DIGITAL MARKETING

Is LinkedIn Advertising Effective and Worth it? Is it just ideal for a B2B business?

Everyone knows how influential and vital LinkedIn has recently become. Here in this blog, we will see if marketing on it is useful, and is it just ideal for a B2B business?

LinkedIn has been there since 2002, but it was only in the last few years when it has attracted a lot of user base and engagement. Facebook and Instagram were ruling the Social Media Marketing Industry and were working the best for B2C companies as all of their customers were there. They just had to hit the right pain point, and they were gold.

But the case of B2B companies is a bit different. They don’t sell the services or the products to just one user but a multiple of like-minded users. The power of choice doesn’t just lie in the hands of a single buyer, but the decision is taken by the whole organization.

B2B marketers have to be more sophisticated as compared to B2C marketers. Aj Wilcox, CXL Institute

This is what LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and other founding members utilized.

LinkedIn Ads

What started just as a place for professional networking now has changed one of the leading social media platforms for lead generation.

You may have heard that LinkedIn Ads CPC is so high, but LinkedIn has the power to help us bring a highly qualified lead.

You may think that Google Ads traffic tends to send in hot leads, so why bother with high costing LinkedIn Ads? The reason is simple: Google Ads sends a lot of unfiltered traffic.

They send the CEO’s contacts but send janitors’ connections as well and everyone in between too. So you may think, can we just target the upper management? The answer is no as people tend to search similarly.

This brings us down to social media platforms. We have 3 primary options when it comes down to social media platforms for B2B marketers, namely-

1. Twitter: Here, business to business targeting is pretty weak. It tends to be more of a personal focus, but the beautiful thing is that the cost is pretty low so you can take quite a few shots on goal to try to get it right.
2. Facebook: It is more decent than Twitter. Still, the biggest challenge of Facebook is that people think it’s probably something like 4% to 6% of people even bother to put their company info into their profile. Hence, it’s more personal. It’s hard to achieve scale, but of course, the good thing is that even though costs are rising pretty rapidly, it’s still relatively low cost.
3. LinkedIn: It has by far the most precise business to business targeting, and it’s very business-focused. The one big challenge there, as mentioned above, is its high costs.

Advantages of using LinkedIn Marketing

1. Business Mentality and Robust Targeting: When you give someone an offer that augments one of those two things you’re going to tend to have a much higher conversion rate than with other platforms which is awesome
2. No Gatekeeper: So a lot of you know, basically influential executives will pass the keys to their email accounts to a secretary or admin. But they may not give the keys to their LinkedIn account just because that tends to be more personal and more guarded. So when you get a lead from a CEO, you’re probably going to be talking to the CEO.
3. Larger Deal Sizes: across all of the times we’ve done this study across multiple platforms. LinkedIn always closes the most significant deal sizes, and Google Ads still closes deals the fastest.

Disadvantages of LinkedIn Marketing

Like any other platform, even LinkedIn is far from being perfect

1. High Cost: We’re going to pay 6 to 9 dollars per click on average, which is two to six times more expensive than a lot of the times that we see on Facebook, for instance.
2. No Dayparting: This is kind of silly when you realize that in a B2B platform, there’s value in showing your ads during the business part of the day when people are in the office. Moreover, a sales rep is in your office ready to reach out and take their call. So you’ve got to use a third-party platform to do dayparting.
3. No Device Level Bidding: This is rough when your offer has very different conversion rates between mobile and desktop sites. You may want to funnel most of your clicks to one or the other. LinkedIn doesn’t let you do that. It’s kind of a one size fits all experience.
4. No exposed Relevancy Score: So LinkedIn’s relevancy score is much like Facebook Ads relevance score or Google Ads quality score. And this is helping you understand how you stack up to the average as an advertiser in getting people to take action. LinkedIn tracks this, and you’re held to it, but they don’t tell you what it is.

So, who’s suitable for LinkedIn Marketing?

These are not any mentioned hard and fast checklist that your company should check when deciding whether they should use LinkedIn Marketing services or not but just a few points that according to me should be at least taken into consideration for a better analysis-

1. Lifetime Value: A B2C or B2B product or services company that’s doing lead gen and you have a high lifetime value. When I say high lifetime value, I generally mean somewhere around 8k.
2. Recruiting: If you’re in the recruiting space if you’re recruiting white-collar talent, LinkedIn tends to work 99.9% of the time.
3. Higher Education: If you’re recruiting for a Ph.D. or an MBA program, LinkedIn’s targeting is proper around education, and so it tends to also work well.

If you’re outside of this, like if your lifetime value is too low or you’re not recruiting white-collar talent, you may have a little bit of an uphill challenge ahead of you.

A lot of B2C companies don’t have such high LTV’s. Hence I would seriously suggest all B2C companies give LinkedIn a hard thought, but if they have a grand strategy and know-how to make it work, then there is no point in stopping you.

In this blog, we discussed how

1. How LinkedIn Ads plays a very vital role in B2B business.
2. How is it different than Google Ads and other Social Media Platforms Ads.
3. Advantages of LinkedIn Advertising
4. Shortcomings of LinkedIn Advertising
5. Is LinkedIn Adverts best match for your organization

Thank you so much for going through this blog.

Let’s connect if you want to know more about LinkedIn Marketing or Growth Marketing. You can reach out to me at LinkedIn at Shreyansh Goel or email me at shreyanshgoel16@gmail.com.