In the ever-evolving digital marketing landscape, personalization has emerged as a powerful tool for businesses looking to captivate their audiences and drive meaningful connections.
When it comes to LinkedIn advertising, personalizing your ads can be a game-changer, especially for ABM campaigns or when targeting a specific niche.
In this blog, we will embark on a journey of exploring the art of LinkedIn ad personalization, uncovering strategies and insights to help you create compelling ads that resonate with your target audience. Join us as we dive deep into the world of personalized LinkedIn ads and unlock the potential for increased click-through rates and enhanced engagement.
LinkedIn Ads Simplified
LinkedIn users spend less time on the platform compared to other social media platforms. This means that LinkedIn ads require more attention to detail than ads on other platforms to capture their attention.
When you have less time to capture the attention of LinkedIn users, you must make the most of the resources available to you. The key elements of a well-personalized LinkedIn ad are:
- Audience analysis
- Advertisement design
- Advertisement copywriting
- Matching advertising offer with target group intent
I will discuss each point in detail with examples and techniques that we use to achieve the desired results for our clients:
Audience Analysis for LinkedIn Ads
When crafting a marketing campaign, understanding your target audience is crucial. While I won’t delve into the standard steps, I’ll focus on the essential details specific to LinkedIn ads.
LinkedIn offers advertisers a wide range of targeting options. Your personal profile information, such as job title, years of experience, interests, groups, and more, can all be leveraged for targeting.
Knowing who you want to reach within your target group and identifying their common characteristics is paramount.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator simplifies this research through its advanced search functions. If you don’t have Sales Navigator, you can still gather valuable insights about your target audience using the LinkedIn Insight function.
Personal experiences with customers and your target group often provide more valuable insights than what you find on LinkedIn.
Incorporate these experiences into your research to uncover as many angles as possible. This approach creates more options that you can later test with LinkedIn ads.
As you begin advertising, you can continue to refine and optimize your targeting based on performance.
By understanding your target audience and utilizing LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities, you can create highly effective campaigns that reach the right people with the right message.
5 Tips for Audience Analysis for LinkedIn Ads
1. Utilize LinkedIn’s Targeting Options:
Leverage personal LinkedIn profile information such as job title, years of experience, interests, groups, and more for targeting.
2. Identify Common Characteristics:
Understand who you want to reach within your target group and identify their common characteristics.
3. Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator:
Simplify audience research with advanced search functions to uncover valuable insights.
4. Consider LinkedIn Insight:
Gather insights about your target audience using the LinkedIn Insight function.
5. Incorporate Personal Experiences:
Integrate customer and target group experiences to uncover valuable angles for testing with LinkedIn ads.
How We Approach Target Group Analysis
When starting a new campaign, our initial step is to gather as much information as possible about the target audience.
In many cases, our clients provide us with existing data files that we can utilize. However, if such files are unavailable, we often commence with a comprehensive competitor analysis. This involves examining the most successful businesses within the same industry sector.
By doing so, we gain valuable insights into the demographics, preferences, and behaviours of their target audience.
Additionally, we conduct extensive online research to identify current affairs, trending topics, and significant issues relevant to the sector. This enables us to tailor our messaging and strategies to resonate with the target group more effectively.
Designing Effective LinkedIn Ads
The image of the ad is the most important part of a LinkedIn ad.
When you scroll through LinkedIn, the first thing that is registered is the visual information. Your brain is subconsciously busy looking for interesting things.
Scrolling on LinkedIn rarely has a conscious goal. After all, you never know what you will see. Your attention will, therefore, be drawn to the things that your brain labels as interesting.
Elements related to individuals or personalized content tend to stand out. Here are some strategies to consider when designing LinkedIn ads:
Humanizing
One of the proven strategies you can apply in the design of your LinkedIn ads is humanizing. Humanizing is a term in the marketing world that is used when an ad uses real people. This can be an image or a video.
The reason why this works is very simple. People are more likely to interact with companies that present themselves as genuine, empathetic and in line with their values.
Using people in your image reinforces all of these positive emotions. One of the proven strategies you can apply in the design of your LinkedIn ads is humanization.
Appearance
It is important that your LinkedIn ads have the right look. What exactly this should be depends on the goal of the campaign.
Are you working on brand awareness? Then, the focus is much more on presenting the standards and values of your company.
Are you looking for potential customers? Then, you want to radiate the value of your product or the service that it reflects.
The perfect examples of this are the mega-expensive TV commercials of the largest companies in the world. Coca-Cola, for example, sells you a drink that may not be healthy for your body, but in their advertisements, you will only find positive emotions. When you taste the drink, it meets all your expectations exactly.
Call to action
The call-to-action button is always important to use if you want to encourage the target group to take action.
By using a call-to-action button, you can already let the target group know what the intention of this advertisement is.
It will also help to make the next step easier. Because the button is already in the advertisement, this is often the first place where people click.
Here are a few more ideas:
- Personalization: Incorporate personalized elements such as the user’s name, job title, or company in the ad copy to create a sense of relevance and connection.
- Authenticity: Use genuine images and videos that depict real people and situations to evoke trust and authenticity. Avoid stock photos that may appear generic or staged.
- Simplicity: Keep the ad design clean and uncluttered to ensure that the key message is easily digestible. Avoid overwhelming the viewer with too many elements or text.
- Contrast: Utilize contrasting colors and elements to make the ad stand out from the surrounding content. This helps grab attention and increases the chances of the ad being noticed.
- Mobile Optimization: Ensure that the ad design is optimized for mobile devices, considering that a significant portion of LinkedIn users access the platform on their smartphones.
- A/B Testing: Conduct A/B testing with different ad variations to determine which design resonates best with your target audience. This data-driven approach helps refine your ad strategy and improve its effectiveness.
By implementing these strategies, you can create visually compelling LinkedIn ads that effectively capture attention and drive engagement, ultimately achieving your marketing goals.
Copywriting for LinkedIn Ads
The copywriting you use for your LinkedIn ads is one of the most important moments in which you can captivate your target audience and influence their decision.
While a visually appealing design may initially capture their attention, it’s the ad text that solidifies their interest. Of course, copywriting can also serve as a primary attention-grabber, but we’ll delve into that later.
Personalize Your Copywriting
The text in an advertisement copy can be approached in many different ways. Personalization is only one part of this. Want to know everything about copywriting? Then, read this article of ours.
For personalization, it is important that you know exactly why your target group is interested. With the copy, you want to make sure that all these reasons are used.
Take, for example, an IT manager who sees how automation at the competition leads to more growth, and he still has to keep track of everything with Excel sheets. If you are a company that offers solutions for this, you can play on such frustration.
Bringing up a topic like this with an IT manager will at least get their interest, which you can then capitalize on in the rest of your customer journey.
Stand out with copywriting
Of course, you can also use copywriting to make your LinkedIn ads stand out. LinkedIn shows the first 150 characters of an ad by default. After these 150 characters, you have to click on ‘ more ‘ to read the full text.
The first 150 characters can be used for a targeted call-out, for example. An example of this is: ‘ Hey entrepreneur, are you looking for…’ or ‘ Looking for a new job? We offer the best…’ . With these openings, you directly address the person to whom you want to click on your LinkedIn ads.
Here are a few tips on copywriting:
- Personalize Your Copywriting: Understand your target group’s interests and incorporate personalized elements like their name, job title, or company in the ad copy to create relevance and connection.
- Emphasize Authenticity: Use genuine images and videos that depict real people and situations to evoke trust and authenticity. Avoid stock photos that may appear generic or staged.
- Keep it Simple: Maintain a clean and uncluttered ad design to ensure that the key message is easily digestible. Avoid overwhelming the viewer with too many elements or text.
Match your offer with the intention of the target group
When crafting your marketing content, it’s crucial to thoughtfully select the content you present to your target audience. Ensure that the accompanying images and texts align with this content.
Transparency is key. Let your target group know what to expect. If your offer significantly deviates from their expectations, it may discourage them. Conversely, when your offer matches its anticipated value, the sales process becomes significantly smoother.
Here are the key takeaways planning your offer:
- Understand the target group’s needs, pain points, and aspirations.
- Research the target group’s online behaviour and preferences.
- Tailor the offer to address the specific challenges and goals of the target group.
- Use personalized messaging and content that resonates with the target group’s values and interests.
- Offer incentives or value-added benefits that align with the target group’s priorities.
Frequently Asked Questions
Often, it comes down to just trying it out. Most companies have multiple forms of content. It is important that in the first phase of advertising, you look at what content performs well within your target group. Based on this information, you can look further at possible new content to create.
Once you know what content you will offer, the first step is very simple. Read and research the content. Once you know exactly what the content is, you can start with ad design and copywriting. This way, you are 100% sure that everything fits together well.
Related:
Conclusion
Personalizing LinkedIn ads requires a lot of attention per campaign. It is, therefore, not advisable to go into the subject matter so deeply for each campaign but to apply it mainly to smaller target groups and ABM campaigns.
By making a good first impression with your advertisement design, combined with strong copywriting, you bring the advertisement closer to your target group. This makes it easier to arouse interest.
In order to achieve a coherent end result, you should also thoroughly investigate the offer you are making before you start with the design and copywriting.
Do you also want to personalize your advertisements for your target group, or are you looking for a partner who can take care of your LinkedIn advertisements? Then please feel free to contact us without obligation.
This article was initially published in the Dutch language on Prime Marketing.
