Much like Amazon, LinkedIn has expanded its advertising offerings a lot in the past 5 years or so. As of writing, LinkedIn offers the following to anyone:

• Display Ads
• Sponsored Posts

The platform also expands on those offerings in their Advertising Partner Solutions to offer:

• Premium Display Advertising
• Sponsored In Mail
• Follow Company Ads

Each of these types of advertisement can be highly targeted and as such the CPC tends to be a bit higher than other platforms like AdWords (Bing and Google), Facebook, and Amazon.

LinkedIn Advertising: Basics

To begin, you will need a company page, but those are very easy to create, so we are going to gloss over them. Showcase pages are in the same vein, so we will skip those, too.

Display and Text Ads

LinkedIn Display ads are much like the display ads that we are all familiar seeing on websites around the internet. They include an image to the left of text, plain and simple and they show up in the obvious places and are accompanied by a small note letting you know they are ads:

To make a good display ad simply add a picture and some text to the ad builder in the LinkedIn Marketing solutions platform. To make your ad better:

• Use punchy, succinct wording
• Use an image of a person - stats still show that the image of a woman gets more clicks than any other image
• Make the link text very concise and engaging

Sponsored Posts

LinkedIn Sponsored Posts are an excellent way to boost your content and get it in front of a bigger audience than your network alone. It is also an excellent way to get targeted content in front of the right audience. Sponsored Posts are also a little more sneaky as they appear in user's feeds like this:

In order to make a really effective Sponsored Post, we suggest:

• Including relevant content to wherever the post link will take people. If you are taking people to a sign-up form, let them know, if it is a link to a blog post give a brief intro to the post.
• Include a CTA no matter where you are linking
• Always use a high quality image
• Consider who your audience is and write with them in mind

When you publish your Sponsored Post, you are able to target incredibly specific demographics. Options include job title targeting (C-suite, Management, etc.), company size (0-10, 11-50, 100-1,000, etc.), location, industry, and more. Combining these targets can yield extremely successful campaigns.

LinkedIn Advertising Partner Solutions

This package allows businesses to reach wider audiences with a few more tools.

Premium Display Advertising

Instead of being lumped into a box on the right hand side of the page, LinkedIn offers four different placements for these display ads:

• A medium 300x250 pixel rectangle on the right hand side of the page
• A long 160x600 pixel rectangle on the right side of the page
• A text-only link at the top of the feed
• A leaderboard image 728x90 pixels that appears at the bottom of some feeds

Sponsored InMail

LinkedIn now allows you to send InMail to any of its 500 million users. These messages can either be a form or a simple email like message that LinkedIn users receive through the platform. These offer a high degree of personalized touch that breaks through the chatter of feeds or display ads and lands right in a user's inbox. Not only that, but a LinkedIn user can only receive one piece of InMail every 60 days, ensuring that your InMail is not lost in a swirl of hundreds of other sponsored messages.

Follow Company Ads

These ads appear instead of the Display ads and are great for brand building or even getting your logo in front of as many people as possible. They allow LinkedIn users the ability to simply click on a button to start following your company. This ad space can also be used to promote your company's products with a direct link to buy. LinkedIn also uses this ad space to promote their own features:

LinkedIn has made engaging with its users through advertising incredibly easy, robust, and targeted. Because of this, the return on advertising through LinkedIn can be huge, even though upfront CPC might seem a bit steep.

As always, feel free to contact our experts if you have any questions about promoting your company on LinkedIn!