A few weeks ago, we had the opportunity to attend an invite only LinkedIn marketing event in New York City. During the event, LinkedIn shared some great insights on user behavior in their platform as well as an upcoming product roadmap. Here, we'll share some of those insights and discuss the new features coming soon and why we're excited about them.

Key Insights for LinkedIn Advertising

User behavior on LinkedIn is quite different than other social platforms. LinkedIn users are logging into "invest time" versus personal platforms like Facebook where users login to "spend time". LinkedIn users are looking for information related to their current career or career opportunities, updates on brands and updates on current affairs. In personal platforms, users are looking for information on friends and personal interests as well as entertainment updates.

Another key point that was shared was LinkedIn's trust ranking coming in at more than double that of Facebook and Twitter. Not surprisingly, this high level of trust along with the mindset of the users has lead to a 5x better conversion rate than Facebook ads for certain industries.

The Product Roadmap

LinkedIn has been busy over the past year with a number of recent releases including:

• Lead Gen Forms: Provides a seamless form experience directly in the ad as opposed to directing clicks to a campaign landing page
• LinkedIn Audience Network: Extends the reach of LinkedIn ads beyond the LinkedIn platform
• Conversion Auto-Optimization: Gives the option to auto optimize Sponsored Content ads when conversion tracking is enabled
• Campaign Demographics: Provides insights into the demographics of LinkedIn users that are exposed to your ads. Includes job function, job title and more.
• Website Demographics: Provides insights into demographics of LinkedIn users that visit your websites. Includes job function, job title and more.
• Campaign Recommendations: Provides optimization recommendations directly in the campaign manager
• Campaign Manager Refresh: Provides a more user friendly and enhanced campaign manager experience
• Matched Audiences: Target by website visitors or upload a list (from your database or that you've acquired) and target those individual users
• New Targeting Facets: Target by followers and company connections

Upcoming releases we can't wait to start testing.

Why we're excited for it:

As you've likely seen with your organic social media channels, video posts yield a much higher engagement rate compared to text or images. As an ad format, this can yield improved upfront as well as downstream performance. 

Why we're excited for it:

eBooks and Whitepapers are a great incentive to generate leads for ads. This format will make the delivery of those documents seamless while maintaining a lead generation component.

Why we're excited for it:

For services, products etc...that have multiple selling points or speak to various audiences, having a carousel ad format will help tell a story and better communicate with users to drive better engagement and more informed clicks.

Why we're excited for it:

Sponsored InMail has been one of the most effective digital ad formats we've encountered. And lead gen forms for Sponsored Content have yielded improvements in both upfront metrics and form conversion. Combining Sponsored InMail with lead gen forms should be a huge win.

More features will likely be released in addition to these 4 above but these products will certainly help drive better performance and enable LinkedIn to compete with other social advertising platforms.

Need help advertising on LinkedIn?

Whether you're starting from scratch or need help with existing campaigns, the experts at In Linked Consulting LLC can manage it all for you. Contact us today to learn more and get started.