LinkedIn is a fantastic professional social networking platform. That goes without saying. However, LinkedIn is quickly becoming a force in the PPC industry as well. With the ability to target by geography, industry, job title, skills, groups, age, gender, seniority, company, company size, and any combination thereof, you can easily see why.
Back in June I wrote a post with 3 quick tips for LinkedIn PPC, but before you create a single campaign, ad, or landing page you need to answer these 10 questions:
10 Questions To Answer Before Advertising on LinkedIn
- What geographic areas would you like to target? Be specific since LinkedIn offers targeting by country, state, province, city, etc.
- What industries are your best customers in?
- How large (in term of employees) is your customer or his/her company?
- What companies would you like future customers to be working for?
- What job title(s) do your customers have?
- What level of seniority in the company makes for the best introduction?
- Which functional areas do your customers come from?
- What age range do your best customers fall into?
- Which LinkedIn groups would potential customers be members of?
- What skills would your potential customers have been endorsed for on LinkedIn?
As you can see, these questions all line up with targeting options in the LinkedIn advertising interface. However, you should take it one step further before creating your campaigns.
Create A Persona
With the answers to the questions above, describe a fictional customer who has the traits of a specific group of customers. Here is an example of a persona that Clix Marketing might target:
Web Developer Dave/Diana
- Lives in the suburbs outside a major US metro area
- Works at a web development company
- Skills include web design, Java & C#
- Director/Manager
- 35-45 years old
Using this information you can then create ads that speak to the needs of Web Developer Dave/Diana, target those ads, and have a landing page that offers a solution to a problem facing Web Developer Dave/Diana.
What other questions do you wish you’d answered before starting your LinkedIn advertising campaigns?
