How to Run Ad Campaigns on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is becoming a key tool for Japanese professionals looking to connect globally. These days, I even see some Japanese people working at international companies posting in English to share their message with a wider audience—something that was rare years ago. Many Japanese professionals also use LinkedIn to follow cutting-edge industry news, which is often shared by leading American companies. While English literacy in Japan remains generally low, those who do use English are using LinkedIn to engage with global trends and explore international career paths.

As LinkedIn has been gaining popularity in Japan, I've recently helped several clients with their LinkedIn accounts, including their company page, LinkedIn Recruiter and Jobs for recruitment marketing, and of course advertising. You'll need to first create an account to use any of these features. This post provides an overview on how to get started with advertising on LinkedIn, including an introduction to different types of LinkedIn ads.

Targeting Options

The unique advantage of LinkedIn ads over other platforms such as Google and Meta, is that you can target users specifically based on their employer or job title. I'd recommend starting out with audience sizes of about 20~80k. You can try narrowing the audience to further optimize your campaigns - for example, if your target audience is marketing decision makers, try creating separate ad groups for "CMOs" and "Marketing Managers" as long as the audience sizes are still large enough. You can also exclude recruiters and salespeople who are probably using LinkedIn to promote their own services.

Cost

LinkedIn ads are generally a bit more expensive than other social media ads, so you may optimize for leads that are most likely to have a high LTV. The average CPC is around $7.

I'd recommend starting with around 3000$ to 5000$ to see whether LinkedIn ads would work for your business. If the trial budget is too low, you might miss out on potential conversions, and the algorithm won't learn and optimize. However, if your account is still running out of budget every day, you can try decreasing the bids.

Ad Formats

LinkedIn offers a variety of ad formats. Here are some examples and when to use them.

Text Ads

Text ads are shown on the right rail on desktop only, which is part of the reason why their CTR is lower than other ad formats. To combat this, set up a larger audience size. I'd recommend text ads in the following situations:

• Your budget is limited. Text ads are the cheapest LinkedIn ad format.

• Your goal is to generate leads by having users fill out a lengthy form that isn't optimized for mobile.

• You don't have large, visually appealing images to use for ads. Text ads only use a 50x50 pixel image, and most advertisers just put their logo.

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Sponsored Content

Sponsored content is probably the main ad format that comes to mind when people think of LinkedIn ads. This is the type of ad that appears in your newsfeed.

Most of the sponsored content ads will be shown on mobile, and the average CPC is around 8~9$. A CTR of 0.4% or higher is considered decent, and you can get up to 15~20% CVR if you are offering gated content that is valuable to the user, such as a whitepaper containing market insights. For marketing materials such as brochures for your product or service, the CVR will be lower, around 2~3%.

Sponsored InMail

Sponsored InMail allows you to send a DM to your target audience from your LinkedIn profile, or another member's profile if they approve it. Make sure that the sender has filled out their profile before running your ad campaigns, to increase credibility and ultimately conversions.

For Sponsored InMail, a CPC of around 4$, CTR around 0.25~0.3%, and open rate of 50% is considered decent, at least in the US where LinkedIn is widely used. You'll probably be spending around 0.50~0.80$ per InMail, and you are charged for the number of sent InMails, regardless of whether they are opened or led to conversions.

To still get the maximum results, personalize the messages as much as possible, and provide a more valuable offering. For example, you could invite the recipient to a closed event, instead of just asking them to download a whitepaper that is available to anyone.

An interesting bonus to Sponsored InMail is the 45 day frequency cap, which means that for 45 days after your sponsored InMail is sent, your competitors won't be able to target the same users.

Note that you can't specify which users will receive your Sponsored InMail, just targeting based on audience characteristics as with the other ad formats. If you are working on an outreach campaign targeted towards specific users, you can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator instead.

Marketing 5.0: Technology for Humanity

This post is about Marketing 5.0 by Philip Kotler, Hermawan Kartajaya and Iwan Setiawan. It's not a summary, but more about concepts and reflection on parts that I found especially interesting.

I was originally waiting for the Japanese translated version to be published, but that normally takes at least 6 months. I was already excited for the father of modern marketing's new book, so I read the e-book on Rakuten kobo this week.

What is Marketing 5.0

Marketing 5.0 is based on both Marketing 3.0's human-centric approach and Marketing 4.0's technology-driven approach. If you've read Marketing 3.0 and 4.0, the previous themes will be familiar. Now, the main theme of marketing 5.0 is about the digital age, specifically with AI innovation - predictive models, optimization, and automation for digital marketing.

When businesses consider digital transformation of their services, they should assess whether their customer base is ready, in terms of both access and willingness to adopt new technology. If the customer base could be hesitant, businesses can consider using incentives. Positive incentives could be some immediate benefit such as cash back or discounts. Negative incentives such as additional cost or wait time, or making the offline version unavailable altogether may also be effective.

Intersection of Psychology and Tech

The main topic of Marketing 5.0 is about AI for marketing, but perhaps because I'm already pretty familiar with recent AI trends, I didn't find it particularly eye opening. The book does discuss several other themes such as generation gap, and the intersection of marketing psychology and technology - which was the most interesting part for me.

We are social creatures, relating to others' life stories as we navigate our own. It's natural to compare ourselves and imitate people in our social circle - the people closest to us are the strongest influencers. These days, people constantly check social media, and that could be a subconscious motivation to live a more exciting life and win impressive accomplishments.

Humans have a natural desire to control their environment, and we get a sense of happiness from perceived control. So one business application is that even if you're confident that you are already using technology to give the best customer experience, you could consider introducing an element of choice somewhere.

Also, most people don't fully understand how AI and machine learning algorithms work. People subconsciously perceive AI as something that we cannot control, making it harder to overcome the psychological barrier to adopting new technology. This is especially true for systems that require a lot of trust, such as autonomous vehicles and medical treatment. Due to the 100th monkey effect, we probably will eventually adopt these technologies, but full integration could take decades.

Finally, Marketing 5.0 says that there's a divide in how people think about their personal data being used for digital advertising. Some people see it as a benefit because their digital activity will be more personalized. Others see it as an invasion of privacy used for capital gain - this is apparent given the recent news and reactions to Apple's iOS 14 update.