A Hootsuite report found that a single LinkedIn ad can potentially reach 14.6% of the world’s population. As a result, most companies, from SMBs to large-scale enterprises, are gunning to invest in the platform to raise brand awareness and convert prospects into paying customers. However, they make the common mistake of approaching a marketing agency that manages omnichannel ad campaigns, which means their expertise doesn’t necessarily lie in running and managing LinkedIn ads. Every platform is an ocean of knowledge and most agencies have 1-2 core channels they are experts in and simply “add on” the others without actually possessing the expertise to get amazing client results.
If you’re a brand looking to explore and make the most of the LinkedIn advertising space, it’s important to choose the right agency. In this post, we will examine the many advantages of working with a LinkedIn ads agency and discuss how to spot a good one.
Towards the end, we will also take a look at an Impactable case study to emphasise the positive impact of working with a LinkedIn ads agency. Let’s get started.
Why choose a LinkedIn ads agency?
1. A LinkedIn ads agency keeps tabs on new updates and knows how to leverage them effectively.
According to Influential Executive 2020, out of the 62% of Fortune 500 CEOs with a social media presence, an overwhelming majority (almost 92%) prefer LinkedIn because of platform-specific benefits, like, low barrier to entry, easy access to industry trends, and ability to reach a more professional audience. Needless to say, people (and brands) come to LinkedIn with a clear agenda in mind — to connect with their peers, to make a note of what their competitors are doing differently, and to discover the many ways they can improve their business.
Unlike Facebook, and Twitter, where the content is more informal, light-hearted, and entertainment-focused, LinkedIn has successfully carved a niche of its own as the largest professional network in the market. eMarketer found that 40% of B2B marketers consider LinkedIn to be the most effective channel for generating high-quality leads. The platform, year over year, continues to improve their advertising capabilities to facilitate higher conversion rates, engagement, and brand awareness.
As a result, if you’re looking to invest in LinkedIn, you need someone with a finger on the pulse of the latest that the platform has to offer. A generic ads agency will most likely not be familiar with all the nuances, updates, and features to help you make the most of LinkedIn ads. You need an expert (or a team of experts) with a proven track record of conceptualizing and managing LinkedIn ads to step in and do the heavy weightlifting for you.
For example, at Impactable, we handle the end-to-end operations of 80+ Linkedin Ads accounts. Immediately after a new feature or functionality is introduced, our team members brainstorm and come up with ways to update the campaign strategy for individual clients to achieve maximum ROI. Industry additions is an example of something Linkedin constantly updates. Because our team is launching multiple new accounts weekly, we notice the addition of new industries almost immediately and are able to recommend better fit targeting for client accounts where most agencies could take months to find these better ways to identify prospects.
2. Let the experts do what they are good at!
Depending on the audience groups you’re targeting, LinkedIn’s cost-per-click (CPC) ranges anywhere between $2 to $7. Compared to Facebook’s, which is between $0.70 and $1.01, the steeper price can seem daunting however, it’s important to note that LinkedIn conversion campaigns are successful around 65% of the time. An expert that specializes in LinkedIn can ensure that you get more bang for your buck by, say, making use of the full spectrum (video ads, sponsored InMail, carousel ads, dynamic ads, etc) of the ad types the platform has to offer.
In my experience, I haven’t come across a lot of agencies that are equally good at managing ad campaigns across all platforms. They often put substantial effort in running ads for platforms they specialize in; for the rest, they simply set up an Ads Manager and call it a day.
When Impactable takes over a new LinkedIn ad account for a client (previously managed by an agency), we almost always notice a few crucial details missing. For example, the Insights tag is not installed on their website, which means, there is no reliable way to track conversions or segment audiences for retargeting. As I’ve covered in previous posts, if you’re not running retargeting campaigns, you’re missing out on almost 80% lead-to-customer conversions.
Someone who’s not well-versed with LinkedIn ads will not know when to, say, expand the audience network, which categories to explore, or how to go about the bidding process in various situations. One example of this is that the Linkedin audience network has recently shifted how it pulls spend and has more recently shifted more and more spend off of the platform and into their audience network off-platform. Because we are in the platform all day, we saw this shift and started testing measures to improve results for clients. One solution we found to still leverage the benefits of the audience network without allowing it to take too much budget off of the platform was to duplicate our campaign and have one with and one without the audience network enabled. The one with audience network was then given a lower daily budget thus limiting the amount of spend it was allowed to ship off of the platform.
Maybe now you can see why you need a dedicated LinkedIn expert or agency to come to your rescue and offer ad solutions that are tailored just for your brand.
3. You need a LinkedIn-specific ad strategy to get ahead.
When you bring in someone with a core expertise in LinkedIn ads, you also get to tap in to the new features and capabilities sooner than your competitors. More importantly, you have a real strategy in place for your ad campaigns — something that is unique to the platform.
For example, LinkedIn recently launched single image ad retargeting, so unless you’re someone running LinkedIn ads day in-day out, you might not know about the feature immediately. On the other hand, your competitors might already be updating their ad strategy by implementing the said feature. At Impactable, we were in the know from the moment it was announced, and started applying it to our ongoing campaigns. In many cases, it helped us double the retargeting audience and improve ROI for our clients.
How to choose the right LinkedIn ads agency for your brand?
If you’re on the look-out for a LinkedIn ads agency, you should evaluate your options based on the following criteria:
- Do they have experience with your industry or your company size?
- What is their general approach to LinkedIn? Can you gauge what their standard ad strategy looks like? Hint: It should be different than their ad strategy for other platforms, like, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
- Can you see actual, number-oriented results from their ad strategy?
- Are they comfortable leveraging the different LinkedIn capabilities (audience segmentation, retargeting, etc) to achieve optimum ROI?
- Do they provide you with real-time insights from industries you are receiving the most traction?
That being said, if you’re not looking to get a LinkedIn ads agency onboard in the foreseeable future, then make sure your sit down with your current provider and ask them some hard-hitting questions. They mustn’t have, say, a 3 out of 10 on LinkedIn ads. Often clients don’t have enough knowledge about the advertising side of things and are more than happy to just allocate a budget for LinkedIn without ever following up on the results. They don’t assign LinkedIn-specific monthly targets or probe deep enough to see how good their provider is with LinkedIn.
Impactable Case Study: How we saved $100,000 in monthly ad spend for a new client.
We recently worked with a $5.7 billion SaaS company that secured $200 million in series E funding. They were spending $500,000 a month just on LinkedIn ads and had a full-time person dedicated to running LinkedIn ads who was otherwise doing a good job but didn’t come from a deep LinkedIn ads experience.
We were quick to spot fundamental structural issues related to tracking and reporting specific metrics.
For example, when reviewing their cost-per-conversion (CPC) by industry, it became clear that while audiences from some industries were very responsive to the campaign, others only resulted in a handful of conversions. To maximize the ROI, a reasonable response to this would have been to increase the ad spend for the first group by cutting off the second group. They could have said—”Sure, we are seeing some conversions from 3-4 of these industries, but they are five times the ad price, and we’d be better off putting our money somewhere more fruitful.” However, not knowing how to acquire relevant CPC information for their LinkedIn ads, the company felt it was easier to keep targeting audiences across all industries.
Since Impactable’s expertise lies in LinkedIn ads, we sought out specialized reporting systems to save almost $50,000 a month in ad spend.
Furthermore, we structured their ad account to ensure the money was being funneled into the right campaigns, which saved them another $50,000. It became increasingly clear that by working with an agency that primarily dabbles in Facebook or Google ads, the client would have continued to lose money to audiences that were not very conversion-friendly.
In Conclusion
In today’s fast-paced, tech-forward marketing landscape, brands (like yours!) are constantly competing for the attention of the relevant audience groups. If you’re looking to target working professionals, testing the waters with LinkedIn ads is a good start, and choosing an agency that delivers on your requirements can be a game-changer.
We hope this post furthered your understanding of LinkedIn ad agencies and the difference choosing the right one can make. If you have more questions, our team at Impactable will be happy to answer your queries — Book a demo today!
