Christa Tuttle October 22, 2020 
With professionalism at the core of LinkedIn’s brand identity — “Manage your professional identity. Build and engage with your professional network. Access knowledge, insights and opportunities.” —it has naturally become the go-to social media platform for B2B marketers. Of the over 675 million LinkedIn members, 63 million are in decision-making positions. With such a high volume of decision makers evaluating potential B2B business opportunities, properly executing LinkedIn advertising can be an abundant source of generating new and more qualified leads.
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In a previous blog, we provided an overview on how LinkedIn ads operate and why B2B organizations benefit from using them, as well as some key features. While this blog is still a useful resource for B2B marketers, both experienced with LinkedIn Ads and novice to them, a number of new LinkedIn ad features have since been rolled out. Learn how each of these new features operates and how they can add value to your LinkedIn advertising.
Latest LinkedIn Ads Features
Video Watch Percentages
Videos have become an increasingly reliable tool for B2B marketers to build engagement and generate leads. 71% of B2B marketers utilize video marketing and 70% of marketers report video converting better than any other content medium. Understanding this need for video marketing, LinkedIn includes video ads as an option that marketers can use when creating their ad campaigns. When LinkedIn audiences are scrolling across their feed, they can be reached by video ads that succinctly and meaningfully convey an organization’s brand, message, or new product offering.
To help B2B marketers using video ads reach the audiences that engaged with them, LinkedIn now allows marketers to retarget ads based on important video ad metrics, particularly video watch percentages. LinkedIn video ad metrics allow you to see the number of times your video was watched at 25%, 50%, 75% or 97-100% of its length. In being able to retarget the audiences who either slightly engaged with our video, almost completely watched the video or were so immersed they watched the entire thing, LinkedIn marketers can create reengagement campaigns that specifically target these audiences and provide them with more valuable video content or the next logical step in their content journey. These reengagement audiences can be pulled from video watch metrics as much as 365 days from when your video ads campaign was launched, allowing ample time to reengage with these audiences.
Conversation Ads
Using the premise of “turning conversations into conversions,” conversation ads are a great way to reach your audience directly in their LinkedIn inbox using InMail and help them choose a clear path to their next steps with your marketing or sales campaigns. Conversation ads exemplify how you can create a personalized experience for the audiences you’re targeting, since the templates you create for each message can add in variables that will be unique to each recipient, such as first name, company name and other key values available via LinkedIn.
LinkedIn makes the process of creating conversation ads simple with ad templates. When building your conversation ads, you also have the flexibility of choosing any marketing objective, whether it be brand awareness, website traffic or lead generation. The basic details of your conversations ad will include:
- Ad name
- Sender (either the person creating the ad or a first-degree connection to the individual setting up the ad
- Banner creative (optional)
- Lead gen form (option but suggested for campaigns with a lead generation objective
With the basics covered, the next focus will be creating the ad itself. The ads components include:
- Intro message (this is your subject line and can be up to 500 characters)
- Call-to-action buttons (up to 5)
- Button text (up to 25 characters)
- Button action
To ensure that your conversation ad is built out and flows properly, there is a View Flowchart option you can utilize while creating the ad to see how your CTAs work.
Reach and Frequency Reporting
In addition to the new targeting options, LinkedIn has added features for better tracking and analysis of your campaigns. Reach and frequency are the new metrics you can view, allowing for a deeper look into the impressions your campaigns are making. LinkedIn defines these metrics as:
- Reach: “estimate of the number of unique members served with at least 1 impression”
- Average frequency: “average number of impressions seen by each user exposed to at least 1 impression”
By understanding reach, you will have a better idea of how many members of your campaign are actually being reached. This can be helpful when determining if your campaign is targeting an audience it can actually engage with or whether you need to adjust your audience specifications, such as making it smaller and more targeted. With average frequency metrics, you can see how often audiences who are being exposed to your ads are seeing the ads multiple times. If the number is too high, this could mean that you need to adjust your campaign so that the audience isn’t being bombarded.
Upcoming Features
While it hasn’t been developed or rolled out as a beta yet, the paid social team at Brainlabs has the inside scoop on forthcoming features similar to Facebook’s Business Manager. The LinkedIn version is anticipated to operate the same, in that organizations utilizing LinkedIn ads for multiple accounts or clients can keep them separate and provide separate access to each of these accounts. This will be particularly useful for agencies with multiple clients whose LinkedIn ads accounts they manage, as well as for larger organizations that may have different teams operating from the same LinkedIn ads account but with different ad focuses.
When creating marketing ads, it is important to target a space that your audience frequently visits. For B2B organizations, LinkedIn has proven itself to be a hotspot for targeted marketing. Utilize these latest tools and the already established resources on the ad platform to ensure that your marketing efforts are not only reaching LinkedIn members, but are reaching the right audience members with the right content.
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