In a previous post, we unpacked LinkedIn’s helpful guide for the marketing industry. In this second part, we’re delving deeper into the strategies, activities and information that has been proposed for business owners who want to grow and see a return on the investment they are spending on marketing during COVID-19.
LinkedIn’s key steps to showing the impact of your marketing activities: Part 2
1. Make measurement easier
Getting an accurate look at the ROI of your marketing spend is vital to understand where you are wasting money that could be better spent elsewhere. With economies declining worldwide, it is more important than ever to know what you’re getting for your investment to ensure growth even in the toughest times.
LinkedIn understands that this is a crucial aspect of business ownership, and has made it even easier to measure and prove your ROI when spending your marketing budget on the platform. In this endeavour, LinkedIn has partnered with various providers such as Google, Moat and Acxiom to help you optimise your LinkedIn measurement strategy. The aim of this is to give you confidence in using the platform and proving outcomes based on brand, business and performance.
Whether you aim to educate your audience, generate more leads, or create awareness for your brand, LinkedIn’s performance is being showcased through a variety of partnerships, whether native or 3rd-party. When using these accurate measurements to make business decisions, you’ll have better information at your disposal to increase your decision-making abilities and drive your business into the post-COVID-19 era.
2. Implementing best practice
This section provides a valuable, easy to follow list of tips to help you measure the impact of your investment in ad campaigns on LinkedIn. It takes you through various stages from launch to A/B testing and provides links to helpful resources for each of the steps in the best practice section.
Let’s take a look at the tips:
- Be clear on your marketing goal and use it to identify your key metrics before you launch a campaign.
- Use the insight tag in LinkedIn to understand which actions your ads are driving (including sign-ups, downloads and sales).
- Create Lead Gen forms to accurately track the metrics at the end of the funnel (such as cost per lead) to ensure that you’re spending your budget on value-creating activities.
- Study your campaign results. The recommendation is to review your results after 7 days, but it’s always worthwhile to check in on your results as your campaign ages to determine performance over different periods.
- Take note of the audience demographics from your campaigns. This will help you to target audiences more accurately in future and customise your messaging to suit the audiences who respond best to your campaigns.
- Improve your bids to get the best for your budget by studying your performance insights. The campaign manager should become your virtual “war room” so you can adapt and improve your messaging across the various aspects of your campaigns.
- Test your messaging with A/B testing, so you understand how to better link messaging with audiences for improved results.
3. Goal alignment with LinkedIn
In the previous post, we mentioned different scenarios that you might be facing in terms of your marketing budget (eliminated, reduced or maintained). This section of the LinkedIn guide provides you with a low-down on how LinkedIn can help you reach your goals, the accountability process behind these activities, and the tools that will be implemented in the process whether your budget is more, less or the same as pre-COVID.
From understanding insights from the market and applying strategies used in recession economies, LinkedIn can help you to use organic methods and free tools on the platform to reach your goals if your budget has shrunk to zero. Suppose your budgets have reduced, but you still have some funds to apply. In that case, LinkedIn can help you to understand where your potential customers are consuming content, and how to match up with your ideal audience to improve performance with a mixture of free and paid tools on the platform.
For the business owners who have maintained their marketing budgets, LinkedIn provides an array of organic and paid strategies to reach a larger target market, generate leads, drive sales and awareness and build authentic brand messaging. This level of spend on LinkedIn gives you (as business owner) more options and also gives you access to weekly check-ins to determine your progress across the tools on the platform.
The fantastic news about goal alignment with LinkedIn is that there are many options for every budget, so no business owner is prohibited from participating on the platform.
If you’re ready to focus on your digital strategy and improve your ROI on marketing activities, download the eBook now.
If you want to revitalise your marketing, digital marketing strategy, or LinkedIn content, contact WSI OMS for assistance during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.