The Getting Started Guide to LinkedIn Advertising

If you are trying to reach other businesses and professionals, then Advertising on LinkedIn is one to try. Unlike Facebook, Twitter, and other social advertising platforms, LinkedIn has targeting options so specific that you’ll be able to increase conversions while decreasing costs. In this post, we’re going to look at the essentials of creating a successful advertisement on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Advertising Plan Outline

Before we dive in to details, here is the quick outline of what you will need to execute a successful LinkedIn advertising campaign.

• A LinkedIn account to use LinkedIn advertising. While you don’t need a completed profile or company page if you are linking to your website in your ad, having both are good for your overall online presence.
• A definition of your ideal customer for ad targeting purposes.
• A landing page customized for the product or service you are advertising targeted to your ideal customer.
• An idea of how you want your ad to look by researching other ads on LinkedIn.
• Strong headlines, descriptions, and images for your LinkedIn ad variations.
• Time to review your ad variations to only use the ones with the best conversion rates.
• Time to measure your results to determine if LinkedIn ads are right for your business.

Now, let’s go into specifics!

1. Define Your Ideal Customer

Before you get started with any paid advertising campaign, you need to define your ideal customer. Otherwise, you won’t know who to target your ad to and might wind up spending more money than is necessary to convert with the right audience.

Try to be as specific as possible when defining your ideal customer. What type of company do they work for (technology, retail, restaurant, etc.)? what position are they in (manager, sales, executive, etc.)? Where are they located? and so on.

If you’re not sure about these details, take a look at your current client list and see if they are LinkedIn. Specifically, look at the bottom of company pages to find basic about information…



Then look under the How You’re Connected area to find people from the company that you are connected with.



You can then note job titles, skills, and other important details that might come in handy for your LinkedIn ad targeting.

2. Create One (or More) Landing Pages

Once you’ve defined your ideal customer and determined what you want to advertise to them, make sure you have created landing pages that sell those ideal customers and your advertised product or service.

Some great landing pages to use in your LinkedIn advertising campaign include:

• Pages for specific products or services with emphasis on how they can help your ideal customer.
• Free trial offer pages for your product or service.
• Squeeze pages to build your company’s mailing list by offering free content or discounts.

If you need help with landing pages, be sure to refer to the huge collection of articles here with landing page tips and landing page examples.

Also, if you sell products, you can look at my favorite landing page examples from Shopify. They have over 100 targeted landing pages for a wide variety of businesses including those selling services, construction equipment, and office supplies. Targeted landing pages can help increase conversion rates dramatically.

3. Research Other LinkedIn Ads

If you need a little inspiration, you can find LinkedIn ads while browsing most parts of the site at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar.



These ads are shown to you based on information in your professional profile. When you are viewing your main LinkedIn newsfeed, keep scrolling down. As the page shows you older activity from your network, it will also refresh the ads so you can see more than just the first three that match your profile.

As you do this, note which headlines, descriptions, and images stand out most to you. You may even want to click through to see what landing pages the advertiser is using if the ads are similar to what you will be creating.

4. Create Your LinkedIn Ad

Now that you have your ideal customer defined and your targeted landing pages created, you are ready to create your ad. To get started, go to LinkedIn Advertising, sign in with your LinkedIn account, and start a new campaign.



For each campaign, you can create up to 15 ad variations. This can help you test different headline, description, image, and landing page combinations to find the one that works best on your ideal customer. Note that all 15 variations will have the same targeting criteria – you will have to create a new campaign per different targeting profile.

When you put in your landing page, be sure to use UTM parameters to help identify traffic coming to your landing page from your LinkedIn ad. You can use Google’s URL builder to easily create the correct URL structure to identify the ad traffic in your Google Analytics.

5. Target Your Ad

Once you have entered your ad variations, you will then target your ad towards a specific audience. You can target your ad to be shown to people based on location, company industry and size, job title and seniority, school, skills, groups they belong to, gender, and age. As you narrow down your audience, you will be shown an estimate of the audience size.



Be sure to keep targeting your ad to as specific of an audience as possible. The goal isn’t to have a huge potential audience to click on it. The goal is to have a targeted audience who will not only click through, but also convert. This will keep your advertising costs low and conversions high.

6. Set Your Budget

Next, you will set your budget. You can choose a CPC campaign (cost per click) or a CPM campaign (cost per 1,000 impressions).


If the goal is conversions, then you’ll most likely want to choose the CPC option. If the goal is increased visibility for your business, then you’ll most likely want to choose the CPM option.

7. Focus on Successful Variations

If you created multiple variations of your ad, you can visit the LinkedIn ad analytics, click on your campaign, and see the impressions vs. click through rate for each of the variations.



Here, you can toggle off the least successful variations so that your high converting ones are showed prominently. You can also edit each variation in order to keep testing different copy, images, and landing pages to find the combination that delivers the best results.

9. Measure the Results

There are three ways to measure your LinkedIn ad campaign results. The first is by viewing your LinkedIn ad analytics to see the clicks by date range and by campaign.



If you used UTM parameters for Google Analytics, you can see more information about visitor behavior from the ad to your website by looking under Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns.



If you don’t use UTM parameters, you can look under Traffic Sources > Sources > Referrals to see traffic from the entire LinkedIn network.



Here, you can see the difference in traffic from your ad compared to other areas like your profile, company page, search results, groups, and other LinkedIn areas.

The combination should help you decide if your LinkedIn ads are giving you the results you need compared to other social advertising platforms as well as compared to other activity on LinkedIn.

Do you use LinkedIn advertising? What results have you seen? Please share in the comments!

author: Kristi Hines
http://unbounce.com/social-media/guide-to-linkedin-advertising/

Tips To Write An Effective PPC Advertisement Copy

Search Engine Marketing is one of the best ways to reach your customers online. Among the many useful methods used in Search Engine Marketing, PPC advertisement (or Pay Per Click) is the most effective way to develop your business. Ads that appear on social networks, on the sides or at the top of search engines, will only be charged when there is a click on the advertisement. In other words, you only have to pay when users land on your websites.

These days, one has to be on their toes in order to do their marketing well or impress users. PPC advertisement is no different in this regard. The activity has its own challenges when it is initiated practically.

To help you effectively write your PPC advertisement copy, here are some great tips. 

PPC Advertisement Tips

1. Keywords In The Ad Copy Has A Big Role To Play

Even though this is a well-known fact, there are several ads that do not include anything that is similar to a user’s search query. Adding keywords in text-based ads will trigger ads quickly and more frequently. It would be great if you can use the keyword in the display URL in addition to one more appearance of the distinct keyword. 

2. Let Your Ad Be More Relevant To The Destination Page

No matter if it is a website page or a landing page specific to a campaign, the ad ought to be relevant to the destination page. When a reader goes through the promotion, benefit and any kind of offer in your text-based ad, they expect to see more details as they click it. Hence if you can ensure that the destination page is more relevant to the text ad, it will help you improve quality scores, bounce rates and conversion rates big time. 

3. Make It Easier & More Effective

Here, you can take the short and sweet way by directly inviting your customers by using phrases like “Reserve today”, “Learn more” and “Order Now”. You can avoid longer phrases like ‘Click here to buy’. This might sound strange, but it is proven that such methods grab a visitor’s attention more. 

4. Using Number Details Is Crucial

Numbers are sometimes catchier than words. You can include details like percentages, pricing or dates. The more specific your ad copies are the better. Numbers help you be more specific.

5. Design Your Ads With The Smaller Ad Groups In Mind

Never use too many keywords in a single big ad group. Rather try to make smaller and more targeted ad groups. Again the keywords come into play. Make sure you do not adjust your write-up to match with the keywords. Rather, make them appear in the most natural way. This will ensure better CTR (Click Through Rate) or overall quality scores. 

6. The Quality Of Your Content Is Always A Huge Factor

There is nothing much to explain on this factor. Spelling and grammar errors are no longer tolerated in the online industry, more so in an advertisement of 25 to 35 characters. Every now and then we come across many websites that tend to show minor typos, grammar and spelling errors. We tend to think that they are not quality sites. Imagine these errors in short write-ups like advertisements.

7. Maintain A Balance Between Emotion & Promotion

It is important to make a balanced mix of promotions with words that provoke feelings of emotions and that will help you hook your audience better. Remember, an overdose of any of these factors can backfire. The key is to think from a buyer’s point of view. Just ask yourself ‘What would I expect as a customer?, Is this advertisement exaggerated for my liking?, Are there enough promotions to impress myself?” This will definitely help you improvise your business.

To sum up, everything goes down to the basic rule – study, practice and then execute. You will be doing wonders by studying how advertisements in the past have succeeded and more importantly, why advertisements in the past have failed to succeed.

Remember, no ladder can be climbed with your hands in the pocket. So work hard and your will taste success. Good Luck!!

 Author: Nathan Brown

http://onlineincometeacher.com/traffic/effective-ppc-advertisement-copy/

How to Make Your Facebook Contests Stand Out

Do you run contests on Facebook?

Would you like to make your next Facebook contest stand out?

This article will give you 4 ideas to improve your next Facebook contest.

Why Facebook Contests?

Facebook contests are a popular way for you to get your audience engaged and excited about your brand. More and more companies have adopted the use of Facebook contests to better track participation and engagement.

 

Contests are a popular marketing tactic for businesses on Facebook.

With so many companies using contests, even if you’ve read the 9 Tips for Running Successful Facebook Contests, it can be hard to differentiate yourself. Your Facebook fans are pummeled with tons of advertisements and other promotions. So it’s important to stand out against your competitors.

Simply giving out a free iPad or a gift card isn’t enough to attract the attention of social followers.

Here are 4 ways to make your next Facebook contest unique so it gets the attention and engagement you are looking for.

#1: Connect Your Facebook Contest to Other Social Platforms

When you plan your next Facebook contest, consider all the other channels you could use as part of the contest. Don’t limit your promotions to just Facebook, and don’t limit the activities for the contest just to Facebook.

HuHot Mongolian Grill held an annual contest where fans submitted their favorite recipes. A winner from each location was selected, and then they competed nationally against the other franchises.

The contest was published to their corporate Facebook Page.

Then HuHot decided to promote the contest by creating a Pinterest board dedicated to the recipe contest showing prizes, how to enter and past winning recipes.

 

HuHot’s Pinterest board.

By using multiple social media platforms, you will be able to reach a much larger audience. Utilize the strengths of different social channels and you will have higher engagement and reach more people.

For example, Pinterest is a great place to incorporate pictures into your contest. Twitter is a great way to give quick, short updates about the contest.

#2: Use Location-Based Services in Your Contest

One feature that is often underutilized by brand Pages is the ability to check into a location on Facebook.

However, using this feature for a contest can ensure that people are not only thinking about your brand, they are also physically going to a location to interact directly with your brand.

If you are able to convince your followers that your company is worthy of them taking their time to go to your location, you are closer to converting them into a customer.

Southwest Airlines hosted a promotion where they asked their fans to check into their physical locations at airports, and they would donate $1 per check-in to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Not only did they make a lot of money for a charitable cause, they also increased the number of followers of their Facebook Page from 991,200 to 1.2 million.

 

Southwest Airlines’ Facebook contest.

Not everyone incorporates location-based services into their Facebook campaigns. However, using them can differentiate your company and the contest from all of the other Facebook contests.

Even if it isn’t incorporating check-ins into your contest, think about ways to get your followers to directly engage with your brand. Location-based services are a great option, but there are others out there to explore.

#3: Include Your Followers When Choosing the Winner

Interactive contests are vital to maintain engagement and keep your followers coming back for more.

When you have a contest where one person is randomly selected for liking your photo, it doesn’t give your followers a reason to keep checking back on your Page.

On the other hand, when you run a contest based on what your fans want, this will give people a bigger reason to keep checking your Facebook Page to see who wins.

When Zipcar hosts contests, they typically involve their social media followers to help pick the winner.

Last June, they hosted the Ultimate Ziptrip contest, inviting members of their social media community to tell them in under 750 characters why they wanted to take a vacation to one of Zipcar’s cities.

Zipcar narrowed down the entries to 50 people who were then asked to create a video about why they wanted to take a trip. The finalists were posted to Zipcar’s Facebook Page where 1,000 fan votes chose the ultimate winner.

During the contest, the Facebook contest Page was viewed over 53,000 times and shared by over 2,500 people. Zipcar also gained 9,200 more Facebook likes.

 

Zipcar’s Ultimate Ziptrip contest.

When hosting a contest on Facebook, including your Facebook fans is important. If you have a community on a social platform, you’ll want to consider making your contest part of the social experience.

When you include your fans as a core part of the contest, it leads to increased engagement, because your fans will feel an attachment to the person they vote for.

#4: Use Other Parts of Facebook to Promote Your Contest

You can promote contests creatively within Facebook.  Please make sure you follow Facebook Guidelines.

Some companies host contests by asking viewers to upload pictures of themselves interacting with the brand or company to become eligible to win prizes (using a third-party app). Other contests may be promoted through Facebook’s Sponsored Stories, whether within the news feed or in the sidebar.

When creating your contest, think about how it can spread on Facebook, whether by posting on others’ walls or seeing it in your news feed.

By using other Facebook features, you are promoting the Facebook contest throughout the entire Facebook experience. Users who are comfortable with Facebook and not other platforms may find it easier to participate in the contest by using the Facebook tools they are already familiar with.

Takeaway for Your Next Contest

The next time you are considering hosting a social media contest, think about ways to stand out. Instead of choosing winners based on the number of likes, consider having your followers select the winner.

Instead of creating your own promotional videos, ask the people involved in the contest to create them.

Instead of uploading your own pictures to Facebook, create a Pinterest board.

There are many ways you can think outside the box with Facebook contests, and these contests stand out more to your followers than others.

Consider what you know about your audience, and use the part of Facebook that you know your followers are the most comfortable with. The participation in your contest can be higher as a result, and you may see the results you are looking for.

What do you think? What other unique ways could you use Facebook contests? How have you seen other companies or brands use them? Please share your ideas and comments below.

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/make-your-facebook-contests-stand-out/

Author: Rachel Sprung

Facebook Advertising Guide: All Ad Types and Specs

You may love or hate Facebook, but surely it has gained its place in the marketing mix of small business owners. However, despite Facebook’s continuous efforts to drive more businesses to the platform, the information available to potential advertisers is somewhat confusing. This is why this post is a starter’s guide to Facebook advertising, explaining the difference among all the different ad formats.

Facebook Advertising

1. Domain Ads



These ads are the standard solution for advertisers. They run on the right-hand side of the screen on any Facebook page. This type of had can feature up to 25 characters for the headline and 90 for the content. Images are limited to just 99 x 72 pixels, therefore pay attention to readability, if you intend to place some call to action in the image.

2. Page Like Ads



Page Like Ads are not very different from domain ads. However, their purpose is to direct Facebook users to Facebook Pages, Apps, or Events instead of external domains. The specs (characters, picture size) don’t differ from domain ads, except for the headline, that that cannot be edited as it correspond to the name of the Facebook Page, App or Event you are advertising. This is limited to 35 characters.

3. Page Post Ads



Page Post Ads are probably the best way to engage users and direct them to Facebook Pages. This format allows advertisers to use any “object” they have already posted on their Facebook page and turn it into an ad. In fact a page post ad can be any of the following:

• Page post text ad
• Page post photo ad
• Page post video ad
• Page post link ad
• Page post question ad
• Page post offer ad
• Page post event ad

Page Post Ads are limited to 120 character limit. In case your post text was longer than 120 characters, Facebook will only show the first 120 characters and add three small dots.

Page post ads can also be created directly through the “Promoted” button when posting something.



The way the ad is displayed also depends from the target audience, as non-fans will see a “Like” button and will be able to like the page directly from the ad. Current fans instead will see a sponsored story. What is a sponsored story? Read below.

4. Sponsored Stories



Sponsored stories are probably the trickiest format to understand. So-called (by Facebook) also “voice of friend”, they show users their friend’s interaction with the advertising brand. They always include the friend’s profile picture and their name, along with the action they performed.

This is an extract of how they work (from Facebook Education Resources):



Sponsored stories are displayed only to the friends who took one of these actions:

Liked a Page or a Page post in the last 7 days
Checked into a place or claimed a deal in the last 7 days
Used an app/played a game twice or for >10 min in the last 30 days
Shared an app in the last 14 days
Liked, shared, or posted content from your domain in the last 7 days
You can target mobile-only, desktop-only, or just news feeds.

6. Facebook Offers



Facebook Offers are a relatively new format that allows local businesses (and more) to advertise coupon codes directly to potential customers. In order to access the discount code, fans have to “claim” the offer by clicking the relevant button. Despite being free to create, their reach is limited, unless advertisers pay for it (surprising, huh?), by turning it into a page post offer ad, like any other page post. Unless promoted, offers only appear in a small share of fans’ news feeds. And their friends will only see it if the offer is claimed.

All the above ad formats can be split between two main categories: Facebook ads and sponsored stories. The bid mechanism is similar to Google Adwords, as the CPC or CPM (cost per thousand impressions) advertisers are charged is determined by a Vickrey auction.

See also : 5 New Ways to Improve Your Facebook EdgeRank

Hope this starter’s guide will be of use to you.  If you have any questions, hit me up with questions by commenting below. Good luck!

http://onlineincometeacher.com/socialmedia/facebook-advertising-guide/
Author: Daniel Nathan

Great New Way to Make Money on Twitter!

I came across this pretty cool site to make money from twitter in your spare time. How it works is that advertisers will pay you to send tweet adverts. This is something that is very easy to do if you are not too concerned that your followers may see some adverts from time to time. The good thing is that you have full control over what tweets you are sending out.

It's free to sign up. This is not a get rich quick scheme but will give you an additional income stream. If you are just starting out to make money online and already have a Twitter account, this will be very simple to do. Advertisers can pay anything from 10 cents per tweet to a few dollars per tweet. The amount the advertisers will pay you to tweet will depend on the number of your followers.  So, if you have a large number of followers, it will be worth your while. You can check it out here  http://sponsoredtweets.com/

Would love to hear your comments.