High-performing B2B lead gen landing pages: design and information architecture
John Woods
October 3, 2024
High-performing B2B lead gen landing pages: design and information architecture
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!
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John Woods
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