Like many social media platforms, LinkedIn has an advertising option that will allow businesses to pay for their content to appear in front of target audiences. The question we're going to look at today is whether or not LinkedIn is the optimum social media platform to be advertising on and what are the benefits and limitations of their setup when it comes to paid content.
Firstly LinkedIn as you probably know is considered to be the professional social media platform made for networking with like-minded people, others in similar job roles, or for finding a new career itself. As a result, businesses that are targeting professionals have taken to LinkedIn by storm and are filling it with paid content, so the question is should you be doing the same.
The main thing to consider with LinkedIn is that it's perfect for targeting individuals based on key demographics such as job role, education, industry, etc. Where it does have limitations however compared to social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram is that it's much harder to target people by other demographics such as interests.
The team at minc marketing has vast experience running social media advertising campaigns and is therefore well placed the highlight some of the limitations with advertising on LinkedIn. The main limitation is the cost, whilst compared to traditional advertising methods such as TV and radio the cost seems reasonable when compared to advertising on other social media platforms the cost per click is far higher. For example on Facebook you can expect a cost per click to be somewhere around the £1-£2 range depending on audience and call to action. On LinkedIn however, it's much more common to have a cost per click around the £8-£10 mark. This is because Linkedin's advertising model implements a more competition-based approach where essentially you are bidding against other businesses for the right to advertise to key audiences.
This doesn't mean however that you should neglect LinkedIn completely as although you will get more clicks for your money on Facebook or Instagram or even Twitter the quality of those clicks may not be to the same level as LinkedIn depending on the audience you are advertising to. For example for businesses that are targeting individuals, Facebook or Instagram is the place to focus on however B2B businesses will struggle on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram to find the ideal target audience to sell their services to.
So the question is, if you are a business in the B2B space looking to advertise on LinkedIn how much budget will you need? Well, there isn't a definitive answer as this does vary depending on the audience, call to action and other factors but to give you an example, a recent campaign we ran for a client had a minimum spend of £700 over a two-week period. LinkedIn wouldn't allow us to insert a total budget lower than £700 giving you an idea of the kind of costs that are involved. Whereas with a platform like Facebook you can easily run an advert for £10, £20, or £50. As with all social media platforms when it comes to advertising it's all about trial and error as what works for one business won't necessarily work for another.
Our main piece of advice would be to ensure that before committing to any social media advertising campaign you've completed testing to make sure you won't waste your budget on an audience that hasn't been targeted in the way you thought. Also make sure you consider other options when it comes to reaching a B2B audience on LinkedIn that don't require you to go down the advertising route, this could be something such as using Sales Navigator to message key individuals or by joining industry-relevant groups and posting content in there.
If you're unsure how to make social media advertising work for your business and would like to have a free consultation with our marketing team we would be more than happy to do so.