LinkedIn Ads Tutorial for Beginners - Step-By-Step

learning any advertising platform can be daunting often it means we stick to the one we know and we don't try anything new but you are missing out if you're looking to work with other businesses Market to professionals and drive more leads because LinkedIn ads is the best place to do this LinkedIn is actually one of the most simple platforms to use and in this video I will break it down for you step by step LinkedIn is the number one platform for B2B marketing but it is also used heavily for b2c marketing why because LinkedIn users

have on average two times the buying power of other platforms put simply people on LinkedIn have money and more of it ready to spend in this video you're going to learn how to set up your first ad campaign four little tricks to make your ad convert tip number three is a little secret that not many marketers know I'm going to talk about audience expansion and whether or not it's a good option for your ads we're also going to talk about your audience size how narrow is too narrow when setting up your ads okay so the

way that you find the LinkedIn ads platform is really simple you're just going to go ahead and click on advertise that's going to go ahead and open up the LinkedIn advertising dashboard and in order to get started the first thing you're going to do is create a new campaign so you just click on Create and you'll click on campaign or campaign group I'll dive in to what that means in more detail a little later in the video so now that you are in the dashboard the first thing we're going to talk about is how to

actually create an advert so if you click on create what you're going to do is click on campaign and that is the first step you see it's going to open up a campaign group now campaign group can be a number of different ads you can run a variety of different ads and test them all within one group that can be really useful if you have one specific product or service that you're trying to promote so we'll go ahead and click on next and then the first thing is going to ask you is the objective of

your ad so as you can see you have brand awareness you then have you know considerations you want website visits engagement you have conversions personally I don't recommend using Awareness on LinkedIn don't think it's particularly useful I don't really think awareness is useful for any platforms ultimately what you want is to get people to your website or you want them ideally to become a lead or you want them to actually convert on your website so for me personally and what I recommend to you is either a website conversion someone is actually buying something on your

website or taking action on the website or lead generation you're actually getting a lead and then of course that is valuable to you so for this example I'm going to select a website conversion and then it's going to pop up it's going to ask us about location you know target audience those types of things we'll come back to that in a little bit but first what I'm going to talk to you about are the ad formats because ad formats on LinkedIn are a little bit different to a lot of other platforms they have some really

cool ad formats you can't get elsewhere so for example you have all the things you would expect a single ad a carousel ad video ads but what I think is very interesting about LinkedIn is you have these message ads so this is where your ad is going to actually be delivered directly into your targets inbox LinkedIn also has an ad format called a spotlight ad what they do with this is personalize your ad based on the individual's profile data okay so now that we've covered some of the advertising formats you can select let's rewind a

little bit and talk about how you would get started step by step because there are a couple of options I would avoid when you are actually setting up the campaign I'll cover those in just a moment one of the very first things you're going to want to do is set up a LinkedIn company page this is super easy it can be done by clicking just a few buttons the other top tip I would give you here is to make sure you get your payment details set up you don't want to get through this process you

haven't got that set up you can't get your ads out there first up we have campaign groups like I mentioned earlier this is really important to get everything linked to a certain group of ads you can then manage the budgets date and everything for that particular group in one place now that you have a group set up we'll dive in to creating the ad for that group a quick tip I would not recommend using the brand awareness options that link in offer you want to focus on a website conversion on the generation as I touched

upon earlier okay so now let's come back to setting up your audience a lot of beginners get caught here because they don't know who Their audience really is so really think very carefully about who you want to target audience size is something that can waste your budget if you don't get this right LinkedIn makes some recommendations here which you should ignore I will cover this in more detail a little bit later on but first who typically buys from you who follows you on social media figure out who they are are in marketing we call this

the customer Avatar I can do a whole video on this so comment below if you would like to see that video but the main lesson is really think about who that person is so you can make sure you're targeting the right people the other thing is you're most likely going to play around with this to improve your results but what I would say is don't overthink your audience don't let it be a block to getting started just iterate as you go and improve upon it another great tip is using exclusions a lot of people focus

on who they can Target but don't think about who they should not be targeting you don't want people seeing your ads who are not relevant at all finally it's great if you already have an email list or data on your customers use those that can help you with targeting but today I'm going to focus on audience attributes I.E a completely new audience because this is made for beginners so as you can see here in the LinkedIn dashboard we have audiences and we have audience attributes so that's what we're going to focus on here so you

can select company you can select demographics education job experience you know interest and traits these are all pretty self-explanatory I would just advise that you spend some time in each of these options so let's take a look at demographics for an example I won't show you these in too much detail because they are relatively straightforward but what we can do is select the age and then you can select you know if your product is for 18 to 24 year olds or 25 to 34 year olds and then you can select accordingly and you can of

course go into a lot more detail by choosing other things education job experience interests and traits to make these as specific as possible so as you are selecting attributes you're going to want to keep an eye on your audience size which is this number right here the larger your audience the cheaper it is to run the ads and the more narrow the more expensive but the more likely it is that these people will be relevant be mindful you're not wasting money advertising too broadly to people who aren't relevant and don't care about what you're advertising

LinkedIn has a few recommendations when it comes to audience size they recommend for sponsored content a minimum of 300 000 people and sponsored ads and text ads between sixty thousand and four hundred thousand people but be very cautious of following this advice because LinkedIn are most interested in getting as much money from you as they can really you need a range of different audiences to get the best results and now we're gonna go a little deeper on audience options okay so once you've been through and you've started getting your audience set up the LinkedIn is

going to ask you if you want to enable audience expansion what does this mean well put simply LinkedIn will take the audience details you have given it use an AI robot a bit of magic to work out if there are other people that you should also be advertising to so is it good or is it bad I would recommend that you test it create two ads that are the same and then run one set of the ad with audience expansion and the other one without and see how they perform if you need help with your

marketing or your advertising and would like to work with me then check out the links below and fill out the form to get in touch so a little earlier in the video I explained the types of ads so we won't go over that again but what's really important to know is you want to uncheck the Audience Network option this is where LinkedIn is going to show your ads outside of LinkedIn I don't recommend this option as the whole reason I'm using LinkedIn is because the buyers are relevant to my product and service and have high

purchasing power this LinkedIn Audience Network option gets automatically checked when you choose single image ad for the carousel ad and the same is true for the video ad but not for some of the other options like text ads Spotlight ads so just be aware of that if you're choosing any of these three options make sure to go ahead and uncheck the Audience Network option okay so now we're going to talk about budget and scheduling so you can restrict your budget on LinkedIn but LinkedIn do state that some days they may spend as much as 50

percent more and what LinkedIn is doing here is on days when your ads are really working and getting results they're going to push these out even more and use a bit more of the spend they offer the option of Impressions or clicks which is what I recommend I always recommend you take the clicks option because we want people to take action not just see our ad and move on forget about it you can set how much to pay for a click they try and encourage you to spend as much as possible but I recommend you

start small and grow from there and again this is where you'll see that text actual amount spent daily may vary and then if you click on here they're going to explain a little bit more that's why I tend to set an overall budget so a lifetime budget for the campaigns and then of course I will let them optimize it Etc another tip is I always have a start date and an end date for my campaign so I'll test them over a seven day period 10-day period so that I can really see how it's working I

never want to just let an ad run if it's not working once I find something that does work then I will definitely allocate a budget and just let that ad do thing and of course check on it from time to time now when it comes to conversion tracking I would highly recommend you get this set up there are some options that are really straightforward but for the most part to really get this working you're going to need a developer or an expert to actually go in and set up conversions so they work well personally I

usually find people on Fiverr who can do it for ten dollars twenty dollars and they'll get it all set up and running properly on that note if you'd like to see a full video about conversions and how to set it all up and what I would recommend then leave comments below and I can look into creating a video on that subject okay so now let's move on to building the actual ad itself so here I would click on next of course click save it's going to save the campaign then it's going to open up where

I can actually create the ad so this is where I add the images the text and I can see how it's going to look so I would go ahead and create new ad for me I'm just going to browse existing content so that I can quickly show you how it will look so here's one you can see that I've pulled out of my archive I have you know of course I have a name for these ads I then have the introductory text I then have a destination URL where I want people to go and on

top of that you can then see some of the alt text this is again just good for SEO I've got the headline description the call to action I want the other thing I can do is look at how this is going to appear in the desktop feed and in the mobile feed and really get an idea for what if I think that preview looks good and if I think people are going to want to click on that ad okay so now I'm going to talk about the secret tricks to get your ads to convert first

up key keep your content short with videos you have as little as 10 seconds to capture attention so front load the video with the most interesting elements another top tip is to use recognizable leaders in your ads such as your company's CEO and just having a person so a face in your ad it's going to boost conversions by as much as a hundred and sixty percent and here is that unknown tip that I mentioned earlier in the video so unlike Facebook LinkedIn does not know its users ages LinkedIn instead guesses people's ages by their graduation

dates and other Milestones so when you advertise here it's important that you place a bigger focus on location and job titles to get a much better result finally you're going to want to use noteworthy statistics quotes and testimonials reel them in with something short and Punchy and then get them to come that with an irresistible offer LinkedIn did a test to see how important statistics are and they found adding a statistic improved click-through rates by as much as 37 and led to 162 percent more Impressions finally LinkedIn isn't the only advertising platform where I have

been getting some amazing results if you watch this next video to learn how you can Master Twitter ads I cover it in depth and discuss all the pitfalls to avoid and how to get started as a beginner the other video on screen now is going to show you how to create amazing LinkedIn ads with artificial intelligence thank you [Music]