Three ways to improve your LinkedIn advertising through creatives
ARTICLE
A primer to better, more engaging LinkedIn Ads creatives
One of the most straightforward ways to improve your campaign performance on LinkedIn is to invest time, effort, and a bit of budget on creatives. To successfully break through the noise and positively stand out from others is to have unique, well-thought-out, and engaging ads – regardless of format. A savvy B2B marketing professional can set up an outstanding campaign in terms of targeting or bidding, but unfortunately, that alone isn’t sufficient anymore. Creatives WILL make or break your campaign.
To help the community of LinkedIn advertisers, here’s a list of three ways to get started on your journey toward better ads – spiced up with a free template for planning your strategic approach for creatives.
One: Careful planning lays the foundation for success
Successful B2B marketers have outstanding resources for creating relevant, engaging advertising by leveraging their ideal customer profile – specifications, buyer personas, and customer journey mappings as planning resources. If you find yourself thinking in a position where these are not completed – I suggest finalizing them first and the returning to this guide. HubSpot, for example, has excellent tools for them.
Like everything in marketing and business, begin with your objective – are you looking to drive traffic to your website to get familiar with your product or service, or are you looking to generate quality leads for your sales team to pursue directly? Once you have a clear idea of your primary objective, select a relevant KPI and set a *goal* to reach.
Once you’re clear on what you need to achieve with your campaigns, start tailoring the ads based on the audience. What is their role on the path to purchase, and determine a theme for the creative – such as a case study, a feature update, or an industry insight you wish to educate your audience? Once the groundwork is done, ensure you have an actionable, reliable KPI that correlates with your objective and get to producing your ads!
A simple example could be generating leads from decision-makers within ICP by promoting a recent case study you’ve published and measuring the success of your creatives through conversion rates and campaigns through cost per lead.
Two: Find insights through experimentation
You could be the best designer or copywriter the world has ever seen, and you could nail the visual and copy on the first try. But the chances are that you’re a mortal B2B marketer like most of us, and finding the best-performing combination takes a bit of time.
And this is where experimentation comes into play – specifically with creatives. Hedge your bets through variety and a modular approach where you have a library of different visual assets, description texts, headlines, and CTAs, and methodically test multiple combinations to see what resonates with your audience. Form an initial hypothesis of what will most likely work, prepare all variants and create the ads in LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager.
Start with a broader portfolio, and trim down to the most effective variants as the campaigns progress. Depending on the size and budget of your campaigns, reaching statistical significance might take a while, but as massive proponents for data, we suggest refraining from jumping to conclusions too early!
As you’ve probably noticed, LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager recommends having at least five ads in a single campaign to allow their optimization algorithms to work their magic.
I would be remiss if I wouldn’t mention that creating all those variants using LinkedIn’s native user interface is quite painful and time-consuming. However, success and excellent results are rarely achieved without effort, so please set aside time, and you’ll be rewarded!
The challenge mentioned above is why we’ve started working on our solution here at Ambine to create, edit and manage ads on LinkedIn en masse. Let us know if you’d be interested in participating in our pilot program as we develop these functionalities and make managing ads on LinkedIn easier for B2B marketers!
Three: Stretch the boundaries of formats, and be *creative*
Similar to the slight pain of creating and managing ads within a campaign, LinkedIn Ads’ restriction to a single format within a campaign is unfortunate and a bit frustrating.
However, LinkedIn’s relatively wide array of different formats allows marketers more creativity than you might first imagine.
You can use carousel ads to tell a story in multiple slides while engaging the users to spend more time with your brand.
While you can’t do *animated* ads on LinkedIn, on the other hand, all videos under 20 seconds will loop and replay automatically and create a similar effect. Also, a short 4-second video can convey a strong message quickly, and on the far end of the spectrum, you could also use a 30-minute instructional video as an ad.
One GREAT addition to the format library is document ads. They work somewhat like carousel ads and are a format where you can upload an entire PDF file for the users to browse directly on their feeds. Document ads enable marketers to, for example, educate their audience effectively without forcing them to leave the app.
In summary, B2B marketing on LinkedIn doesn’t need to be boring – an endless barrage of single-image ads with barely differentiated copy from each other.
If you end with a setup that includes multiple formats and, by extension, numerous campaigns, Ambine’s budget optimization helps you get the most out of your media spend.
