LinkedIn (Est 2003) provides an online space for professional networking and career development. The site houses over 740 million members, many of whom are job seekers uploading their CV or recruiters searching for potential employees through job advertisements. The site can also be used to make connections with other professionals working in the same field. Unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn has a much more professional atmosphere, allowing users to interact within their industry with likeminded individuals.

How can LinkedIn give your business a much-deserved promotion?

Pros

LinkedIn is one of the best platforms for B2B companies to advertise on, due to the quality of leads you can gain. LinkedIn has the ability to connect recruiters with active job seekers in a beneficial exchange while also being more accessible.

Who remembers going into a business with a hard paper copy of your CV? Before the internet was heavily used for job applications, there were a limited amount of ways to interact with recruiters and job seekers who might not be on your doorstep. LinkedIn’s messaging system can also be used to nurture your existing relationships with your 1-degree connections, group pages and fellow group members.

Digital advertising campaigns on LinkedIn are set out in a beginner friendly format, with campaign creation taking as little as five minutes to go live. You’ll see the results much quicker on this platform! LinkedIn adverts enable you to use videos, images, promoted content ads and lead generation features, allowing you to create unique ads rather than traditional ones that can over saturate the market.

LinkedIn’s targeted ad options stand out from the crowd when compared to their competitors. LinkedIn allows advertisers to group their audiences by a selection of categories, making it simpler to target certain groups. You can group audiences by employer or industry (both past & present), their current job title, years of experience, education level, professional certifications and who they follow.

LinkedIn Sponsored Content is also an effective way to generate leads. Sponsored content appears as a regular LinkedIn post, meaning you have more control over the content on your ad. Their targeting criteria allows you to see who your post has targeted by location, the industry they work in and the company’s size, their job title and more, providing you with excellent data on how to widen the users seeing your sponsored content.

Cons

There are definitely some drawbacks within LinkedIn’s interface, as it doesn’t allow digital marketers to easily and effectively duplicate ad campaigns or groups. The interface also does not host a media library, meaning more time is spent uploading images that might have been used previously in a separate campaign.

LinkedIn requires a minimum budget for your ad campaign and while this isn’t typically high, it does require you to commit to it. LinkedIn Ads are however reported to be more expensive than Facebook or Google Ads. For certain businesses, this might not be a viable route to go down as their budgets might be inflexible when they can’t guarantee how well the campaign will perform.

The customisation and metric tools are also lacking on LinkedIn. The platform doesn’t allow marketers to choose from a selection of metrics or customisations, which is something that both Google and Facebook currently offer. This often results in more businesses turning to these platforms for ad campaigns over LinkedIn.

Adding advertisements onto LinkedIn is a very simple and quick way of creating brand awareness, however it does require you to put in a minimum spend for your ads. Sponsored advertisement on LinkedIn alongside LinkedIn Ads are certainly worth investing in as they can boost your business, as well as allow you to build long-standing relationships with other businesses in your industry.