What is LinkedIn?
LinkedIn Advertising is a business-oriented website founded in the year 2002 in the United States that has been built on the basis of how social media platforms work. In fact, LinkedIn is considered to be an “employment social networking service,” as it is mainly used for professional networking.
The key aspect that makes LinkedIn different from other social networking services is how it helps professional individuals and businesses to match on a single platform. Here, social interactions are based on the mutual benefit obtained by both parties having access to the single biggest online database of career based resources.
Most of LinkedIn’s revenues come from selling access to its professional user database to headhunters, recruiters, sales professionals, and large corporations. This is because people “advertise” their skills and availability for work on the platform when they create a LinkedIn account and add their professional bios and work experience to it.
Currently, LinkedIn rightfully boasts about having more than 433 million registered users on their platform, with over 300 million active users and 106 million of those in the United States alone. LinkedIn’s popularity is due to how easy the platform makes it for employers to place their Job Postings and for job seekers to post their resumes and professional bios, which results in real-world professional connections.
LinkedIn users are scattered among 200 countries all over the world, and the main languages spoken by LinkedIn users are English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, French, Dutch, Russian and Japanese.
The main types of professional connections that can be made on LinkedIn include:
- Job seeking users finding work at a given company through a job posting;
- Employers finding potential candidates for jobs through a job post or through a resume search;
- Users can follow different companies and watch for any opportunities for new job openings;
- Users can “Bookmark” job postings for which they would like to apply at a later date;
- Users can see who has visited their profiles and prepare for potential job offers
What are LinkedIn Ads?
LinkedIn Ads is a way to market on the LinkedIn platform to a highly targeted audience made up of professionals that already know what is that they are after. LinkedIn Ads are a great way to reach a global audience by promoting your particular brand of service right on a professional context that has been calibrated for business since day 1!
It is very probable that you had not heard about LinkedIn ads up until this point, and we don’t really blame you for that, because LinkedIn is most commonly known as a social media platform for professionals, and it is often overlooked when it comes to advertising because marketers and planners do not see it as a consumer-centric place.
To put it simply, marketers and planners tend to think of it as only a business to the business platform with a smaller audience compared to what can be found by marketing on Google or Facebook, but bear with us, because we are about to blow out some facts and numbers for you to consider:
- While it has a smaller audience when compared to Google or Facebook, consider that it is still has a 300 million people audience, and over 100 million of those people are from the US alone.
- The targeting options are pretty narrow thanks to how LinkedIn works. It is ideal when you are looking to target people by job title, type of employer, role in the company where they work, employment status, skills, and interests.
- Professional bios contain much more up to date information than what can be found on a Facebook profile. Remember that this is a platform designed exclusively for professional networking.
What types of Ads Does LinkedIn Offer you?
Much like any other online advertising platform, LinkedIn offers you a wide variety of ad types to promote your brand or content. However, these types of ads are tailored to deliver career-related material that can be of use to your intended audience, to build your brand awareness and to get more leads within LinkedIn.
The LinkedIn’ Campaign Manager is a platform where you will be able to deliver highly relevant, targeted messages to unique audiences by using: text ads and sponsored content.
Text Ads: Text ads have been designed to drive action on high-quality leads within any budget. They are easy to create and deliver, and will allow you to stay on budget because you will be able to choose whether to pay for clicks or impressions!
Sponsored Content Ads: This type of ads will allow you to promote your content to the largest online professional network and deliver it on any desktop or mobile device. Sponsored content ads are great when you are looking to engage more people with your updates, whether by telling them about an upcoming event or by sharing a piece of written content with them. Besides Text Ads and Sponsored Contents Ads, LinkedIn offers you other Advertising products, such as Sponsored InMail Ads, Dynamic Ads, and Display Ads.
Sponsored InMail ads: One of the best ways to reach the kind of people that matter the most to you and your business is by getting to them right in their mail inboxes. “InMail Ads” will deliver your content to your targeted audience in their LinkedIn mail inboxes.
Dynamic ads: Deliver creative content through responsive display ads in the LinkedIn platform on any device. Dynamic ads will allow you to personalize your message and creative copy, to target the audiences that matter and to measure your performance!
Display ads: Display ads will allow you to deliver display ad campaigns on desktop devices for optimal placement and outreach. High viewability and engagement are given when you start delivering display ads on LinkedIn!