LinkedIn Advertising in 2024: LinkedIn Ad Examples From Tuff Clients

Author’s Note: This post was originally published in 2020. It has since been updated for 2024! 

LinkedIn has gotten a rep in the past that it’s only useful for B2B marketing. And while that is somewhat true—and we’ll provide a few Linkedin ad examples below—we’ve also seen great success testing the channel for B2C efforts, too! LinkedIn’s member base consists of a more engaged, professional audience than some other channels, so it’s a great place to be if you’re looking to promote a product or service that may best be served to this particular audience when they’re paying the most attention.

Let’s take a look at some of the LinkedIn campaigns we’ve run over only the past 6 months for our partners and some of the results those campaigns have yielded!

Driving free sign-ups to SaaS organization Nulab’s core software products

Goal: Driving free sign-ups to Nulab’s core software products through a variety of messaging – content-based and action-based

Campaign Objective: Website Conversions

Ad Format: Sponsored Content → Static Image

The Linkedin ad format you likely think of (or see while scrolling on your feed) is Sponsored Content, which essentially appears as a promoted post and can feature a static image, video, carousel, or even an article. Images tend to perform well when driving site traffic or conversions, and video or carousels work best as upper-funnel awareness-building content. A square ad ratio is recommended for Sponsored Content ads due to its ability to take up a larger portion of the screen across both desktop and mobile placements. Don’t forget to include text overlay and branding to catch the audience’s attention quickly and form strong brand associations!

We’ve tested a variety of static image creative for Nulab, whose product suite includes a project management software and online, collaborating diagramming software. In an effort to position their products to their target audience on LinkedIn, we promote a lot of their educational and value-based content to engage with users. 

Driving B2B MQLs for EdTech organization Multiverse by promoting valuable pieces of content

Goal: Driving marketing qualified leads that will be nurtured in their down-funnel sales pipeline to ultimately become deals by promoting valuable content that’s relevant to their target audience

Campaign Objective: Lead Generation

Ad Format: Document Ads

Want to take promoting content a step further? Why not check out Document Ads?

Multiverse, one of our EdTech partners based in the UK, has a very robust content strategy that involves several new reports, white papers, and case studies being published every quarter that are relevant to the ICP they’re trying to reach and what is going on in the industry at the time. In late 2022, we identified the new-at-the-time Document Ad format as a great vehicle to get this content in front of our target audience – GATED – without them ever needing to leave their LinkedIn feed to access it.

Linkedin Document Ads are especially a great format to test if you are a B2B organization looking to promote the content you already have on hand. They appear native to the platform because they are essentially an embedded slideshow presentation that you can swipe through to read, like turning a page or moving to the next slide. For gated Document Ads, we usually recommend previewing the first 1-3 pages and requiring users to fill out the lead form to download and view the full document. Since this format allows you to share a Document directly in the feed, there’s no need to click off to a different landing page, making the content easier and more convenient to read and engage with – and we’ve found that LinkedIn users prefer to stay on LinkedIn when they’re there.

In order to run a Document Ad, you just need to incorporate your content into a PDF, DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX file type that is no greater than 100 MB in size and no longer than 300 pages (we recommend anywhere from 10-20 as a sweet spot because the more pages = the longer it will take to upload to the platform, and users are less likely to download a resource longer than 20 pages). To follow LinkedIn’s best practice of 5-8 creative concepts per campaign, we recommend creating several cover variations of your report/white paper/e-book so that you can swap them onto new versions of the PDF and run each version as its own creative concept!

The types of content we have historically promoted via Document Ads for Multiverse include case studies, reports, and white papers.

From the content we’ve promoted, we’ve taken away some learnings around what works well to drive click engagement and leads from this type of ad format:

• Case studies that feature well-known organizations or companies
• Relevant content that is being talked about in your industry – for Multiverse, this is skills gaps, upskilling, and AI
• Clear messaging around what the content is about and what value a prospect will be getting if they down this content

We tend to see Document Ads being a bit more costly than other formats as it’s a hot commodity in terms of ad formats to promote, but we’ve found a sweet spot with promoting it alongside other formats, such as Sponsored Messaging campaigns, to get more bang for your buck.

Driving leads for FinTech organization Acres by promoting content through personalized messages

Goal: Driving leads to that will be entered into nurture workflows in their CRM by promoting their latest, science-backed report on land value data

Campaign Objective: Lead Generation

Ad Format: Message Ad

Another one of the formats that is unique to LinkedIn that we love testing, especially alongside Document Ads or other in-feed ads to further ramp up high-quality lead-driving campaigns, are Sponsored Messaging campaigns. Whether you’re testing Message Ads or Conversation Ads, both formats offer the ability to reach audiences in a personalized and conversational way through the use of dynamic fields that auto-populate with a member’s first name, last name, company name, or job title, creating a tailored message experience at scale.

This ad format performs best when the designated sender has a Director or higher job title relevant to the content of the message, plus a welcoming profile picture. 

Key Message Ad Components: 

• Subject Line: A short and engaging hook
• Body: The sender introduces themselves and then leads into a clear and concise description of the offering, ideally 500 characters or less for better performance
• CTA Button: Customizable text, up to 20 characters

TIP: Bullet point formatting helps drive home the main points of the Message Ad and subtly guides a user’s eyes toward the CTA button (like we did just now!)

We tend to find that, when paired together, Document Ads and Message Ads are a real powerhouse together when you are promoting the same content and targeting the same audience: you stay in front of your target audience while they’re scrolling their feeds with a visual asset, grabbing their attention, and then you follow up on that with a personalized message delivered directly to their LinkedIn inboxes, where they may be more engaged.

We’ve promoted Acres’ land value report across both ad formats simultaneously and have generated over 100 leads that their team has been able to nurture down the funnel.

Taking it one step further

If you have the resources and bandwidth to do so, leveraging various ad formats at once allows you to capture your audience’s attention in several ways – whether that’s through informative document ads with in-depth insights or personalized messages that directly tap into the value that your organization is offering. And if you’re not sure what would work for you? Test, test, and test again! LinkedIn specifically is a great paid social channel to test on – they even introduced their A/B test tool late last year so you can now do this on your own – so you can take your learnings and apply them to your future strategy.

By taking advantage of the channel’s features, we’ve been able to layer LinkedIn into our paid social channel mix to reach our target audience in new ways and with new messaging, and there is so much more to explore! If you’re looking to take your LinkedIn advertising to the next level, let’s talk!