LinkedIn is an essential platform for anyone who works in the B2B market. What started out as a place for business professionals to upload their CVs online and look for jobs has grown into a fully fledged social media platform.

In fact, it has grown exponentially over the last few years and now boasts 500 million+ members.

Chances are you probably use LinkedIn every now and again to check on your profile and update your details to reflect your current employment and skills, and so does the vast majority of its user base.

That’s great for us marketers as it means there is a B2B platform where we can place adverts and messaging directly in front of professionals.

LinkedIn advertising is incredibly underestimated in the advertising world. The majority of B2B advertisers will always go for Google Adwords services as their primary ad platform. While Adwords is still a very effective channel to use, LinkedIn offers a more targeted option for B2B marketers.

Here are three more reasons to investigate LinkedIn when you’re next looking to advertise.

1. It offers specific job and company demographic targeting

The great thing about LinkedIn is the amount of job and skills information people provide about themselves and the company they work for.

LinkedIn allows advertisers to tap into that information to place adverts in front of the right people.

Let's take a law firm, for example: they want to target people over the age of 45 who own a business, and this business has to be in the financial services sector.

Through LinkedIn you can target everything from job title to industry sector and even years of experience and skills. There are 16 different targeting options so you can be sure you can cover all bases.

Because LinkedIn is seen as a more formal way of promoting your work life than other platforms like Facebook, you know that if someone adds ‘business owner’ as their occupation then it’s pretty likely that they will be a business owner.

Which in turn allows you to be certain your targeting will be accurate.

2. You can use retargeting

It’s quite a new feature for LinkedIn adverts and one that's been around on Adwords and Facebook for years…

Retargeting!

LinkedIn allows you to install a tracking pixel onto your website which will collate data on the people who visit your website. LinkedIn will then match this data to its user base and if they have a LinkedIn account, you can show adverts directly to them.

Why is this a more effective way of advertising?

Because the people you are advertising to have already seen your website and brand and will be more likely to engage with it.

You can also upload a list of your contacts from your database and retarget your current clients and leads.

3. There are different advert types for different objectives

There are 3 main types of advert you can run on LinkedIn; text ads, sponsored content and sponsored inmail.

All of them suit different B2B objectives and each has its own niche.

Text ads

These are great for driving a targeted audience to a landing page and generating leads. These adverts appear around the edges of the platform in strategic places people will look at when they use LinkedIn.

These adverts are all about a snappy enticing headline rather than an image.

Sponsored content

This type of advert is great for building brand awareness and can also be used for lead generation as well.

This advert is more centred around an image but the text is still important.

LinkedIn have recently added in a lead generation form to this advert type which means you can capture people's details within the platform rather than on a landing page.

Sponsored In-Mail

LinkedIn is great for striking up meaningful conversations with potential leads.

This advert type allows you to target a certain demographic and send out in-mail messages to them.

This is great for when you have a certain type of customer in mind and you would like to start a conversation with them or the company they work for.

B2B and LinkedIn go hand in hand

So if you are thinking of new ways to try and generate leads for your B2B business then LinkedIn is definitely worth the effort.

After all, LinkedIn is set up to service the B2B community and the targeting options available allow you to narrow your audience much more efficiently than platforms like Adwords.

LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager is fairly easy to get to grips with, so why not give it a go? Let us know how you get on!