This content is provided by Connally Plumbing, a plumbing company serving New Braunfels, San Marcos, and surrounding areas, and a member of the New Braunfels Chamber since 2016.
You’ve heard of LinkedIn and you probably have an account, but have you ever considered using it to advertise your business? Before we dive right into talking about direct sponsored content, let’s look at a few statistics.
- LinkedIn has over 500 million
- Two new LinkedIn profiles are created each second.
- 80% of business to business (B2B) leads come from LinkedIn, and 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn.
As you can see, LinkedIn is a growing platform that businesses can use to make connections and attract clients, especially if your business provides services or products that other companies need. Even more, you can use sponsored content (LinkedIn ads) to attract the right audience to your business.
What is Direct Sponsored Content?
Direct sponsored content is LinkedIn’s form of ads, somewhat similar to Facebook ads or Google AdWords. This content does not appear on your company’s page. It essentially allows you to promote content on LinkedIn without cluttering your company’s page. You create the sponsored content within a campaign and then set the time and budget.
Rather than explaining how to create direct sponsored content, this article will focus on how to strategically use it to reach your ideal target audiences.
Location
You can target your audience by location, from very broad to very specific. For example, you could select United States or you could narrow it down to a specific city in your state. This is key because out of the 500 million users on LinkedIn, 128 million are in the United States, which means the majority are in other countries. Specifying a location ensures that your content is being shown to potential buyers in the most relevant area, and your budget is being maximized.
Company
You can also target your audience by company and/or job title. If you know there are certain job titles that use your product or need to know about it, you can filter your audience by that title. If your product or service isn’t specific to a certain job title or company, you can choose for your content to be available to all job types.
Skills
Target your audience by certain skills your customers typically have, such as computer software, advertising, documentation, writing, etc.
Gender/Age
You can narrow down your audience by gender and age as well. This is useful when a product or service applies specifically to men or women.
When you start using LinkedIn’s direct sponsored content, don’t limit yourself. Create multiple campaigns to reach multiple audiences. This gives you the opportunity to tailor each content to the appropriate audience, because the images and content you use for an audience in New England might look different than what you use for an audience in California. Use this flexibility to your advantage and take the time to create content to match each of these target audiences.