Author’s Note: This post was originally published in 2020. It has since been updated for 2022! 

LinkedIn advertising has been quickly gaining momentum as a critical tactic for our clients at Tuff —and for good reason. As a growth marketing agency, we’re constantly testing new channels and tactics to find the right mix for our partner’s target audiences. In this article, we’ll show LinkedIn ad examples for a variety of tactics and industries. 

Unlike Facebook, Twitter, and Google, with LinkedIn advertising, you can connect with granular, business-oriented audiences with targeted copy and creative. 

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 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.

At Tuff, we’ve known the value of a comprehensive LinkedIn ad strategy for the last couple of years. We ran our first LinkedIn advertising campaign back in March 2017 and are still actively running campaigns for clients today. 

This is the first campaign we ran (ever!) on LinkedIn. It looks a little out-dated now but back then it was CUTTING-EDGE stuff.

We’re also willing to bet that LinkedIn will continue to grow throughout 2022 and beyond, especially as LinkedIn advertising features continue to improve and advance to match the same level of sophistication as other paid acquisition channels. 

That’s why we recommend LinkedIn display ads to a variety of our partners, B2B, SaaS, and eCommerce, especially those with valuable content, brand awareness goals, or leads to collect.  

In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the LinkedIn ad campaigns we have run so far in 2022 alongside our partners. 

Using LinkedIn for B2C Advertising Campaigns

Promoting Certificate Programs to Professionals for Pathstream

Goal: Driving leads

Campaign Objective: Website Conversions

Campaign Type: Sponsored Content

Creative Type: Static images

Pathstream offers certificate programs in partnership with Facebook, Tableau, Salesforce, and Asana and in partnership with universities throughout the country to help people who are looking to switch careers by learning something new or those who are looking to advance their careers by building upon their existing skill set. They’ve seen great success from Facebook campaigns, but we knew there was an audience on LinkedIn that we could very easily reach while they’re already scrolling through the channel for career-acceleration opportunities.

We leveraged Sponsored Content with the goal of generating leads by sending our target audience to campaign-specific landing pages where they could fill out a form to learn more about the certificate program they were shown. We learned shortly after launching that the best way to really make sure we were showing to a qualified audience for each program was to TEST TEST TEST these audiences.

We launched the campaigns by targeting an audience with relevant Job Titles AND 1-10 Years of Experience for the Digital Marketing program and an audience with the “Project Management” Skill, Years of Experience, and entry-level Job Seniorities for the Project Management program. In March, we layered new audiences into both programs built around another targeting option – Job Functions:

Project Management:

Digital Marketing:

Job Function targeting allows us to get a little broader and reach those we may be missing out by only hitting Job Titles, but the Years of Experience and Job Seniority targeting parameters still allow us to hone in on those who are not too far in their career and are looking to make a switch or advance where they currently are.

These audience tests helped us glean insights based on which audience was converting more, AND we were able to drive even more leads! By the end of April, the Digital Marketing Job Function audience had driven nearly double the leads than the original audience, and the Project Management Job Function audience, despite driving 4 fewer leads than the Skill audience, had contributed to a $20 lower CPL.

With the abundance of targeting options that are available in LinkedIn, it’s really important to ensure that you’re testing these audiences to find the one that engages with your ad and, ultimately, converts the most.

Getting in Front of Newcomers to the U.S. for Nova Credit’s B2C Efforts

Goal: Driving credit card pulls

Campaign Objective: Engagement

Campaign Type: Sponsored Content

Creative Type: A/B testing video and images

Nova Credit is a financial technology company that helps newcomers to the U.S. apply for financial services using their international credit scores from their home countries as long as Nova Credit services that country. 

Since we are looking to reach people who have just moved to the U.S., we have been taking advantage of LinkedIn’s Member Trait targeting options of “Recently Relocated (International)” and “Ex-pat.” Member traits are distinguished by members’ behaviors and actions they take on LinkedIn, their profile, their device preferences, and/or their general location inferred from their IP address.

While our goal is to drive conversions from the campaigns, we have been testing the Engagement campaign objective. This objective shows the campaign to people who are most likely to like, share, comment, view, or click on the ads or follow Nova Credit’s LinkedIn company page. We bid on a “cost per engagement click” model, which means we’re bidding anywhere from $2-5 for an engagement click, making the objective fairly affordable with efficient cost-per-conversions – and we know that LinkedIn can oftentimes cost more than advertising on other platforms  

Through running these tests, we’ve found that LinkedIn has been the top channel in terms of driving conversions compared to the other channels we’re testing, which include Facebook, PPC, and Quora. And not only that, but it’s been one of the most efficient in costs due to the engagement objective.

Testing Video and Messaging to Mental Health Providers for Headway

Goal: Driving leads

Campaign Objective: Website Conversions

Campaign Type: Sponsored Content

Creative Type: Video

Headway is a software company in the mental health space that is working to build a virtual network of therapists who accept insurance that will help patients find more affordable access to therapy and care. We partner with them to target mental health care providers who are either working with insurance companies directly and looking to offload the work that comes with that or who have not yet considered working with insurance companies but would if they could find a helpful tool like Headway.

One element we began testing when we began our partnership with Headway was which creative type worked the best at encouraging providers to convert. It’s important to keep in mind with creative testing on LinkedIn is that you choose the ad format on the campaign level – so you can only set up ads within that format in your campaign. If you want to test between two formats, you’ll need to run 2 campaigns. In January, we ran static image videos but after a month or so of low lead volume, we switched to new video creative that our team had designed – and after swapping to video, the ads generated a 28% increase in click-through rate.

Since we saw a stronger CTR from the video creative, we deemed video as the winner and have been running video-only campaigns over the last few months. 

Another element that has led to a large spike in performance at a more efficient cost is the messaging in the ads. Headway services a select number of states throughout the country based on where they have large quantities of patients to work with, so our targeting approach has been segmenting the campaigns out by state and Job Titles. In March, we began to call out the states and statistics around the number of patients in each state in the ad copy. This doesn’t involve a ton of lift on our creative team’s end – we were able to simply swap a different state abbreviation or number depending on which state’s ad it was. 

The difference in performance, specifically the CPL, was very significant. When comparing March-April vs. January-February, the ads generated a 71% decrease in lead costs. While we’ve learned that testing and fine tuning our targeting on LinkedIn is very important, it’s also safe to say that our creative – both the image/video and ad copy text – truly make a difference as well.

Using LinkedIn for B2B Advertising Campaigns

Leveraging LinkedIn’s Company List Feature for Nova Credit’s B2B Efforts

We also partner with Nova Credit to promote their products to financial institutions who are looking for a way to tap into a new market of consumers, and we have been leveraging LinkedIn to get in front of these professionals. Their team provided us with a large list of companies they were looking to target. 

LinkedIn offers company list targeting that allows you to upload a list of company names that will then be matched against the 50 million LinkedIn Pages on the platform. 

LinkedIn recommends the list size be at least 1,000 organizations and to allow it at least 48 hours, or sometimes longer, to generate once uploaded. 

They offer a template to follow so that you can provide all of the appropriate fields to ensure the highest match possible. These fields include:

• Company name
• Company website
• Company email domain
• LinkedIn Company Page URL*
• Stock symbol

While not all of these fields are necessary to properly match, the channel recommends you have at least company name, company website, and, most importantly, the company page URL. This last field requires you to manually find the LinkedIn page for each company you’re looking to target, but it’s well worth the match rate you’ll get once you upload.

The list we uploaded was only a couple thousand, but we were able to match to over 2 million members on the channel! From there, you can append more granular targeting options, such as Job Seniority, Job Functions, Years of Experience, or Job Titles. We layered Job Title targeting options into the B2B audiences so we could reach the most relevant people at these companies.

This targeting has allowed us to generate over 150,000 impressions in just over a month to aid with driving brand awareness around Nova Credit’s offerings to lenders and underwriters, all while specifically targeting the companies they truly want to be in front of!

How Are You Using LinkedIn Advertising?

At this point, it’s pretty clear that there is a lot more we can do to fully activate LinkedIn campaigns outside of just targeting Job Title or Company Industry. By taking advantage of the channel’s other 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!