LinkedIn Ads – the basics for B2B companies

Blog · Partner: POLISH YELLOW PAGES® · since 1991

A post from the POLISH YELLOW PAGES® blog (formerly DATABOT.PL), originally published on 17.11.2022. Some information (tools, prices, regulations) may have changed since then.

Boring, standard online advertising? An absolute no-go in B2B! Personalisation and a precisely selected target group are extremely important for your online marketing and advertising. Social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, as well as search engines such as Google, have also recognised the importance of advertising.

Operating in the B2B sector, LinkedIn should be your first social platform on which to be active. As a business network, LinkedIn offers the ideal platform for creative advertising activities , because LinkedIn users are open to business-relevant content. More than 810 million people use LinkedIn worldwide ;17 million people use it in the DACH region . Sounds like a good start, right?

Because LinkedIn collects a lot of information about users from their profiles , you can select a target group for an account-based (ABM) approach exactly as you wish. But do you know where to start? Do you know the difference between custom audiences, matched audiences and Campaign Manager? Don’t worry — you’ll soon be able to cut through the jungle of new advertising terminology.

If you’re looking for tips on how to start running ads on LinkedIn , this article is for you. We’ll cover every aspect of LinkedIn Campaign Manager and see how you can create ads on the network.

What does LinkedIn Campaign Manager look like?

Your first point of contact for ads and sponsored content on LinkedIn is probably LinkedIn Campaign Manager. You can access Campaign Manager through your personal profile , if you are an admin of a company page. After logging in to LinkedIn Campaign Manager you will first see a clean page with your account icon, a question mark and a bell in the top right corner.

On the page itself you will see the text “Account details list” under the Campaign Manager heading. Here you can see which accounts you manage – this is especially important if you are an agency or freelancer managing ads for several clients.

If you click on one of the accounts, you will see three additional tabs: Campaign groups, Campaigns and Ads.

On the left you have your menu, which you can use to plan new campaigns and make further settings for your Campaign Manager. 

By default you first reach the Advertise tab , which contains the three tabs mentioned above with an overview of all campaigns and the like.

Use the Plan tab to create new campaigns – but more on that later .

What is account targeting?

Before we get to how to start a campaign here on LinkedIn, we want to clarify the most important LinkedIn terminology with you. If you understand these terms, you are almost ready to get started with LinkedIn audiences.

Account targeting means speaking to a precisely selected target group. So this strategy works best if you already work with ABM or want to start. With account targeting on LinkedIn you address only the decision-makers who move within your target group. 

This means only users belonging to your target companies can see your LinkedIn ads. This form of targeting lets you generate high-quality leads , keep wasted reach to a minimum and increase your chances of winning new customers. 

Of course, you can also tailor LinkedIn ads to people and companies that meet certain criteria, such as industry, company size, interests, skills or field of activity. However, that only limits the group of people who will see the ad. You cannot specify exactly which companies you target, and so you don’t know exactly whether those companies really represent prospects . Company targeting therefore remains undefined and is not really suitable for account-based marketing.

What is the difference between custom audiences and matched audiences?

Custom audiences are a targeting option for Facebook ads. A custom audience can be built from customer lists, website traffic, lead lists , and even interactions on Facebook. You can also create custom audiences from people who already know your company and whom you have already saved on a list somewhere.

However, many also use the term “custom audiences” to refer to “matched audiences” on LinkedIn. Matched audiences on LinkedIn are essentially the same as custom audiences on Facebook.

For example, if you want to show ads to your website visitors, existing customers or prospects on LinkedIn, you can upload a list of those companies to LinkedIn. Another option — especially for website visitors — is a LinkedIn tag placed on your website that automatically retargets visitors to your website when they are on LinkedIn.

What is a lookalike audience?

Another important term when it comes to Audiencesis the so-called lookalike audience . Such an audience is ideal for LinkedIn ads because it targets further matching professionals from your target audience .

A lookalike audience is nothing more than an extension of your matched audience. Lookalike Audiences creates new targets from people you have already targeted on LinkedIn. A lookalike audience contains people or profiles that have the same or similar characteristics as your matched audience. These can be job title, skills, location, gender, age and much more.

Advantages of a lookalike audience

With the lookalike audience feature you expand the pool of matched audiences who see your LinkedIn ads. Because LinkedIn generates Lookalike Audiencesfor you, you don’t have to do anything more than “clone” your existing matched audience in just a few clicks.

How to create matched audiences on LinkedIn

Open your company’s LinkedIn Campaign Manager and click the Plan tab on the left of the ribbon, then the Audiences option.

The next thing you will see is a drop-down menu where you can choose the source from which you want to create your matched audience. For example: you can upload a list of your best existing customers, very well-matched prospects or company lists from a sales intelligence tool.

In your retargeting you can choose from event attendees, website leads and others to target with LinkedIn ads.

At the bottom you will also find the Lookalike audiences tab , which you can use to create a lookalike audience.

Note: unfortunately it can sometimes take up to 24 hours for LinkedIn to match all the companies to its members on the platform.

Of course, a lookalike audience is only interesting if you create it from a target group that is highly relevant to you and promises high sales. That is why it is extremely important to create the original list carefully that you upload to LinkedIn. How about targeting ads at employees from companies similar to your best customers? Simply upload your company’s customer list via LinkedIn account targeting.

LinkedIn will then generate a lookalike audience containing employees from companies similar to your best customers and target ads at them. To avoid showing ads to existing customers, you can also exclude your existing customers’ account list.

We recommend uploading only company lists to LinkedIn. Why? Uploading contact lists is possible in principle but critical because of the GDPR. You therefore risk a warning, because you are the advertiser – not LinkedIn!

How to create a lookalike audience on LinkedIn

Log in to your LinkedIn Campaign Manager account.

1. Log in to your LinkedIn Campaign Manager account.
2. In the left-hand menu click the Plan tab, then the Audiences tab, and then the Create audience tab.
3. At the very bottom select the Lookalike tab from the drop-down menu.

This box will then appear:

How many contacts or email addresses do you need for a lookalike audience on LinkedIn?

According to the business platform’s own statements, you need at least 100 contacts from a country in your target group to create a lookalike audience on LinkedIn.

Fun fact: in some countries you cannot target ads at people under a certain age. This is usually linked to the age of majority. It means lookalike or matched audience ads cannot be shown to audiences under 18 years of age (worldwide), 20 (in Thailand) or 21 (in Indonesia). You can, however, target this age group by location or gender, if at all.

How to create an ad on LinkedIn

Now it’s time to get to work: you want to create your own LinkedIn ad! If you don’t have an active campaign yet, you first need to create a campaign group :

Only in the next step can you create a campaign , in which, in the final step, you can create an ad. Think of the whole thing a bit like moving from the largest circle to the smallest. In your campaign group you set the theme , design campaigns for different target audiences and choose different formats.

In the next step you can create a campaign in the campaign group you have just created. Here you can define the target group, the campaign objective , budget, schedule and many other parameters. LinkedIn Campaign Manager will guide you through it step by step. In the menu bar on the left you can always see where you are at any given moment.

In the following steps you can specify exactly how large the companies should be, which employees your ads will be shown to, which industry you want to target and much more. Parameters you can define include, for example:

• Company name
• Industry
• Company size
• Job title
• Job function
• Seniority
• University
• Fields of study
• Degrees
• Skills
• Groups
• Gender
• Age
• Years of experience
• Company followers
• Company connections

In the final step you need to set the budget and start time of the campaign:

If all this was a bit too fast for you, or you prefer to learn about LinkedIn ads through videos, we can recommend this video from B2B Hero. He still works with the old version of Campaign Manager in the video, but the features haven’t changed, so it’s worth watching:

Once you have finished creating the ad, it may look like this in your LinkedIn news feed:

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the German Act against Unfair Competition (UWG) will certainly come to mind when it comes to advertising. But don’t worry about it too much! Why? Usually people using these platforms upload all the information about themselves — such as age, gender, job title, location and so on — themselves.

For example, LinkedIn account targeting is GDPR-compliant, according to LinkedIn’s own website . LinkedIn does, however, point out that customers (advertisers) are responsible for their own compliance with legal requirements regarding personal data. This means you must make sure you have the right to share personal data with LinkedIn for advertising purposes.

As already mentioned: if you use only what users themselves have uploaded there, you should be on the safe side. If, however, you enter data yourself – for example for matched audiences on LinkedIn – you must take care that the data really is publicly available, i.e. GDPR-compliant, and that you are allowed to process it. Instead, stick to uploading only company entries to LinkedIn — this is where sales intelligence tools support you best.

Never heard of Sales Intelligence ? In short, they are digital tools that collect and process publicly available B2B data for you based on artificial intelligence. Focus on sales and marketing and gather leads quickly, instead of searching the internet for the right prospects.

You will find detailed information on sales intelligence in an article on our blog.

Conclusion: reach your target audience with LinkedIn ads and watch your sales grow

One thing is certain: LinkedIn ads are the way to reach prospects . Every day millions of users use the popular business platform and often draw new information from it. Reach your target group relatively directly and stand out from the crowd with creative ads .

If you understand all the ins and outs of LinkedIn Campaign Manager and know common terms such as matched audience or lookalike audience, nothing stands in your way!

Tags: Ads, Audiences, B2B, B2B-Marketing, B2B-Vertrieb, Customer Journey, Leadgenerierung, Leads, LinkedIn. LinkedIn-Werbung

Mariusz Biniak – creator of the POLISH YELLOW PAGES® brand (formerly DATABOT.PL) and author of a blog on B2B sales. Disclosure: the author is connected with the publisher of THE BUSINESS TIME.

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Source

• POLISH YELLOW PAGES® (databot.pl) – original blog post

© POLISH YELLOW PAGES® / Argonauts Media Group Limited. Copying, downloading and distribution without the publisher’s written consent are prohibited. Illustrative photo: Pexels.