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István Bálint, Head of PPC, i.balint@mito.hu
August, 2020 · 6 min read
More than 150 countries, lots of Euros spent, challenging niche B2B audiences and countless hours of planning (and replanning), fine-tuning and optimizing. What we’ve learned for certain is that while remarkably useful, LinkedIn is also a tricky creature that can turn into a real money-pit if there is no well-thought-out strategy behind the ads.
In this article, we’ll take a look at LinkedIn as an advertising platform and its intricacies.
There are three aspects we definitely need to examine before starting to advertise on LinkedIn. The first one is the available budget. Though this seems obvious, clients are often shocked to learn how expensive this platform is. In some countries, targeting the executive level can cost you up to 25 Euros per click. So we need to decide right at the beginning of the campaign who we are going to target and how, because advertising without a well-devised strategy is simply a waste of money. However, having a good strategy is not enough in itself. If you lack pertinent content to offer to your professionally educated audience or if you do not have a suitable website, the campaign will not bring the desired results.
Before launching a campaign, we need to clarify the following questions: Who do we want to reach?; With what tools?; And what is the goal of the whole campaign? Answering these will help us build up all the elements of our campaign in a purposeful way.
Ideally, a company knows who their (potential) customers are, who make up the target audience that they want to reach in some way with a campaign. It’s worth defining these groups on LinkedIn based on the available targeting parameters. Business decisions are not made by a single person. The target audience can be divided into different groups based on their role in decision-making: those who influence decisions and those who make them. It’s not enough to convince the decision-makers: you also need to reach people with influencing power multiple times, and this must figure into your strategy. If these groups are split into even smaller target groups based on their most dominant characteristic, we end up with personas. Creating personas help in understanding the target group better. From a communications viewpoint, personas need to be handled separately, as each have their own interests, language characteristics and priorities, so our product/service might be relevant to them for different reasons.
If we’ve identified our target groups, our next task is to determine at which point of the customer journey they are currently, and to define a goal that can bring them to the next level.
Our target audience can be categorised into 4 groups based on how much they know about the advertiser and their products/services:
does not know the advertiser
knows the advertiser but is not directly interested in the advertised business service
is directly interested in the advertised business service but needs more information to be able to decide
is about to make a business decision
Based on this, the objectives of LinkedIn campaigns can be sorted into the following categories:
Having considered everything above, we can select the campaign objective on LinkedIn’s campaign management interface. After the campaign objective has been selected, the range of advertisement types we can use in the given campaign automatically narrows. This is because it’s generally true that a given advertisement type cannot serve every campaign objective.
However, it’s worth keeping in mind that there are certain types of advertisements that can be used for all three objective categories, though with different settings. Direct Sponsored Contents, or by their new name, Single Image Ads are such an example. With a general creative, they can serve reputation objectives, with a product- or service-focused creative, they can help consumer decision-making and with an attached lead generation form and appropriate CTA, they are also perfectly suitable for collecting leads.
Lead generation can happen two ways in a LinkedIn campaign: either with the help of a Lead Gen Form or through the website of the advertiser. In the case of Lead Gen Forms, users do not have to leave LinkedIn’s website, as the form can be attached to a compatible ad and appears when the CTA on the ad is clicked. In our experience, the conversion rate is higher when Lead Gen Forms are used than in the case of landing pages. This is largely thanks to the fact that LinkedIn automatically fills out all the basic fields (name, email address, company name, position, etc.), making the user’s job easier. The advertiser can download the submitted data as tables but importing the data into their own CRM system can also be automated. In our experience, continuous quality control of the leads is essential for every LinkedIn campaign, as is routing back the related information to facilitate regular fine-tuning of the targeting.
The next step of the process is determining the appropriate targeting. The user data collected by LinkedIn enables us to define the B2B audience we’d like to target along various parameters.
Here are a few rules of thumb to keep in mind when targeting LinkedIn campaigns:
Besides strategy, it’s also important to offer appropriate content to the users. At the very beginning of campaign development, we have to examine whether the target group actively uses LinkedIn to obtain information. Launching a LinkedIn campaign is only worth it if the answer is yes.
In our experience, leaders are open to branded advertisements but only if they find something of value in them. So good content is content that the target audience finds useful, but it’s worth determining through marketing research what shape that content should take in the given case. Such contents might be industry/market analyses, articles about products or innovations, leader insights, success stories/case studies.
The message conveyed by the advertisement has to match the campaign objective and the language of the persona, while also conforming to the nature of the advertisement type. We’ve found that the best way to demonstrate this is a message matrix, with the personas and advertisement types represented in the rows and the different phases of the campaign in the columns.
Based on this, we can build a detailed content flow that determines the order in which the users will see the contents.
If we have successfully defined our target group, translated them into LinkedIn’s language, reached them with suitable targeting and advertisement types, showed them content relevant to their interests and were also able to measure the campaign’s effect on the customer journey, the battle is half won.
It is generally true that users who have encountered the advertiser before and have visited the site are more likely to positively react to an advertisement the next time than those who have never seen it before. Being present on other channels and showing something new to the users helps us make the most of our audience collected on LinkedIn.
The synergies stemming from the simultaneous use of different advertisement channels cannot be ignored in the case of any B2B campaign. However, detailing a whole B2B advertising strategy is beyond the scope of our subject, so we’ll elaborate on that in a later article. In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about Mito Performance, click here to see our previous work or check out our B2B campaign planning services.
A kosárlabda csapatok 5 fős felállásban játszanak. A nevezett csapatokat csoportokba osztjuk, a sorsolást a tornát megelőző héten minden csapat részére kiküldjük. A mérkőzéseket hivatalos játékvezető vezeti. A mérkőzések egy pályán zajlanak. A csoportok első két helyezettje az egyenes kieséses szakaszba kvalifikálja magát. Az egyenes kiesés szakaszban a csoportmérkőzések során első helyezett csapatok a másik csoport második helyezettjével játszanak, ezt követően a vesztesek a harmadik helyért mérkőznek meg egymással, majd a győztesek vívják a döntőt.
Csapatlétszám: 5+1 fő.
Játékidő: 2×10 perc (szünet nélkül térfélcserével)
A mérkőzéseket 3×2 méteres kapukra játsszuk.
Page speed has become an important factor for website owners and SEOs since Google began focusing more and more on user experience factors. If companies don’t adapt to this new mindset, they will lose their organic power.
Nokia has experienced an extensive page load time on most of its pages, but lacked proper measurable information about the performance of the website. It is challenging to adapt site-wise technical modifications without understanding what is really behind the curtain.
Mito introduced a multifactor, multi locational-targeting page speed measurement and reporting system across different devices.
Our focus was to develop a measurement system from scratch that is able to report on different page speed KPIs so we can better understand what additional analyses are needed to increase the pages’ performance. We did not only focus on a page level measurement, but also grouped pages to page types that assists us in making more educated assumptions.
We paid attention to location modularity in order to extend the number of analysed locations to additional countries by adding new Virtual Machines to our framework.
We are able to measure different KPIs on both mobile and desktop so we can see how the site performance is realized across devices.
Our measurement system and dashboard provided us insights on what type of elements of the different page types might cause low speed performance and it helped us to further analyse the loading curve, just as the opportunities in Google PageSpeed Insights recommendations for the different page types.
We set up the measurement system and the dashboard that reports on website performance and opportunities.
Through properly tracking the page speed improvements, Nokia becomes a more powerful organic participant in the telco market in Google search, while they provide a better user experience for their visitors.
An international business of this size requires a comprehensive measurement strategy including responsible data collection, consistent management of tags and measurement codes, personalized website tracking and purposeful conversion rate optimization (CRO).
We kicked off Analytics projects from January, 2020, beginning with extensive Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics audits. Besides inspecting the different system settings, we also optimized the measurement and pixel implementation processes within Nokia in order to increase efficiency and reduce implementation periods.
After the key adjustments and process harmonization, we have moved forward and started to work on the website and landing pages’ efficiency, including several conversion rate optimization tasks such as heatmap analysis and A/B testing.
Nokia is receiving continuous support from our analytics team to ensure the client’s measurement and data is reliable. Due to streamlined processes, implementation periods are shorter and we eliminated unnecessary website tracking codes which cause longer loading times.
Nokia launched a digital campaign to educate the market that their industrial-focused LTE solutions are the key in accelerating the ultimate benefits of digital transformation and realization of the fourth industrial revolution.
The goal: to build brand awareness and create demand for Nokia private Industrial Wireless solutions in new vertical markets, especially infrastructure or asset-heavy industries where digitization has been mostly restricted to point solutions without general network connectivity.
We’ve developed a multi-touch global digital media campaign, which covered the entire user journey of business leaders, from education to making a business decision.
Our main goal was to make Nokia visible on a large scale through automated solutions and smart targeting to reach people when they are reading, talking, learning about or searching for private wireless networks.
To archive this, we’ve utilized the combination of digital media platforms, including industry specific content sponsorships, social media ads, paid search, programmatic hyperlocal and Digital out-of-home ads in front of target company HQs. We’ve made sure that when our key audience is browsing the web, using social media on their phones or just walking outside of their offices, they see a relevant Nokia ad.
The campaign has reached over 80 000 business decision makers and influencers in 3500 target companies, across 5 industry verticals globally.
Private wireless solution specific brand search volume increased by 70% during the campaign period (YoY). In Q2 and Q3 2020, Nokia Enterprise had a double digit year-on-year growth in net sales and new customers.