How to Promote Your Event on LinkedIn
There is no denying that LinkedIn can be a pretty daunting platform. For many, it is the platform that we choose to avoid as it is often more expensive than some of the other platforms. It does, however, have a multitude of benefits particularly for B2B targeting, which helps to generate a higher ROI, despite the slightly higher CPA, and once you know how to utilise LinkedIn’s capabilities to promote your event, it can produce really strong results.
Before setting up successful event marketing PPC campaigns on LinkedIn, it is really important that you have a strong presence on the platform via your Company Page; what we mean by this is posting engaging content to your followers regularly. This allows users to interact with and become more familiar with your brand. This is a crucial starting point on LinkedIn as the audiences on this platform tend to be more Top of the Funnel and Middle of the Funnel, so you need to slowly introduce your brand to the users and in doing so, they will convert later on down the line.
Where Should I Start?
Campaign and Ad Type
The first step that you need to take when promoting your event on LinkedIn is deciding what type of campaign you want to run and, like Facebook, there are a number to choose from on LinkedIn. It is recommended that you use a combination of ‘Conversions’, ‘Lead Generation’ and ‘Engagement’ campaigns. It is important that you try a number of different variations to allow you to discover what works best for your type of audience for your event promotion on LinkedIn.
Within these different campaign types we also have different ad creative types: Single image ad, Carousel ad, Video ad, Message ad and Conversation ad.
Audience
One of the biggest attractions to LinkedIn is your access to a premium type of audience. LinkedIn users tend to keep their profile up-to-date on a regular basis, which makes targeting that little bit more accurate than Facebook. For example, on Facebook I am still currently employed by Topshop but on LinkedIn I have been working for Tag Digital since July 2019. LinkedIn is a more accurate representation of where many people currently are in their career.
It is important that you use a combination of the available criteria in order to perfect your audience – such as member skills, member interests, job functions, seniority and company size, to name a few. Layering with this type of criteria allows for greater flexibility and ease when looking to target a particular type of audience. Be wary that it may take a few attempts before you reach the perfect audience.
An example – if your target audience are Senior Executives working in Human Resources for a large company, you can use LinkedIn’s layering abilities to create your ideal audience. You can approach this in a number of ways, one of those being to select the following:
- Job Seniority: CXOs, VPs, SVPs
- Job Function: Human Resources
- Company Size: 5,001-10,000 and 10,101+
Budget
Allocating an appropriate amount of budget can sometimes be the most challenging task. However, LinkedIn gives us the ability to change how we are willing to pay through cost per click (CPC), cost per impressions (CPM) or automated bids. We do not recommend using automated bids as this is based on machine learning and there will likely be tests carried out to figure out the best strategy so this can be more costly. CPM also requires higher bidding, which is why we would recommend using CPC for the majority of your campaigns.
CPC is the cheapest method of bidding, yet if your CTR is averaging lower than 0.39% (LinkedIn’s average CTR for sponsored content ads) then you should look at changing to another bidding method. The change might become more advantageous in the long run.
What has the Tag Digital team said?
In terms of overall budget, our Tag Digital team has recently found that running shorter LinkedIn campaigns with a slightly higher budget is helping to improve overall results.
For example, if you have a budget of £5,000 to spend on LinkedIn, you should average your daily spend between £100-£150 per day for a 4 week period, rather than averaging £25-£50 per day over an 8 week period.
Conversions vs. Leads
Choosing between a conversion or a lead campaign can be difficult as there are a number of pros and cons for each campaign type. However, the benefit of using LinkedIn is that the lead quality, regardless of the campaign type, can be higher than that of other platforms due to the targeting type and also the mindset that people have when on the platform.
Conversion campaigns help drive traffic to your website which you can use to your advantage for future remarketing campaigns. This can be costly if the users do not convert. Lead Gen campaigns, on the other hand, do the opposite. They allow the user to convert without leaving the LinkedIn platform – and conveniently your details are, more often than not, already filled out for you. The downfall of Lead Gen campaigns is that you have no way of retargeting this type of traffic as users are less likely to click through to your website.
Finding the right campaign type for promoting your event on LinkedIn takes some time. You might find that running both of these campaign types in conjunction with one another is what works to your advantage, but you won’t know until you try.
For more information on how to promote your event on LinkedIn or general support with your event marketing campaigns then click here to get in touch with the Tag Digital team today.
Written by: Kirsty Ferguson, Paid Social Specialist
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