Whether it’s Twitter, Youtube, Snapchat, or Facebook, each major social media outlet has its own audience, targeting, ad formats, and process.  

As a business owner or marketer, one of the most important choices you can make is identifying the right channel and tactic for your audience. Exposure in the world of paid acquisition does not come cheap, and you must make sure that your advertising reaches the right audience. For businesses that wish to target business professionals or promote B2B content, LinkedIn advertising stands as a preeminent choice. 

Why LinkedIn Advertising?

The venerable LinkedIn launched at the end of 2002, more than a year before Facebook. Since then, it has grown tremendously to become one of the leading social media platforms in the world. It has also carved out a unique niche for itself. While sites like Facebook and Twitter cater to any use whatsoever, LinkedIn remains dedicated to a professional network. As a result, it has a clearly defined user base that relies upon the site for important things like job searches and professional development. 

Despite these qualities, LinkedIn’s advertising opportunities often get overlooked. This can represent an egregious oversight on the part of a marketer, as LinkedIn advertising can prove massively successful for the right type of business. Its large membership aside, LinkedIn offers several benefits that clearly distinguish it from other channels.

Let’s take a look! 

The Benefits of Advertising on LinkedIn

Many people use social media almost exclusively to share their personal information. Whether it’s vacation photos, or your personal opinions on the future of democracy, sites like Facebook offer a forum where users broadcast a steady stream of personal data. LinkedIn offers a singular advantage in this regard. Though users on other platforms share insights into their personalities, daily lives, beliefs, habits, and preferences, they rarely reveal their work history or place of employment. In fact, many people actively keep their career and social media presence squarely separate.

With LinkedIn Ads, your company gets access to accurate data about a sizable professional audience. Among other things, LinkedIn shares info about location, work position, prior work experience, professional skills, and education. This sort of information is a goldmine for savvy marketers, as it allows them to identify specific demographics for the effective placement of ads and content. When you launch a LinkedIn advertising campaign, you can choose among targeting options that include:

• Location
• Job Title
• Company Name
• Industry
• Degree
• Professional Interests
• And more

LinkedIn also allows for variability in content. LinkedIn’s ad options allow you to choose between the best type of media to engage your audience, whether it’s text, video, or images. LinkedIn advertising also offers a variety of formats, including email and carousel ads.

For proof of LinkedIn’s success as a marketing forum, you need simply look at the statistics. These 15 LinkedIn advertising stats not only showcase the potential of this social media mainstay, but also whether it represents the right choice for your investment.

Vast Exposure

LinkedIn’s membership is massive. The social networking giant has over 660 million users, about half of which access the site regularly. Of that number, 40 percent use LinkedIn on a daily basis. Many users visit the site multiple times a day for content, messaging, networking, job searches, profile management, and other purposes. In addition to its individual users, LinkedIn also has membership from 30 million companies. The vast size of this network means that ads on LinkedIn can reach a staggering 12 percent of the world’s entire population.

The Promise of Growth

Since 2003, LinkedIn has grown at an astronomical pace. The site started off well, and amassed 1.6 million members shortly after its launch. In 2011, when LinkedIn had 160 million members, it went public. This lured a massive influx of new sign-ups, and the LinkedIn user base nearly tripled. As for continued growth, consider this: for every second that you spend reading this sentence, LinkedIn has acquired more than two new members. That works out to nearly 173,000 new users each and every day, and 62 million additions every year. 

A Professional Audience

Of this user base, the 303 million who use LinkedIn regularly are active and engaged professionals. When you consider that a major purpose of LinkedIn is to connect business professionals for career development, it’s not surprising that the site’s users tend to be mature, accomplished adults. 

Danielle Hollembaek is a marketing professional for Minute Suites, which offers air travelers private retreats in terminals around the country. She has used LinkedIn Ads to great success in the growth of her business.

“We have really focused on growing our LinkedIn audience. Through the use of LinkedIn advertising, we expanded our reach almost 1,000 followers in less than 6 months,” says Hollembaek. “Frequent flyers, business travelers, and business professionals were our main targets. With an investment of $1,000, we saw almost 223,000 impressions and 950 clicks to our website.”

The Cream of the Crop

If you break down LinkedIn’s membership, you’ll see that most users are over the age of 35. The most common age falls between 46 and 55, a range that should capture the focus of almost any advertiser. This is the age when many people attain the pinnacle of their professional achievement. If you analyze the income of U.S. adults organized into 5-year age groups, people between 50 and 54 make more money than anyone else. What’s more, the average CEO of a Fortune 500 company is 58. In other words, if you want to aim your marketing at people who have some money to spend, LinkedIn advertising is the way to go.

The Go-Getters

While most LinkedIn users are older, that doesn’t mean millennials consider the site irrelevant. Users between the ages of 25 and 34 represent one of the most rapidly growing segments of LinkedIn’s membership. This is another excellent demographic for marketing, as young professionals have a lot of purchasing power and room to grow in their careers. As of 2020, millennials count for an astonishing 50 percent of the U.S. workforce. As the engine of our economy, this age group presents a gold mine of prospects readily accessible through LinkedIn advertising.

A Trusted Source

Advertising does much better when it appears in a respected forum. Among 91 percent of marketing executives, LinkedIn rules the roost as the most trusted source for quality content. Twitter, on the other hand, only gets approval from 29 percent of marketing executives, while Facebook inspires confidence among only 27 percent. 

Equal Opportunity Advertising

If you want to reach a general audience reflective of the actual population, LinkedIn once again presents a way. Many social media sites skew toward men or women. For example, Facebook has more female users than male, while most YouTube users are men. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is split right down the middle, with virtually identical numbers of male and female members.

Influence the Influencers

Advertising on LinkedIn reaches a very different audience than on other social media platforms. An incredible one-third of LinkedIn’s users have positions of authority and count as upper management in the place of their employment. In 2019, LinkedIn could count among its users 90 million influencers of senior-level position, 63 million decision makers, 17 million industry opinion leaders, 40 million mass affluent professionals, and 10 million C-level executives.

The Dominant Channel for Content Distribution

LinkedIn has proven so successful for B2B marketers, that nearly every professional in the fields employs it for content distribution. An incredible 97 percent of B2B marketers use LinkedIn as their main outlet channel. This number, calculated in 2018, represented a 3 percent increase from the previous year. The second-most popular platform for B2B content, Twitter, actually saw a 2 percent decline over that same period of time.

High Returns for B2B

Among B2B marketing professionals, 58 percent identify LinkedIn Ads as producing a high return on investment. Emarketer’s ROI stats show that, along with Facebook, LinkedIn represents the top choice among social media platforms for value derived from paid advertising. Twitter comes in at third in this regard. According to this research, YouTube, despite its massive number of users, is four times less effective than LinkedIn for B2B marketing.

The B2B Social Media Leader

Another B2B-related statistic concerns LinkenIn’s dominance among social media leads. LinkedIn not only has a high lead conversion rate, but also accounts for an incredible 80 percent of all B2B social media leads. Facebook, by comparison, generates a paltry 6.73 percent of B2B leads.

The Top Choice for Content Marketing

If you plan to create and distribute B2B-related content, LinkedIn advertising is an indispensable forum. The vast majority of professional B2B marketers, nearly 80 percent of them, identify LinkedIn as the most effective choice for content marketing across social media. This puts LinkedIn far ahead of its rivals Facebook and Twitter, which respectively see use from only 42 and 48 percent of B2B marketers.

Global Traction

While the United States represents LinkedIn’s biggest individual market, 70 percent of the network’s total users live elsewhere in the world. This type of global reach is indispensable in the world of ecommerce. In addition to its 167 million users who reside in the U.S., LinkedIn boasts 211 million European members and 179 million from Asia-Pacific. Available in 24 languages, LinkedIn advertising allows marketers to reach across borders into practically any market they want.

The Impact of InMail

Anyone who does email marketing knows that most people will simply ignore their message. LinkedIn’s InMail, however, has a remarkable open rate of nearly 52 percent. How does this compare to normal email campaigns? According to data from MailChimp, only 21.3 percent of email advertisements garner so much as a glance. InMail, on the other hand, connects more than half the time. This type of LinkedIn advertising can prove particularly effective among the busy decision-makers in companies and sectors you want to target.  

Carol Li is the growth marketer and co-founder of CocoFax, a secure and reliable online fax service. She has seen great success with the use of InMail.

“Sponsored InMail is highly personalized, due to the fact that you are sending a direct message to a LinkedIn user who is in your target audience,” says Li. “With LinkedIn, you can do this to reach high-quality audiences such as target influencers, decision-makers, and business executives.”

LinkedIn Advertising Will Only Get Better

As of 2019, the steady growth of LinkedIn, along with its proven ROI for advertising, led 42 percent of marketing professionals to increase their investment in the service. This showcases a great deal of confidence in LinkedIn advertising, along with faith that returns will continue to grow in pace with the network’s community of users.  

One final thing: money matters in advertising. You need your marketing investment to generate a measurable return, and every dollar spent ineffectually can represent untold amounts of lost revenue. 

Ellen Jantsch

Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing.  She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.