers to pull. But that doesn't mean that marketing on LinkedIn can't become an extremely useful element for you in your marketing.

An obvious advantage of marketing on LinkedIn, for example, is that the leads you find are automatically much warmer than the ones you'll find on Facebook. Facebook users are online for a variety of reasons. It could be sheer boredom. They're not necessarily in the mindset you hope for when looking for potential buyers or partners.

You'll often get far more targeted results on a site like LinkedIn, where you not only know that every user created is involved in the job market in some way, but is probably browsing LinkedIn for reasons that are far more relevant to you. They may be looking for job opportunities, potential collaborations, or simply business projects that seem compelling. Either way, you can be pretty sure you'll catch people in the right mindset when you run your marketing on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn strategy for businesses

Before you attack marketing on LinkedIn as a company, you should make sure you have a strategy in place. It may not need to be detailed, but an overall game plan is still useful. What are you looking to achieve? What can LinkedIn marketing do for you? What are the pitfalls/disadvantages of marketing on LinkedIn?

Here's our take on a LinkedIn strategy for businesses that you might want to keep in mind before you start your LinkedIn marketing.

• Be clear about your target audience. In all marketing, you need to know your target audience first and foremost. Make sure you know who you're trying to target (and why - that is, what value can you offer them) before you start LinkedIn marketing. If you come up with a clear profile of your ideal end user, you can hold it up against LinkedIn's audience segmentation and already stand strong.
• Organic content. An active and engaged profile sends a good signal. You could assign an employee to spend 20 minutes a day creating activity on your LinkedIn profile. Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn has the advantage of appearing more professional as a network - there are no cat pictures. So it's okay to like and share content you find relevant. Even better is to create your own content. Feel free to use your blog or refer to your newsletter if it seems relevant.
• Graphic content. Just like on Facebook, images and especially videos often win over text-only posts. They simply have a stronger stopping power. Therefore, use professional graphics and videos as much as it seems appropriate, both in organic posts and in your LinkedIn advertising.
• Still unsure? There are plenty of marketing agencies that can help you with your LinkedIn marketing. If you feel that there is something to be gained on LinkedIn for your company, you can contact one of these agencies and ask them. Most are happy to give you a no-obligation assessment of whether they can help you run your LinkedIn advertising, for example.