linkedin advertising case study

9 LinkedIn Ad Case Studies That Marketers Can Learn From

Updated: July 01, 2020

Published: June 29, 2020

When you think about social media marketing, what's the first platform that comes to mind? For many marketers, it's probably Facebook or Instagram. But if I were to pick one, I'd go with LinkedIn.

Why? Well, first, LinkedIn is an amazing platform to use for brand awareness. Their Business Solutions offer a variety of ad types, like photo or video. Ads are visible to the platform's 630 million users , and the unique optimization tools, like audience targeting, ensure Ads reach qualified leads.

Second, LinkedIn's Business Solutions are expansive . There's a lot of opportunity for ad customization and budgeting — which is helpful if you’re not quite sure which ad is right for your strategy.

That's where my third reason for loving LinkedIn comes in: case studies.

Case studies often explain the thinking, process, and analysis behind how a team or business uses a product or solution. Marketing case studies usually focus on specific verticals, industries, or solutions.

Want to learn more about LinkedIn Ads ? Their case studies are a good place to start. Let’s walk through a few.

LinkedIn Ads Case Studies

These case studies will dive into every ad type LinkedIn has to offer and what those corresponding campaigns look like. LinkedIn offers four ad types: Dynamic, Sponsored, Text, and Message.

Dynamic Ads change based on the interests of LinkedIn members. They come in four formats and offer the most opportunity for personalization. Use this ad type, if you want to create highly stylized Ads for your campaign.

While Dynamic Ads can be shown in a variety of places on LinkedIn, Sponsored Ads are shown only in the main feed. They're similar to other channels in which ads blend into a user's main screen.

Text and Message Ads live on users’ main screens too — just in less obvious places. A Text Ad shows up in a member's right column, where other promoted content lives, while Message Ads are sent directly to inboxes.

Let’s look at a few companies that are at all levels of LinkedIn advertising expertise as well as companies with a variety of budgets.

Are you ready to see them in action?

LinkedIn Dynamic Ads Case Studies

Dynamic Ads use data about LinkedIn member interests to show them personalized Ads. The content of the ad, like copy or photos, changes based on that data. LinkedIn members can configure what's collected by LinkedIn to personalize the Dynamic Ad experience from the main feed.

LinkedIn's Dynamic Ads come in four formats:

It's likely that you've come across one of these ads on LinkedIn before. With so many versions, it's almost impossible not to see a job ad to your right, or a spotlight ad in the middle of the homepage.

If you've always wondered if those ads were successful, here are a few examples.

1. NerdWallet's Follower Ads

Finding top technology talent isn't an easy task — with so many qualified applicants, and even more competition, Companies like NerdWallet , which gives customers personalized financial advice, need help finding prospects.

In 2019, NerdWallet used LinkedIn Pages as a recruiting tool. LinkedIn's emphasis on professional content makes Pages the perfect place for them to promote its company culture.

Follower Ads about the company's self-proclaimed "nerdy" company culture would bring interested LinkedIn members to their Careers Page, where jobs are posted.

Image Source

“We're building recognition of our company and talent brand among industry peers. Through LinkedIn, we've even been able to reach VP-level members. That's not easy to do anywhere else," says Vivian Chen of NerdWallet's Brand Marketing team.

Results: NerdWallet's most popular posts usually center around company culture. One of NerdWallet's communication managers notes that employee-centric posts provide a genuine depiction of working there. Visible representatives can recruit those who can see themselves joining a team like NerdWallet's.

Takeaways: LinkedIn allows marketers to use the platform differently from other social media channels. If none of your other social pages allow for work-related content. Consider using Company Pages to spotlight company culture, and Promote them using Follower Ads just like NerdWallet did. These Dynamic Ads will change based on audience interest, so your transparent, company-related content will reach potential talent and followers.

2. ESCP Europe's Spotlight Ads

The World's First Business School, ESCP Europe , wanted to generate applicants for their Masters Degree in European Business in addition to building a global leads pipeline. They used Spotlight Ads, like the one below, to engage prospective students:

Spotlight Ads offer valuable content with which to target audiences. This ad, giving scholarship information, is perfect for gaining leads from a landing page. ESCP used LinkedIn Spotlight Ads because they’re a great platform for reaching higher education students.

"Precise profile targeting has led to quality results, which have converted in record time," says Rachel Maguer , the Director of Marketing and business Development at ESCP Europe. The company wanted to see a conversation rate of one completed application per 100 leads, in addition to generating at least 250 high-quality leads for their degree program.

Results: So, did ESCP make the grade? As a result of this campaign, ESCP Europe saw over two million impressions from potential students. Additionally, the ads led to a conversion rate of almost 14% — almost twice as much as the intended goal.

In total, ESCP generated 40 more leads over goal and found three countries that topped their qualified leads, solidifying the plan for a global lead pipeline.

Takeaways: Staying customer-focused with ads helped ESCP Europe secure almost 300 applicants. Ads showed images of current students enjoying the beautiful campus. Spotlight Ads accrued the leads, and ESCP Europe nurtured them through to conversion with follow-up calls and interview next steps.

Use Spotlight Ads to identify quality leads in global markets, and nurture them by providing valuable content to audiences in a Dynamic Ad format.

3. Snagajob's Job Ads

Snagajob , formerly known as Snag, is a source for finding hourly work. Because the platform is for job discovery, it's not hard to guess that when opportunities open, Snagajob's team wants people to know. To help, the company turned to LinkedIn for lead generation and ads to capture the attention of their target audience.

The company's ideal customers — business owners and managers — are on LinkedIn. The Job and Video Ads showcased Snagajob's deep understanding of customer behavior: that decision makers often don't have enough time. As a result, ads are short, explain the service's value, and are visually stunning:

Results: Snagajob's marketers had a hunch that Job and Video Ads would be successful for compelling busy professionals, and they were correct. Their campaign saw an 84% rise in converted leads. They earned more applicants and gained quality leads, all while lowering their cost of ad spend.

Takeaways: When targeted Ads are used in a calculated way, like Snagajob's, they're not a waste in ad spend. Additionally, Job Ads let people outside of a member's network know that companies in their industry are hiring.

4. Noodle's Content Ads

Noodle.ai provides artificial intelligence services to businesses, helping them become more efficient. To build brand awareness, Noodle.ai's marketers decided to use Content Ads to connect with their target audience of C-level executives.

In 2018, Noodle used LinkedIn's ad tools to solidify a lead pipeline. Content Ads, which promote downloadable content that automatically generate leads, were an excellent method to reach supply chain executives.

The Content Ad above promotes an ebook about supply chain management. Noodle.ai's team found that their target audience responds to content that helps executives understand their expertise.

Results: Noodle.ai saw three times better ROI than other marketing methods. In addition, CTR soared to up to three times higher on Noodle.ai's paid content and obtained 40% of qualified leads from the channel overall.

Takeaways: LinkedIn has now become a prime tool for identifying Noodle.ai's leads. By using Content Ads, Noodle.ai's marketing strategy is now a refined, reliable process for team cohesion.

Use Content Ads as a scalable marketing choice — as Noodle.ai grows, their marketing efforts with LinkedIn can grow as well. Remember, Content Ads are only available by contacting a LinkedIn representative .

LinkedIn Sponsored Ads Case Studies

Sponsored Ads appear in the news feed of LinkedIn members. They blend into feeds, but are notated by a supporting headline. Sponsored content includes single image ads, video ads, and carousel ads. Let's look at examples of each.

5. Kate Spade New York's Single Image Ads

Before 2019, designer brand Kate Spade New York (KSNY) never had ad campaigns on LinkedIn.

It wasn't until the company's team identified customers for their smartwatch on the platform that LinkedIn was considered for advertising. Krista Neuhas , senior director of global digital marketing for KSNY, says, "It’s important to us that the message we are sharing with consumers fits on the platform we are using."

Initially, the goal of the campaign was to drive traffic. The team decided to run a single image ad that featured actress Busy Philipps wearing the watch. The supporting copy tells the busy working woman that the new watch does everything they need:

The single image ad was used to spread brand awareness and showcase the new launch. It was part of a strategy that aimed to reach the right type of professional with the right messaging, and a simple image did the trick. Let's see how the ad campaign went for KSNY.

Results: The Busy Philipps ad made impressions with 143,000 audience members. It also earned a 2.44% engagement rate and 1.78% CTR. Total engagement numbers reached 5,000. Kate Spade New York hit a home run with their smartwatch ad — In fact, out of four platforms used for the campaign, LinkedIn members produced the highest CTR.

Takeaways: B2C content has a place on LinkedIn . Most audiences are part of the professional landscape in some way, so engaging them on LinkedIn can be useful. Start with a single brand awareness ad, like KSNY, to gauge engagement.

Ultimately though, remember that if framing marketing in the right context, like the smartwatch and its copy, the right customers can be reached.

6. Corporate Visions' Carousel Ads

If you've seen Carousel Ads on other platforms, they're similar on LinkedIn. These Ads allow for multiple images to appear in the same post. Carousel Ads are great for lead generation because target customers see multiple iterations of offerings which helps to pique their interest.

B2B training company Corporate Visions had a large audience on LinkedIn. Their ideal customer is a decision-maker in customer service, sales, or marketing. Even so, the leads they were earning weren’t qualified, and they quickly identified they had a content problem.

To make content their audience would enjoy, Corporate Visions' marketing team used LinkedIn's targeting tools to research their target market's demographics. They identified previous ads that performed well and produced the most high-quality leads: carousels.

With this information, the team moved forward with a carousel campaign. Carousel Ads from Corporate Visions give quick, actionable tips to their audience about the B2B industry, like this one below.

This campaign was optimized with LinkedIn's Conversion Tracker . This function tracks audience behavior and allows small changes to be made. Advertisers on LinkedIn can target members based on job title, seniority, and company size, so Corporate Visions was able to get very specific with who was seeing their ad.

Results: Corporate Visions saw a doubled increase in ROI after optimizing their Ads and reaching the right customers. The company has also seen a 116% increase in qualified leads year-over-year, making the new carousel strategy a success.

Takeaways: Companies could be leveraging LinkedIn Ads but not optimizing them or tracking conversions. When Corporate Visions learned about customer behavior on LinkedIn, they were able to identify how to earn the most leads with the platform. Look at campaign performance and study the reactions of your audience — is there a way to better reach them?

7. Automation Anywhere's Video Ads

Automation Anywhere builds software bots that do repetitive tasks so humans can spend time in other places. When the time came to advertise the biggest launch in the history of their company, Automation Anywhere sought to use LinkedIn's live broadcasting feature to announce their product.

The goal for the campaign was to build the most awareness possible. Automation Anywhere's Company Page had over 100,000 followers and an active community, so they posted a teaser to test video ROI. Two minutes later, the video had over 300 comments . Their marketers knew they'd made a great choice.

Automation Anywhere's official LinkedIn Live broadcast included repurposed content, drawing clips from previous videos to attract leads. But how did the broadcast perform?

Results: When the broadcast went live, the response was almost immediate. Within a few minutes, they had 400 comments from interested viewers. At the end of the broadcast, there were one thousand.

Though the product launch announcement ran across multiple platforms, 78% of viewers came from LinkedIn Live.

The team at Automation Anywhere engaged with their community and had meaningful conversations about the product. Having a team of product marketers talk to followers was big for building customer relationships and providing valuable messaging.

Takeaways: Consider hosting a broadcast similar to Automation Anywhere’s. Maybe there's no launch coming up, but consider producing a live Q&A or webinar. Automation Anywhere's team was blown away by the response from their community with a video; Maybe yours will be just as active.

LinkedIn Text and Message Ads

LinkedIn Text Ads show up in the right module of the main feed and give members a bolded CTA as a headline and a supporting sentence. They're easy to create, pick a target audience, and track leads.

Message Ads are a bit different — they're sent to a LinkedIn member's inbox. This gives advertisers the ability to communicate directly with leads, without a character limit. There are also tools to beef up a message's impact, like adding a form into the message.

Instead of a busy email inbox, LinkedIn Messages are less cluttered, leaving messages more room to be seen. And with the Conversion Tracker, keep track of who's engaging with and converting from your Ads.

8. Design Pickle's Text Ads

Let's see how graphic design company, Design Pickle , earned over $1 million in revenue with Text Ads. The company is a subscription service, but instead of food or makeup, customers are set up with professional graphic designers.

As part of a small business that aimed to increase plan subscriptions, Design Pickle's marketers had to keep their strategy cost-effective. The team decided to use Message Ads to retarget website visitors.

LinkedIn's tools identified a target audience closely matching the company's persona, so the marketers were able to personalize ads for a specific, ideal market.

The emphasis on targeting proved to be effective. Message Ads addressed company stakeholders making buying decisions. Copy like, "Save $37,000 On Design" is eye-catching and grabs a user's attention.

So, did the low-key ads bring high-yield results for Design Pickle?

Results: This campaign led to 463 new signups, 64 of them for premium subscription plans, leading to an estimated $1.8 million in revenue . As for cost effectiveness, LinkedIn provided the lowest average cost per signup by 19% when looking at the campaign across platforms.

Takeaways: Sometimes, it doesn't take a big, flashy ad to make an impact. Design Pickle is a graphic design company and earned over a million dollars with two-sentence ads. When audience targeting and retargeting happens on LinkedIn, companies can reach a large audience and re-engage leads.

9. VistaVu Solutions' Message Ads

VistaVu Solutions is a B2B company that was struggling with brand awareness. We've seen how LinkedIn's unique audience targeting tools impacts visibility for companies, so let's see if that rings true for this company.

In addition to boosting brand awareness, VistaVu's marketers aimed to generate leads and increase brand credibility with compelling Ads. VistaVu's team chose LinkedIn because their niche audience — oilfield industry leaders — was active on the platform.

To make their brand stand out from the competition, VistaVu's marketing managers decided to use Message Ads to amplify their unique company and its value. To make sure the team was targeting the right audience within the oilfield industry, LinkedIn's tools filtered audiences to make that happen.

The message itself was an ebook offer, and included a CTA with a download link. Because there's no character limit, the body text was able to properly introduce the company, its area of expertise, and the ebook.

Results: As a result of the messages campaign, VistaVu earned a 23.8% conversion rate , and cut ad spend by 75%. Using LinkedIn as opposed to other platforms earned the company five times more generated leads and led to twice as many conversions.

Takeaways: LinkedIn as an advertising platform doesn't limit efforts to just main feeds. Building brand awareness by using Message Ads allows for ample text to introduce a company to prospects.

Case studies can be extremely helpful for a real-life example of strategies you've never tried. You can visualize how a campaign looks and the tools to help you get there.

Be sure to pick a case study that's recent and comes with both qualitative and quantitative data. When it comes to ads, numbers and percentages are important, but so are strategy details. Recent studies will give you the most accurate numbers and processes for advertising.

If I want a relevant case study about social media, I start with the website itself. Every social media platform I've used has a section for case studies. For those that don't, I look at other articles, like this one about Facebook case studies .

Now that you know how to pick out a case study, and what a LinkedIn Ad strategy can look like, maybe for your next LinkedIn campaign, you can conduct your own case study. Try it, and see what you learn.

Don't forget to share this post!

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We’ve been helping marketers improve their funnel in the MECLABS SuperFunnel Cohort community (feel free to join us for a ChatGPT, CRO and AI: 40 Days to build a MECLABS SuperFunnel LiveClass to get ideas for improving your own funnel from the cohort).

The first step in any successful funnel is customer acquisition. So to give you ideas for attracting potential customers to your funnel, today we bring you three quick case studies – one using a paid tactic, and two using organic tactics:

• Paid advertising – How an AI solution improved its advertising messaging thanks to customer interviews and demo attendance.
• Technical SEO – How an HR tech platform used AI to help migrate subdomains on its main domain to improve SEO.
• Keyword-driven SEO – An ecommerce company’s five-step plan for finding keywords to attract organic traffic.

Quick Case Study #1: AI solution interviews customers, increases ad CTR from 3% to 10%

“Before I joined the Aimondo team, the company did not consider LinkedIn to be a decent customer acquisition source,” said Alisdair Hunter, Head of Growth, Aimondo UK .

BEFORE – Wrong pain points

Cost per lead was very high (>$120), and the clickthrough rate (CTR) was 1% to 3%.

“Pretty soon I realized that our messaging conveyed in the single-image ad LinkedIn campaign was built on the wrong assumptions about customers’ pain points,” Hunter said.

The marketing team had asked the sales team about customer pain points. The sales team provided these pain points:

• Low quality of data used for pricing workflows.
• Price optimization projects are too complex to handle, and not every company has someone experienced enough on their team to tell them where to start.

Based on these insights, the marketing team crafted messages that were supposed to reflect these pain points. For example, the image headline in one ad read “46% of sellers get wrong pricing date.” Another ad’s image headline read “Piece together your winning pricing strategy.”

Creative Sample #1: LinkedIn ads with average CTR, before

AFTER – Jobs-to-be-done framework

In February, a digital marketer from the team attended three demo sessions and conducted four customer interviews with existing customers. After processing the insights, the team quickly realized that insights delivered by the sales team were not exactly correct.

Instead of using generalizations (complex projects, low-quality data), they switched to addressing very precise ‘jobs to be done’ that prospects had.

“New messaging for the next single-image LinkedIn campaign was built on the following customer interview-driven insights: our prospects struggle to fulfil a very precise task – calculate price elasticity, and our prospects have to improve the quality of their demand forecasts,” Hunter said.

For example, one ad’s image headline read “What is the price elasticity break point for your product?” Another ad image headline was, “Does your April sales forecast account for weather data?”

Creative Sample #2: LinkedIn ads with average CTR, after

RESULTS – Higher CTR

CTR went from 1-3%, to 10-12%. Average cost per click (CPC) remained less than $3. 

“Customer interviews come in exceptionally handy. They provide qualitative data (therefore, you can very well get away with less than 10 interviews) for the initial hypothesis that can be proved or disproved via surveys with multiple participants. Or – like in our case – through LinkedIn campaigns,” Hunter said.

Quick Case Study #2: HR tech increases organic traffic by 1,200% in four months using AI-driven site migrations 

Founded in 2019 by Dee Coakley and Emily Castles, Boundless was born from the belief that people should have the freedom to shape their work lives without forfeiting their right to secure employment. Today, Boundless is operational in 25 countries.

The global employment, benefits, and payroll platform had two subdomains – guides and blogs. Boundless published over 25 country guides (each consisting of 10-12 subpages) which resided on the guides subdomain, while the blog content had hundreds of articles on a separate blog subdomain.

“We had all these different types of content sitting on different subdomains which made it both difficult to manage, but also suboptimal to our traffic goals. We decided to migrate everything to our main domain, boundlesshq.com,” said Irina Dhambazova, Head of Communications, Boundless .

However, the team had a limited budget.

“Limited budgets means there simply isn’t the luxury of time to spend hours trying to decide which content will be carried over and where retired content will be redirected to, so we turned to data using AI to help us deliver within budget” said Andreas Voniatis, Founder, Artios (Boundless’ SEO consulting firm).

The challenge was to bring across the content to the main website without losing rankings and traffic. “What most non-SEO experts won’t always appreciate is that before migrations, search engines have an existing model of your content and how they relate to each other. As soon as you migrate content, that model changes which is where the risks of losing traffic happen,” says Voniatis. “As soon as you migrate content on a website, even if it is within the same domain, you change the search engine model.”

The team decided on which content they could migrate and leave behind using the Pareto principle – 80% of your results come from 20% of your actions. “We were able to help them identify which content had SEO value by using Pareto on their Google Search Console (GSC) logs to work out which of the content drove most of the traffic,” Voniatis said.

Using AI to create redirect maps

While the URL structure for blogs and guides was straightforward, the team then had to consider what to do with articles they wouldn’t carry forward.

Some marketers might use the 410 GONE HTTP status code. Other marketers might redirect these all to the home page and lose any backlinks and traffic.

But the team wanted to find the best live pages to redirect the URLs to, and decided to use a language model to test the similarity of the removed content to the live content. “Historically for a site with many pages, this would have taken at least a week of analysis and often with some mistakes, but with AI we were able to carry out this analysis and produce a redirection map within a day which helped to keep the whole project within budget,” Voniatis said.

Although no design changes were involved, the team wanted to ensure the staging versions of the migrated content will perform comparably if not better than the existing live versions. So they audited the staging versions of the migrated content.

While the content performed fine in terms of Core Web Vitals (CWV) and being indexable, the team could see that it wasn’t as discoverable. Again, they used AI to model the distribution of internal links to content and were able to pinpoint articles that were insufficiently cross-hyperlinked from other content. “This not only helped mitigate the risk of visibility loss post-migration, but it also actually helped all content maintain its inclusion in Google,” Voniatis said.

Results – More traffic

Four months after the migration switchover, traffic increased by 1,200%, enabling Boundless to rank for English searches worldwide in Google for its main target terms around ‘Employer of Record [country],’  ‘Employees benefits in [country]’ and simply ‘Employer of Record.’

“The traffic growth since the migration was mad and quite unexpected. Not that we didn’t expect good things, but even we were surprised at how the traffic growth wildly exceeded the traffic growth levels forecasted,” Irina Dhambazova concluded.

Quick Case Study #3: Ecommerce company’s five-step plan for growing organic traffic from 10,000 to 650,000

“When I first joined Kicks Crew, we were laser focused on marketplace selling and were only averaging 15 orders per day. In two years’ time, we grew revenue by 100x with exponential growth,” said Gary Hui, Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer, Kicks Crew .

Here is the step-by-step process that the team conducted to achieve that growth.

Step #1: Baseline SEO Audit

The team started by conducting an SEO audit of the global ecommerce platform for sneakers’ website. The baseline focus of the audit examined organic traffic and the number of ranking organic keywords (spots 1-100 in the Search Engine Results Pages, aka SERPs).

Step #2: Identify ‘easy win’ keywords

‘Easy win’ keyword opportunities are keywords that the site is already ranking for in positions 4-30 (a.k.a, the first three pages of the SERPS). Google already sees the site as relevant for these key phrases. The team sought to capitalize on these existing keywords by using them, and variations of them, in more blog posts and webpages. The team:

• Ensured the site’s on-page SEO features these keywords or phrases
• Added additional, keyword-related content to the site
• Built links to these pages from high-quality, high-authority, relevant sites

Step 3: Competitive gap analysis

The focus was to identify missed opportunities and what key terms the competitors were ranking for that Kicks Crew was not. As a result of the competitive gap analysis, thousands of keywords were identified and up for grabs, including ‘Chucks’ and ‘Kicks on fire.’

Step #4: Ramp up blog content

Now that all of these keywords and gaps were identified, the team ramped up their content production and began creating relevant blog posts for the site to get the site to rank for longtail, intentional keywords. For instance, the team published posts about sneaker care, how to wear various sneaker styles, and how to resell sneakers.

Step #5: Guest posts

Guest posts were used to target high-intent, bottom-funnel keywords that users are generally plugging in when they’re ready to buy. They created posts on both sites with high domain authority and traffic, and sites with less domain authority and traffic.

RESULTS – Sales increase

The most important result is the sales increase – the site’s sales increased by 100x in two years.

The SEO improvements contributed to this increase. At the start of the campaign, Kicks Crew was ranking for around 40,000 keywords and at the end of the campaign it was ranking for almost 200,000, with a significant increase in keywords ranking in first page and top three positions. For example, Kicks Crew ranked in the No. 1 position for the keyword ‘authentic air jordan 1.’

Of course, this had an impact on traffic as well. Kicks Crew went from 10,000 monthly visitors to more than 650,000. 

“As mentioned, our site was averaging 15 orders per day which was just unacceptable to us as a company but most of all, we felt our end customer was missing out on our product offering. We are proud of our platform and knew what we had to offer was worth a portion of the market share. Through implementing a strategic SEO strategy, we were able to reach our target end customers and further connect with them by giving them relevant, useful blog content that they value,” Hui said.

“They remained flexible and passionate about reaching their end customer which wound up benefiting them immensely in the long run,” said Marc Hardgrove, CEO, The HOTH (Kicks Crew’s marketing agency).

Related resources

Ecommerce Research Chart: Acquisition cost per customer

Loyalty Marketing: How to get customers to stick around (and keep buying)

Growth Marketing: Attribution is a myth, but you need it

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Do LinkedIn Ads Really Generate B2B Leads? Read This Case Study.

Jan 4, '19 / by Marq Mosier

For most people, LinkedIn is a tool for staying connected with others professionally, or perhaps for finding a job. Marketers tend to think of LinkedIn as the B2B equivalent of Facebook – in other words, good mostly for sharing content and building communities (without the selfies and pictures of what people are eating).

But how many of you think of LinkedIn as a vehicle for B2B lead generation?  

You might want to rethink your answer: LinkedIn represents 80% of all B2B leads generated through social media . With the ever-growing amount of demographic data contained within LinkedIn, you’d be hard pressed to find a better option for reaching both broad audiences and niche targets. And as LinkedIn continues to expand its offerings and products for B2B marketers – for example, the new hashtag communities, options for native video, and ongoing updates to group and company pages – the ability to grow audiences within specific verticals is nearly limitless.

But what if you’re looking to accelerate that growth with paid advertising? LinkedIn ads come with a robust suite of advertising options and features to help you directly reach your audiences. And yet, despite these newer and flashier options, my favorite lead generation tool in LinkedIn remains the classic text ad. I find this tried-and-true approach still one of the more budget-friendly ways to serve impressions to the specific audiences you want.

To illustrate the power of LinkedIn text ads, let me walk you through a recent campaign I created for a client in the aerospace industry. The results we achieved with simple text ads were phenomenal – generating 57% more leads than our goal, at a 33% lower cost per lead.

Here’s how we did it.

Choosing our offer

If lead generation is your goal, your offer will form the foundation of your ad campaign. You need a compelling reason for leads to provide you with their email addresses – which means you need to offer them something that delivers significant value, and something they’re actively searching for or thinking about.

For my client’s campaign, the aerospace market was facing a new set of regulatory standards that would affect all manufacturers in that industry. My client and I decided to develop a series of white papers and webinars explaining these new standards, starting with a high-level white paper that we would advertise on LinkedIn via text ads.

Choosing our ad format

The great thing about digital advertising is the immediate feedback you receive. Because of this, it’s easy (and highly recommended) to test different versions of your ads, so you can determine with certainty which specific ad strategies generate the strongest results.

In this instance, we knew up front we wanted to test a wide variety of creative options for our campaign, and text ads gave us the most flexibility to do so.

I kicked off our campaign with ten ad variations that incorporated different images, copy and CTAs. I developed each ad with a specific audience segment in mind, to help me drill down and find the strategic approach that would provide the most conversions.

Identifying our audience

When selecting audiences to target on LinkedIn, I find it best to put in some time researching any data available on that audience before launching the campaign. This helps bypass that sense of “feeling around for the right audience” that can happen if you’re not properly prepared, and instead lets you focus immediately on finding your highest-converting segments.

Fortunately, my client had great data on our audience, including well-organized lists of individuals who had attended previous training courses on aerospace regulatory compliance. These lists included names, companies and job titles, which enabled me to create very specific buyer profiles to target during our campaign. This also allowed me to compare how well different audience segments converted, which meant I could quickly eliminate ads to the underperforming segments and focus our budget on the highest performers.

Additionally, because the new regulatory standards only affected U.S. aerospace manufacturers, we excluded suppliers, non-U.S. companies, and other non-relevant segments of the industry. And because we were targeting B2B leads, we set our ads to run Mondays through Fridays, from 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. EST. These factors helped us keep our campaign narrow and focused, thus keeping our overall cost low.

Setting our budget

To determine your budget for LinkedIn advertising, it’s helpful to first put that ad spend in context. I like to consider several questions before spending even a single dollar:

Does this ad campaign need to drive brand value, in addition to leads?

Can we achieve our lead generation goals with our available budget, do we have a process in place for managing the leads we generate.

Although you could make the argument there is branding in almost any marketing effort, for your LinkedIn ad campaign, think about ways you can build brand value with your ads.

This is why I often prefer to run my ads on a cost-per-impression (CPM) basis rather than cost-per-click (CPC). I find the average CPM on LinkedIn is competitive with Google Ads – but gives me a better ability to target audiences within a specific industry.

For my client’s campaign, we wanted our client’s brand to become the brand associated with these new regulatory standards, and specifically for our client’s brand to be thought of as the top provider for issuing certifications for the new standards. Therefore, paying for impressions rather than clicks made the most sense for this campaign.

Additionally, to help maximize our brand value, we also placed ads in targeted industry publications.

As with any marketing campaign, this should be weighed ahead of time to help you decide if a particular platform or ad space is worth the time and investment.

In this case, I worked with my client to set a budget of $2,000 for an eight-month campaign, during which time we hoped to generate at least 100 downloads of our white paper. This translated to a projected $20 cost per lead. This amount might be a bit high for a small business, but it isn’t unreasonable for a larger company like my client.

The unfortunate truth is that marketers don’t always have full control over lead management. On more than one occasion, I have seen marketing qualified leads handed over to sales teams who did not quickly – or sometimes at all – follow up on the leads. I have also seen marketing departments take the blame for these failures.

And yet, marketers can still wield significant influence. One thing I find helpful is to establish a process for lead follow-up ahead of time. This can be a great opportunity for the marketing team to highlight best practices for the sales teams on how incoming leads should be handled, including timelines and goal-setting. It’s just good housekeeping that can save you potential headaches down the line.

For my client’s campaign, having the lists of individuals who had attended previous regulatory training helped us focus our follow-up: Any lead from this list who also clicked on our ad was immediately designated as a marketing qualified lead and passed on to the sales team with priority status.

Our follow-up didn’t stop there. I also carefully reviewed the data on all leads who downloaded our white paper, to see if I could find any commonalities. It turned out that many of these leads had job responsibilities that included a specific aspect of the new regulatory standards. This was an important insight! We immediately set about creating a new webinar that dove deeper into this particular requirement, and we promoted the new webinar directly to these leads. This resulted in a higher-than-average turnout for the webinar, as well as an above-average view time across all attendees.

Our LinkedIn ad campaign results

Here are our final campaign numbers:

Although we spent slightly more than our intended budget due to a strong final day, we crushed our most important goals: total downloads, cost per lead and brand value:

• Whereas we had hoped for 100 downloads, we blew well past that with 157 downloads.
• With our total ad spend of $2,092 for those 157 downloads, our cost per lead was only $13.32 – 33% below our target of $20 cost per lead.
• At a cost of only $261.50 per month for eight months, this campaign delivered brand awareness to a targeted audience for over half of a calendar year.

We were also thrilled with our $1.28 cost per impression (CPM), which is substantially below the estimated $8.39 average CPM on LinkedIn .

And best of all, the leads we generated were extremely high quality, which I believe is a testament to the power of the LinkedIn platform. While LinkedIn often gets a bad reputation for advertising due to its frequently higher costs versus Google and Facebook, the quality of B2B leads generated by LinkedIn ads are typically much higher, due to the professional nature of the LinkedIn user base.

Are LinkedIn ads the right platform for you?

Depending on your goals, LinkedIn alone may not be enough to meet all your advertising needs. However, if you know the audience you want to reach, and you have identified reasonably achievable KPIs, then LinkedIn can indeed become one of your highest performers. In fact, for B2B marketers seeking lead generation and brand value, LinkedIn might very well be the premiere vehicle out there at this time.

If you think it might be time to expand your presence on LinkedIn and incorporate LinkedIn ads into your marketing mix, having an experienced partner to guide the way can help. Let’s talk !

If you want a few extra tips on social media marketing for your business, this Beginner's Guide to Using Social Media might be for you!

Topics: Strategy , Social Media

Written by Marq Mosier

Marq Mosier is a guest author for Clariant Creative and the founder of Wonderland Marketing in Houston, TX. He specializes in helping small business owners find their voice in local markets through digital advertising, content development and community building.

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