Well, in my never ending quest to improve my marketing skills, I’ve been trying all sorts of random things. Linked-In ads is one of the pieces that I’ve been trying. I’ve had mixed results using Linked-In ads, so i thought I’d chat a little about them today and give you some pointers.
First off, if you haven’t used Linked-In Ads, it’s another form of pay per click (PPC) that you can use to try to connect to all the people on linked-in. You can find it by going to: www.linkedin.com/ads. Now for me, this is my first foray into PPC. It’s actually pretty simple, but keep in mind that I’m still learning (right now, I’m learning about Google Adwords, so I’m sure I’ll have more pointers on that coming soon. =)
Anyway, start simple, make yourself an account. You connect the linked-in ad account to your linked-in account. From there, create yourself a campaign and list all the groups you’d like to market to. Now, connecting to a lot of groups in Linked-in can be good, or it can be a spam attractor. (As a side note, be sure to watch your email settings for each group you join, or your inbox might end up pretty cluttered). Now for each campaign you can assign how much you’re willing to pay for each click, what groups are assigned to each etc.
Now, the most important part is the ad. The ad gives you the option of a title, a little text, the ability to point to a linked-in page or a website, and even add a logo. You can make a bunch of these ads under a single campaign. Now the real work comes in from making different variations of the same theme over. Make a bunch to figure out what might actually attract someone to click on it. But remember, this is only the click… it still doesn’t mean “interest”. So here’s what you need to think about… you want people to click on your ad, but only if they are really interested. Every click means you have to pay… if you get a lot of people clicking, but no one requesting additional information, you’ve just spent a lot of money for nothing. If no one clicks… well, then it was wasted effort. You’re looking for the sweet spot.
I’ve been doing linked-in ads for around 9 months. Initially, I got no hits for a few months. This is likely for one of 2 reasons. One, every ad must be viewed multiple times before it “generates” interest (got this from marketing books). The other option… my titles just weren’t good enough to generate interest. So, you might need to keep tweaking your titles and text… over and over and over again… Now if you have ads that are working well, but aren’t getting clicks… I’d suggest adding even more detail to the ad… Either way… it’s a lot of trial and error.
If anyone out there has some good advice, I’d love to hear it… I’m learning things slowly… but if anyone can speed up my learning curve, I’d love it…
Thanks for reading,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,
Mike