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Four LinkedIn Pro Hacks Every B2B Marketer Should Know 

Four LinkedIn Pro Hacks Every B2B Marketer Should Know 

Most B2B marketers would agree that LinkedIn plays a crucial role in their marketing strategy, both paid and organic. 

In this blog article, we highlight four of the potentially lesser known but very useful features that LinkedIn offers marketers—and most of them are free! 

A quick overview of what we’ll cover: 

  • Spotlight Ads: dynamic ads that provide effective, low-cost brand awareness with up to 5X the CTR of Text Ads
  • Manage placements on the LinkedIn Audience Network: have more control over where your ads are shown, ensuring brand integrity and maximising your media budget
  • Post Inspector: enables publishers to see how a link will appear in a LinkedIn organic post
  • Ad Library: a clever way to keep an eye on what ads your competitors are running

Spotlight Ads

Spotlight Ads are a dynamic ad format that displays on desktop only, they are found on the righthand side of the newsfeed, and you’ll often notice they contain your profile picture. 

Spotlights are often used for recruitment but for B2B advertisers they provide an excellent opportunity to get their brand and value proposition in front of their target audiences, including a remarketing audience. 

Pro tip: Because they sit in a similar placement as Text Ads, we recommend running both types of campaigns to maximise your brand impressions for your target audience.  

Furthermore, our current research shows that Spotlight Ads, with their larger format and design options, outperform the CTR of Text Ads by up to 5X. 

When you’re setting the ads up, you can choose whether to leverage the user’s profile picture. Our best practice approach is to consider the messaging and call to action and whether there is relevant context to show the profile picture or whether it makes more sense to just stick to your brand assets. 

For example, with an invitation to book a demo in a bottom of the funnel message to a remarketing audience, a profile picture works nicely to help the user imagine themselves having the demo. 

But for a top of the funnel value proposition focused ad, the profile picture would be distracting and even jarring and is better left out. 

Pro tip: the CTRs for these placements are low, we see on average between 0.02% and 0.05% CTR, so if you choose Website visits as your objective, the campaigns will be lower cost than if you choose Brand Awareness with a CPM bid. 

Brand Placements 

One of the features of LinkedIn advertising is that you can enable your ads to be shown not just in the LinkedIn feed, but also in the wider LinkedIn Advertising Network. 

This option isn’t available for all ad formats but where it is available, for example single image sponsored content, it can increase impressions and lower CPCs with its extended inventory. 

In general, we like the network as an option, especially as (at least in theory), LinkedIn is still only showing those ads to your target audience. 

That said, it’s important to monitor and manage those placements carefully, both to make sure your ads are shown by publishers that you trust are aligned with your brand values and to ensure that lower quality placements (for example mobile apps) don’t consume too much of your advertising budget. 

LinkedIn’s help article on the topic will show you how you can exclude certain categories of publishers and include or exclude specific third-party sites and apps so that you can choose the apps and sites on which your content appears.  

Pro tip: make sure you’re using Advanced Mode in order to manage your delivery preferences! 

Post Inspector 

If your organic LinkedIn post includes a URL, LinkedIn will usually generate a preview when you publish it. Some of the content that LinkedIn shows in that preview is taken from obscure elements of the page metadata. 

And it’s easy to have page metadata that doesn’t match the page – for instance if you’ve copied and pasted a post – and end up with a garbled preview.  

LinkedIn’s Post inspector  enables you to see how a URL will look on the platform and gives you a chance to optimise it before you publish it. 

It also nudges LinkedIn to refresh the data they have about your page and identify potential issues with your meta data. 

Here’s the information you’ll see when you enter a URL: 

We recommend this as best practice for any posts containing URLs but especially for your most important ones where driving engagement with the content is your primary goal.

Ad Library

The Ad Library is provided by LinkedIn to offer “transparency in advertising by providing a searchable collection of ads.”

You can search by company or advertiser name or by a keyword and filter the results by country and date.

So, for example, a quick search of Sharp Ahead provides this scrapbook style overview of our recent ads:

If instead, we wanted to find out what other UK B2B digital marketing agencies have been up to this year, we could also do a search for “b2b digital marketing”, filtering by United Kingdom and selecting “This year” as the date range.

Pro tip: Note the use of phrase search (putting your search query in quotation marks), without that, the Ad Library returns results with any of your keywords!

All very handy for keeping an eye on your competitors, your wider industry, or just having a nosy for some best practice inspiration.

If you would like to find out more about these features, other aspects of LinkedIn marketing or B2B digital in general, please get in touch!

Landing pages for B2B digital marketing

Landing pages for B2B digital marketing

Landing pages are important in many aspects of B2B digital marketing and are absolutely critical for B2B lead generation campaigns. A good landing page will multiply up the success of a B2B lead gen campaign and deliver a 2x, 3x even 10x improvement in ROI. A bad landing page will doom a campaign to failure. 

Sharp Ahead recognised the importance of landing pages at the very beginning of our agency back in 2014, so B2B landing page design and optimisation have always been core parts of our service. Almost every B2B lead generation project we work on will have at least an element of landing page design or optimisation. But we’ve seldom talked about landing pages in our blogs. So it’s time to fix that!

Over the next few weeks we’ll be publishing a sequence of blogs that share the best practices around landing pages for B2B digital marketing that we’ve honed over ten years’ work in our agency. 

This first article covers basic concepts and explains the crucial role of the landing page in the B2B lead generation user journey. Subsequent articles will go into details such as: 

  • How to design a successful B2B lead gen landing page 
  • Conversion and call-to-action best practices for B2B landing pages 
  • Managing B2B landing pages: technology and governance considerations 
  • Measuring and optimising B2B landing page performance 
  • B2B applications for landing pages beyond lead gen 

There’s a lot to cover! So let’s jump in. 

What do we mean by a “landing page”? 

There’s scope for some confusion here. 

In the world of web analytics, “landing page” just means “the first page of a visit” – i.e. the URL at which a person first “lands” on the website. You’ll come across that term in reports like these in Google Analytics: 

In that context the “landing page” has no specific purpose or function – it’s just whichever page a visitor happened to see first. 

But in B2B digital marketing optimisation we mean something a bit more specific by “landing page”: 

A landing page is a web page that is specifically designed to receive the click-throughs from a particular digital promotion so as to maximise the success of that promotion.

The crucial thing here is that the marketing team is designing and using the landing page specifically to serve as part of a particular digital marketing campaign, and for no other purpose. 

That might not seem like a big deal. Aren’t all web pages designed to serve a marketing purpose? Why do landing pages need to be any different from “normal” web pages?  

To answer that we need to apply the First Rule of Marketing Success – look at the world through the eyes of your target customer. 

The user journey for B2B lead generation 

In lead generation we’re looking to interact with a person who needs a product or service like ours and who is just about ready to make contact with our sales team. That person will often be actively searching for a solution. So it’s very likely that their user journey will involve interactions with a search engine like this one: 

The person is using a search engine and they’ve entered a query that reflects their needs – in my example, they searched for “flexible office space oxford”.  

The search engine has done its job and brought back a long list of web pages that might be a fit for the searcher’s requirements. There’s an interesting mix of websites in this particular case – a paid ad for one particular office space provider, a blog article with a review of multiple coworking spaces, some listing sites that offer multiple locations, and some individual office locations. All quite intriguing and likely to help with the research process in different ways. 

If you’ve been skilful with the design and implementation of a PPC campaign, your search ad might be one of the links that appears on that page. And if your ad is carefully written, there’s a good chance that it will appeal to the person who is searching. If the stars align, they’ll click on your ad. And they’ll see your landing page! 

At this moment the landing page has a HUGE job to do. Because at this point in the user journey, your landing page is in competition for the user’s attention with the search engine and with every other link on the search results page. If your landing page can’t immediately engage the searcher, the search engine (with its familiar, trusted user experience) and all of those tantalising competitor links (with their novelty and promises of relevance) are just one tap of the back button away. One click and that person is lost to you, perhaps forever. 

You have to convince the searcher to stay on your landing page, and you have to do it FAST. (Within 10 seconds, UX guru Jakob Nielsen wrote in 2011. In 2024 even 10 seconds seems too long!) 

You need to reflect the reality of this type of user experience in the design of your landing page. 

User experience challenges for a successful B2B lead gen landing page 

Grabbing the searcher’s attention is essential. But by itself it’s not enough to guarantee success. You need the person to remain engaged with your landing page and to be willing and able to take action. 

So your B2B lead gen landing page needs to deliver on three different user experience challenges: 

  • It must convince the user VERY quickly that they’ve come to a place which offers a valid and accessible solution to their needs. You have less than 10 seconds of the user’s attention to do this. You can’t assume that they will scroll down your page or otherwise interact. This is a brutal design challenge that requires an extremely focussed approach to the page’s information architecture. 
  • If the user does engage and starts to scroll through your page or otherwise interact, it must continue to offer a flow of easily-accessible information about your product or service in a way that offers the user a better return on time spent than a press of your ever-present competitor, the back button. 
  • Once a user has been persuaded that they should take the next step and get in touch with you, the page must make it effortlessly easy for them to do so. 

A general-purpose web page isn’t going to do any of those jobs very well. Websites are designed to fulfil multiple purposes for a wide range of different user journeys, and so web pages within those sites have to feature complex navigation and multi-purpose information architecture. They rely on a visitor being at least somewhat engaged and willing to spend some time processing information and navigating around the site. 

You don’t have the luxury of an engaged, committed visitor for a B2B lead gen landing page. You need to bring specialist design principles to bear if you want to keep your visitor out of the clutches of the competition and give yourself a good chance to turn them into a lead. 

We’ll dive into the details of landing page design principles in the next article in this series. 

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing more insights and best practices on landing pages for B2B digital marketing. Sign up for our newsletter to receive the rest of this series straight to your inbox – and never miss out on the latest tips to maximise your lead generation success!

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01865 479 625 or
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