Advertising Strategy

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Key components

When you are setting up a linked in marketing strategy before you do anything you need to look at the following components.

• Setting objectives: This is what you are aiming towards and what you expect to achieve from the campaign.
• Audience targeting type: What audience are you going to target? Will you use the standard demographic targeting or mass audiences?
• Setting relevant KPIs: These are indicators that will benchmark the performance of the campaign.
• Resourcing: Consider the materials and supporting content needed for the campaign. For example, content and graphics.
• Budgeting: What is your allocated spend for the duration of the campaign?
• Ad copy: This is the presentation of the campaign.
• Scheduling: This is a defined timeline for the campaign.
• Measurement: This is a review of the campaign's performance.
• Maintenance: Making the necessary adjustments to improve and optimize the campaign.

Setting KPIs and benchmarks

Depending on the objectives, different KPIs will be applied to measure the performance of the campaign. KPIs should be applied to campaigns to track your progress and benchmark your success to ensure that goals are on track to hit targets. For example, if you are working towards awareness based campaigns the KPIs set might be impressions or views gained. If the campaign is Lead Generation focus, the KPIs set might leads acquired a click-through rates. Accurate targeting based on authentic data is the foundation of the LinkedIn platform.

Audience segmentation

LinkedIn gives brands a proven way to directly target from within the most affluent influential and educated audience on the social web. LinkedIn's targeting is highly accurate because it draws from actual profile data provided and is continually updated by its members themselves. You are able to target the first-degree connections of specific members and also their behavior on LinkedIn.

For example, you can see what groups they join and how much they share and comment, which can be used to inform your targeting. This is why audience segmentation for targeting is so important. You should be taking all of the following into account when devising your own LinkedIn advertising strategy: skills, industry, age, gender, company size, job title, seniority, function, discussion groups, company name, education, and then finally, geographical location.

Cost structure

The KPIs and objectives that you will set will determine the cost structure of your LinkedIn campaign. Depending on what you want the audiences to do a CPC, which is Cost per Click, or CPM, which is Cost per Impression, cost model can be applied. If the audience is encouraged to take an action in the advert it will most likely be CPC cost structure. If there is no call-to-action in the ad it is likely that a CPM cost model will be applied.

Let's now look at some of Linkedln's marketing solutions. Displaying ads with the purpose of increasing awareness will often take a CPM cost structure as there is no call-to-action and the aim is to boost visibility. Marketeers want as many views as possible.

If you take Sponsored InMail as an example, this would take a CPC cost structure as there is a clear call to action with every InMail. The action is taken as complete when the call-to-action button in the InMail is clicked on. You'll notice that the Sponsored Updates has both CPC and CPM as options. This is because Sponsored Updates caters to both. The marketeer can decide how they pay for Sponsored Updates as each sponsor's post may serve a different purpose.

Depending on the post, it may be a simple update but no call to action or hyperlink. In this case, CPM will be more appropriate. If a post contains a redirect link or a call to action, then CPC would be more appropriate.

Ad copy

The ad copy represents the presentation of the ads.

The elements of a well-written ad copy include the following:

• Make sure you have a sufficient body of text that doesn't overload the user with information and detail.
• Use text sparingly to allow the user capture your message quickly.
• LinkedIn lets you create up to 15 ads per campaign and multiple ads increase your chances of getting multiple responses. It's important to make a variety of ads with different headlines, descriptions, and images. Multiple ads allow you to experiment with various copy and keywords to see which ones work best for your target audience.
• The call-to-action within the copy needs to be explicit and easy for the user to understand. It should highlight benefits, special offers, or product features.
• Good ad copy will have simple eye-catching imagery but will not distract from the call to action.